The 160-acre parcel of land that Leland Sarmont and Jeanne Faulkner bought in northern Wisconsin in 1992 lies in the middle of 200-to-300-foot hills eight miles from Lake Superior. The land is covered with maples, basswoods, yellow birches, blueberries, and Juneberries. The west fork of the Montreal River cuts through a corner of the property, carving a gorge with a stair-step falls, Rock Cut Falls, that drops 60 feet.
A 1995 survey by the Iron County Development Zone Council, a nongovernmental group focused on encouraging the local economy, reported that snowmobiling was pumping $15 million a year into gas stations, repair shops, motels, restaurants–and bars. Hurley alone has 31 bars–five of which are also strip clubs–that anchor Silver Street, the town’s main drag. Michael Rosen, proprietor of a shoe store in Ironwood, Michigan, Hurley’s twin city across the Montreal River, says, “People come up here to snowmobile, to drink, and to hit the titty bars.”
Faulkner says she’d always been touched by stories her father used to tell about his father growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “I always thought it might be a good place to resettle,” she says. “Rock Cut was the most reasonable price and the loveliest terrain. We came, we saw, we bought.” They paid $27,000 for the land.
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Sarmont had lined up a job with a local aircraft-instrument maker, but that fell through when the company moved to Mexico. He and Faulkner moved anyway. “This was everything I wanted in my life–beautiful land with a mountain and a river,” she says. “Other people have their dreams, and this was mine.” They rented for a while, then in 1993 bought a house in Ironwood. In 1994 they moved to a farm they bought in Iron Belt, a half dozen miles west of the Rock Cut Falls property.
Nothing happened with the couple’s request. They continued to complain, and the rowdies and the people Faulkner calls “pear-shaped-fanny old doozies” continued to speed across their property. Sarmont says, “There were drunks going through at 90 miles an hour.”
At the March meeting of the county board the members adopted the minutes from the February meeting–but they specifically deleted the bridge-sale resolution. “We were fit to be tied,” says Sarmont, who argued that a public body had no right trying to undo an action it had taken by making the record of it vanish.
Somehow the two sides kept negotiating, and by August another proposal sat on the table. Varda says the new pact was “a sweetheart deal” for the landowners. Sarmont and Faulkner disagreed. Some of the details were the same–the county could, for instance, use the right-of-way for five years–but instead of a 30-day cancellation clause there was now a one-year clause. And the county refused to reroute the trail. The county did offer to pay the couple $200 a year to use the bridge, which it explained could be seen either as a land-use fee (suggesting Sarmont and Faulkner owned the bridge) or as a fee for storing the bridge on their land (suggesting the county still owned the bridge). Sarmont and Faulkner didn’t like that provision at all, because it didn’t settle who owned the bridge. Varda says, “If the bridge is still there over the river, who cares who owns it technically? The bridge wasn’t going anywhere–and neither was the county.”
