Those who are familiar with life on a dairy farm or cattle farm know that from time to time the farmer has to spend some time fixing fence. When I was a boy, I used to think that I could do pretty well at fixing fence; and even though fence repairs can be strenuous and vexing, I don’t remember minding too much whenever I was assigned that task by my dad. Sometimes the difficulty of a task is a challenge instead of a dread, especially after you can see the job done and feel that you did it pretty well.

Last week, my brother Ben and I were getting ready for the farm sale at our folks’ place on Slack Street in Pea Ridge, and we got into repairing the fence corner where the driveway meets the highway. The three wooden posts that anchored the corner had rotted off at ground level, allowing the barbed wire to sprawl all over the place. Itwas the kind of failure that normally calls for replacing the corner post with a good 10-foot by 10-foot treated post, outfitted with a brace posts and good solid brace from two sides to support the corner post.

But we were faced with a quandary. We had too little time to do a thorough job, and the corner post would have to go in next to a utility pole and very near the gas meter. So we decided to do a temporary fix using steel posts and a makeshift brace. It worked, but we will have to do it over again before long. That’s the way it goes with temporary fence fixing.

I got an early start as a fence fixer, working with my dad. Well before I was able to really help with the work, I was out with Dad as he repaired fences and built new ones. When you are too little to do something, you tend to want to do it to prove that you can.

I’ve known some parents who are so afraid that their child will get hurt that they won’t even let the child be around the work. Or they may just want the child to stay out of the way so they won’t be bothered. I liked it that my dad would let me try working at things, even before I was really able to accomplish the tasks.

I had learned to drive nails with a hammer early in my life, and by the time I was 4 years old I knew how to guard against hammering my fingers. But fence fixing brought a new challenge to my hammering skills. When you are fixing barbed wire fences on wooden posts, driving in fence staples to hold the wire to the posts is a main task. Fence staples are notat all like nails. The part you hammer on is curved, and you are driving in two points, not just one. The skills I learned to protect my fingers when driving nails was hard to apply to fence staples. Because of the small size of the staples, you almost have to have your fingers close in, where they can easily get hammered. Also, you can’t just swing your hammer at will, because the staple points don’t bite in evenly. You have to tailor each blow to persuade your staple to bite evenly and deeply. Dad would let me try to hammer in a staple. If I bent it, or didn’t get it driven in well, he would have to pull it out and do it over. But I remember being proud when I began getting them hammered in and Dad didn’t have to rework them.

For fixing barbed wire fences, and especially for building barbed wire fences, one needs a fence stretcher. What a fine,useful and dangerous invention a wire stretcher is! These days, I have a cable-type come along with a rachet winch mechanism.

In the old days, we had a stretcher which used a rope and pulley mechanism to pull the wire tight. The key to the success and safety of a fence wire stretcher is the clasping mechanism which grips the wire. Sometimes you are gripping one wire with one end of the stretcher and gripping the other wire with the other end, with the intent of tying the wire ends together in the middle when tight.

To avoid having the barbed wire fly loose and slash your face or arm, you want to get the wire firmly set in those grippers. If you get it set in well, then the harder you pull the tighter the gripper holds on the wire.

But if you don’t get it right, you want to be out of the way when your wire pops loose!

All his life, my dad’s pickup was a fence fixer’s truck.

The fencing tools were always in the truck. A can of staples and a can of fasteners for steel posts were nearly always in the truck bed, along with a few spare posts and a post maul or driver. As time goes, now that Dad is gone, my truck is getting more like that.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.

He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 10/13/2010