My cousin, Mike, came up to St. Johns during the summers when he was in college. He would also work on Grandpa Earl’s ranch. My older brother, John, and I would often work with him because he was old enough to drive. We had some really enjoyable times together on the ranch. John and Mike laughed a lot more than I did, however, because I was usually the one being laughed at. I spent quite a few afternoons trying to sun-dry after being thrown in a mossy drinker. But one summer afternoon, I got to laugh instead.
As I think back on it, I was rather cruel to be laughing at such an unfortunate event, but I had been the butt of too many jokes and pranks not to have some fun at someone else’s expense.
Our job that day was repairing fences. We loaded our pickup with rolls of barbed wire and stay wire, T-posts, T-post drivers, pliers, and fence stretchers. We got our water and lunches and headed toward our destination—a rocky plain covered with large patches of prickly pear cactus.
Building a new fence is actually easier than repairing an old fence. When repairing fences, wires that need tightening are often tangled with other wires. Tumbleweeds and chemise bushes have to be hacked from the fence-line to get to broken wires. It is a hot, dirty, and often painful job. The barbs on the wire are sharp and render new gloves nearly worthless in days. The barbs have a tendency to find unprotected skin to scratch and draw blood. Pliers can pinch fingers, and if a tight wire breaks, better watch out! The fence has teeth!
We started that day tightening loose wires using a wire stretcher. The wire is removed from 10 or so posts in both directions and then stretched with a ratcheting tool. Then the wire is fastened to the posts again. The process is long and tedious. As I cleaned the fence and re-tied broken stays, John and Mike stretched wire and drove the truck through the maze of cactus. By lunchtime we had not reached a mile of fence. We were way behind. Mike decided another approach was necessary.
Mike started tightening the wire at each post. The wire was fastened to the barbed wire, looped around the post and also the barbed wire on the other side of the post. A foot placed against the post provided leverage as he pulled the stay wire. This, in essence, cinched the barbed wire around the post. It also helped, somewhat, to tighten the wire. This was definitely a faster method.
By afternoon we were moving at a much faster pace. I was still cleaning wire ahead of Mike and John when a scream issued from behind me. It was followed by a line of profanity; words I never even knew existed. I ran back toward the truck only to fall down, laughing hysterically.
During one of Mike’s attempts at tightening a stubborn post, his thin strand of stay wire could not stand the strain. When it snapped, Mike’s own exertion on the post propelled him backwards several feet and he landed, rump first, into a very large patch of prickly pear cactus.
We carefully extracted Mike from his painful predicament and got him situated in the back of the truck. We couldn’t put him in the front because it was too painful to sit. Mike rode in the back over countless bumps and many dusty miles to home with two kids in the front grinning and giggling like a couple girls.
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