Audio By Carbonatix
There is one point of fact upon which Ron Siegfried and the City of Lakewood agree. Here it is: When code-enforcement officer John Holmes came to tell Siegfried that his grass was too long and neighbors had complained, Siegfried was indignant and unrepentant. “I’m an American,” both parties agree he said. “I don’t have to put up with this.”
Other than that, the facts are not facts, but widely varying interpretations with little common ground–except, of course, Siegfried’s yard, where miscellaneous code infractions are alleged to have occurred.
Siegfried vs. the City of Lakewood has been escalating since the fall of 1995, with no end in sight. You never get to the bottom of a dispute such as this–except, perhaps, Talmudically.
Let’s examine different aspects of the one thing we (think we) know to be true. Is Ron Siegfried an American? Yes. Did a fellow American complain about his lawn? More than once. Are Americans required by law to cut their grass? Well…the Constitution doesn’t cover that, but zoning regs usually do. Does a lawn look better cut very short as opposed to left somewhat long? That depends on whether your landscaping ideal leans to British estate design or the Argentine pampas.
Siegfried, typically, favors neither.
“Now, most people trim their lawns in what you might call a crewcut–it’s accepted,” he muses. “But I am not into cutting my hair like a crewcut, so why should I do it to my lawn? In lawns and in hair, I like a nice style. Longish, with shapes cut in. Plus, when all this started, I couldn’t cut my lawn, anyway. I was waiting to see if the English thyme and chamomile were going to come in like I wanted them to.”
Siegfried’s lawn–and his unorthodox view of how it should look–was what first drew the attention of municipal authorities. Since then, however, the general unruliness of his lot has expanded to include not just the front yard, but the side and back yards, which are crammed with construction materials that will come in handy someday, “and whether I brushed my teeth this morning, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Siegfried says. “But all I can tell you is, I never picked this fight.”
A career carpenter/fix-it guy, Ron Siegfried had always taken advantage of the excellent salvage opportunities available to guys who happen to appear at construction and reconstruction sites with empty pickup trucks. When he saw, for instance, a pile of massive hundred-year-old beams, he put them in his truck and took them home. A bunch of pallets busted up outside a marble company–each with intriguing foreign lettering–cried out to be made into rustic tables, picture frames and country-style hutches.
“Yeah, yeah, I made all that stuff and had wood left over,” he says. “I wake up in the morning wanting to make stuff. I’m the scrapmaster.”
But something happens to scrapmasters who turn forty, as Siegfried did five years ago. “You stop going to bars, and all of a sudden you want to grow potatoes,” he explains. “I wanted to make a garden. An ever-changing scene. An edible landscape, you know what I’m saying? All my yard had was a half-dead apple tree and hard clay dirt. I started reading good magazines and got some ideas.”
Acting on those ideas, he sowed a “green manure” cover crop, in which buckwheat was left to grow all winter and then tilled into the soil to “fix the nitrogen, whatever that means,” he says. “I started raspberries and old-fashioned hollyhocks, eight feet tall. Lots of scilla, tomatoes and chives, a little here and a little there until it became completely unmanageable and insane.”
Although there’s an undeniable methodical madness to Siegfried’s garden, it also is quite an accomplishment, with astoundingly healthy perennials growing in mounds of compost and vines and flowers of all kinds shooting up toward the light in a classic cottage-garden style. Unlike the other yards in his neighborhood, Siegfried’s has a rambunctious personality that is obvious even from a speeding car.
“Other gardens around here, I’ve noticed, are really, really tacky,” he volunteers. “Pansies. It’s scary. Those yards with twelve pansies in them, and that’s it. Whew. And they call that gardening!”
At least they know what to call it. The same cannot be said for that copper-tubing framework, about eight feet by eight feet, which sits just to the right of Siegfried’s wavily trimmed lawn. He offers a label. “Shock art–a little something to freak out my relatives,” he says darkly, scurrying about, hooking up hoses. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”
A few minutes later, water begins spurting from two pinholes at the top of the copper tubing. As water pressure increases, the spurt forms a sort of round ornament made of water. “Yes!” he says excitedly. “It’s supposed to look like blowing glass, right? But there’s also supposed to be a hummingbird feeder right behind it, and the vision is, you’re supposed to have a hummingbird fly by at exactly the right moment, right around sunset, and that never happens, but that’s the plan, which I thought of early one morning, so I just built it.”
Once he started his garden improvements, Siegfried had such a surfeit of plans that his wife clipped a pertinent quote from an architectural magazine, framed it and hung it from the front-porch pillar. “There is a place for precision, naturally,” it reads. “Architectural lines such as those from hedges, walls, paths or topiary are the bones of the garden. But it is the artist who then allows dishevelment to evolve.”
Evolving dishevelment is just the sort of thing that irritates anal suburban neighbors, and Siegfried, if he is correct about which neighbor ratted him off to the authorities, lives near a doozy.
“That guy, the mailman has told me, is very particular about the way his mail is packaged,” Siegfried says with disgust. “It has to be folded and rubber-banded just so. That guy shovels the snow off his lawn in the winter and vacuums the leaves off his roof in the fall.”
It is that guy, Siegfried assumes, who complained about his unusual garden to Lakewood code-enforcement officials. “Also, I may have had a couple of gazebos in the driveway from this garage sale I had held,” Siegfried admits. “They had been up for, like, three days. This zoning guy tells me, ‘Take it down. This has been going on for some time now. Wood and rubbish.’ Rubbish! Ha! But I take the gazebo down. Then he comes back a year later and tells me there’s wood and tires on the side of my house, and I have to move it all to the back.”
Siegfried’s version of events roughly coincides with official records found by Barb Brown, Lakewood’s supervisor of code enforcement and John Holmes’s boss.
“Well, yes,” she says, scanning her computer, “outside storage of wood…complaints about wood, an old car, junk…complaints about lawn…We’ve followed up on three different things since 1995, and with ordinances, there is usually room for some gray among the black and white. But not with wood storage, unfortunately.”
And where, Ron Siegfried wants to know, is a person supposed to store wood, if not outside his home? “I moved it to the back, and I took some loads to the dump,” he says, “but geez, it’s around the sides of houses that people keep their stuff. Side is convenient; back is not. You know what I’m saying?”
Inevitably, as the seasons passed and more stuff accumulated, code-enforcement officers moved past the sides and around to the back of Siegfried’s house, where they saw vast piles of wood, both in and out of sheds, as well as a playhouse, ingenious outdoor tables constructed of cinderblocks and flagstone, a deck made of salvaged lumber with a square hole right in the middle in which to plant lettuce, old beams waiting to become something else…
“If he had just one pile of wood, I could see working with him,” says Brown, who finally decided to accompany Holmes on an inspection tour of the infamous Siegfried yard. “But he has a bunch in the back, a bunch in the shed and a bunch he said would be a sailboat. I told him, ‘You cannot store this stuff outside indefinitely,’ and by his own admission, it had been two years he’d been planning to build that boat! What he heard me say was, ‘You cannot build that boat,’ and it made him mad. That’s not what I said, but he did not hear me. I tried and I tried.”
Well. For starters, two years is nothing to a scrapmaster. Ron Siegfried may very well be planning to build that sailboat, which at the moment may very well look like a pile of plywood but is clearly labeled “Flounder Bay Boat Company.” So there you go. Indeed, he might rise early one morning intending to build that boat–but what if he has another hummingbird shock-art vision? He’d have to get right on it. And the boat makings, nicely stashed in the back yard, could just wait another couple of years.
Second, “you can have two cords of firewood in your yard according to Lakewood law,” Siegfried says triumphantly. “Legally some of these piles could be firewood, even if it’s really priceless beams from an old building. And what do they tell me? I can burn this wood, but by recycling it I’m a criminal?”
At this, Brown sighs. “Yes, you can have two cords of firewood,” she says, “but this is so obviously not firewood. This is obviously building material. I forget where he got it, but you should see it. It’s cool. He just cannot keep it outside. He just cannot.”
After Brown’s visit to Siegfried’s place, much discussion of such fine points ensued–and as anyone could have predicted, no compromise was reached. On May 11, Siegfried, Brown and Holmes met again during the course of an “administrative abatement hearing,” during which Holmes showed photographs of the yard in question and Siegfried got mad at Holmes for trespassing. Holmes said he took the pictures from a neighbor’s yard. Siegfried thought about Brown telling him he simply could not build that sailboat and got mad all over again. Brown thought about how hard she had tried to clarify matters–he could build a sailboat, but he couldn’t store its components outside his home–and grew frustrated all over again.
“These people are not schmucks,” Siegfried says. “They’re just doing their jobs. But I’m sunk. I know it.”
If he is, not only will all dreams of a boat sail away, but Siegfried will have to clean up his entire yard–or pay for the City of Lakewood to do it. “Even this redwood would have to go,” he says, thumping a big pile of wood. “They don’t like these things, but am I not in the back forty of my own house?”
The hearing officer has yet to deliver a verdict.
“It may be lost in inter-office mail,” Brown offers.
While waiting for it, though, Siegfried had another vision: a ten-foot-tall Statue of Liberty, to be constructed of chicken wire except for her torch, which would be made from one of those solar landscape lights you can buy at Home Depot. It was so clear he could practically see it, and he got to work. Within twelve hours, he was finished.
Today the statue sits largely on Siegfried’s front lawn. It carries a sign that announces, “Lady Liberty Is Zoning Violation.”
What effect will this artistic sabotage have on his zoning file?
“Really, we’re not out to hassle anyone,” Brown insists. “Really. Really. Mr. Siegfried is very creative and very talented. Also,” she adds, “very difficult to communicate with.
