In the West, there are three things that you can always count on; thistles, wind, and fences. Along roads between homes, towns, and cities of the West you will find, somewhere, a fence line. It may travel with you for miles and miles, or peel away down a canyon, or over a ridge, sharing minimal time in your company, yet quietly reminding you, that man is here.
When tearing fence down on the farm, barbed wire becomes like thistles. Hard to handle, yet always needing dealt with, the more you gather wire off an old fence, the more snagged and bristled with rusty spikes the wild, springy loops become. Kicking down the posts themselves is a different experience, filled with a combative flair, and high chance of victory over rotten, tar covered lumber, the only wood within miles. Years and miles of tumbled down fence, filled every time the wind blows with towering piles of gray thistles; cascading into ditches and at times completely blocking roads in drifts reminiscent of snow. Today I tear these barricades down. Freeing a landscape of its daunting fences.
I am told the Natural Resource Conservation Service wants to protect native grasses and streambeds with fences. To keep the possible stray cattle, sheep, deer or 4 wheelers out. To allow the plants a chance to grow and flourish as they once did, long before I was born. So again I am sent to remote parts of the farm property. This time to build fence. Create a wilderness within boarders.
How to strengthen a boundary, mark off an area, put a land to your use. These things you can come to know. It is something we have done, and continue to do daily to the West. Yet no knowledge I have with fence or land, makes me willing or capable of ever defining a land’s true purpose. Some things even a fence, or lack of fence, cannot do.
second photo by Bill Allard
No comments:
Post a Comment