View from the North 40: Pasture fencing as a mixed metaphor

At the point my friend, Kerri, asked me last weekend what I was doing, I was at the tipping point into the realm of too tired to make words happen, so I let my cellphone camera do the talking, snapped a photo and hit send.

I’m so modern and tech-savvy.

Kerri messaged back: “What am I looking at?”

What? Duh.

She wanted my tired brain to type words using my overworked and blocky peasant fingers on this cellphone’s teeny tiny screen-typewriter? Sure, my photo wasn’t a professional glamour shot but it was a perfectly accurate capture of the repair-in-progress of a corner brace in my fenceline.

She just needed to look at it to see that — oh, wait, nope. This is just chaos.

It shouldn’t have been. Building barbed wire fences is pretty simple. Labor intensive, but simple.

As an intellectual pursuit, if the task was math, it would be the equivalent of learning to count by ones, twos, threes and so on up to, maybe, 10s. Of course, if you add the labor component it’s like doing the counting while working in a rock quarry with nothing but a pick ax and a wheel barrow.

However, if we’re looking at how much brain power it takes for construction of the corner braces themselves, that’s more — in terms of this math metaphor — like geometry.

Sure, not a whole school year’s worth, but like, the first month of class or whatever point it is you learn the Pythagorean Theorem. A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared is, probably, the most useful, basic thing one can learn in geometry for practical application in everyday life. More useful than pi. But I digress.

We still have to address the problem of my chaos on the fenceline.

I wrote this whole thing about what corner braces are in barbed wire fences, how to build them and why they work. It was a really long snooze-fest.

Let’s just say that corner braces are the cornerstone of the barbed wire fence, the key to the long-term structural integrity of the entire fence. Building them requires a minimum of three large, long posts, two long posts for rails, wire, an assortment of fasteners like nails, fencing staples, screws, if you prefer that route, and more. Plus, you need tools for things like digging and sawing and hammering and wire cutting and chiseling and blah blah blah.

So I had all the above stuff out there and a bit more, just in case, like a portable panel to block the opening in the fence during construction and three hole-digging implements. Plus, this was a repair job so I also had the two rotted posts and all the assorted materials that I had dismantled for repairs on the scene, as well.

To make matters worse, I was in the middle of putting things back together and finding out that some of the all stuff I saved to use wasn’t going to works. I was hauling things in here and shoving things out of the way there and untangling deadly wires with deadly barbs and reaching my maximum capacity for energy output and my daily frustration quotient, which multiplied the chaos.

It looked a surgery scene in one of those TV medical dramas. The scene where someone came to the operating room for one of those simple problems but when the doctors opened the patient up they kept finding more problems and having one crises after another. At some point the patient is opened from from stem to stern whilst five doctors jockey for elbow room to operate on the patient the same time, some vital organs are outside the patient’s body, and bloody wound packing and surgical instruments are strewn across the floor.

These are classic tropes of the genre.

I told Kerri I was doing fence surgery, but the scene was spiraling out of control. No doubt the power was about to go out (my power-tool battery would go dead) and a hospital administrator would have to get kicked out of the O.R. for getting in the way (one of my horses was coming over to help).

In the end, I told her, I quit for the night when I was too tired to be careful and the barbed wire had scratched me up from fingertips to elbows on both arms.

I figured it was time to call the time of death on my workday when I realized mine was the only blood being shed in this operation.

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At least I’ll have a project to look forward to this weekend — not — at http://facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .