The Other Side of the Glass

A blue flatbed truck was parked at the northwest corner of the property, and someone was out in the grass digging.  I put on my mackinaw jacket, tucked my insulated gloves in the pocket and walked across the pasture toward the truck.  The temperature was hovering around freezing and the wind was ripping, twenty knots or so.  Gusting harder than that.  Duke, who loves the cold, ran ahead of me.  I turned up my collar.
   
Probably John Cosgriff repairing the fence, I thought.  John’s family has been ranching around Otter Creek for generations, and I’ve come to know him since we bought property out here.  John cuts hay on our place in late summer and pastures his horses on our land in winter, and in return he lets my father, my uncle and me hunt on his property.  As I got closer I could see a tan cap with earflaps, floppy with age and darkened with dirt.  Frayed strings hanging down from the earflaps.  John Cosgriff.  The wind was blowing from him to me, and Duke, smelling who it was, ran to greet him.  John had just dug a hole for a new fencepost and was trying to hold the post upright in the hole and simultaneously shovel the loose dirt around its base.

“If you wait long enough, someone’ll come along and hold that post up,” I called.

John looked up and grinned.  “Hey,” he said.

“Let me grab that post.”

John shoveled dirt around the fencepost and packed it down with a steel pole.  John’s horses were grazing at the other end of the pasture, so we didn’t have to worry about them running through the fence while we worked.

“How do you like this Montana weather now?” he asked.  It was cold, but I knew the bottom hadn’t dropped out of the thermometer yet.  Last week we had warmer air blowing down the valley, what John calls a Chinook wind.  We were still feeling some of the warmth.

“Well, I figure it’ll get colder, so I’m trying not to wimp out yet.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled.  “Wait ‘till it gets to zero or a little below zero and the wind blowing like this.  That’s cold.”

“Right.  I’ll let myself bitch about the weather when it gets that cold.”

“Yeah,” he said.  He finished packing dirt around the post.  “Although, you know, working out of the pickup these days, it’s never that bad.  You’ve got the heater a few feet away.”  I looked at John’s truck.  Grille broken out, exhaust pipe broken, muffler hanging from a strand of bailing wire.  But apparently the heater still worked.  John talked about how they used to work out of some other piece of equipment, the name of which I didn’t catch.  Sometimes I don’t understand everything John says.  He talks as though I have also been ranching in Montana for decades.  “Open cab and stuff.  You’d get so cold you had to get off and warm your hands around the exhaust manifold.”

I nodded.  “What happened to the old fenceposts?” I asked.

He pointed to the roadside ditch where he had laid the posts.  “That one had rotted out,” he said.  “And the others were about to go, so I figured I’d go ahead and replace them all.”  I looked at the posts – rotted for sure.  I’d driven past this corner ten or twelve times and hadn’t noticed.

John had already put in two new posts before I got there.  Now we had to install braces.  When you run a barbed wire fence, you generally use three heavy wooden posts in each corner of the pasture – one post in the true corner of the pasture, and then two adjacent wooden posts along the fenceline so that if you looked at the three posts from above, they’d form an isosceles right triangle.  All three posts are sunk fairly deeply, and the two non-corner posts are braced to the one in the corner.  You fasten the barbed wire to the heavy triad of posts in one corner of the pasture and then use a come-along – basically a hand-operated winch – to stretch the wire tight from one corner of the pasture to the triad of posts in the next corner.  After the wire is stretched tight, you clip the taunt wire to metal fenceposts that you drive into the ground along the wire’s route, one about every thirty feet.  The metal fenceposts will hold the wire in place as time passes and the wire loosens, but it’s the heavy wooden posts that get it taunt in the first place.

John pulled a chainsaw off the flatbed to notch the wooden posts so that we could install a brace.  He made two horizontal cuts, each about an inch deep, in the side of the post where the brace would attach.  One cut about eight inches above the other.  Then with an axe he chipped out the wood between the cuts.  That made one notch.  He repeated the process on the opposite post, and sawed a wooden pole fit between them.  We lifted the pole and set it in the notches John had cut.  It fit snugly.  He nailed the pole in place, and the brace was complete.  Then he sawed two cuts in the other side of the corner post so that we could install the second brace, and I picked up the axe to chip away the wood between the cuts he'd made.  It was close work so I swung with my hands apart on the axe handle.  I got it done, but it took me about three times as long as it had taken John and the result was not nearly so neat.

I leaned on the axe handle when I had finished.  There were stray marks all over the post from where I’d swung the axe and missed my mark.  “I need to work on my accuracy,” I said.

“Oh, it looks pretty good,” John said.

“You do the next one.  I need to watch again.  I didn’t pay close enough attention the last time.”

As John efficiently chipped out a notch on the third post, a Mercury SUV drove up on the gravel road.  Two young guys inside.  They slowed and rolled down the window.  John looked up.

“How’re you guys doing?” one of them asked.

“Good,” I said.  I figured they were friends of John’s – most folks know each other around here – so I waited for John to say something.  But he didn’t.  I guess he figured that since we were on my family’s land it was my job to do the talking.  I took a couple steps toward the car and said, “how’re yall?”

“We’re okay,” one of them replied.  I waited a second for him to introduce himself or say what he was doing but he just looked at his buddy nervously and then they drove off.  John picked up the axe again.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

I watched them drive away.  “Colorado plates,” I said.

Not from around here.  I thought about the way we must’ve looked to them – a couple guys out in the cold beside a worn-down flatbed, fixing a fence.  Tools lying around, old fenceposts in the ditch, a dog sitting in the grass.  They were probably concerned about the impression they were making on the locals.  Probably thought I was a rancher.  I grinned at Duke and spat in the dirt.  I picked up a hammer and some fence staples and walked back to the posts.  It was nice to be on this side of car window for a change.

Overlooking Otter Creek; Crazy Mountains in background.  The view from a hilltop on our place looking west. 

Overlooking Otter Creek; Beartooth Mountains in background.  The view from a hilltop on our place looking south.