From New Hampshire Public Radio, this is outside in. A show about the natural world and how we use it.

I'm Sam Evans Brown, and today we're talking about dogs.

One dog in particular. This is Taylor Quimby and the doc we're talking about is his

dads but I think this is also a story about what we're allowed to do with the

property that we own and what we're allowed to do with the property that we own and what we're not.

Because when you buy a piece of undeveloped property what you're really buying is a fantasy

you're buying this dream of what the property will look like once you put in lots of years of work.

Yeah, like it's a blank canvas.

What a lot of people don't know is that homeowners don't have a blank canvas,

there are lots of rules about what you can and can't do with your property.

And this is a story about a guy, my dad.

A guy whose dream put him on a collision course

with what he thought was a heartless, faceless bureaucracy. Forest Quimby is a surgeon who lives on Franklin Pierce Lake in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.

So, I think it was back in about 1998.

We built a deck that had a little screen house, we called it the T house, and then a permanent dock that was over the water.

I mean you used to argue that it was like the it was one of the most beautiful if not the most beautiful

Deck and duck on the lake is actually people thought it was you know I mean one of the one of the nicest aesthetic structures on the lake.

It was this high-end three-tiered thing that hung out over the water in a broad

semi-circle and then climbed up onto the lake shore in a set of terraced decks

topped by this little circular gazebo where you could get out of the bugs but still

feel like you were outside. Force Quimbeat loved his dock. You know and I spent months

staining it with three coats of sick and stains so that it would just last and be

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