| ||
| ||
|
Send Us 
E-mail
|
| The Lighter Side of Fencing |
You are here: Newsletters > June 2004 > The Lighter Side of Fencing
"Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be stringing fence line and using power tools."
By Kim Gordon
When ERRI board member Linda Veblen told us about the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation fencing grant I thought, "That's great!" When she said we were probably going to do most of the labor I thought, "That's not so great!"
Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be stringing fence line and using power tools. When the work started, I set out equipped with my tool belt, chocolate donuts and coffee. What I thought was going to be a horrible experience turned out to be a lot of fun. I was out in the fresh air (never mind the extreme heat and cold we sometimes faced) which in itself can be nice considering the busy lives we lead. Luckily we were blessed with mostly nice weather.
Thank goodness for Laura Baier and Linda. If not for them, the grunts like me would have been clueless. With their expert foremanship I was hammering staples and using power tools in no time. Jim Crews was a lifesaver too. Laura, Sue Adler, Lucy Cook and I would start the staples, and he would hammer them in the rest of the way. This saved us a lot of weary work. At the end of the day my arms were grateful.
Now there are technical terms for the equipment we learned to use, but it seems, we made up our own terms. If we needed a ferrule, which is used to join lines together, and didn't know the professional term, saying "Hand me a tubie-thing" worked just as well.
So begins the ERRI fencing language: Spinning jenny = spinnie thing, also hoojie & thing-a-ma-jig, ratchet-type wire strainer with spring clip = pizza cutter (because they look like one), Wire tangle = doink. Needless to say, for those who knew the real names, our nicknames took some getting used to.
Thankfully no one was injured during the project other than some scrapes, bruises and hammered fingers. We learned the hard way how to hold the staples so the barbs wouldn't tear our fingers apart. We shared the information we learned so others could bypass our injuries, but the warnings didn't always help.
It was amazing no one fell as we trudged through brush, weeds and tangled vines carrying all kinds of tools and feeling like kangaroos in our tool belts and work aprons. I did let everyone know that if anyone fell (including me) after I stopped laughing I would be glad to help them up.
Of course as we worked, we were very intense. When we were hammering, cutting wire etc., many of us made faces we didn't realize we were making. I had the pleasure of working with Laura and seeing her "hammer face".
Now in defense of Laura, all of us had a variation of the hammer face. Someone would be intensely working and would hear snickers and muffled laughs. As they looked up from what they were doing and gazed down the fence line, everyone was watching their "hammer face". One person would clue everyone else in so they could have a good laugh. What comes around goes around because soon enough it would be someone else with a face.
Not only did we have exceptional volunteers giving their time to complete this project, we had some animal helpers too. Miss Brilly, barn dog extraordinaire, helped us in many ways. She could not wait to get in the car and ride shotgun to the place where we were fencing. Once we started a fence line, the horses were very interested in what we were doing, so Brilly became our guard dog. She would bark and try to chase the horses away from us with all the ferocity of a German Shepard.
Speaking of horses, Flash (board member Sue Adler's horse) liked to help out by making sure we had the right tools in the bucket. He did this by pulling the tools out of the bucket and generally keeping an eye on the process. He would also carry off our Munchkins boxes.
ERRI rescue Dash thought he could help David Veblen. As David leaned over fence braces, Dash decided to lick the back of David's head, this went on for about three minutes. The laughing went on for five more, and David's head stayed very cool.
Thanks to the volunteers, human and animal, our fencing project was a huge success and a lot of laughs.