After a week of kind of sketchy weather, things are suddenly moving into high gear around the ranch. We’ve been pecking away at stuff for weeks, and it never feels like I’m really getting on top of it. I’ll leave home with the tools and supplies to knock off one list of projects, and come home with a new, longer list of stuff discovered along the way.
Last weekend was Fence-a-palooza, an annual event where I shame the rest of the extended family into coming to patch fences. I did a measurement on Google Earth, and came up with about 12 miles of barbed wire fencing on the ranch.
There’s the perimeter fence, then fences along both sides of the highway, and fences along both sides of the river to keep the cattle from pooping in the water, then a bunch of cross fences to manage grazing, separate cropped land from pasture, and so on. There are long-standing, unwritten arrangements with neighbors about who does what. We don’t get all of it during Fence-a-palooza, but aim for about a third.
The goal is to get the essential stuff done before the cattle come home from the desert. Fortunately, the cattle aren’t ours. The family that leases the pastures is responsible for the fencing, but they have all their people out rounding up the cattle that wintered somewhere on the west desert.
They get them trucked to Kamas, and then there is branding and vaccinating to be done, and there just isn’t enough capacity to mend the first round of fences. So we get the first pastures ready to go, and they take over the rest of it as they move from pasture to pasture.
Some years, the winter damage to the fences is huge. Trees blow over, heavy snow pushes them down, moose walk through them like they aren’t even there, breaking all four wires.
This year was a pretty light winter, and the damage was minimal. In the whole effort, with about 20 people, I don’t think we had to splice more than a half dozen wires. A couple of years ago, we were spicing the splices everywhere we looked. So this was a chance to fix some problem areas, rehang a gate or two and replace a few posts that had rotted out after something like 80 years.
There’s always a fair amount of grumbling from the conscripted labor about having to do it. Sometimes the weather can be miserable, and the work can be a lot harder after a tough winter. But once they all get here and into the rhythm of it, they have fun. Nobody wants to break for lunch — “I want to get to that next corner first.” At the end of the day, they are still out finishing up their assigned section of fence.
There’s the “get it done” approach, and there’s the “make it perfect” approach, and through the years, we’ve learned that those two approaches can’t be on the same team or section of fence.
The “make it perfect” folks don’t understand that the cows don’t care. If 300 yards are perfect, and you didn’t get to patching the last 50 feet, they will wander through the last 50 feet and be out on the highway. My father always said, when slamming things together, “We’re not building a piano.” He was definitely in the “get it done” camp. The perfectionist genes come from in-laws.
For the last couple of years, some friends of one of my nephews have come from out of state to join in. They came from Georgia and Minnesota for a weekend of barbed wire fence patching, and are apparently the envy of all the guys they work with at home in their cubicle farms. They all wish they could come out and work on a real ranch in exchange for a T-shirt and tetanus booster shot.
I understand. There is something incredibly satisfying about starting at one end of a long run of fence and seeing the ending point get closer and closer. So much work today is open ended, iterative, and never really finished. Working your way around 50 acres and reaching the end, well, it’s done and you can see that it’s done.
I don’t know that I could sell tickets for a chance to come and mend fence, but I suspect there are a lot of people who would find it kind of therapeutic — for a couple of days. The novelty wears off pretty quickly. It’s the same story as Tom Sawyer painting Aunt Polly’s fence.
As I work different sections of fence, I can tell different people’s work. There are different techniques and little tricks. Our old farm hand had a trick where he could use a hammer as a crank to tighten a sagging section, and there are strange little “Myrle curls” randomly placed all over. I can’t replicate it.
Grandpa could drive a post into the ground using profanity alone. Somebody consistently twisted wire backwards—“righty tighty/lefty loosey” is supposed to be universal, but apparently not.
It’s good, honest work, and it’s important for the extended family of owners to get dirty on occasion. It’s a good reminder that riches are the reward for years of hard work, preferably done by one’s forebearers.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.
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