Good Fences Make Bad Marriages

It took millions of men hundreds of years to build the Great Wall of China. If they made it out of wooden pickets instead, it would have taken them twice that long. This weekend I drafted various friends and family members to help me build a backyard fence. It won’t keep out any Mongolian raiders, but it might just let our dogs poop at will outside – a much loftier goal. I have yet to see a Mongolian take a dump on my carpet, but I guess I’m not here all day. Lola made food for the work crew but didn’t help with construction, much to everyone’s relief. While I would never suggest my wife has succumbed to hormone-induced insanity, I happen to know another pregnant woman – let’s call her Mola – who earlier this week nearly murdered her husband over a box of Cheese-Its. There’s a reason the Surgeon General recommends pregnant women stay away from power tools and it has nothing to do with the health of the baby.

Lola originally insisted on a white picket fence, and as far as she knows she’s still getting one. It’s a well known fact that pregnant women can’t see colors.

With Lola confined to the house, there were about seven of us left to build two hundred and forty feet of fence, a Herculean task even if all of our tools had been adequate. Instead of renting a gas-powered post hole digger, I should have just bought some dynamite or maybe some kind of space-based laser. The post hole digger’s only useful feature was that it was loud enough to drown out our swearing. The large screw it used to bore into the earth was evidently designed to cut through a surface about as hard as pudding. Whenever it encountered something tougher, like a slightly thicker pudding, it would kick back, slamming me in the legs and knocking Rocco over backwards. Rocco would then stab the ground with a screw driver until he figured out what object was impeding our downward progress. These searches quickly proved unnecessary. The only thing we didn’t find while digging in my yard was actual dirt; there wasn’t any room for it between the tree roots, rocks, and discarded bricks lurking below the thin veneer of grass covering my property.

Filling the spaces between these posts with pickets is one way to keep out intruders. Using these posts to mount the skulls of my enemies is another. The method I go with will depend entirely on which permit is cheaper.

Wherever possible, my brother Harry would use a wooden post hole digger to finish the holes we started to make room for the 4x4s, which my dad, Lola’s dad, and Lola’s little brother put in place. My dad is a former farmer who is used to building fences in northern Iowa, where the temperature is often twenty degrees below zero in the middle of June. Fence posts there had to be planted at least three feet in the ground to get below the frost line; otherwise they’d never be strong enough to withstand months-long snowstorms and frequent yeti attacks. Conditions aren’t quite as harsh where I live now. This fence only has to hold back a few hard freezes a year and maybe an occasional Mongol, but we opted to follow with my dad’s Antarctic building codes just to be safe. At least that was the plan before we realized my yard is basically a brick road with a little vegetation on top. We made progress where we could and some where we couldn’t, resulting in post holes without any semblance of uniform depth. Some made it about as deep as my dad wanted, while others appeared to actually increase in elevation by the time we were done digging. The posts, however, are all exactly eight feet long, meaning some of them stick out of the ground almost seven feet. The goal originally was to cut them off at about the same height above the ground, but leaving them uneven might help keep away the neighbors. You’re less likely to stop by for a visit if you think a poorly grounded piece of timber is going to fall over and crush you to death.

If our dogs learn to dig the entire fence will be useless. Then again, if our dogs learn anything Hell will freeze over. Hopefully that will keep the ground hard enough to keep our dogs from getting through.

We managed to get all of the posts set by early afternoon, leaving only the small task of putting up about six hundred pickets. My mom came out to help for that part, and she and Harry made it around the first bend in the fence before we all gave up for the day. In the process we discovered our yard is about as flat as Dolly Parton’s chest. Discussions about how to deal with those changes in elevation resulted in shouting matches but no injuries because none of the possible solutions involved Mola or a box of Cheese-Its. Putting up the pickets would have been faster if we used a nail gun, but on my dad’s advice I opted to use screws instead. The fence is ridiculously overbuilt for this part of the country, but I feel safer that way. If a yeti ever does venture this far south, it’s not getting onto my property without a screwdriver. Of course if it has the motor skills necessary to use a hand tool I suppose it could just open the gate. By that point the dogs will be outside, though, and the minute or so the yeti spends eating them should give me more than enough time to escape.

I need to install the remaining five hundred pickets between now and next Saturday, when my dad is returning to build these yeti-compatible gates. That’s about one hundred pickets a day, which means in reality I’ll put up about a dozen on the first day and none for the rest of the week. In all honestly this project will still probably be unfinished when our yet-to-be born child is old enough to finish it for me, which won’t really be that far away since I plan to put him to work by age four. We’re building this partially for him anyway, although I don’t know how much he’ll want to use it since we’re basically converting the entire backyard into one big doggy bathroom.