For close to seven years, I and a few other residents along our road have been rolling a boulder up the mountain–the boulder of trying to get other residents to care about our road.
As mentioned here over the years, the road we live on is a private road. That means no city, county or state agency covers the costs of maintenance and repairs, and it’s up to the parcel owners to deal with that sort of thing. Same deal for messes made up here, like when non-residents drive up here and dump a truck load of garbage because they’re too cheap and lazy to take it to the dump. Car accidents fall under the jurisdiction of California Highway Patrol, while the Santa Clara County Sheriff and other County agencies have jurisdiction for civil and criminal issues, and San Jose Fire is our primary contact for residential fires, wellness checks, and EMS needs, but when it comes to wildfires and defensible space, we’re in the State Responsibility Area and thus subject to CalFire’s regulations.
Figuring out who to call when one neighbor’s livestock ends up on another neighbor’s land after escaping a gap in a fence created when a car slid off the road to avoid a load of garbage someone dumped, but then said livestock were actually stolen from another parcel three months earlier and now their sudden reappearance caused their original owner to faint–ok, I’m exaggerating a bit, but you get the idea that one needs a flowchart to sort out who to call for help with what.
But I digress. In 2017 a longtime resident here put letters in mailboxes saying it had been 18 years since the last serious bit of work to the road (an entire repaving effort), and part of the road was in need of attention and we, the residents, should try to sort out what should be done and how we should do it. I stupidly offered to help organize.
This has led to small acts of industry like putting up Private Road and No Dumping Signs, then cleaning the graffiti off said signs; providing dumpsters for all the garbage that had been dumped along the side of the road and taking care of “new” dumps that appear; getting rid of burned out cars on vacant lots; renovating a road that had fallen into complete disrepair to provide residents with an emergency way down the mountain, etc. etc. etc.
But it isn’t always hugs and cuddles. While about ninety percent of the 48 or so households here are perfectly pleasant, there are some questionable types when it comes to trying to take care of the road. For example, the person who wanted to argue for thirty minutes about the fact that the ad-hoc group that volunteered to organize road maintenance and repair chose the word “association” to identify their efforts. Then there was the guy who doesn’t even live along the road but showed up (apparently drunk) to an online meeting to argue that we had no right to make repairs to the road. My personal favorite was the elderly resident who used to call me up out of the blue to scream about random things, including whatever it was the volunteer group had recently tried to do, only then to start sobbing about how lonely they were a minute later. A close second was the other resident that screamed and swore at me for a good twenty minutes and threatened to shoot me after inviting me to talk to them about the flooding they had caused by blocking off a swale. The one that truly takes the cake, though, was the resident so vehemently opposed to the residents creating a formal road association, who a couple of years later then wanted to know why the people building new structures up here weren’t required to pay to use the road. I cannot make this stuff up. People do really behave this way.
The other ninety percent of the residents up here aren’t like that ten percent, and they do band together to do what needs to be done. Like when a winter storm downs many trees and makes the road impassable.
