This has been a busy summer around my place. We’ve installed roughly a mile of barbed-wire fence along the river to keep the cattle off the riverbanks and let the vegetation grow back up. There were a couple of places where the riverbank was pretty hammered, though for the most part it wasn’t eroding too badly. It’s a big project by the time you fence both sides of the river. It bends and twists as rivers do, and so there is a corner post in the fence about every 100 feet. If you’re running a couple of hundred feet in a straight line, you can hook the wire to the tractor and pull it piano-string tight. But with these short stretches, we used the fence stretcher, which isn’t anywhere near as much fun.
Though pounding T-posts into the ground isn’t exactly recreation, there is something pretty soothing about being out in a beautiful meadow all day. The flies are gone for the season, so it was actually pleasant. We’d lay out a section, set the corners, drive the posts, and then pull the wire before moving on to the next piece. The wire pulling was a nice break in the hard work of pounding the posts. For a good portion of the job, it was impossible to drive materials out there in the truck. We used an old two-wheel-drive ATV with a trailer until that got that stuck, and ended up packing a lot of the materials by hand. You may want to drop your Jenny Craig membership and take up fence-building instead. I lost 10 pounds in the process.
My dog came along every day to help, and we had my uncle’s border-collie pup with us most of the time too. They had a great time, but it was an interesting dynamic. My dog is a purebred Swede Alley Retriever; the front end is lab, the back could be greyhound. The stick-fetching gene didn’t make it. Border collies are, of course, border collies. They come with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder pre-wired. It had to herd something. For the first week or so, when the cattle were in the pasture, the collie would herd them up and down the field.
The cows were curious and would sneak up on the fence project. One minute I’d be there alone, pounding a post into the ground. Then, when I’d reach for another post, there would be 50 cows creeping up behind me. My dog found that alarming. She chased the cows a little more than is good, but to their credit, the cows chased back. They developed a couple of kinds of obvious games, with mutually understood lines of where the cows would retreat before turning and charging the dog. After a couple of days, and a couple of solid bovine kicks, my dog learned to leave them alone. The collie, though, would gently herd them up one side of the field and then down the other. We finally moved them to another pasture because they had an uncanny ability to anticipate where we would be working and mark each post location with cow pies. With the cows gone, the collie took to herding us, nipping at our heels.
It’s amazing how much of a dog’s behavior is on autopilot. Mine would find a stick and a shady place and spend an hour or two grinding it into sawdust. The collie was running slalom around the fence posts. When we got the bottom wire stretched, she would run between the posts, leaping over the wire each time. She was sure that we had built the fence just for her amusement. the time the second wire was up, she would give up and wait until the next section of posts was ready to run through. I don’t think I could get my dog to run a slalom course, alternating through the fence posts, if I worked with her for the rest of her life. The collie did it naturally.
Maybe it’s age or maturity, or too much sun, but I kind of enjoyed the fence project (though not so much that I was above hiring a contractor to do part of it). As a teenager, I would have driven a T-post through my foot to get out of driving a couple of hundred of them. Barbed wire is intractable stuff. If you ever let go of it without having it tied down to something, it flies off the spool like some cartoon clock-spring. It can destroy a pair of Levi’s in a matter of hours. I found that Carhartts hold up to it much better, though even heavy canvas pants aren’t indestructible.
The whole system of barbed-wire fencing is well thought out. The posts, the wire, the ratchet stretcher that pulls the wire tight, the pre-bent wire clips that tie the wire to the posts all of it is designed to go together quickly and durably. The most amazing piece of it is the fencing tool. It’s a full toolbox in one piece. It’s mostly a specialized pair of pliers designed to hold, twist, pull and otherwise work with the wire. There are notches in it that make twisting the wire clips on to the T-posts quick and easy. One side has a small hammer head on it for releasing the ratchet on the stretcher and pounding staples in a pinch. There are wire cutters, a rounded pry bar that makes pulling staples or giving the wire that last little stretch easy. Somebody spent a lot of time engineering all of that.
Through the years, I’ve accumulated quite a pile of bicycle multi-tools that include wrenches, screwdrivers and chain-repair tools. They are light, compact, and downright elegant in design. But they’ve got nothing on the fencing pliers. More than the Winchester, it’s the tool that won the West.
The amazing thing about the fence project, other that getting it done, is that nobody needed stitches. For all the engineering involved, barbed wire is still barbed wire, and it’s nasty stuff to work with.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs On Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for nearly 20 years.