A few years back, a developer managed to buy thirty-odd acres of flood plain at the end of the dead-end road where I live. His goal was to change the zoning, make millions and run away, leaving me to enjoy the view of at least eight new McMansions.
"I shall resist," I informed him and proceeded to discover way more about Oregon land use law and Lane County land use policy than I really wanted to know. Long story short, I stopped the attempted development at Oregon's Court of Appeals. Lane County supplied a lawyer to the developer's team at no charge.
The developer finally sold his holdings to a woman of means who bought the land for her daughters to keep horses on. The existing fences were all at least forty years old. The cedar posts had rotted off at ground level and the rusty field and barbed wire was held up periodically with steel T posts.
I have some small experience building fence so I took the opportunity to rustle up a little business for myself. I imagined that I would use field wire with stress panels every few hundred feet. Such was not the case.
Kay, the oldest daughter envisioned a fence five feet tall with wooden posts every ten feet, packed in 3/4 minus crushed rock with Non Climb wire facing inboard, topped by 2 X 6 boards to prevent horses from rubbing on the top of the wire. I had never built anything quite like this but agreed to go along with it as long as I got paid by the hour. Kay and Kate decided on five inch treated peeler cores for fence posts with six inchers for stress panels. I started stockpiling material on my way home from the day job in Eugene.
I began digging fence post holes with my old PHD. The ground was dry and hard. The pile of tailings from my excavations had the consistency of flour. When I had a hole a meter deep, I would shovel in enough gravel so that when I tamped it down with the post, the penciled circle at three feet would be precisely at ground level. Then I poured a layer of gravel around the post followed by water with a thorough tamping with a steel bar, another layer of gravel and so on. Next hole. Repeat. Again. Carry the gravel in my old wheelbarrow that needs its tire inflated every day, and the water in white plastic buckets.
Our Korean neighbor watched me plant a post and observed: "Everything heavy. Everything hard." He didn't know the half of it. I wasn't satisfied with the amount of green stuff on the pine peeler core posts so I stood them in a bucket and soaked them overnight in Termin 8 . I painted the bottom 40 inches of the post with more of the same while I was at it.
The rolls of Non Climb wire were 100 feet long so I emplaced a heavy duty stress panel every hundred feet. I used a small chain saw to rough in the notches and then a wood chisel for detail work. A battery powered drill would make a fine hole through the face of the notch to the back of the post. I painted everything liberally with Termin 8 and soaked the ends of my 4 X 4 horizontal supports in a coffee can of the green stuff. When I installed my horizontals, I would then drive 10 inch steel gutter spikes through the drilled holes to hold everything together. Then came the figure "X" guy wires which I twisted tight with 15 inch pieces of re-bar. Everything heavy. Everything hard.
Time to string the wire. I use a two ton come along to pull the wire tight. Staple down one end and wrap the loose ends of wire around the anchor post of the stress panel and twist the ends around so the points face away from the pasture. Make a 2 X 6 sandwich with double headed nails on the free end to chain on to. Click-click, click-click. The come-along winches everything tight. Stress panels creak. Chains come taught under thousands of pounds of tension until you can play a tune on the Non Climb wire. Then I start at the far end and staple every strand to every wooden post while standing on my bar through the bottom wire to make sure it is flush with ground level.
I tried using the local tractor guy with an auger attachment on his John Deere to drill the post holes. One in four holes came out exactly where I wanted it. I got to "chowse" out the sides of the rest with my PHD and then it would take half a yard of crushed rock to fill in the crater. Then, too, Mike's auger attachment could not power itself through the dirt so I had to suspend my hundred kilos at the end of my bar wedged in the transmission mount of the rig to make it bore. The vibration was numbing. I reverted to hand digging. At least there are no rocks in the flood plain. It takes me two hours to dig a hole and plant a post in gravel. Everything heavy. Everything hard.
I closed off one pasture one summer. Removing the old fence was a job unto itself. Blackberries had completely intergrown the rusty field wire in some places. Mike would mow the berries down to the dirt once I got the wire pulled and wadded into "mattresses" for transport to be recycled. I closed off another pasture and started in on the orchard. Kay called the the locater company to mark underground utilities. I stayed well away from the colorful paint stripes on the road side. Damn, that was one tough root. Oops. The "root" turned out to be the Robinsons' phone line that the locater missed.
A small grey fox hangs around the barn and watches me work. I dubbed it Michael Grey Fox, regardless of its gender. I think it must be eating the cat food put out for the barn cats. This may explain why we had no poults this year from the herds of "wild" turkeys that roam the neighborhood at the end of the dead end road where we live. Sometimes it yaps at me like the annoying little hairy wienerdog that lives next door. Charlene from the very end of the road, reports that she has seen it eating an egg stolen from our chicken coop in the middle of the road.
Last week I finally tied into the Robinsons' fence corner with my last stretch of wire. It was 96 feet from anchor post to anchor post so I had just the right amount of free "end" wire to work with. The fence meets the corner at a slight angle so it takes a little creativity to make the pull. A few chains hooked end to end from a tree across the road and I've got an anchor for my come-along. Staple down the wire to the Robinsons' corner post and it's all over except for wrapping the wire around the post and itself. Cut off the excess and Sigh, it's all done.
Everybody is good at something. I am good at building fence. Seems like a lost art any more. I have always had some segment of this fence project on my to do list for some years now. There are a few more fences that may need replacing soon but they are OK for now. Oh well. The neighbor to the east wants a deer fence. I don't have a problem with building fence or cutting firewood. I can stop whenever I want to.
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