by J. Pongratz, Member of the Board of Directors
The Retreat is working together.
The Cumberland Mountain Retreat is designed to be a community, not an investment scheme. Investors in land don’t build community. People are community, and the Retreat is here for that purpose. This includes the care and stewardship of the properties. Each person is needed for the community to work effectively, as contributors and participating members. While the world out there may try to make you feel as a “worker bee,” we are actually reflections of one another and partners.
We need each other like most life needs oxygen.
But you might be disappointed, or know someone who is.
“The POA is fabulously wealthy, a gold mine. They don’t need my contribution.”
“I don’t like the way the POA is maintaining the roads, so I’m holding back my support.”
“I don’t think the POA is doing very much because things here aren’t so shiny today.”
When you engage is this kind of thinking, you are engaging in fantasy entitlement, without considering how your lifestyle is impacted by the decisions you make, or how you impact the greater community. You have removed yourself from the community and are disassociating yourself. Big words, but big problems. You are discounting yourself as a person, when you believe you are making yourself better.
That’s on you.
You also don’t consider the idea that the CMRPOA has been here for more than 50 years, like many other HOAs and POAs with lakes and other complex infrastructure. It takes continued work, commitment and effort just to keep things in working order. While rustic can be beautiful, the need for good stewardship never goes away. You are a large part of that, in your own home, and in the operations of the Retreat.
As a riparian community, a collection of lakes, dams, creeks and waterfronts, the Cumberland Mountain Retreat has many needs, and is regulated by the State of Tennessee. We have laws to observe, dam inspections and maintenance, paperwork to maintain, taxes to pay, insurance to fund, a swinging bridge to maintain, roads and drainage to manage, signage, and in some places, a water district with testing and requirements. As a non-profit cooperative entity, most of us are volunteers, and none of us are politicians.
A few of us come from the city, expecting the city to be in the country. It’s not, or this would be the city.
“Country living is good and life is free.” You think?
It’s true that less is often more in life, yet we are not free of accountability to one another. If you want that, you need to get a piece of land out in the middle of nowhere without bylaws or property restrictions, build a tall fence, and keep to yourself on your own lonely plot. Of course, you will still be required to pay your taxes, or you will lose your land. That is life in this age. You are not free from all “responsibility” or to do exactly as you please in every way.
While life can very good at the Retreat, and freedom the standard, life in a community is not without expense or effort. Your expectations must be managed by your willingness to participate. The less you contribute, the less you should expect. But many people oddly expect more. To me, that’s mental illness.
A few of you, in rash moments, have voiced the opinion that you wish the POA would go away. Were that to happen, you would be in immediate legal peril. The State of Tennessee, like multitudes of other states, has requirements that would no longer be met. The lakes would be drained and the dams removed if no solution was found. While the State of Tennessee considers that it owns the water, the land underneath that water is held by the property owner, which in this case is the Cumberland Mountain Retreat. With the lake gone, you would lose the lake and all of its benefits, including the sustaining value of your property, and the desirability of much of your life.
While you wouldn’t have anyone to work toward any standards, and you might briefly experience a temporary feeling of freedom, you also wouldn’t have anyone to maintain anything, and your life would become a wilderness. The community would eventually devolve fully into a backwater, a totally bereft place of weeds and overgrowth without human attention. Nature has a way of reclaiming itself from our influence. You’ve seen it. Nature fills empty spaces, but that same nature can help fill empty hearts as well. With the right priorities, we find balance.
As a member of the Cumberland Mountain Retreat, it is imperative that you recognize your role in the success of the adventure we are united in. Life is about maintaining a measure of stability and cooperation, which circles back to community and friendship. None of us likes everything a person does, and there are lots of us here. Yet, we still find ways to live together as a body of individuals, and support one another the best we can depending on our abilities. We actually need one another, and we actually need to communicate, to talk, associate, even work with one another. Your failure to do that falls back on you more than the community.
The truth is that I would love to express the measure of freedom that is here in the country and at the Retreat at large, the relative lack of rules, and the desire for greater freedom together as we share in that magic. You can still be an individualist, your own man or woman. You just share that and live your life as an American with others. You join others, plan and make moves for a better tomorrow. That is known as true prosperity, the richness of similar purpose and goals as we spend more time living in the moment. That is what the Cumberland Mountain Retreat is about.