DON'T FENCE ME IN

Rex Burress

Sierra Club hikers thrive on adequate, unfenced trails where the free spirit can be unleashed, but throughout most of the country barriers indicating private ownership exist, unless you're in parks and public places. Thank you, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and many other park advocates who helped obtain open spaces for outdoor people.

Closer to home, the charming neighbors next door to me in Oroville have a lovely setter-type dog named Bailey. He barks at me when I'm in the back yard, partly because I'm the noisy garbage can-man who rolls it out every week and he suspects my every move.

What keeps the dog and me apart is a chain-link fence. I can't imagine what might happen if that restraint wasn't there, so I'm glad the previous owner shared the cost of that fence years ago. As Robert Frost said, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Europeans have made their mark in America since the 1600's, mainly through boundaries of fences and walls surrounding buildings and livestock. We know fences not only define ownership, but are designed to keep things in or out. The 'wall principle' is exemplified in Frost's poem, “Mending Wall,” which ponders the cobblestone wall between him and his neighbor as they work together in the spring replacing stones 'to sit things right.' “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/And to whom I was like to give offense./ Something there is that doesn't love a wall...,” Frost wrote. The same might apply to fences.

There is a Butte County sample of a rock wall south of Chico that rambles through the fields in a long stone line rather suggesting that the cattle stay on their side. The lava rocks strewn across the landscape were gathered and placed by Chinese laborers in the latter half of the1800's.

When the Pilgrims arrived, the Indian tribes of the new world had not built fences, although they recognized territorial occupancy. As plots were parceled out to pioneers, the role of land-defining fences became apparent, even on the western plains, until now fences mark properties wherever there is tillable soil or a home on nearly every acre of the country.

If you are of the John Muir, John James Audubon, or Mountain Man mentality, your free-style wandering is now a thing of the past. About the only free-way walking experience without confronting fences and “keep-out” signs is to take a tailored trail like the Pacific Crest Trail or the Appalachian Trail. Some would say that the Sierra and Mojave are fenceless, but somewhere along those routes you will run into obstacles of some kind. Taking a wagon train from St. Joseph to Sacramento is not a fenceless thoroughfare anymore. Travel is only possible on the roads or in the air.

Boundary methods to control livestock comes in many styles. Wire has been the most used type of fencing, and the perimeter fences on nearly all Missouri farms where I lived as a boy had woven fence, but inner areas, such as the cow lane through timothy and lespedeza fields to the bottom land was barbed wire. Cattle and horses could be controlled with an electric fence, too, with one strand of wire, and it was a kid's game to grab the wire between alternating currents to avoid shock.

Woven wire could be a trap for animals, but when brush became established, those fence lines became a haven for quail and rabbits when rust allowed escape-holes.

The barbed wire fence along the road over Table Mountain has provided the rancher with good cattle control, but during flower season getting to the flower fields on the other side was a challenge for flower seekers until gates were installed. Above all, “Please don't cut the fences!”

Bolt's Antique Tool museum and the Pioneer museum in Oroville both have collections of different styles of barbed wire illustrating the extreme effort to deter intrusion. The cry of the wild and free is “Don't fence me in,” yet civilization demands restrictive policies! Are you, like a cow, fenced in?

“There are three kinds of men. The one who learns by reading. The few who learn by observation.

The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.”

--Will Rogers

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”

--Robert Frost