Posted on October 6, 2008 - by Hubba

Postholes, not Swords

The last three days, I helped build a mile of fence.  When I got in at night, I was too tired to write anything on Hubba’s House.  We worked awfully hard.  It wasn’t a flat mile of fence, it went through several draws.

But I always think about how easy we have it today.  We worked hard, and we were tired at night, for sure.  But we bought all of the posts.  The wood posts were pointed and we drove them into the ground with a tractor-mounted machine.  Any places where the ground was flat enough, we unrolled the wire with an ATV.  Where it wasn’t, we would park the ATV, and walk the wire across the draw.  We had a Bobcat with a posthole digger to dig all the holes.

Back in the day, before they ever started fencing, they had to cut the posts, which is terribly hard work.  Then they had to dig a hole by hand for every one of them.  In a mile of fence, we probably only dug fifteen holes.  They usually put the spools of wire on a long rod and walked them from one end to the other.  Yeah, we have it very easy.

Still, I was a little jealous when I heard that my sister Julie in Ft. Collins has made a new friend who is taking a college fencing class, and has made Julie her sparring partner on occasion.  I think I would enjoy that type of fencing a whole lot more.