Thanks to our vandal, we’ve got trail cams set up in key areas. After finding the lock on our gate glued a few times, back in 2018, we set one up on a tree facing the gate, and that’s how we caught our vandal in the act. Since then, part of my morning routine is to switch out the memory cards and check the files.

Sometimes, however, weather, snow, or other factors means we skip a day – or longer, if the weather is really bad. I’m not too concerned about that since, if the weather is bad enough we can’t get to the cameras, our vandal isn’t going to get at what they’re covering, either!

The corner of the property the house and outbuilding are on is at an intersection. When we first moved here, the stop signs for the road that goes past our driveway each had a name sign for our road, though. And when I say “our” road, that partly means the road is named after my family, and that name was on one of the stop signs. The roads also all have numerical designations. This is true of pretty much all the roads around us; they have a name that’s usually from a family with a long time farm along it, and a number.

For many decades, none of the roads had any names at all. Most people went by section numbers. In fact, the electric company still uses that system. Beyond that, it was more along the lines of “turn onto the gravel road and drive X number of miles…” and so on. For as long as I can remember, right at the corner post of our fence was a sign with my late father’s initial and surname on it, which helped in giving directions! As you can imagine, that made things difficult for emergency vehicles to find places, so the roads were given proper names then, at some point, got numerical designations too, and everyone’s driveway got a marker number.

Well, after we started having issues with our vandal, first the stop sign with our family name on it got knocked to the ground and the sign stolen. Then the sign with my father’s name on it disappeared. It was hard enough to get people to find us, since our physical address doesn’t exist – Google maps has several miles of the road past our driveway listed as “unknown road” – but without those signs and landmarks, it made it more difficult. So I decided to make a sign to put at the corner to make things clear. You can read about that here, here, here, and here, where my brother helped me install it far better than we could have done, with the materials we had! (all links will open in new tabs)

With the other signs going missing, I made sure to have a trail cam set for the new sign. More specifically, the area in front of it. We even got a new trail cam that could take a combination of stills and video, and we were able to mount it directly to the corner post.

Then one morning, I came out and it was gone. Ripped right off. Of course, we have no proof, but there’s only one person who would have taken it.

We ordered a new camera, which is now the gate came, and set it up on the corner post again – this time with an older camera set up to monitor the new camera!

In the end, though, we didn’t want another camera stolen off the post, so we found something we could use as a stand. The new camera couldn’t be set up on it, so we used an older camera that can only take stills, set up out of reach inside the fence line rather than on the post, and the new solar powered camera went to monitor the gate.

This set up has worked out well. Granted, we have barbed wire fences, so it’s not like a determined person still couldn’t get at it, but it works out. We do see our vandal going by ever now and then, since he lives so close to us, but since we were able to get a restraining order against him, we no longer see him making rude gestures at the camera anymore. The visible presence of the cameras themselves are a deterrent. Well. Except for the one that got stolen!

So that’s the background.

In the winter, there are always times when we can’t get at the sign cam because of the snow, but there’s less of a concern in the winter. Our vandal is in no shape to climb over the huge plow ridge at the intersection, or make his way through snow drifts, to get at the sign. I wasn’t able to switch out that camera’s card in the last little while, but was able to this morning, and this evening I was finally able to go through the files.

Yes, I did see our vandal go by in a couple of them, but I found something else far stranger.

It’s not unusual to see people stopping on the road at or near the intersection and getting out of their vehicles. This time, however, we got images of three young men walking away from their stopped vehicle towards the intersection.

Then climbing the plow ridge to get to the sign.

One of them posed in front of the sign while a second one took his photo, and the third one stayed further back.

I have no idea who these guys are. They looked to be maybe in their late teens or early 20’s, and I’ve never seen them before.

They would have seen the sign cam, of course. The sign cam may now be further back from the fence line, but it’s visible from the road. From where they climbed the plow ridge to get in front of the sign, they were facing it. The one guy who took the photo even seemed to look right at it. They had to know they were being recorded.

Whatever they were doing, they seemed to be having fun and were all laughter and smiles, but…

What on earth could there be about our sign that they’d go through that effort to get to it, and why would one of them want to have his picture taken in front of it?

It’s a complete mystery for all of us!

The Re-Farmer