The old fenceposts don’t look anything like the new ones. They’re giant, irregular splinters of locust wood, most of them probably harvested, split, and stabbed into the ground by the original homesteaders of this property a hundred years ago. Some of them lean, all are heavily weathered and most have been colonized by green moss and multichromatic lichens.
The majority of the posts surrounding the overgrown garden are the old variety. There are perhaps forty of them, and they look completely at home, as if over the past century the landscape has accepted them into its bosom. The newer posts are scattered irregularly along the fenceline, obviously installed when the garden fence was rehabilitated by the previous landowner. There are maybe fifteen of them, round and proportioned like mini-telephone poles. They appear artificial, dead, and completely out of place.
It is my job today to pull them all out of the ground, old and new, so that this bramble-infested plot might be repurposed to become the front yard of the mountain cabin I am planning to build. It is a bittersweet activity for me. I am a sentimental man and it bothers me to destroy something that was lovingly wrought by other men. Who knows what beauty this garden contained when these old locust fenceposts were fresh from being hand-split? How many meals over the decades were prepared from the fresh-picked bounty it produced? How many times had someone, just like me, stood in this very spot and admired the garden area simply because it was beautiful?
I’ve never pulled up fenceposts before. My neighbor, a wise and pragmatic man named Tom who has lived in this end-of-the-road mountain cove for three decades, advised me to hire a backhoe operator. I resisted this for several reasons. First, I dread the impact that heavy equipment will have on this land. I completely understand that I am being naïve, that at some point during the site prep and building process that this garden area will be trounced and trampled by the cement trucks and construction crew. I try not to think about that. Right now, the garden has been lying fallow for twelve years, and it has become a wild mountain meadow filled with the successional growth that can only occur at high altitudes in the southern Appalachians. My neighbor Tom assures me that it will quickly grow back, but I dread the day when this garden, even temporarily, becomes a flattened and scraped mud-zone.
Another reason I want to pull the posts up by hand is because I’ve never been a physical man. I’m a long-distance hiker and once cycled regularly, but I’ve never been pressed into hard, brute-forced physical labor for any length of time. If I’m going to own a cabin in a remote Appalachian cove, I need to prove to myself that I can actually do the work required to maintain the property.
Where to start? It seems that before I can begin removing posts from the ground, I’ll have to take down the fencing stretched between them. It’s mid-morning, but because the property is tucked deeply between two mountain arms, the sun is only now beginning to peak over the east ridge. It smells like a summer morning, and the ground is moist and soft beneath my hiking sneakers. I take my tools ( a fancy red-handled fence-post staple-puller I bought at Gentry’s Hardware in Hot Springs, forty minutes away, plus a brand new spade from the East Asheville Lowe’s, and a six-foot breaker-bar that I found on the property and that must weigh fifty pounds), and head for the first post.
It’s one of the newer posts. Pressure-treated and perfectly round, it’s a prime example of a mass-produced industrial forest product. Not a single trace of moss or lichen stains its perfect form, and the logo of the Georgia-Pacific corporation is stamped plainly on its flank in crisp black ink. I glance at one of the adjacent, century-old locust fenceposts and wonder how this marvel of modern factory production would look in a hundred years if I left it here. Chances are good, I decide, that in a hundred years most of the locust posts would still be here, while the pressure-treated pine posts would be long dissolved, melted back into the earth.
Here I go. I glare at the fencepost. “You’re going down, buddy,” I say in my best southern drawl. I was born and raised in a small town in rural Georgia, so my drawl is authentic and well-practiced, though I long ago learned to turn it off in high-end, big-city business situations. It’s sad, but true: yankees judge you if you drawl.
I step up to the fencepost and prepare to wreak havoc, but it turns out that I have no idea how to use the fancy and expensive red-handled fence-post staple-puller tool. The owner of the hardware store had offered to show me how to use it, but I’d demurred, mostly from pride, but also assuming that I’d be able to figure it out. I mean, not to boast, but I’m a smart guy. I have a masters degree in business and I’ve been a successful entrepreneur for most of my adult life. I’ve taught executive-level business courses to CEOs and 3-star admirals at a prestigious university. I’ve rarely encountered a challenge I couldn’t eventually figure out.
Nonetheless, the damn tool completely and utterly stumps me. I spend almost half an hour trying to remove a single fence staple before I throw the fancy red-handled fence-post staple-puller tool into the weeds. For a moment I glare at the fencepost, and then I go retrieve the fancy red-handled fence-post staple-puller tool, which is buried in a luscious clump of poison ivy. Anger never leads to good outcomes, I tell myself, and besides, it’s too expensive for me to simply discard.
I try again to pull a staple, and once again, I am bamboozled. I know in my deepest heart that there is some simple motion, some utterly simple action required to position the tool so that the thick steel staple can be removed with a minimum of effort. I try a hundred different options, but nothing works and I only succeed in bloodying my knuckles. I briefly consider going to my neighbor Tom and asking for his help. Surely he’ll know how to use a fancy red-handled fence-post staple-puller tool. But no, my ego won’t allow me to ask for help for what should be such a simple task, so I curse and throw the damned tool back into the poison ivy and ponder a backup plan.
By now it’s almost ten o’clock, and the sun is lighting the tops of the giant Chestnut trees that shade the north edge of the garden. Ancient and gnarled and none-too-healthy from the blight, they are still impressive. No doubt the original homesteader planted them here to shade his home, the mossy rubble of which is mounded a few dozen feet from the western edge of the garden.
Here’s something I learned a long time ago. If a thing is hard to do, somebody, somewhere, has invented a tool to make it easy. As I stand here contemplating my foe, I realize that I am grossly under-equipped for the task at hand. Yeah, sure, I’d bought the fancy red-handled fence-post staple-puller and a sleek shovel with a Ferrari-yellow carbon-fiber shaft, but even with them I have the sense that I’m not exactly making life easy for myself. For a moment I regret not taking Tom’s advice and calling in a backhoe. It would have already pulled all fifty fenceposts from the ground by now.
I finally decide to try the breaker-bar. Maybe I can pry the fencing off the post with brute force. It works, sort of. Instead of yanking out the thick steel staples, the bar applies enough force to snap the fencing. At first I’m dismayed. I’d planned on preserving the fencing so we could use it for another project. But no matter. I’m determined to clear the fence-posts today, and if I have to break some wires to do it, so be it.
After almost an hour, the first post is ready to be removed from the ground. I stand back and examine it, suddenly unsure of how to proceed. Should I use the shovel to dig around the base, or should I try to lean it back-and-forth in an attempt to work it out of the ground? I decide to try the lean-and-work option first, and miraculously, it works. After the huge disappointment of the fancy red-handled fence-post staple-puller tool, I’d expected this to be much more difficult. It takes me less than sixty seconds to wobble the fencepost free of its moorings in the soft earth. I wrap it with both arms and lift it up and out of the hole, feeling total triumph.
In the next instant I suddenly realized why the hardware store owner in Hot Springs had also advised me to wear steel-toed work boots while attempting this task. The heavy pole slips out of my arms and comes down hard on the front of my left sneaker. It is only after I remove my shoe to examine the damage that I convince myself that I haven’t fractured every toe on my foot.
Chastened and chagrined, I move to the next fencepost and glare at it suspiciously. This one is of the old variety. It stands only about four feet out of the earth, and it is festooned with a dozen rusted staples that tell the stories of several different fences over the past century. The hardened locust-wood is a rich, variegated gray, the color of a century-old barn, and it is deeply lined with the channels and fibers of the ancient tree that gave it birth.
Honestly, it is beautiful. A dozen different shades of lichen spot its surface, along with a clump of yellow moss it wears like a haughty sailor’s cap. Strands of old barbed-wire stick out threateningly from several of the ancient staples. This thing looks like a fierce, grizzled old warrior, ready to stab me and send me to the hospital with a fatal case of tetanus.
I grip the heavy breaker bar and limp toward the second fencepost, favoring the injury sustained in my battle with its young colleague. I manage to rip the fence-wire down without too much trouble, but when I go to leverage the post out of the ground by rocking it back-and-forth, it doesn’t move. At all. Trying to shove the ancient locust fencepost is like trying to argue with a Q-Anon supporter on Facebook. In the end, I am red-faced and furious and it hasn’t budged a bit.
I decide to dig it out. I plant my gleaming new shovel in the earth about a foot from the base of the post and stomp the blade with my foot. Once again, instantly, I am reminded of the hardware store owner and his gentle insistence that I buy a pair of work boots. The soft rubber sole of my sneakers folds over the edge of the shovel blade and pain shoots up my leg. Worst of all, the shovel only penetrates a couple of inches into the soft earth.
I offer up a brief prayer of thanks that nobody is around to see my humiliation, then walk around in circles for a few moments while I wait for the pain to subside. “Alexa,” I say out loud. “Add steel-toed work boots to my shopping, list.”
Alexa doesn’t answer. She’s a long, long way from this remote mountainside, which doesn’t have digital connectivity of any kind to any form of modern convenience, whatsoever. I resolve to not buy my work boots from a faceless corporate entity, but from the soft-spoken hardware store owner back in Hot Springs to whose wisdom I should have listened.
Suddenly I’m laughing, mostly at myself. I take in a deep breath of the chilled morning air, moist with possibilities, and I spend a long moment leaning my chin on the top of the shovel handle and simply watching the sun dapples slide down the trunks of the Chestnut trees. The air is pure, oxygenated, filled with the scents of the forest. All I can hear is the burble of the adjacent creek, the distant roar of a nearby waterfall, the omnipresent hum of the insects busy pollinating the lake of wildflowers in which I’m standing, and the gentle cadence of my own breath.
