Perhaps 20 years ago, I was visiting my parents in Longmont and poking around the garage with my father. We happened upon various pieces of junk awaiting restoration, among them the business end of a clamshell post-hole digger. Its long wooden handles had broken off, and my dad offered me the tool. “You can get new handles for a few dollars at any decent hardware store,” he said.
I offered some cash or at least some of my own junk in trade, but he said it was gratis. “I’m glad to be rid of this. To tell you the truth, I don’t care if I never see another set of clamshells the rest of my life.”
That sentiment is coming on strong here now, after a weekend of installing fence posts, all on account of an energetic new dog. Our 15-year-old chow mix, Ted, died in December. She had been rather slothful for her last four or five years, too lazy to climb the woodpile and jump over the back fence to the freedom of the alley.
The new dog, Bodie, adopted us 10 days ago. He’s about eight months old and appears to be a shepherd-collie mix. He first adopted a local guy who was working for a highway contractor in northern New Mexico. The skinny, tick-ridden dog appeared every morning and hung around; when the job ended, the guy couldn’t bear to leave him, so returned home with his new canine friend.
His wife works for a veterinarian in Poncha Springs, and they ran the full drill of civilization on Bodie: castration, inoculation, de-worming, de-ticking, de-lousing, de-fleaing, de-anything- else-he-might-have-picked-up.
But their household already had several dogs, and when she heard from a mutual friend that the Quillens might want a dog, I got a phone call.
Bodie quickly found the wood-pile route. Our wood zone was already mostly fenced. Just a 12-foot gap remained, and that could be closed with some fence and a gate.
Fences need posts, and the lumber yard had treated posts that were 6 1/2 feet long. You’re supposed to bury a third of the post, 26 inches in this case, and I figured 30 just to be sure the fence would stand up to the wind and the anticipated canine assaults.
Out on the plains where I grew up, you can dig down 3 or 4 feet without encountering a rock any bigger than a fingernail. Here, you can dig about 8 inches before potato-size cobbles appear, and the rocks get bigger the deeper you go. Soon every inch requires probing, pounding and picking with the spud bar, assisted on occasion by a short-handled, 4-pound sledgehammer.
One monster rock was the size of my work boot. This made me wonder: How could I ever be sure of a solid back-fill if the hole was shaped like a gallon jug, rather than a straight-walled cylinder? Concrete, maybe, but mixing that at home with a hoe and wheelbarrow is even harder work than digging post holes.
I’d settle for screened dirt with frequent tamping. Such labor allows ample time for thinking. For instance, how did they build those miles of fence on the old ranches around here? There weren’t power augers in those days; were those men built of tougher stuff than us moderns? Or did they have access to some cheap immigrant labor?
Then I’d ponder the nearby pile of fence-construction materials – wooden pallets I’d spotted by an alley where the owner was grateful to have someone haul them away. A contractor friend built a handsome stuccoed wall around his courtyard from old pallets, and my next-door neighbor had just rebuilt his yard swing with wood from used pallets.
Every year, 500 million wood pallets are built in this country, and the average one makes only 1.7 trips. They’re an environmental headache for many landfills, but Salida is a town with many scrounge artists; used pallets seldom last even overnight once they’re set out.
So there are probably a lot of uses that I haven’t seen or thought of. Perhaps with some research, I could produce a best-selling book, “101 Uses for a Dead Pallet,” and I’d have enough money to call a fence contractor the next time the need arises. But I’m just too darn tired after digging all those post holes.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
