October 21, 2994

Liebe Margrit,

We made it to Carlisle, and are staying at Albrights Motel, where we always stay, actually in one of the rooms which we have frequently had before.  We got up early in Konnarock; After breakfast, I drained the water system; it took me exactly an hour and fifteen minutes.  We left at eight thirty; Margaret doesn't like to drive in the dark.  We got here at five o'clock, just as everyone was turning on the lights.

I took one of the computers into the motel room, because I have all kinds of things on my mind, which I did not have leisure or time spell out in Konnarock, but which I want to put down before I forget them, as I forget almost everything now, sooner rather than later.

First I want to thank you for the willingness with which you gave me the the new trust for which I asked.  It is actually a very complex legal document with the details of which I don't want to bore you except to say that it is not carved in stone and can be easily changed.  If you should find any clauses in it now or in the future which you don't like, then I would like to change them to your satisfaction.  

So far as the practical matters of house maintenance are concerned: The septic tank functions like new; I covered it with a layer of soil; I intended to scatter some grass seed over it, but I ran out of time.  If it still looks bare in the spring, there will be time enough then to do some sowing.  At least we don't have to build a new septic tank; and a potentially expensive problem is solved.

I finished clipping the hedge everywhere except at the posterior margin in front of the house.  Even so, it doesn't look bad at all, and I will finish the trimming next time I am in Konnarock.

I cemented the rims of the sumps which I installed in the basement, and cemented the gutters which I cut out of the basement floor.  The hot and cold water systems seemed to be unaffected by having been drained dry for two months.  The only untoward event is that I burned out the hot water heater, because I turned on the electricity before the tank had filled completely.  I repaired the heating element and the thermostat, that tank works well, and there is no reason why any of us should repeat the same mistake.

The antifreeze in the boiler seems to be working very well.  All the radiators are perfused with antifreeze, and get warm.  The elevel of antifreeze in the system has remained constant, so there has been no leakage.  It looks now as if this aspect of the heating system will need very little attention.  There remains one problem with the fire chamber in the furnace, in that it appears to resonate, periodically building up a small amount of air pressure which pushes combustion gases into the basement.  I took apart the stove pipe that connects the furnace to the chimney, cleaned out a small amount of soot from the bottom of the chimney and a more substantial amount from the sheet metal pipe. I glued a gasket in the draft vane, and sealed all the seams of the sheet metal with aluminum tape.  But the combustion gases still escape, although in smaller amounts.  I don't think they contain very much carbon monoxide, I spent a long time in the basement without feeling sick, and the gasses dont seem to penetrate into the rest of the house. It was very warm when we were there, and the colder the weather, be better the draft, and the less the amount of combustion gas that escapes.  So in cold weather, which will presumably prevail when you are there at Christmas, there will be even less risk, though it wouldn't hurt to crack the bedroom window open just a little bit. Actually, I think the furnace is no smellier and leaks no more than it has been for most of the past forty-two years, and possibly even a less so.  I placed a smoke alarm on the ledge between the furnace room and your garden table, and that you will hear it shrieking if any amount of smoke escapes.  This is NOT however a fire hazard.

If the alarm bothers you, get up on a chair (without breaking your leg) and remove the little plastic box.  Ask Jeane's help, if you can't find it.  Next summer, I will take the furnace apart and fix it with a smaller oil burner nozzle to try to get rid of the smoke problem.

Otherwise, there are the venetian blinds to be repaired and various exposed, bare wood surfaces need painting.  I hope to get to that also next summer.  Margaret thinks we should get the blue bathroom retiled with ceramic tile or do it ourselves, and I agree.  There are also a few windows that have broken springs, most notably the one facing the mail box from Muttis and Papas bedroom. Those repairs are potentially most difficult, but I will repair them as soon as I can.

Now for the legal issues; if you don't want to hear about them, you can just skip these paragraphs.  The old trust which we just dissolved was called the Meyer Realty Trust.  It was necessary to give the new trust a different name from the old one to prevent confusion.  I called it the Iron Mountain Realty Trust.  I am offended by the implicit narcissism of so many Meyer Family Trusts.  Two is enough.  So I thought I would pick a name from the environment.  The trouble with Iron Mountain Realty Trust is that it sounds too grand, as if we owned the whole mountain.  On the other hand, "Coolgreen Trust" makes me wonder whether the settlor or the beneficiaries are on drugs.

The old trust had three deficiencies, of which I was unaware when I drafted it four and a half years ago.  The first defect of the old trust was that the trustee served at the pleasure of the beneficiaries.  Last summer, I did some research on this issue, I found that the courts have sometimes construed trusts whose beneficiaries control the trustee as partnerships and have held all the beneficiaries liable for judgments against the trust.  The second defect of the old trust was that it ignored the problems of legal liability, not because I was unaware of them, but because I did not see a good way of dealing with them.  The third defect of the old trust was the absence of any provision for amending it.  That is why, to get the changes which I thought desirable, we had to revoke the old trust and to start all over again with a new one.

These deficiencies have now been corrected, or cured, as the lawyers would say.  The trustee is now legally independent of the beneficiaries, Furthermore, the trust instrument now states affirmatively that persons are on trust property at their own risk and shall reimburse the trust for any expenses incident to claims for physical injury or property damage.  This as you know was our concern last summer when we tried to buy liability coverage for Klemens and Margaret as trustee, it turns out, unsuccessfully.  In order for the provisions of the trust relating to liability to be effective, the persons to whom they apply must have notice of them. There are many ways of giving notice.  At one extreme is the legal doctrine which holds that the trust, recorded now in the Clerk's office of Washington County Circuit Court is a public document, and that its being on record is sufficient notice to making its terms effective.  At the other extreme is the legal doctrine that individuals affected must agree to the conditions of the trust, by giving their written consent to its terms.  In practice the extent of the notice which the court might require is unpredictable.  The best one can do is to make a legal record, by acting in a manner which is fair and reasonable.  For my part I am very flexible, willing to consider any changes in our procedures that you might wish, up to and including deleting the paragraph from the trust if you find it objectionable.  The reason for my flexibility is, that Margaret is no longer involved as trustee, that Klemens is effectively insulated from liability, your own assets are not reachable by creditors, and I myself have lived with professional liability risks for 24 years and expect to be able to take care of myself.  That leaves the trust property itself as the only significiant property ar risk, and if we had to auction it off, we could always buy it back, if we still wanted it.  

To give potentially affected individuals notice of the terms of the trust I have made two signs, one of which I mounted on the mail box post, the other of which is scotch-taped to the door between the kitchen and dining room.  I enclose copies of them and you can think about them.  If they offend you, and you want me to take them down, just tell me.

So far as the posted notices of assumed risk are concerned, you have any number of options:

1) You can ignore them, let your visitors, (the lawyers call them invitees) read them and draw their own conclusions.

2) You can apologize for them to your visitors, explaining that you consider the signs absurd, and that you consider your brother a self-made bastard.  I would find such criticism helpful, since it would not weaken the legal effect of the notice, and would provide very convincing affirmative evidence that notice had in fact been given.

3) If you mentioned your brother's obnoxious craziness to your visitors, and possibly even showed them a copy of the notices before they came, that, from my point of view, would be ideal.  One most assuredly does not need to address the notice to the visitor in question, do NOT need to give get anybody to sign anything.

What is most important to me is that you should feel free to use the house as you see fit, and that you should be comfortable with the specific arrangements; I don't want you to be embarrassed by obnoxious odors, whether the emanate from the oil burner or from my legalistic preoccupations.  While I think that the risk of injury to a visitor is small - only one has occurred in 42 years.  Tante Grete fell downstairs and hurt herself moderately seriously, it is said because the hand rail was too short, - and she didn't sue.  So even if the risk of a lawsuit is small, I think the physical hazards of the place, which we don't appreciate, because of our familiarity with the topography, are real.  People are all the time falling off retaining walls; Yale University lost a lawsuit over such an accident.  Our retaining wall is completely unprotected, and invisible in the dark.  A five and a half foot fall can do very serious permanent injury.  The external illumination of the grounds, designed to dissuade intruders, is inadequate to permit persons unfamiliar with the property to walk about safely at night.  And then there is the host of other real or imagined hazards which are totally unpredicable.  If you give some one a sharp knife to peel a potato, you can get sued because it was too sharp; but one can also cut himself, because the knife was too dull, and sue for that.

The other element of the mail box notice also requires explanation.  The road from the bottom of the hill to the house was originally a private road.  After Lee Waters bought the farm from the Board, Mutti and Papa, very unwisely, I think, forced him to give the state a forty foot right of way, so that it could become a public road, viz. Route 602.  To the best of my knowledge, Mutti and Papa, and the Church holding the remainder interest to the house never gave a right of way, but the state just started to use part of our land as a turnaround.  I never thought anything about this, perhaps I should have, until the state put up a no parking sign on our land, and Franklin Jarmon scolded me for leaving my gray car under it.  At present the status of the turnaround is uncertain, especially since no one knows where its boundaries are.  I placed the sign, again, to make a legal record.  Jeane and Franklin both agree, that the highway department will probably not even read it.  It will remain there from month to month and from year to year, we will replace it, as needed.  At some time in the future, 10 weeks or 10 years from now, the state may challenge us and claim that it acquired our land by custom. More likely they will say, to hell with you, if you don't give us a right of way, we will stop maintaining the road, and make a turnaround where the Jarmons road branches off, and the state has its forty foot wide right of way, leaving us to worry about a road impassable from ruts or fallen trees.  That would be just fine with Klemens, Margaret and me, and I hope with you also.

One other clause in the signs requires explanation, namely the smoking ban.  Margaret is much more sensitive to cigarette smoke than I am. I haven't discussed it with Laura and Klemens, they don't smoke, and I don't know how strongly they feel about it.  I  think that the supposed dangers of inhaling fumes from the cigratette smoke of others is part of the health hysteria of our day.  I don't consider smoking a fire hazard unless you get drunk and then light a cigarette while you're trying to go to sleep.  I hope you won't let any of your visitors smoke in bed, they probably wouldn't anyway.  But the reason I put the smoking clause on the sign is that people are so used to being pushed around about smoking and some of them even feel very virtouous about their tobacco abstinence, that the reference to smoking would make the liability clauses less startling and less grating.

I do worry a little bit about that fat red candle on the dresser in Muttis and Papas bedroom, which has obviously melted asymmetrically for many hours.  However I decided to be good and not to get rid of it, - I hope you will.  For the rest, I hope you can keep your Christmas candle sentiments under control. In any event, don't go to sleep by candlelight, and don't go out to look at the stars while the candles are burning.  There are two fire extinguishers, one in the garage, and another next to the fireplace, which doesn't mean that the fireplace is safe to use.  I don't know; it hasn't been used for ten years.  Make sure you know how to operate the fire extinguishers if things get out of hand.

Please don't get angry at me for speaking my mind, but having just spent 11 days working on the house almost all day every day, I feel somewhat morally superior.  I agree that there is danger in that also, perhaps greater than in a melting candle.

I also enclose the revised instructions for opening and closing the house.  Normally when one opens the house, one first closes all faucets and valves.  To make things easier for you (or Jeane), after draining the water, just before we left, I closed all the valves and faucets, except for the hot water faucet in the kitchen.  When you arrive at Christmas time you need only: 1) turn on the electric power to the furnace, 2) turn on the water pump, and 3) after water has started to run smoothly from the hot water kitchen faucet, turn on the electric switch to the hot water tank.  Please see explanations attached.

To my suprise, Jeane showed an interest bordering on enthusiasm about opening up the house for you two or three days before you come.  I think there is a lot to be said for accepting her offer, because even though everything functioned well this time, it would be embarrassing if you came and, for example, the oil burner did not ignite, or there were a sizable leak from one of the water pipes.  Jean's checking things out before hand might save you much inconvenience (and expense). However, the decision is obviously for you to make.  I will be available for telephone consultation if you tell me when I will be needed.  Consider also whether you wish to let Jeane close the house for you.  She seems to want to do it.  If the oil burner is working satisfactorily, the house can be closed a day or two after you leave, or a week later. As I mentioned, it took me an hour and fifteen minutes, in addition to freeze-proofing the washing machine, which I did with Jeane the evening before.  Again, I will be available for telephone consultation by appointment.

Und noch eines, - ich habe einen besonderen Schlüssel fuer Dich an besonderer Stelle abgelegt.  Aber das lässt sich besser telephonisch erörtern.