Talk of the Town - This land ain't your land February 10 2001

Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for tis' the only thing in this world that lasts ... Tis' the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for — worth dying for ... Twill come to you, this love of land. There's no getting away from it, if you're Irish.
-- Gerald O'Hara to his daughter, Katie Scarlett, in Gone With the Wind
Why are we drawn to the land? Perhaps it's a primitive desire to control territory; the atavistic need for a hunting ground. Maybe it's a connection to the earth from which we spring. Personally, I only find land useful if you need a place to play kick ball.
I'm only half-Irish, so my connection to the land is tenuous. I'm drawn to it, all right. But I have no idea what to do with it once I'm there. You just have to look at the pockmarked lawn around here to realize.
But what's left of my Irish got riled last week when four guys stood in my yard telling me that part of said yard is not, in fact, mine. They represent a development company - "nature liquidators" is a much more accurate term — that plans to turn the woods behind my house into, well, houses just like mine.
They put wooden stakes in the ground and brandished maps. They pointed to a surveyor's line that purports to be the boundary between our two properties. Then they showed how my back fence impinges on their real estate.
The terra firma in question is 84 feet long. It goes from being an inch across at its narrowest point, to 6-and-a-half feet at its widest. It's like the long, narrow slice of a pizza pie nobody eats because all the other pieces have twice as much cheese. Doesn't matter, because these guys are seriously hungry. They want my mozzarella — all of it.
You learn lots of special terms at a time like this. There's the surveyed property map, called a "plat." There's "quit claim," which refers to a bit of land deeded from one party to another. And then there's a "horse's patootie," which is me.
Because no matter what happens, this is going to cost me. If I want to refute the builder's survey, I'll have to pay a surveyor of my own. If I accept the developer's word, it'll cost me to move the fence. And in the worse-case scenario, I'll pay a surveyor to tell me the property's not mine, on top of having to move the fence. Did East Germany go through this when it reunited with West Germany?
The irony for me here is two-fold. First, the strip of land in question, about the size of a dog run for a moderately lazy cocker spaniel, is worth less than the grand it will cost to give it up.
Second, the property in question is lined with azaleas. I spent the whole summer keeping the needy, H2O-sucking critters on life support, hosing them down in the middle of the night during drought restrictions, getting chomped on by every nocturnal flying carnivore in the former Confederacy. The water bill for this act of flora-obsessed folly could have bought me a 100-acre spread in Montana, if Ted Turner hadn't already purchased the whole state.
Actually, it's a source of continual amazement to me that I'm involved in a land dispute. I come from generations of city-bred apartment dwellers. And no wonder. The last Slatterys close to the land starved to death during the Great Irish Potato Famine 150 years ago. Mother Earth disowned us way back.
There's a feeling of déjá vu, but it has nothing to do with the Old Country. It's more like the Old West. It finally dawned on me that I'm living in a modern-day Western, or a Southern, if you have to be a stickler about geography.
Think of all those horse opera plots. The developers are the ruthless mining syndicate and I'm the lone sheep farmer. Or they're the greedy cattlemen and I'm the lone rancher. You get the idea. There's a bunch of them and only one of me.
When plat comes to shove, I'm going back across the water to take my cue from the noble nation of Finland. Outnumbered and outgunned by the Russians during World War II, Finland was forced to cede a strip of territory to its much larger neighbor.
When they finally threw in the ice-cold towel and evacuated, the Finns took everything with them. The last inhabitant carried the last pot and pan. Anything that could be taken away was taken away. They left nothing for the Bolsheviks.
That's how I feel right now. The land I stand to lose may only be a few inches wide, but I'm taking everything on it. There won't be a single sapling, pine cone or ...
On second thought, guys, keep the azaleas.
You deserve them.
Glen Slattery, author of Water Heaters Can Fly: Uplifting Tales From Suburbia is out of bounds in Alpharetta. E-mail: gmslattery@aol.com.