Last Saturday was fence-a-palooza at the ranch. It’s one day a year when I’m able to cajole a significant part of the extended family to put in a day’s work on the place.
We have about 12 miles of fence to maintain. There’s the perimeter fence, then fences along both sides of the highway, and fences along both sides of the river, and fences for managing grazing rotations. There are fences that don’t appear to serve any purpose at all, but were built for a reason. Maybe they were to separate different groups of dairy cows. We haven’t been in the dairy business since about 1960, but you never know.
As long as you don’t have to drive posts into boulders, it’s not terribly strenuous work. There’s a lot of bending over and kneeling down in the mud, but with a big enough crew, it can also be quite sociable and relaxing once you get in the rhythm of it. There’s no denying the satisfaction of standing at a fence corner and looking back at a quarter mile you’ve just patched, and checking that off the list.
There’s also no denying that as a teenager, I actually considered driving a fence post through my foot to get out of it.
I’ve tried a lot of approaches. I used to hire three or four off-season ski resort employees for a week at a time. That worked great. Some are still friends, but they all seem to have other jobs lined up or vacations planned.
Conscripting the family seems like an easy choice. They own the place, for one thing. And work cheap. But this time of year is cluttered with all kinds of end-of-school stuff that complicates it. There are some who aren’t sure which end of the fencing pliers they are supposed to hold on to. So the last couple of years, we’ve recruited others to get enough help.
My nephew has a group of friends from 30 years ago. They all worked together at an aerospace company in California, and all got canned when a project ended. They are scattered from coast to coast and in between. He talked it up, and it’s become an annual reunion for them. One guy, who works in a soulless cubicle farm in Minnesota, told people he works with that he was going out west to spend a weekend working on a cattle ranch. His co-workers wanted to know how much he had to pay, and could they get in on it.
Another nephew had a Scout group that needed a conservation service project. So they worked on the fences that keep the cows from pooping in the river — their drinking water on the Wasatch Front. The Scouts weren’t great help, but the adults who came with them were great and slammed out a lot of fence. A contractor friend just showed up to help.
There are places where the “soil” is river cobble, packed in like bricks. Then in the other canyon, the soil is rock-free and bottomless. In the rocky areas, getting a post into the ground at all is a challenge, and few people alive can get one to go in straight. My grandfather could drive them into ledge rock using profanity alone. It was both frightening and beautiful at the same time.
In the soft stuff, we have to drive the tractor out and pull the posts up out of the ground or a 4-foot fence becomes a 2-foot trip hazard over time. The demarcation line between the two geologies is surprisingly abrupt, even if the surface looks more or less the same. Without winter this year, things were in pretty good shape, though a lot of trees had blown down on the fences. Other years, the snow weight flattens them.
There are different ways of doing a lot of things, and when you work the same fences every year for decades, you get to where you can tell who did this patch and that somebody else spliced the wire below it. The aerospace engineers didn’t seem to understand that the goal was to have 100% of the fence cow-proof (a fictious dream), and instead were aiming to get 50% of it done to aircraft tolerances, while leaving the other half available for cows to walk into traffic. But they got their section done.
We had lunch, and “Fence-a-Palooza ’26” T-shirts, and somewhat slower afternoon. Overall, we covered about eight miles of fence. That leaves a lot left to do, but as the cows start arriving home from the west desert, there are pastures ready to put them in. The rest will get caught up as they rotate pastures through the rest of the season.
Without really thinking about it, we had done a pretty complete Tom Sawyer job on the fencing. Nobody offered to pay us for letting them do it (other than the office-dwellers in Minnesota).
But you have to wonder. I’m looking into marketing “therapeutic irrigation meditation retreats.” They would be a kind of detox from modernity, standing in a field chasing irrigation water around without a phone or internet connection. Just you, your gumboots, the ditch, a shovel, canvas dams and the wind blowing the collected soot out from between your ears. Sounds marketable to me.
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.