HOA Blocked My Road with a Gate — They Fled When My Cop Friend Arrived!

 

Part 1 — Twenty Acres of Quiet and One Very Loud Gate

If you’d told me seven years ago I’d spend more time in court than on my own porch, I would’ve laughed and asked you to pass the coffee. I moved out here to get away from all that noise. Twenty acres of Utah that looked like God’s pocket lint—sagebrush, granite, hawks carving circles in a sky so wide it made your troubles feel too small to keep. There was a lean little house the wind approved of, a pair of sheds that creaked themselves to sleep at night, and a dirt road that wound through my place like it was trying to escape town the same way I was. Four thousand feet of rutted, dusty freedom, deeded to me clean, not a shared access, not a handshake easement with a neighbor’s cousin. Mine.

Most mornings, I’d rumble that road in my crusty F-250 with Mo—half Lab, half crimes against upholstery—grinning in the passenger seat. Coffee in the cup holder, radio low, heading toward the hangar where I kept the rigs for my solar company and the tools that make a man feel like he can still fix a world that insists on breaking. The only witnesses to my commute were deer, coyotes, the occasional Amazon driver who’d stare at the washboard ahead and reconsider his life choices.

No gate. No fence. No sign. Didn’t need them. Out here, the sagebrush does a better job keeping secrets than plywood ever could.

Then the Cedar Summit Ranch HOA found themselves a new president.

I’d heard the name at the co-op and the feed store like a smell you can’t quite place. Karen Sanders. Aviator sunglasses indoors. Business-speak sentences that felt like they were bought in bulk. Carried a clipboard the way a marshal carries a badge. People said she called the cops like she collected refrigerator magnets. I figured her species liked sidewalks and bylaws. The HOA was a mile as the crow flies, two as the truck crawls, and a universe in the other direction.

I came home one Tuesday and found a shiny metal post sunk into the ground where my road kisses the county lane, cement around the base still wet and smug. Bolted to the post was a burgundy-and-gold plate—the HOA’s school colors, apparently—declaring PRIVATE ACCESS. CEDAR SUMMIT RESIDENTS ONLY. ALL ENTRY PRE-AUTHORIZED BY HOA SECURITY.

I blinked slow because blinking fast wasn’t going to improve it. My tires crunched more careful than usual as I rolled closer. And there it was: a whole motorized gate, keypad glowing, RFID reader winking, a camera staring right into my front seat like it wanted to know what I had for lunch. Not a ranch gate for cattle. Corporate-grade HOA hardware, planted smack in the middle of my deeded road.

I put the truck in park. Got out. The boots, the dust, the wind, the whole postcard. Dog whined like he’d found a raccoon he wasn’t allowed to chase. Tracks in the dirt told the story—somebody came at night with a trailer, set the whole thing up like it was an above-ground pool for people who hate joy. No note. No warning. Not even a bored teenager in a reflective vest to say “sorry, sir, we just do what we’re told.”

I swore once. The kind of word you use when your thumb meets a hammer. I am not a man known for counting to ten. But I know the headlines in small towns, and I didn’t want mine to be LOCAL IDIOT ASSAULTS STEEL. So I cooled off the way adults do when their blood boils: I called Teresa at the county records office.

“Mister Field,” she said after I heard her keyboard do that cheerful little murder it does, “that road’s yours. Deeded. No easements. No nothing. If the HOA put a gate there, they’re building castles on sand.”

“Appreciate you, Teresa,” I said, and I meant it in a way that probably should’ve gone in a Hallmark card.

Next morning I drove to the Cedar Summit clubhouse—a low modern thing with a fireplace that had never seen smoke and a lobby that smelled like lemon wipes and disappointment. I parked right out front like I had something to sell. “President,” I told the receptionist, who wore politeness like a mask that didn’t quite fit.

Out she came. Heels too thin for gravel. Sunglasses too dark for indoors. Clipboard like a shield. Smile like a funeral director who’s already measured you.

“Can I help you?” she asked, which told me she didn’t plan to.

“Take down the gate you installed on my private road,” I said. I have found that direct is quicker on the blood pressure.

She smiled wider but forgot to put her eyes in it. “Oh. That road. We’ve discussed it in our meetings. Cedar Summit is responsible for safety and traffic in that buffer zone.”

“Buffer zone,” I repeated, because sometimes you have to roll a word around on your tongue to confirm it tastes like nonsense. “Lady, that’s my road.”

“If you’d like to apply for a use permit,” she said, already turning away, “we can grant you access.”

Now, I’m not an easy laugher. It’s just that the line landed so far past ridiculous I had to let out a sound or I’d bite the inside of my cheek clean through. “I don’t need your permission to use land I pay taxes on.”

“Then you should contact legal counsel,” she said. “Have a pleasant day.” And marched away like she’d just surrendered Paris.

I didn’t call a lawyer. Not yet. There are two numbers a man like me calls when the world gets stupid: his buddy with a backhoe and his buddy with a badge. This one was badge. Lieutenant Mark Dorsey from the sheriff’s office—door-kicker’s shoulders, decent handshake, the kind of memory that keeps favors written in pencil, not pen. He owed me for patching solar arrays after the wildfire took a bite out of their roof.

“Don’t touch the gate,” he said. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”

It took him sixteen. He walked up, looked at the gate, scanned the cement like it had committed a personal offense, and said, flat and holy, “You have got to be kidding me.”

I explained. No notice. No permit. Fresh cement. Deed road. He muttered “HOA madness” like a prayer and called his partner, Officer Wheeler—eyes like a man who had spent every day of the last month telling people to stop yelling at cashiers. We were standing there deciding whether to laugh or cry when a white SUV rolled up with an HOA logo and a paint job that screamed “lease.”

Out stepped Karen Sanders. Clipboard. Sunglasses. Mouth already moving.

“Officers,” she said. “Can I help you?”

Dorsey pointed at the gate like a man introducing evidence. “Why is this blocking private property?”

“Protective zone,” she intoned. “Security. Unauthorized traffic. Community interests. There’s been… incidents.”

Dorsey looked as unimpressed as a Sunday morning. “You don’t own this road.”

She handed him a folder. “Provisional Access Policy. Request forms. Passcodes for approved residents.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Did you just hand a cop a request form to access my land?”

Dorsey thumbed through the papers with the same expression I saw on my dog the first time he tasted a lemon. “This isn’t just civil,” he said. “This is criminal obstruction. You’re denying a property owner access to his own land.”

Karen launched another sentence full of words like mitigate and stakeholder, but Dorsey was done letting English be abused.

“Wheeler,” he said, “get the bolt cutters.”

“That gate is HOA property,” Karen snapped.

“No,” I said. “It’s trespassing equipment sitting on my land.”

Wheeler cut the lock box like it was butter at a church supper, and the gate sagged as if it knew better than its owner. The camera seemed to tilt away. I swear the thing looked ashamed.

One of Karen’s security kids—barely legal, wearing a uniform that fit like he’d lost a bet—stepped forward like a man walking into a glass door. Dorsey didn’t raise his voice but he pulled out The Tone they teach you in week one. “Interfere again and you’re going to jail. I’m not kidding.”

Kid melted back into the SUV’s shadow.

Karen stormed off mid-conversation, broadcasting threats into her phone, promising to speak to the governor, the county, the president, God. “We will be pressing charges,” she said without specifying against whom because details were not her friend.

Wheeler documented everything. My hidden trail cam recorded the whole shindig—from the moment Karen’s SUV appeared to the moment it left after she got stuck in the gravel and had to abandon it like a ship in shallow water. It would have been funnier if the cement hadn’t been curing on my road.

I figured that was the end. Public embarrassment cures a surprising number of plagues.

The next morning I got an HOA email blast: SECURITY INCIDENT UPDATE. An “unidentified male” had been “operating heavy machinery” in an “unauthorized zone,” had “threatened” volunteers, and had “rammed” community infrastructure with a giant truck. They attached blurry screenshots of a F-250 that could’ve been mine or any other truck in Utah and a Photoshopped shot of me gnashing my teeth. I would’ve been offended if the retouching weren’t so bad.

Then came a manila envelope in my mailbox with a return address from something that sounded extremely government: Utah Department of Rural Transportation and Infrastructure, Division of Private Access Enforcement. It fined me $6,400 for “unauthorized interference.” The letterhead leaned, the margins slouched, the watermark faintly read Google Images if you squinted, and the signature was in Comic Sans—the official font of people who should be supervised around power tools.

Teresa at the county clerk took one look and almost fell off her chair laughing. “This department doesn’t exist,” she said. “This P.O. Box is a private rental. This seal is clip art. Mister Field, either your nemesis is a child or a criminal. Or both.”

The sheriff opened a case that day. Karen had walked herself from nuisance to felony with the vigor of a woman in good shoes.

That night I grabbed a pizza, a six-pack, and my memory card, and watched my cameras tell me what they’d seen while I slept. Footage of a crew installing the original gate at 2:47 a.m.—headlights, a generator, some guy with a tablet programming the keypad. But I wasn’t trying to just defend myself anymore. I wanted to give Karen more rope because people like her don’t back down—they double down until they tie the knot around their own ankles.

Three nights later, motion alert. Headlights creeping down the easement-that-wasn’t. Another gate, taller, flashier, Bluetooth controlled, probably sold to them by a guy named Travis who calls everyone “man” and has a sticker on his water bottle that says “grind.”

They left the default firmware on. I fired up my laptop, logged in, and made the arms open-close-open-close until the system screamed and locked out like a slot machine saying “no more.”

Karen and her crew ran around like a raccoon in a kitchen. She screamed into a walkie-talkie that wasn’t turned on. Someone tripped over a coil of cable. It was farce if you didn’t count the morning I’d had to drive a mile out of my way because of their first try.

The next day I showed Dorsey the video, the fake citation, the Bluetooth logs. He pinched the bridge of his nose—cop for “what happened to the world while I was busy raising teenagers?” “She’s cooked,” he said. “She just hasn’t smelled the smoke yet.”

She didn’t smell it. She bathed in it.

A few days later, certified letter. She was suing me for destruction of “community infrastructure,” trespassing, intentional sabotage of “safety protocols,” like I’d thrown a wrench in a hospital generator. Attached: a property agreement supposedly signed by the previous owner granting the HOA joint rights to my road.

The previous owner lives in Alaska, hates HOAs more than he hates mosquitoes, and signs everything with a fountain pen older than me. The agreement was printed with a font that didn’t exist when he moved, signed with a ballpoint from a local office store two months ago, and witnessed by a board member whose handwriting matched the grocery list in a separate email. Tom Delgado—my lawyer who wears boots to court and eats rookie attorneys for a protein snack—got a document examiner to sigh in the right way and write the right report.

The sheriff got the file. Karen leveled up from fraud to falsification and perjury. Then she leveled again.

My northern trail cam went dark. I hiked up, found the pole chopped and the camera smashed. But I’d put another camera inside a hollow fence post like a magician hides a rabbit. It caught Karen at five in the morning, wearing gloves and an expression of entitlement that could have powered a city, yanking down the cam and walking off like she’d returned a library book.

That was it. I was done letting her play offense on my land. Tom filed a counterclaim—trespassing, malicious obstruction, fraudulent filings, property damage. Then the cherry on top fell into our lap wearing a nervous smile. Glenn, a board member with an ulcer and a conscience, sent screenshots from their internal chat. “He won’t fight back. He can’t read legalese. Just make a fake agreement.” There it was in pixels, the HOA version of if it fits, I sits.

The DA took the file like it was a birthday cake. We got a court date. I put the binder together with tabs so satisfying even my ex-wife would’ve nodded. (I’ve never been married. But the tabs wanted that level of respect.)

Court day comes. Karen glides in late, wearing contrition like perfume. Her lawyer sweats through his suit and pretends he’s not the guy who Googled “perjury Utah penalty” at 1 a.m.

Tom laid out the case like a butcher—clean cuts, nothing left on the bone. Deed. Video. Fake department letter. Bluetooth logs. Document examiner report. Trail cam. Glenn’s messages. He didn’t grandstand. He didn’t thunder. He just kept handing the judge facts until you could see the decision build itself like a wall.

“Miss Sanders,” the judge said, voice flat as the salt flats, “were you aware this document was fabricated?”

Karen tried on a stammer and found that it didn’t fit. “I… I didn’t check.”

The judge nodded, once. “I’m prepared to rule.”

Karen’s lawsuit: dismissed. Sanctions: $25,000 for fraud and wasting court resources. Restitution to me: $84,000 and change. The HOA: co-defendant liable. The judge removed her as president effective immediately and referred the criminal portion to the DA with a look I would not wish on a good dog.

Karen sat like a doll dropped by a child who had finally gotten bored.

News spreads fast out here, carried by wind and Facebook. Some neighbors blamed me for their dues being adjusted. More came by to shake my hand and leave a pie, which is how rural apology and thanks share a kitchen. Turns out Karen had spent years fining people for planting marigolds in the wrong hue and keeping a garden gnome that looked “defiant.” All it took to dethrone her was a camera, a cop with common sense, a lawyer who likes boots, and the stubbornness of a mule that refuses to die.

She appealed. The appellate court read the file and denied it so fast the clerk got whiplash. The HOA’s insurance refused to cover intentional fraud. They slapped a lien on her house. A month later, a “For Sale by Owner — Motivated” sign appeared. Last I heard, she moved in with her sister in Nevada and tells people she left Utah because of the air.

I installed new steel posts that look like they could hold up a bridge and lights that flip on a beetle at fifty yards. My buddy Chris in Denver traded me a smart security upgrade for the right to tell this story at trade shows—drones, a gate intercom that reads which way you part your hair, the works. I shrugged and said, “Sure,” because I like my privacy and I like my revenge symmetrical.

The new HOA board passed bylaws that made it harder to spend other people’s money on stupid. Two-thirds approval for lawsuits. Public posting periods for major projects. They printed an apology in the local paper that read like it had been written with a butter knife, but it was still ink. It still counted.

One Friday I dug up a little groundwater line the HOA crew had once tapped without permission, restored the flow to my tank, and added a pressure valve that bites back if the wrong hands twist it. Call it poetic plumbing.

Then I had people over. Barbecue smoke stitched into the high desert air. Sheriff’s crew. Teresa from the records office. Glenn, who ate ribs with the satisfaction of a man whose antacid was finally working. I raised a beer and said, “To boundaries. May we know where ours end and where the HOA can shove theirs.”

Biggest applause I’ve ever gotten without a microphone.

 

Part 2 — Neighbors with Names and Rules with Teeth

You’d think that’d be the end. But life after an HOA battle is like life after a wildfire: new growth comes quick, but the roots remember. I started noticing what I hadn’t before—the way people flinched at “board meeting,” the variants of HOAs that act like governments when they’re just debaters with clipboards.

I didn’t want to be that guy—the anti-HOA zealot who carries laminated copies of the state code like business cards. But I did want the next guy to have an easier time than I did. So when the new board asked if I’d sit on an advisory committee to draft “Rules with Teeth I Can Live With,” I said I’d take two meetings. It turned into six, which turned into a dog-eared document with protections for both the quiet and the loud.

We wrote in a requirement that any “security installation” had to start with a deed map and end with a Sheriff’s Office signoff. We wrote in a carve-out for preexisting private roads—not easements, not shared drives, not “buffer zones” invented at potlucks. We wrote in a sunshine clause that said if you want to fine a German shepherd for his bark, you need to show up to the meeting where the human who loves him can speak.

We capped board terms. We required board training—basic stuff, like here’s the difference between “common area” and “Jim’s barn.” We made it so fines couldn’t be used as revenue, which took the sting out of a lot of tempers and made the board budget less like a slot machine.

I watched people who’d been quiet for years walk into the clubhouse and talk with their voices and not their blood pressure. It looked like healing, which is the only part of civic life I’ve ever been interested in.

Karen’s name stopped getting said like a curse and started getting said like a cautionary tale. The new president was a woman named Mae who kept notes on sticky paper and apologized to every speaker who’d ever been cut off mid-sentence. Mae was stubborn in the right directions. I brought her muffins. We are friends in the way you get when you’ve survived a small war together without actually being on the same side.

I got a letter from a man whose place borders mine from the north—the one with the goat who makes my dog reconsider who he is. He wrote three lines:

Saw what you did. Thank you. Coffee?

We had it on his porch. He told me about the time an HOA scared his dad so bad he sold the house with the maple tree his mother used to sit under. We talked about what gets broken when power is used by people who shouldn’t have it. We talked about what gets fixed when people like us—who would rather be tinkering with a pump—show up in a room and say no with a steady voice.

The day I knew life had returned to normal was an afternoon I had to run to the hangar and forgot to close my gate. I came back to find it closed, latched, and a note tucked in the hinge that just said: “Cameras saw it open. Didn’t want you to have to watch the footage. — Mae.” It was the politest boundary I’ve ever seen.

My lawyer Tom got two new clients because of my mess—a woman out north who’d been fined for her porch color, and a family whose HOA trespassed to spray their wildflowers. Tom told me every case is one person deciding that affection for tranquility and affection for justice don’t have to fight. “Both can be true,” he said. “You can want quiet and you can still bring the noise if someone lies about the law.”

I took Mo to the vet for an ear infection and the receptionist asked if I was the gate guy. “We watched the whole hearing on the livestream,” she said, handing me antibiotics like popcorn.

“Was it… entertaining?” I asked.

“It was satisfying,” she said.

The sheriff’s office finished their investigation. The DA filed criminal charges that read like the greatest hits—fraud, falsification, attempted extortion with a fake letterhead. It didn’t end in a high-speed chase. It ended with paperwork, as most crimes do. Sentencing was quiet. Karen got probation, community service, a fine. Some people wanted more. I wanted it to be over.

I didn’t hate her. Not when I saw her in the hallway outside court the last time, hands folded like she was waiting for a coach to put her back in. She looked smaller than the sunglasses. That’s what happens when a person who’s been playing a role realizes the audience has gone home and the stage is just old wood.

“If you’d knocked on my door,” I said in the softest voice I own, “I would’ve let you through the first time.”

She didn’t say anything. I didn’t need her to. I could see the moment it landed. Not pity. Not mercy. Just the true sentence that should have been the first sentence.

 

Part 3 — The Road, the Rain, and a Gate That Knows My Name

We got a wet spring. The road held. The culvert I installed after the HOA crew tried to “improve drainage” (by which they meant ruin my water pressure) took the rain like a gentleman. Sagebrush greened earlier than usual. The hawks sharpened their circles. The morning light Youtubers spend fortunes on came free through my kitchen window.

The gate—with all its expensive electronics and grudges—learned our rhythm. It opened for me at fifty yards when it recognized the truck’s front grill and Mo’s ridiculous ears. It kept its spine straight when the Amazon guy arrived confused, then mercy-opened after my neighbor’s text: “Let him in. It’s raining. He tried to toss the package. It was a disaster.”

I started sleeping again without the motion alerts pulling me out of bed. Mo stopped barking at invisible trucks. Sometimes at dusk I’d lean on the fence and watch dust flop back to the earth after a truck passed without stopping, like this piece of ground had accepted it was safe again to do what land does best: be.

One morning, the road had company. A bunch of county kids—half volunteers, half community service—were out picking up trash along the shoulder. The kid nearest my driveway held up a hubcap and yelled, “Treasure!” like he’d found a pirate chest. He waved. I waved back and brought out a case of water and a tray of Teresa’s famous peanut butter cookies. “Stay off my sage,” I said, and he saluted with crumbs in his mouth.

A month later, Mae asked if I’d give a talk at the board about “What We Learned.” I told her I don’t give talks; I tell stories. She said that was better anyway.

I told them about deeds and letters and cameras and patience. But mostly I told them about the first day my boots hit the dust on that road—before I’d met any of them, before I’d learned what a recording ordinance was—a day I stood with a thermos of coffee and listened to a place that didn’t ask anything of me but for me to love it right.

“Rules are fine,” I said. “They keep your neighbor from building a pig slaughterhouse in a cul-de-sac. But the minute your rule feels like a stick to hit the quiet guy on twenty acres, you’ve lost the plot. If you have to pick between being right and being neighborly, figure out how to be both. And if you can’t, knock on the door and say it with your mouth.”

A guy in back—hat on backwards, hands that looked like they’d voted for long days—raised his hand. “What if the neighbor’s an idiot?”

“Then you’re gonna need more cookies,” I said.

They laughed, and for the first time since the gate showed up in wet cement, the clubhouse felt like it belonged to the people in it.

 

Part 4 — The Case After the Case

Six months after the ruling, I got a call from a woman three counties over. Her HOA had decided the trail that had been there since horses was now a restricted “wildlife corridor” and had put boulders at either end big enough to be considered landmarks. She’d heard from Mae that I “do gates.” I told her I don’t do gates, I do stubborn and documentation, and both require you to put your boots on and bring your coffee.

I drove out early. Walked the line with her and her old man dog. She showed me her deed. I showed her where to put the cameras. I gave her Tom’s number and told her to do her homework gently but relentlessly. Then, because I am a romantic, I told her to bake a pie and bring it to the next board meeting. “It’s hard to yell at someone holding a cherry pie,” I said. “And if they still do, the judge will like you more than he likes them.”

She won. I got a thank-you note from the dog with a paw print that was mostly smudge, and I put it on my fridge next to a faded Polaroid of my father at a truck stop with his hand on a map like he could feel the road through paper.

Teresa at the county retired. They gave her a cake with frosting in the shape of GIS parcel lines. I spoke at her party because a person who can read a map of your heart deserves a speech. “To Teresa,” I said, “who taught me that the lines we fight over are less important than the people who pick up the phone.”

Dorsey got promoted and pretended he hated it. Wheeler got a new baby and stopped looking like he wanted to be anywhere else. Glenn bought a kayak and started texting pictures of water that looked like the sky.

Karen’s house sat empty for a year. Then it sold to a couple with two small boys and a golden retriever named Beans. The boys learned to ride their bikes on the street where the HOA once measured grass length with a ruler. They planted marigolds in a hue that would have gotten a fine. It felt like an exhale.

One evening, I found an envelope on my porch with money in it. Cash. No note. Just a number that looked like it might be connected to the restitution schedule. I stood in my kitchen with it and realized that, for the first time since I’d put boots on this dirt, the road had given me something besides a place to put my footsteps. It had given me an ending.

I walked outside with Mo and watched the sunset fight the mountains for the last word. The quiet was full again, not empty. There are ends that feel like falling. This one felt like standing.

If you’re waiting for a new villain to walk onto the stage, or for me to install a moat, you’ll be disappointed. The next big story is that there isn’t one. The next big thing is small: a neighbor who knocked instead of emailing, a board that paused before voting, a sheriff who called before cutting.

It turns out the only thing better than winning is not having to fight.

 

Part 5 — The Gate in the Rearview

People online ask me two questions when they hear the story: Where do you stand when someone tries to take what’s yours? and Did justice get served?

I stand at the fence line with respect first and receipts second. I stand with patience until patience becomes permission, and then I stand with a lawyer who wears boots. I stand where the deed says my feet belong, and I stand in rooms I would rather not visit so the quiet guy behind me doesn’t have to.

As for justice—she showed up late and uninvited, ate all the pie, and left the place cleaner than she found it. It wasn’t perfect. It never is. But it was enough.

I still take the road twice a day. It still rumbles the way a good road should. Sometimes, out of habit, I glance at where the post used to be and see nothing but dust. I like it that way. The cameras see plenty. The gate reads my truck’s face and lets me pass. But the thing that keeps me safe isn’t steel. It’s the knowledge that if a person with a clipboard and a vocabulary of hostile nouns shows up again, I know what to do.

Ask nicely. Document loudly. Call Dorsey. Feed Wheeler. Hire Tom. Wave to Teresa in her garden, because retired people still pull strings. Thank Mae for the sticky note revolution. Scratch Glenn’s kayak pictures on Instagram. Pet Beans. Tell the boys to wear helmets. And then—when the dust settles—throw a barbecue and raise a beer to boundaries and the neighbors who keep them.

I keep a copy of the judge’s order in a folder in the kitchen. Not to wave around. To remind myself that even in a world where people make fake letterheads and sink posts in wet cement at three in the morning, there’s a line in the sand that holds. There’s a road that still belongs to the man who wakes up early to drive it.

So here it is, simple and true, the story I end on when a stranger asks me at the co-op why I smile when I tell it. One morning I came home and found a gate. One afternoon my friend in a tan uniform cut the lock. One season later, a judge signed a thing with her name on it that made my hands stop shaking. And one year after that, the marigolds two blocks over bloomed in a color that used to cost money.

If you want something tidy, here’s tidy: the gate’s in the rearview. The road’s in front of me. The dog’s got his head out the window. Coffee’s still hot. Dust is still honest. And the sky—wide as ever—reminds me every single morning that some things, once you fight for them, stay yours.

THE END!

Disclaimer: Our stories are inspired by real-life events but are carefully rewritten for entertainment. Any resemblance to actual people or situations is purely coincidental.