Breaking Point

in this country. Even if Butch hauled all the dirt out and bladed the slope back to the same grade it was, it isn’t possible to have grass just magically grow again.”
    “Pam,” Joe said firmly, “you’re telling me that three bureaucrats drove all the way north from Cheyenne and showed up without a court order, or a warrant, or anything besides a single business card and told you to stop working on the property you owned or you’d have to pay seventy thousand dollars a day in fines?”
    “That’s what I’m telling you, Joe,” she said. “I swear it.”
    “This is just like the Sackett case in Idaho.”
    Marybeth asked, “The what?” Pam looked up like she didn’t know the case, either, which Joe found surprising.
    “The Sacketts,” Joe said. “A married couple building a home in a subdivision near Priest Lake. Out of the blue, EPA folks showed up and told them to stop and didn’t provide any kind of documentation. Told them to restore the land, or they’d get a huge fine every day. The case is working itself through the legal system right now, and my understanding is it’s likely to wind up in the Supreme Court.”
    “You’re telling me this happened before?” Pam asked, as if she wasn’t sure whether it was good or bad news.
    “Something similar, anyway,” Joe said. “Pam, be honest with me. I saw the lot, but I didn’t study it. Is there any way it’s actually a wetlands area? Is it conceivable Butch was filling in a swamp or a runoff stream that would go into the lake?”
    “No, and that’s not all,” Pam said. “When this horrible Naous person finally took my call, I asked her where they had gotten the information that our property was a wetlands. She told me that it was public information and I could look it up on the Internet at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Wetlands Inventory database. I was pissed because I thought the developers somehow forgot to check that or something, so I got on the computer and checked it myself. And guess what?”
    “What?”
    “Our property isn’t listed as a wetlands. I called her to tell her that, and you know what she said?”
    She didn’t wait for Joe to ask.
    “She said the National Wetlands Inventory database isn’t definitive. She said just because our property isn’t on it doesn’t mean it’s not a wetlands.”
    Joe pushed back and stood up. He crossed the kitchen to the pantry and asked, “Anybody else want a bourbon and water?”
    “I’ll take one,” Pam said.
    “I’ll take one, too,” Marybeth said. “And I don’t even like bourbon.”
    —
    J OE PLACED THE THREE GLASSES on the table, and Pam sipped hers and made a sour face, but she didn’t push it away.
    “So what did Butch say to this Shauna Naous and the other two when they told him to stop working?” Joe asked.
    “Nothing,” Pam said, and sighed. “He just clammed up and waited for them to leave. I think he was so stunned by what they told him he just couldn’t speak. His dream was just crashing down all around him and he couldn’t believe what was happening and he just froze up. Boy, I wish I’d have been there. I would have thrown it right back in their faces and told them to get off my property—that they had no right to even be there.”
    Joe believed her.
    “We’ve never been political,” she said. “I don’t even know if Butch voted in the past ten years. We just don’t follow that stuff, even though I’d say we’re both pretty patriotic and conservative. I’m sure he just couldn’t get a handle on the fact that our government could do such a thing.”
    “Twice, apparently,” Joe said, and shook his head. “The more you tell us, the more it sounds like the same
exact
thing that happened to the Sacketts. I wonder if the same people are behind both cases?” Then: “No,” he said, answering his own question. “We’re in Region Eight and Idaho is in Region Ten of the EPA. So it can’t be the same person, can it?”
    He looked to Marybeth, and she nodded crisply. She understood what he was implying.
    “I’ll start doing some research tomorrow,” she said to Joe. To Pam: “What happened next?”
    Pam took another sip. “After Butch came home with Hannah and told me what happened, he just shook his head and sat in his chair in front of the television with the sound off. Hannah said he was quiet all the way home. I tried to discuss it with him, but he couldn’t even talk about it, he was so depressed. He scared me that