The complaints kept coming. I kept waiting.
For three years, Vanessa Roxborough filed complaints against me at the rate of one every five to seven weeks. Most were to Burnet County. A few were to the Texas Department of Transportation. One was to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), alleging agricultural runoff from my cattle pastures. TCEQ sent an investigator named Maureen Dunaway. She walked my pasture, took soil samples, called Vanessa from my driveway, and read to her on speakerphone the section of the Texas Water Code that prohibits frivolous complaints. Maureen then sent Vanessa a bill for the investigation.
Vanessa did not file with TCEQ again. But in April 2024, she escalated to the Sunset Mesa Estates Facebook page. She posted a photograph of my equipment barn, used the word "blight" four times, and tagged the Burnet County Tourism Office.
The post received forty-eight comments. Thirty-seven were from her supporters. Eleven were from a sixty-one-year-old retired ranch wife named Adelaide Marchand, who lived in the smallest house in Sunset Mesa and who pushed back on Vanessa in writing every time she posted about me.
After her third comment defending me, Adelaide walked down the gravel road to my gate one Saturday afternoon.
"Mr. Vickers." "Mrs. Marchand." "Della, please." "Mrs. Marchand."
She smiled. It was the small, dry smile of a woman who knew a fool when she saw one.
"Vanessa is throwing a Labor Day pool party," Della said, resting her forearms against the top rail of my gate. "She’s rented industrial cooling fans, a margarita machine the size of a cement mixer, and a DJ booth. She wants to show the subdivision what 'Hill Country luxury' looks like."
"That sounds like a heavy electrical load," I said.
"It is," Della chuckled. "She's been bragging on Facebook that they had to rewire her pool house just to handle the amperage. I thought you ought to know. She’s entirely too proud of a kingdom she doesn't understand."
I thanked Mrs. Marchand, offered her a jar of Lynette’s preserved peaches, and watched her walk back up the gravel road.