After years of dreaming about it we had bitten the bullet and retired to a place beyond the sidewalks.
Our new country home stood in the middle of a coastal bermuda hay field that had been part of a ranch. There were no outbuildings on the property and no trees near the house. The front of the property was fenced with barbed wire except for a gap where our driveway joined the road. Another barbed wire fence separated one side of our ten acres from a neighboring pasture with about thirty head of cattle on it. The back property line ran down the middle of a crooked, and usually dry, creek bed. There was a barbed wire fence on the far side of the creek. It was in bad shape, but we didn't know that at the time we bought the place because the brush was too thick to get back there. The remaining side of the property, which was nearly a quarter of a mile long, adjoined another ten-acre property with a new house on it. The back two-thirds of that side ran along and across a dry creek bed and through a patch of woods. None of that side was fenced.
When we moved into the place the phones had not yet been connected to the land line. That wouldn't have been a big problem except that we had to drive a mile down the road in order to get cell phone reception. So we pressured the phone company to get a connection as soon as possible. Sure enough, one day we came home to find that the phone line had been installed... sort of. The installer had run what looked like an indoor phone cord from a box a quarter mile away, along and across the dirt road in front of our house and 500 feet down our drive, then across the end of the hayfield to the far side of our house. And there it stayed for three weeks until a crew finally came out to bury it. That should have given us a clue that things were going to be a little bit different from what we were used to, but the honey moon was still shining so we just smiled and hummed a few bars from the “Green Acres” theme.
The phone line wasn't the only reminder that we weren't living in the burbs anymore. In the area where our country place was located it was common for the mailman to require all of the people living near each other to put their mailboxes up in a cluster in front of the property at the nearest intersection to their place. In our case that meant that our box was in front of the house occupied by Lester and Twila, the retired farmers who had owned the property from which our ten acres of independence were carved.
Lester and Twila loved to talk, and at first we were delighted that we lived next to them because they filled us in on a lot of local history. The downside of having our mailbox in front of Lester and Twila's place soon became apparent though. They spent most of the day on their front porch. If they saw you stop to get your mail, they expected you to sit and talk with them awhile. That was OK if you had the time, but when you were on your way home after a hard day at work, and you had a long list of things to get done before turning in for the night, it wasn't such a good thing. So even though we liked Lester and Twila, and we understood that they loved having company, we soon found ourselves swooping in to grab the mail and heading back out again without looking in the direction of their porch. Of course, the next time we did stop to talk to them, they'd say “We saw you pick up your mail yesterday. Didn't you hear us holler howdy?” And we'd say. “Well, you know, that doggone truck makes so much noise we can't hear ourselves think when we're in it.” I don't think they bought it, but they were too polite to tell us we were blowing smoke.
The neighbors on the other side of our property were a young couple who, like us, had never lived in the country before. They had lots of big plans for their place that were pretty much at odds with our dreams of country life. The first time they told us that they were going to dam the creek that ran from their property to ours and cover the bottom with concrete so they could use it for a koi pond, we were about ready to call out the cavalry. It didn't take long, however, for us to realize that they were more into talk than action.
At the time we bought the property I was doing contract work that required me to make a two-hour round trip into the city every day. My wife was home all day, but most of the things we planned to do with the place were too much for her to do alone. So we cut our list of must have items down to two things that we could work on in the evenings and on weekends when I was home. The first thing we did was put up a shed to house the mower and other outside tools. That only took a weekend, but for a couple of office workers like us, it was hard work. The other item we needed right away was a yard fence. We had two dogs that weren't used to roaming all over the country and we knew that the woods and fields were frequented by coyotes and feral hogs. So we decided to fence three-quarters of an acre around the house in order to keep the dogs from becoming a meal for the local wild life. For nearly two weeks we worked on that fence every evening after I came home from the office and every night I was so exhausted that I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I didn't really realize how worn out I was until a couple of friends stopped by for a visit one evening about two weeks after we had moved in and I fell asleep on the couch in mid-conversation. I never did that again, but it was probably three months before I got used to all of the physical work involved in owning a country place.
We didn't do all the work ourselves though. There were several things that we just couldn't tackle. One job that we contracted out was the construction of a 30x50-foot pole barn to store the stuff that wouldn't fit into the shed. Another was the addition of a back porch. When we bought the house it had a divided porch on the front and a small one on the side closest to the driveway. Those porches were on the southwest and northwest sides so they were were sunny and uncomfortable by late afternoon. We decided that we had to have a place where we could sit in the shade in the evening so we cut a deal with the builder of our house to add a covered porch across the entire back wall. It took a couple of weeks for the construction crew to show up, but when they did, my old girl got quite a surprise. She had become used to the privacy of country living by then and was happily mopping the kitchen floor in her skivvies when she looked up to see the builder's crew at the door, ready to tear the roof off and add the back porch. That's when my wife started lobbying for some fencing and a locked gate at the top of the driveway.
I dragged my feet on the fencing, though, because I was busily engaged in tending an acre and a half garden and a small orchard. However, a couple of incidents soon convinced me that my wife was right about the fence. The first thing was that a bull got loose from an adjoining ranch and wandered into our front hayfield. By the time we spotted him he was grazing his way across the field and moving toward our infantile, and unfenced, orchard. I was not going to stand by and watch a ton of steak on the hoof bulldoze the newly planted fruit trees that I had spent hours carefully tending and watering in the midsummer heat. So I walked out in the field and waving my new cowboy hat, and probably looking like the dudes in “City Slickers”, I tried to drive the bull away. He just gave me a haughty glance over his shoulder and kept on munching and moving closer to the apple trees. So I drove the pickup into the field and tried to intimidate him with that. No luck. Finally I took out my 12-gauge and fired off a 3-inch magnum buckshot round about ten feet behind the bull. That got his attention. It didn't scare him though. He just looked back over his shoulder again and slowly ambled over to our neighbors' field. Mission accomplished; but now I understood the need for fencing. So, even though the temperature got up to about 103 degrees in the afternoon that week, the very next day my wife and I began to build a fence down the long side of the property, over the front creek and through the woods to the back creek.
We were in the process of finishing a stretch of fence from the road to the near side of the front creek, just about dying from the heat and wondering if we should give it up until cooler weather, when another incident happened that made it clear that we needed to fence the entire property right away. I was tightening a strand of barbed wire when I heard the sound of hooves on the packed dirt of the driveway. I looked up and saw five horses trotting down the drive, headed straight for the garden that I had spent much of the last three months carving out of the back hayfield. I dropped my fencing tools and ran down the other side of the yard fence to try to head them off. Believe it or not, the horses outran me. By the time I reached them they had pulled up short of the woods and were milling around right in the middle of the garden. I did my “City Slickers” number again and managed to get them headed back up the drive toward the front hayfield. The bad news was that they trampled half of the garden before I could turn them. The good news was that my wife, who was in the house at the time, had seen the herd run down the drive and had called a neighbor who kept horses to ask for help. By the time I got the horses back in the front field the neighbor was already there with a bridle in hand to take control of the lead horse. Even better, she knew who they belonged to and was able to lead them back home.
Most of the trampled plants sprang back up again by the next morning. So we kept the garden damage to a minimum, and got some good organic fertilizer as well, but the incident made us redouble our fencing effort. Before long we had the entire property fenced. We also built a 50-foot chute with a locked gate at the end of the drive so that we could pull up to the road with a trailer on the back of the truck and lock the gate to keep wandering stock off our land.
We finally felt like we were settled into the country life; but that just goes to show how naive we were.
