Exert From that Infamous and Rowdy Tome:
Mares, Foals &
Ferraris
On Doc’s farm,
the abuse generally centered on the fences.
In fact, that old song, “Don’t Fence Me In” was probably put to music by
one of our horses, its melodic ideologue handed down from one generation to the
next so that fence-wrecking was easier to determine genetically than racing
ability. And when it came to demolishing
fences, the same theories launched in the breeding shed, speed versus
stamina, found new credence in their destructive, moronic behavior: some of
them did it fast, while the rest could do it all day. Doc’s emergency response team, which
consisted of him and whatever was in the trunk of the Cadillac, preferred
baling twine or wire whenever an escape was in progress. Some of the fences had highly technical
repairs which I was to learn were mattress sutures. One section had an uncanny resemblance to a
hernia patch. Seems veterinary medicine
and home repairs had a lot in common.
Good thing he wasn’t a dentist, otherwise the whole place would have
been wrapped in dental floss.
I discovered, at
least in the beginning, that a great deal of energy has been exhausted over the
years to support the various fencing lobbies – loose confederations of grizzly
looking wire peddlers who have researched the pros and cons of all kinds of
exotic and organic materials, from old-growth cedar, to recycled Michelin
radials and weird plastic posts made from melted- down dashboards, some with
the speedometers still working. Each
professed to know my true needs, the opening salvo of their sales pitch,
playing on either my naiveté or my ego.
“Well, see here, you got some mighty expensive animals here, and well, I
don’t profess to tell ya yer business, being a manager and all, but I wouldn’t
consider anything but the best. Now look
here at this Bolivian teak...” Little
did he know that what I really wanted to do was dig a mote and hope that two
out of three drowned trying to escape.
We also covered
electric fencing, something called, “The Bull Tamer,” that plugged into your
dryer outlet. It didn’t shock you, it
blew off a limb.
“Don’t you think
that’s a little severe,” I asked.
“Why, hell
no. Them horses of yours will only touch
it once. Once they get a handle on 240
volts, they’ll develop a whole new attitude.
Now, about that Bolivian teak?”
“What about the
rain forest?”
“The what? Ah hell, you mean down there in South
America? Did I say Bolivia? I meant Alabama. I keep gettin’ those places confused. Damn, I never was any good at geography.”
A field trip to
some neighboring farms revealed a number of options, from four-board plank to
an assortment of woven wires – some square, others claiming to be especially
designed for Thoroughbreds:
triangular. I didn’t think most
horses did geometry. I figured it was a
fashion thing. I stopped by to ask Earl,
but he only shouted, “She ain’t workin’ today!”
One neighbor was sold on electric fencing, but when I inspected his
system, the sight of a half-dozen squirrels, frozen like rigored trapeze
artists suspended from the wires, made me a little uncomfortable. Smelled pretty bad too. I did get a vote for this system – from the
cat. I never knew cats could drool. I locked him in the truck.
I even considered
barbed-wire, that nasty stuff that turned the Great Plains into a giant bovine
parking lot. Granted, revenge did enter
my mind in considering such an option, but I figured the cheap horses would con
an expensive one into putting its leg through it, sort of like an initiation
ceremony into a motorcycle gang. I
finally decided on woven wire – non-climb – not the pricey triangular stuff
designed for Thoroughbreds, but a cheap brand guaranteed not to rust, splinter,
break, attract lightning or kill squirrels.
At least until you got it home. I
bought ten rolls, each weighing about two hundred pounds. I never did understand the ‘non-climb’
thing. Our horses were too lazy to climb
anything. If they wanted out, they just
put the transmission in reverse and rammed the fence with their butts. Their excuse was an unreachable itch. I should have bought them all back-scratchers
instead.
I had planned on
being environmentally sensitive by using the old fence posts, split-cedar
relics from another age (when wood was wood and men were...), but the termites
had eaten the bottoms and the horses the tops.
(No, I don’t know why horses eat wood, other than to irritate the hell
out of me.) A guy down the road had a
semi-load of old railroad ties, soaked in creosote and made from ‘Erk’ trees
and was willing to part with them for three bucks apiece, a bargain by local
standards. I asked him what kind of wood
‘Erk’ was, but he just snarled and counted the money. Why does a guy with a fourth-grade education
who uses diesel fuel for cologne always feel inclined to insult a guy who is
trying to give him money? He probably
stole them from Burlington-Northern and the Chicago-bound West Coast Limited
was going to end up in a ditch outside Missoula, Montana.
Now I had the
wire and the posts. The only thing
missing were the holes, which deductive reasoning told me might involve a
little digging. A search of the farm
failed to produce anything suitable for the task. I did find two boxes of duck decoys, the
motor for the barn boat and somebody’s clam sucker, a long tubular device
designed for catching Pacific razor clams.
It showed a lot of promise until it hit a rock. I headed for the feed store.
“Hey, how ya
doin? How’s that Moomud mare you
guys bought doin?” This was Maynard
speaking, the owner of the feed store.
Actually, the mare was a distant relative of Mahmoud. Something got lost in the translation.
“She’s fine, but
I gotta dig some post holes. You got
somethin’ for that?”
“Sure, try
this.” He handed me a two-handled shovel
that looked more suitable for pulling an infected molar on a gray whale.
“Say, you guys
ever heard of a wood called ‘Erk?’ I got
these railroad ties, the guy said they were...”
“That pile on
Novelty Hill? Geez, those things weigh
about 400lbs a piece. That’s Bobby
Williams that has them. He’s from
Georgia. They’re oak, not ‘Erk.’ He just kinda talks funny.”
“Well, I actually
didn’t buy them, I was just thinkin...”
“That’s good,
it’d take a stick of dynamite to get a nail in one of ‘em.”
Great. I just paid a fortune for petrified
wood. And just think, there are only 300
of the damn things.
Back at the farm,
the cause and effect of stabbing the earth with a weird shovel and the need for
good mental health were at odds. I had
figured that good, honest labor would negate my need to curl up on a psychiatrist’s
couch and discuss my infatuation with Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon, Madonna,
Cindy Crawford and Lyle Lovett. Okay, so
I hum along with Lyle and have sexual fantasies about the others. Really, it’s inexpensive entertainment when
you’re faced with punching holes in an unforgiving planet.
The first two
holes went rather well, but by the seventh or eighth, the notion of an hour on
the couch confessing old insecurities began to develop a certain appeal. My shoulders felt like Joe Namath’s knees and
I was even developing blisters on my forehead.
Considering I had 292 earth penetrations to go, it was time to go
high-tech.
Another trip to
town produced a true wonder of modern, technocratic farming: the auger, which is little more than a truck
rear-end with a milkshake mixer attached.
The thing fastens on the back of a tractor, gets hooked to the power
take-off and while I sit and drink frozen daiquiris, it burrows its way to
Shanghai. Perfect, except for one minor
problem: it could dig the hole, but it
couldn’t decide where the hole should be, a conclusion clouded by tall grass
and natural indecision. A male
thing. Men are not natural planners,
we’re executors. Ever watched a B
western real close? Women load the guns,
men pull the trigger.
There are certain
exceptions though, most involving stuff like betrayal, toilet lids, bedding
other women – that sort of thing. Since
the man was kind enough to teach the woman how to load the gun, the next step
goes pretty quickly. The big difference
is that women keep shooting until the gun is empty. Oh, and they try to shoot the man on the
porch, not inside the house. Less mess
that way. That’s the planning part.
After an hour of
circling the field, I took the coward’s way out – I asked Jesse. Women always know where fences belong and
they always show up on cue when something needs clarification. You turn around and there they are! Women love to confuse men with clarification.
She took to the
task right away, explaining the importance of strict boundaries, honest lines
of communication and something about parallel thinking. I tried to explain that parallel thinking was
on a collision course with a forty-five foot alder tree. She dismissed my argument abruptly. “I think you need to re-evaluate your
priorities. Maybe I should re-evaluate a
few for…”
“Hmmm.” I killed the engine on the tractor and swung
around to face her. “We are talking about a large tree?”
I kept looking at
her, then outer space, then back to her.
“Oh bloody hell,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing. The bloody well. You can’t put a fence there. The well is in the way!”
“Then put it over
there!” she yelled, gesturing toward the neighbor’s driveway. “In fact, why don’t you stuff it in...never
mind, I’m leaving.”
Suddenly the
clouds split and God’s long right arm slapped me alongside the head. “I completely forgot about last night...I’m
really sorry.”
“You only
remember what you want to remember.
You’d forget Mother’s Day, the phone bill; you’d forget Christmas if it
weren’t for all the decorations! It was
my birthday!”
Mother’s Day I
could understand. The last thing I
wanted to do was encourage my mother.
I’d already tried twice to get the local paper to print my
obituary. “Wait a minute,” I
interrupted. “I haven’t known you that
long. How am I supposed to remember
everything in your life? I have enough
trouble with my life!” Bad choice of
words.
“Every? I sat in that restaurant for two hours – in a
dress! The waiter started buying me
drinks because he felt sorry for me!
Like I said, put the stupid fence wherever you want. You’ll forget where it is in ten-minutes
anyway! I knew I shouldn’t
have…whatever!”
A dress? I missed that! I figured she’d only wear a dress for the
Queen or something. “But, but…” Never could finish a sentence in these circumstances. However, I did have
clarification.
With that she was
gone, leaving me to my own devices, parallel thinking and all. Actually it was an historic moment: our first confrontation, man and woman sorting
out the intricacies of our lives in front of God and a few of the
neighbors. Somehow, it felt a little
premature. According to my count, we had
gone out approximately five times, not including one romantic rendezvous having
the oil changed in her truck. I had gone
from being invisible to patently irresponsible without ever having left any
shaving stubble in her sink. “It’s not
fair!” I yelled. From a distant porch, a
neighbor yelled back, “I agree with you!”
After an hour of
finger-drumming on the hood of the tractor, I made a bold decision. In reality, drumming your fingers is what
professionals refer to as ‘anger management.’
Kind of like counting to ten, but spread out over sixty-minutes or so. That way you can assertively answer all those
angry statements in the privacy of your own brain. As far as fences went, I would simply follow
the creek on one side and the old fence line on the other. Plus, I’d whack down that damned alder
tree. Somebody or something needed to
pay a price. In this case it was a tree,
which on further examination, turned out to be dead anyway. Probably a suicide. A much better way out than watching me try to
start a chainsaw.
A hole is a hard
thing to move. A 747? At least it has wheels. Holes just lay there sucking the life out of
you. My choices were limited: either buy a two-foot wide auger or digress to
a little corrective work with the manual model.
But then, I figured that by the time the horses got done doing the ‘big
three,’ the fence would probably be a little crooked anyway. So why bother? Besides, Jesse was going to take one look at
it and wrinkle up her nose anyway. I had
gone out with her just long enough to recognize when I had been dismissed by a
facial twitch.
Now that I had
all the crooked posts in the ground, it was time to string the wire. Contrary to what they told me at the feed
store, there is nothing simple about a two-hundred pound roll of woven
wire. The first step is to unroll the
wire. The second step goes a lot
quicker, as the wire decides to re-roll itself with me inside. Step three, which was probably step one in
reality, is to anchor one end, then unroll it.
Once I had it unrolled again, I discovered it was three-feet short of
the end post, which might as well have been a mile, since all I had was a
two-inch staple.
I tried hooking
it to the tractor and stretching it the extra three feet, but that pulled it
off its anchor, causing it to re-roll itself quite smugly underneath the
tractor. A good jack and an hour of
cursing finally brought the wire to its senses.
It was now time to stretch it tight, giving it that professional
look. Oh, I decided to ignore the
problem about the missing three feet. It
was a lot easier to shrink the farm than risk another session with the jack and
a bunch of obscenities. Any more noise
and the guys with the red suspenders would show up to sell me a brain.
The guys at the
feed store told me that the best way to stretch wire was with a tool known as a
come-along, a device that makes a wimpy farm manager into the Charles
Atlas of fence stretchers. His
instructions seemed simple: attach one
end to a stout tree or the tractor and the other end to the wire. Vigorous cranking should make the fence as
taught as piano wire. Evidently in the
farming bizz you couldn’t have a fence that looked like fifteen mesh bras on a
clothesline. Not really acceptable.
There is a
problem with the cranking though. A come-along is really a power trip – singing wire and all that – so guys
want to do just one more crank. It’s
irresistible. Do it, surrender to your
ego and boom, either the posts all pop out of the ground, the tractor tips
over, or, in my case, the wire breaks, once again re-rolling the whole mess
under the tractor, causing the neighbor to throw up his hands and disappear
into his house. I wish the guy would get
into down-loading pornography or something.
About nine o’
clock that evening, I scraped up the courage to knock on Jesse’s door. Mostly the dog barked, but after about ten
minutes, two or three towels and a body showed up at the door. She had been in the shower.
“I’m sorry about
this afternoon,” I offered. Actually I
was.
“No, I’m sorry,”
she returned.
“I’m sorrier,” I
shot back. I was still thinking about
the dress.
“Dammit!”
“I brought you a
present.” I stuck out a bouquet of
flowers and a can of corn. The kind that
has little bits of red pepper tossed in.
“Corn? You brought
me a can of corn?”
“Yeah, Mexicorn. And flowers!
Focus on the flowers.”
So, get the hell to work! You're wastin' daylight.
