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The Travels of our First Webmaster
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Voices of Spencer Creek
Fence building is fast becoming a lost art in rural Oregon. Old farms fall prey to developers and get cut up to where they will never be big enough to produce anything on an economically viable basis. Where I live, there are old fences, fifty years old if a day. The cedar post have rotted off at ground level and the wire is brown and trodden down where people find the need to cross.
Women keep horses on land not good for much else. They prop up the original fallen down fence with an ocassional steel T post and put up little plastic sticks with electric ribbon that the horses will hopefully respect. I fought a developer to a stubborn draw at the end of Fire Road here half a decade ago. The developer and Lane County worked hand in hand to circumvent state land use law and Lane County's own land use policies in order to defeat the zoning and throw down a house farm.
We went to Oregon's Court of Appeals where the three judges who heard the case of Maxwell vs Lane Co and Developer remanded it back to the county with instructions to "fix it." The three judges did not give specific instructions on what to fix and there was a lot of "creativity" involved here. Anyway, the developer knew that I would go round for round with him back to the C of A and so he sold his holdings to a buyer I had found in its original zoning with the lots put back the way they were pretty much. Looking back on the deal, I should have gone back through the system as many times as it took to fix the system but that's hind site.
A woman in California bought the flood plain at the end of the road for her two daughters to keep their horses on. They rent out the mo-beel home across our west fence and their four hayburners wander the 12 acres or so. There was no fence at all on some of the property line so I made my pitch to fence the place as a part time job. I have built quite a bit of fence in my time. I learned this fun as a temp on Medford District of the BLM back in the 70s. Lindy Vaughn, my foreman, commented "I've seen straighter fences, but I've never seen stronger fences."
He and I never did get along so this was, indeed, high praise. I had visualized building a typical stock fence where you construct a massive stress panel wherever the ground breaks up or down. You put a 2x4 sandwich on the end of your wire after anchoring the other end to another panel and use a 2 ton come-along with chains to winch the wire tight enough to play a tune on. Then you staple it down to all the wood and drive steel fence posts every ten feet between the stress panels. Top it all with a tight strand of barb wire and you got a fence!
Karen explained that a crude fence like this simply wouldn't do and went on to describe a fence five feet high with tight woven wire, a wood post every ten feet and the whole thing topped with a treated 2x6. Oh yeah, every fence post needed to be packed in crushed 3/4 minus gravel. Well OK. It pays by the hour. If you pay me enough, I'll wear a purple tutu doing it. I started in by emplacing a 90 degree double stress panel in a corner of a new property line that had no fence at all. A dump truck staged five yard piles of gravel along the project and I started bringing home material after work on the way home from Eugene. The quality of treated fence posts seems to have gone down hill. All you can get now is peeler cores soaked in some green copper solution. I didn't feel this was good enough and have taken to soaking the butt ends in more green stuff before putting them in the hole. Three feet down and five feet up. The special horse wire come in 100 foot rolls so there is a stress panel every one hundred feet to anchor to.
I build stress panels strong enough to tie the Fenris Wolf to. After I have some end panels in place I call the local tractor guy. He has a fence post auger attachment for his medium-sized John Deer. Piece of cake I thought. I placed a stake every ten feet where I wanted a hole. I thought I would be idly watching the machine do all the work. Wrong. The auger goes round and round but it doesn't dig in. I get to insert my five foot long tamping bar and suspend my hundred kilo bulk at the end of it. Even then it is a struggle. The auger bit skips around and almost never drills exactly where the hole is supposed to be. I toss posts in the holes until I can get to planting them. This keeps the local live-stock from stepping in them.
Time to plant posts. I use my PHD to clear the loose soil from the auger hole. If I'm lucky, the 12 inch hole is exactlly where I need it. Usually I get to chowse out the side of the hole with the Post Hole Digger. When I have the hole cleaned out to a meter deep, I then put in enough gravel to make it exactly 36 inches to finish grade. I take my 70 pound post and tamp the crushed rock solid. If I can convince the neighbor to hold the level for me, it goes a little quicker. I start pouring gravel around the base of the post as I keep it next to the string pulled between the hand dug stress panels. I carry buckets of water to compact the gravel as I tamp it with my bar. The heavy bar is actually bent from me forcing the auger into the ground.
Our Korean neighbor comes out of his house in the run-away Christmas tree farm to watch. "Everything heavy. Everything hard." Says Geeno and runs me out a hose lay with a shut off on the end so at least I don't have to hump water. I finish one 500 foot stretch of fence. Then I tear down the remains of an ancient fence near the rental house. Decades of blackberries have covered one end of the fence. I deal with them with a chainsaw. The tractor guy pulls it out in the field with John Deer when he comes to drill more holes. I remove the staples from the old cedar and save them in a coffee can. Don't want them lying around in the grass where livestock can eat them.
Then I roll up the rusty barbed wire like lariats and place them in the old field wire which I roll over and over, stomping it flat each time until I have what looks like a rusty mattress. These go in the back of my pickup to be recycled. The cedar gets cut into firewood. Karen calls the locator who comes out and paints flouescent dashes on the ground where the phone and electric wires are. I still cut Barbara Robinson's phone line 20 feet from the nearest paint mark as I fence the orchard by the barn. Not accepting any blame. The phone company doesn't even try to get in touch.
This, then, is fence building. It is a lot like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer. It feels really good when you stop. It is nice to see a massive fence where nothing stood before. It is humbling to realize that somebody will be tearing down my fence someday to replace it if the world should last so long.
Norm
Copyright © 2006 by Norm Maxwell
Norm Maxwell is the author of a novel in progress, Banjo Lane, a comic tragedy about meth users in Lane County. He is a regular contributor to West By Northwest.org. Norm Maxwell received the 2004 Best of West By Northwest award for his article, The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King. Tens of thousands of readers have "voted" with their mouse by their selection of this story. Visit Norm Maxwell's other pieces about land use, firefighting and life in the country and more at West By Northwest.org.
Norm's Notebook: Dead Cars – The 500 Club
Norm's Notebook: Dead Cars and the Six Million Dollar Manx
(Editor's note–Norm's "Dead Cars" story inspired a feature story in the Register Guard, "Heaps of trouble in the woods.")
Norm's Notebook: Norm's Notebook: Saving Fish Creek, One Dead Car at a Time
Norm's Notebook: A Christmas in Lorane
Norm's Notebook: A Day Doing Lines
Norm's Notebook: Is There Life After Fire?
Norm's Notebook: Dogpatch and the Developers
Norm's Notebook: Norns and Nests
Norm's Notebook: The Mystery Corner of Section 37
Norm's Notebook: Replanting with Cedar and Pine
Norm's Notebook: A Winnebago, Motorhome That Is
Norm's Notebook: Measure 37 Fallout
Norm's Notebook: The Wayward Bus
Norm's Notebook: New Bike and The Three Acre Wood
Norm's Notebook: A Helicopter and a Hometown
Norm's Notebook: A Different Kind of Pre-Emptive Strike
Norm's Notebook: "Goodbye Dear, I'll be Home in a Year"
A Homey Homage to the Homelite: The Stone Age of Powersawing
Take Two: Jackson Road
Norm's Notebook: Battling Broom
Norm's Notebook: A Last Look from the Big Rabbit
Norm's Notebook: From Forest to McMansion, How It Could Happen Here
Norm's Notebook: A Few Acres, a Few Chickens–Who Is Living on the Land Now
Remembering the 30 Mile Fire
Old Men and Fire
The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King
Wee-wee for BB
Norm's Notebook: The Story of the Spruce Tree, and Mosby Creek, a New Land Use Lot Adjustment
Mentoring Military Style
Three Dollar Hammer
Remember Fire Road
Home, Home on Fire Road and more.
© Copyright 2000-2006 by West By Northwest.org
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