“Take one step past that fence and I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”
Tyler Bennett said it from his new backyard, with one hand resting on the top rail of the fence he’d built eight feet inside my property.
He was wearing a light blue polo shirt and expensive sunglasses pushed up on his head. He was holding a cup of coffee. He looked like a man in a commercial for lawn fertilizer.
I looked at him.
Then I looked down at the bright orange survey flag sticking out of the grass, three feet from his shoe. On his side of the fence.
“That’s my land,” I said.
He smiled.
“Not anymore.”
I wish I could tell you that I laughed. That I thought he was joking, or confused, or just a guy who’d gotten some bad information from his fence company.
I didn’t laugh.
Because by then, I understood something about Tyler Bennett.
He wasn’t confused.
He knew exactly what he was doing.
My name is Jason Miller. I’m forty-three years old. I’m a commercial electrician. I wire office buildings and warehouses and the occasional hospital wing. I’ve been doing it since I was nineteen.
I’ve lived in my little brick house outside Raleigh, North Carolina, for eleven years.
I bought it after my divorce.
My ex-wife, Dana, and I had been married for fourteen years. We didn’t hate each other at the end. We were just two people who’d stopped knowing how to talk. She kept the big house in Cary, and I took what I could afford, which wasn’t much.
I looked at nine houses that spring. The real estate agent kept trying to show me condos. Low maintenance, she said. Perfect for a single guy.
Then she showed me this one.
It was small. Two bedrooms. A kitchen that hadn’t been touched since the eighties. A bathroom with pink tile.
But it had two things I could afford to love without worrying they’d ever leave me.
An old oak tree.
And a backyard.
It wasn’t anything fancy. Just a rectangle of grass, a little bigger than most on the street. Enough room for a grill and a storage shed and a vegetable garden I mostly failed at.
And the oak tree. A huge old white oak at the back of the lot, maybe a hundred years old, with branches as thick as a man’s body. The first time I saw it, I stood under it for ten minutes without saying anything.
The real estate agent said, “Mr. Miller? Are you okay?”
I said, “I’ll take it.”
That first summer, my daughter, Emma, was ten. She stayed with me every other weekend and two weeks in July.
The first weekend she came, she walked out into the backyard and looked up at that oak tree and said, “Dad. We need a swing.”
So I built one.
I bought a thick piece of white oak at the lumber yard and sanded it smooth myself in the garage. I drilled the holes. I bought marine rope, the kind they use on boats, so it wouldn’t rot. I climbed a twenty-foot ladder, which I’m not proud of, and tied it to the lowest big branch with a knot an old electrician taught me when I was an apprentice.
Emma sat on that swing every weekend for eight years.
When she was ten, she swung so high I thought she’d end up in the branches. When she was thirteen, she sat on it and cried about a boy named Tanner who didn’t like her back. When she was sixteen, she sat on it and practiced her driver’s test questions out loud. When she was eighteen, the night before she left for college, she sat on it with me in the dark, and neither of us said much, and that was fine.
She’s twenty-one now. She’s a junior at UNC Wilmington, studying marine biology. She doesn’t come home as often as I’d like.
But the swing is still there.
I knew every inch of that yard.
I’d mowed it every Saturday morning, April through October, for eleven summers. Same pattern every time. Front to back, then side to side, then the edges with the string trimmer. I could have done it with my eyes closed.
There was a straight line along the eastern edge of my property. The side next to the house that Tyler and Ashley Bennett bought last year. A line where my grass met the old gravel strip by the drainage ditch, and a row of little monkey grass plants the previous owners had put in. I’d followed that line with my mower for eleven years. It ran from the corner of their house all the way to the ditch at the back.
Which was why I noticed immediately when eight feet of my yard disappeared.
It happened on a Thursday in late April.
I’d started mowing the night before, after work, but it got too dark to finish. I’d left the mower in the yard, near the eastern side, planning to do the last strip in the morning before my shift.
I came outside at six-thirty in the morning with my coffee.
My mower was still sitting right where I’d left it.
The grass in front of it wasn’t.
A brand-new cedar privacy fence stood there.
Six feet tall. Golden-brown boards, still smelling like fresh-cut wood. It ran from the back corner of Tyler’s house in a perfectly straight line all the way down to the drainage ditch.
And the straight mowing line I’d followed for eleven years disappeared behind it.
I stood there in my work boots, holding my coffee, staring at it.
I’d been at a job site in Durham all day Wednesday. Twelve hours. I’d come home after dark and mowed until I couldn’t see. I’d noticed some trucks in the Bennetts’ driveway, but I hadn’t thought anything of it. People get work done on their houses all the time.
They’d built the whole thing in one day. While I was gone.
Eight feet of my lawn had become part of Tyler Bennett’s backyard overnight.
I walked the fence. All the way down to the ditch and all the way back.
I walked it again.
I went and got my tape measure out of my truck. I measured from the corner of my house to the fence. Then I went inside and dug out the closing papers from when I bought the house, in a fireproof box in my closet, and found the survey that came with it. I measured again.
The numbers didn’t match.
They weren’t even close.
I stood in my kitchen with the old survey in one hand and the tape measure in the other. My coffee had gone cold.
Then I called a surveyor.
His name was Carl Jennings.
He’d done some work for one of the general contractors I wire buildings for. He was about sixty, with a gray mustache and a farmer’s tan and a truck full of equipment that cost more than my house. He’d been surveying land in Wake County for thirty-five years.
He came out two days later, on a Saturday morning.
He didn’t say much. He didn’t ask me any questions about the fence or the neighbors. He just got to work.
He went out to the street and found the concrete monuments. Little markers buried at the corners of the block that the original surveyors put in when the neighborhood was built in 1974. He set up his equipment, a yellow tripod with a thing on top that looked like a camera, and took measurements. He checked his numbers against the recorded plat, the official map at the county.
Then he walked into my backyard with a metal detector.
He swept it back and forth along the ground near the fence. It beeped. He knelt down and dug in the dirt with a little trowel.
He pulled out a rusty iron pin. About as thick as a pencil. Buried six inches deep.
“Original property pin,” he said. “Put in when this lot was platted.”
It was in my grass. Eight feet from Tyler’s fence.
Carl walked the whole line. He found two more pins. One at the street, and one at the back, by the drainage ditch, buried in the mud. Both of them right where the plat said they’d be.
Then he drove bright orange plastic flags into the ground every twenty feet or so along the true boundary.
Every single flag landed well beyond Tyler’s fence. Some of them were right up against the back of his brand-new landscaping.
Carl stood there and looked at the line of orange flags. Then he looked at the fence.
“You’re not imagining this,” he said.
“How far?” I said.
He checked his tablet.
“Between seven feet, eight inches and eight feet, four inches,” he said. “Depending on the section. It gets wider toward the back.”
I stared at the fence.
I did the math in my head. My lot is about sixty feet deep from the back of the house to the ditch.
“That’s almost four hundred square feet,” I said.
Carl shook his head.
“Closer to five hundred,” he said. “By the time you get to the rear.”
I photographed everything.
The flags. The pins. Carl’s equipment. The fence. The gap between the fence and the flags. I took pictures from every angle. I took a video walking the whole line.
Carl printed out a certified survey for me in his truck. Official. Signed and stamped, with his license number.
Before he left, he stood in my driveway and looked over at Tyler’s house for a long time.
“In thirty-five years,” he said, “I’ve seen a lot of fences end up a little off. A foot. Two feet. Usually it’s an honest mistake. Some guy eyeballs it, or the fence company guesses.”
He looked at me.
“I’ve never seen one off by eight feet,” he said. “Not by accident.”
That night, I emailed Tyler.
I wrote it three times before I sent it. The first version had some words in it that my mother wouldn’t have liked. The second version was a little better. The third one, I finally got right.
Professional. Calm. No threats.
Tyler,
I had the property line surveyed. It appears your new fence was installed approximately eight feet inside my parcel. I’ve attached the certified survey and measurements. Please let me know when you’d like to discuss having the fence relocated.
Jason
I attached Carl’s survey and six of my best photographs. I read it over one more time.
I pressed send.
I should tell you a little about the Bennetts.
They’d moved into the house next door eight months earlier, in August. Before that, the house belonged to an older couple named the Pattersons, who’d lived there for twenty-two years. Mrs. Patterson used to bring me tomatoes from her garden. Mr. Patterson and I used to stand at the property line on Saturday mornings and talk about the Carolina Panthers. When they moved to Florida to be near their grandkids, I helped Mr. Patterson load the moving truck.
Tyler and Ashley were younger. Mid-thirties. No kids. Tyler worked in commercial real estate, something with office parks. He drove a white Range Rover. Ashley was a dental hygienist. She drove a little gray Subaru and always waved at me when she pulled into the driveway.
When they first moved in, Tyler had come over with a six-pack of beer to introduce himself. We stood on my porch and talked for twenty minutes. He asked me about the neighborhood. The schools. The property taxes. Whether the drainage ditch ever flooded.
He asked a lot of questions about property lines, actually. Where mine was. Where the Pattersons’ fence used to be, before they took it down. How big my lot was.
At the time, I just thought he was a new homeowner, curious about everything.
In October, he borrowed my extension ladder to clean his gutters. He brought it back two weeks later with a bent rung and didn’t say anything about it.
I let it go. You let things go with neighbors. That’s how it works.
Three days passed after my email.
Nothing.
Then four days.
Then five.
I checked my email every hour at work. I checked my phone in the truck between jobs. Nothing.
After a week, I walked over and knocked on his front door.
Ashley answered.
She’d been friendly enough since they moved in. Always waving. Once she’d even brought over a plate of cookies at Christmas, with a little card that said Happy Holidays from the Bennetts!
But her smile disappeared the second she saw me on her porch.
She didn’t say hello. She just turned her head and called back into the house.
“Tyler?”
He came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door half closed behind him.
“Hey, Jason.”
“Hey,” I said. “You get my email?”
He nodded.
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
That was all.
Just Oh, yeah.
I waited for him to say something else. He didn’t.
“So,” I said. “What are we doing about the fence?”
Tyler rubbed the back of his neck. He looked out at the street.
“Honestly?” he said. “Moving it would cost a fortune. The posts are already set in concrete. The landscaping’s all done. We just put in the sod last weekend.”
I waited.
And then he actually shrugged.
“You’ve still got plenty of yard,” he said.
For a second, I thought I’d misunderstood him.
“You’re asking me,” I said slowly, “to give you eight feet of my property. Because fixing your mistake would be expensive.”
“Fences end up a little off all the time,” he said. “It happens. Nobody’s fence is perfect.”
“Eight feet isn’t a little off, Tyler.”
He smiled. That easy smile. The real estate smile.
“Look, we’re pretty busy right now,” he said. “Lot going on. Maybe we can talk about it some other time.”
Then he went inside and closed the door.
I stood on his porch for a long time, staring at his front door. There was a wreath on it. Fake flowers. Spring colors.
Then I walked back to my house.
That afternoon, I walked the entire boundary again. Slowly this time. On my side of the fence, looking over the top.
The fence was six feet tall. I’m six feet, one inch. If I stood on my tiptoes, I could just see over it.
Behind Tyler’s fence, on my eight feet of land, there was fresh sod. Bright green, still with the seams showing between the rolls.
There were ornamental stones. Big flat river rocks, gray and white, arranged in a curving border.
There were two Japanese maples. Dark red leaves. Still in their burlap root balls, planted in fresh mulch. I knew a little about trees. Those were expensive maples. Probably three or four hundred dollars each.
And at the very back, near the ditch, there was a brand-new concrete pad. About ten feet by ten feet. With an electrical conduit sticking up out of one corner.
For a hot tub.
All of it looked expensive.
And all of it had been designed around land he didn’t own.
That night, after dinner, I sat at my kitchen table with my laptop and pulled up the Wake County parcel map.
The county has a website where you can look up any property. They call it the GIS map. You type in an address, and it shows you an aerial photograph with the property lines drawn over it in yellow.
I typed in my address.
The yellow lines came up. My lot. My house. My oak tree.
And on the eastern side, the yellow property line ran straight through the middle of Tyler’s new backyard. Eight feet on the other side of his fence.
The county records hadn’t changed. The fence hadn’t changed anything.
My deed still showed that strip as mine. My property tax bill, which I’d paid every year for eleven years, still showed it as mine.
The fence didn’t make my land Tyler’s.
It just trapped my land inside his perfect backyard.
The next morning, before work, I went to the post office and sent Tyler a certified letter.
Same message as the email. More formal. I gave him thirty days to correct the encroachment. I attached Carl’s survey again, and a printout of the county parcel map with the line highlighted.
I paid for the green card that comes back to you with his signature, so I’d have proof he got it.
The green card came back three days later. Ashley had signed for it.
His response came by text message that same night.
Stop harassing us. The fence stays.
I sat in my truck in my driveway and read that text about fifty times.
Stop harassing us.
One polite email. One knock on the door. One letter.
I thought about texting him back. I typed out about six different responses. Some of them were very creative.
I deleted all of them.
And then I called a lawyer.
Her name was Rachel Monroe.
She specialized in real estate disputes. Boundary fights, easements, contractor problems, that kind of thing. A guy I worked with at the electrical company had used her when his neighbor’s tree fell on his garage and the neighbor’s insurance company tried to weasel out of paying.
“She’s tough,” he told me. “But she’s honest. She won’t tell you what you want to hear. She’ll tell you what’s true.”
Her office was in a converted old house in downtown Raleigh, with creaky wooden floors and big windows and a black cat named Easement who slept on a radiator in the waiting room.
Rachel was in her forties, with short dark hair and reading glasses she kept pushing up on her head. She shook my hand firmly and sat me down at a round table in her office.
I brought everything I had. Carl’s certified survey. My deed and closing papers. My photographs. The email I’d sent. The certified letter and the green card. Tyler’s text.
And something else, too.
The night before, I’d gone on the county permit website and found the permit Tyler had filed for his fence. Any homeowner who wants to build a fence over a certain height in our county has to apply for one. The applications are public. I’d printed it out.
Rachel went through everything slowly. She didn’t say a word for about fifteen minutes. She just read.
Then she got to the fence permit, and she frowned.
“His fence permit,” she said.
“What about it?”
“He applied using a site drawing,” she said. “Look.”
She turned the paper around so I could see it.
It was a simple drawing. A rectangle for Tyler’s house. A rectangle for his lot. And a dotted line showing where the fence would go.
And the dotted line on the drawing was on the correct boundary.
Not where Tyler’s fence actually was.
The real line. The one Carl’s orange flags marked. The one the county map showed.
“He knew?” I said.
Rachel tapped the permit with her pen.
“He certified this placement when he applied,” she said. “Right here. That’s his signature. He drew the fence on the correct property line. Then he had it built eight feet inside your yard.”
For the first time since that Thursday morning in April, my anger turned into something different.
Something colder.
The fence hadn’t accidentally wandered eight feet.
Somebody had moved it after the county approved it.
On purpose.
Rachel sent Tyler a formal demand letter the next day. On her law firm’s letterhead.
It said the fence and landscaping were encroaching on my property. It cited Carl’s survey, the recorded plat, the county records, and Tyler’s own fence permit. It said that if the encroachments weren’t removed within thirty days, we would file a lawsuit asking the court to order their removal.
Tyler responded by putting a padlock on his gate.
Two days later, I came home early from a job. It was a Wednesday, about three in the afternoon.
Tyler was in his backyard, in my eight feet, spreading mulch.
He had a wheelbarrow full of dark brown mulch and a pitchfork. He was spreading it around the base of the Japanese maples. On my land.
I didn’t think about it. I just walked across my yard toward the orange survey flags.
I didn’t touch the fence. I just walked up to it. To the very edge of my side.
Tyler dropped the pitchfork and rushed across his yard.
“Don’t you cross that fence,” he said.
“I’m standing on my property, Tyler.”
“Take one more step,” he said, “and I’ll call the cops.”
I pointed over the fence at the orange flag. It was stuck in the grass right beside his foot. Carl had driven it in just inside the line, on my side of the true boundary.
“That flag marks my boundary,” I said.
Tyler looked down at it.
Then he kicked it over.
Just like that. Kicked it right out of the ground. It flew a few feet and landed in the fresh mulch.
“Your surveyor can stick his little flags wherever he wants,” Tyler said.
I stared at the orange flag lying on its side in his mulch.
Then Tyler leaned over the fence. Close. Close enough that I could smell his cologne.
“I built the fence,” he said quietly. “It’s my yard now.”
Behind him, at the back of his yard, I saw two men in work clothes I hadn’t noticed before.
They were putting together a wooden frame. Big beams. Four tall posts, set in concrete.
A pergola. A big one. The kind you see in magazines, with climbing vines and string lights.
And one corner of it was sitting directly on my property.
Rachel had told me very clearly not to touch the fence.
“Not yet,” she’d said. “Not one board. Not one nail. Don’t give him anything he can use against you. Let the paperwork do the work.”
So I didn’t.
I turned around and walked back to my house without saying another word. I went inside. I made myself a glass of iced tea. My hands were shaking.
And then I opened the county permit website on my laptop again.
I searched for any permits connected to Tyler’s address.
The pergola permit wasn’t there. He hadn’t applied for one.
Neither was the electrical permit for the hot tub. As an electrician, I knew he needed one. You can’t just run a 240-volt line to a hot tub in your backyard without an inspection. I’d pulled that kind of permit a hundred times for clients.
But there was something else on the list.
Something I hadn’t seen before. It had been filed about six weeks earlier.
Tyler had applied for a pool.
A big one. An in-ground concrete pool. Sixteen feet by thirty-two feet, according to the application. With a deck around it.
I clicked on the application. There was a site plan attached.
I studied it for a long time.
The county requires pools to be set back at least ten feet from the property line. That’s the rule in our county. Ten clear feet. It’s in the code.
And on Tyler’s site plan, which the county had approved, the pool was drawn exactly ten feet from the correct property line. The real one.
But I knew Tyler. By now, I knew exactly how Tyler worked.
So I went out back again and looked over the fence.
In Tyler’s yard, near the back, someone had pounded wooden stakes into the ground and run bright pink string between them. A big rectangle. The outline of where the pool would be dug.
I got out my tape measure. I measured from Carl’s orange flags, on my side of the fence, to the pink string, as best as I could reach.
According to the real survey, Tyler’s pool was going to sit less than three feet from my property line.
Not ten. Three.
He’d measured his setback from his fence. Not from the actual boundary.
I called Rachel.
I told her everything. The pergola. The hot tub pad without an electrical permit. The pool application. The stakes. The pink string.
She was quiet for several seconds.
Then she said, “Jason. Listen to me. Don’t touch a single board.”
“I haven’t.”
“Good. Don’t.”
“Why?” I said. “What are you thinking?”
“Because if he pours that pool where those stakes are,” she said slowly, “he’s about to put roughly sixty thousand dollars’ worth of concrete in the ground. Three feet from a property line that he knew about and signed off on. Using a fence that he put on your land as his measuring point.”
She paused.
“And every single dollar of that concrete is going to be his problem,” she said. “Not yours.”
I stood at my kitchen window with the phone against my ear.
And outside, a big concrete mixer truck was backing slowly into Tyler’s driveway, beeping.
The concrete truck stopped halfway down Tyler’s driveway.
My phone was still against my ear.
“Jason,” Rachel said. “Is that a truck I hear?”
“Concrete truck,” I said. “Backing into his driveway right now.”
“Okay. Listen carefully. Do not go over there. Do not confront him. Do not touch the fence. And whatever happens next, let me handle it.”
“I understand.”
“I mean it, Jason. Stay inside.”
“I’m staying inside.”
“Good. I’m going to call the county building department right now. I’ll call you back.”
She hung up.
I stood at my kitchen window and watched.
The concrete truck had stopped. The driver climbed down out of the cab. Tyler came out of his house, walking fast, waving his arms at the driver. Pointing at the backyard. Pointing at his watch.
He looked impatient. Confident.
Like a man who believed the most expensive thing in his backyard was also the most powerful.
He had no idea what was about to happen.
My phone rang eight minutes later.
“I just got off the phone with the county building department,” Rachel said. “I explained the situation. I emailed them Carl’s survey and the photos you sent me. They’re sending an inspector out right now to verify the pool placement. I also requested an emergency review of the permit.”
“How long?”
“They said within the hour. The inspector was already in the area.”
I looked out the window. The concrete truck driver was leaning against his truck, smoking a cigarette. Tyler was on his phone, pacing.
“What happens if they start pouring before he gets here?” I said.
“Then that’s sixty thousand dollars he’s going to have to break up with a jackhammer,” Rachel said. “But I don’t think they will. The pool contractor has to do a pre-pour inspection first. It’s required. They’re probably waiting for that anyway.”
Twenty minutes later, a white county pickup truck pulled into Tyler’s driveway, behind the concrete mixer.
A man got out. Fifties. Reflective yellow vest. Clipboard. A hard hat under one arm. He walked up to the pool contractor, a big guy in a sweat-stained T-shirt, shook his hand, and asked to see the approved site plan.
Tyler hung up his phone and walked over immediately.
I’d opened my kitchen window a crack. I could hear most of what they were saying.
“Everything is approved,” Tyler said. “We’ve already paid the contractor. Half up front. There’s no reason to delay this. The truck’s here. The concrete’s mixing.”
The inspector didn’t argue with him.
He just took a folded piece of paper out of his clipboard and opened it up.
It was Carl’s survey. Rachel had emailed it to the county.
He held it next to the approved site plan. He looked at the stakes and the pink string in Tyler’s yard.
Then he walked toward the fence.
He took out a long measuring tape. He measured from the pink string to the fence.
He measured again.
Then he walked to the gate in the fence, the one Tyler had padlocked, and looked over it, into my yard. At Carl’s orange flags.
He took out a different tool. A little handheld device. He pointed it at one of the flags, then at the pink string.
He looked at the screen for a long time.
Then he pulled out his phone and made a call.
Tyler’s smile disappeared.
“What are you doing?” he said. “Who are you calling?”
The inspector finished his call and turned toward him.
“Mr. Bennett,” he said. “Who established this property line?”
Tyler pointed at the fence.
“That’s the boundary,” he said. “Right there. That’s my property line.”
“No, sir,” the inspector said. “According to the recorded plat and a certified survey, it isn’t. The actual boundary is approximately eight feet east of this fence. Those orange flags in your neighbor’s yard.”
Tyler laughed. A short, nervous laugh.
“Well, that’s a disagreement between neighbors,” he said. “It’s a civil matter. It has nothing to do with the pool.”
The inspector looked over at the concrete truck. The barrel on the back was still turning slowly, mixing.
“Mr. Bennett,” he said, “it has everything to do with the pool. Your approved setback is measured from the actual property boundary. Not from a fence you’ve installed on somebody else’s land.”
Tyler went silent.
The inspector kept walking. He checked the pergola. He looked at the concrete pad for the hot tub, with the electrical conduit sticking out of it. He wrote something on his clipboard.
He took pictures. A lot of pictures.
A few minutes later, he walked back to his truck and took out a sheet of bright red paper. He stapled it to a wooden stake and pushed the stake into the ground near the driveway, where everybody on the street could see it.
I could read the big letters from my kitchen window.
STOP WORK ORDER.
The pool contractor took one look at the red paper and shut down his equipment. He walked over to the concrete truck and said something to the driver. The driver threw his cigarette on the ground, climbed into his cab, and turned off the mixer.
The barrel stopped turning.
Tyler followed the inspector around the yard, talking fast. Demanding explanations. Waving his hands.
I couldn’t hear most of it through my window.
But I heard one sentence very clearly. The inspector said it loud enough for the whole street to hear.
“You cannot pour concrete until this is resolved, Mr. Bennett.”
And then, for the first time since that fence appeared in April, Tyler Bennett looked genuinely frightened.
He stood in his driveway, next to the stopped concrete truck, staring at the red STOP WORK sign. His face had gone pale. He put both hands on top of his head.
Then he turned around.
And he saw me. Standing at my kitchen window.
He pointed straight at my house.
“YOU!” he yelled. “This is because of YOU!”
I stepped away from the window.
My phone rang again.
It was Rachel.
“Good news,” she said.
“I saw,” I said. “Red sign. Concrete truck shut off. He’s yelling at my house.”
“Don’t respond to him,” she said. “The county has suspended all the pool work pending an investigation. No concrete. No digging. Nothing. But there’s something else.”
“What?”
“I got a copy of the original pool permit submission,” she said. “From the county. The whole file.”
“And?”
“Jason, the original drawing he submitted to the county shows the correct boundary. The real one. And the pool is drawn ten feet away from it. Exactly where it’s supposed to be.”
I leaned back against my kitchen counter.
“So he changed the placement,” I said. “After it was approved.”
“That’s what we’re looking into. The pool contractor has a revised layout. A different drawing. Not the one the county approved. And it has Tyler’s signature on it. It places the pool much closer to the boundary. Using the fence as the reference line.”
