Gates

     Gates have made fools of all of us.  I can’t count how many times I’ve smashed fingers, lost blood and even my horse while trying to open or close ranch gates.  Most of them seem to have been built and jury-rigged by some demonic devil intent on testing your skill, patience and strength in an attempt to open or close them.

     If you’re alone or not in a hurry, they all open easy.  The problem gates always show up when you have an audience, a nervous horse or runaway stock.  That’s when you run into one that’s either a puzzle how the wire or latch is rigged, or it’s pulled so tight you can’t get the wire loop off the top of the pole no matter how hard you struggle. 

     Barb wire gates with one pole in the middle never lay down without tangling all the strands of wire together when you pick it up to close.  No matter how careful you are, one of those strands always seems to hang up on another or get tangled in brush or around a rock, spooking your horse when you try to jerk it free.

     In lodge pole country, pole gates are easy to build because the poles are easy to come by.   Bigger must be better cause when you open one, it takes two hands and all the strength you can muster to lift up the end and carry it around so your horse or pickup can get through. When you close it, the other end never seems to go back in the same place and you have to scurry back and forth getting both ends wired back close enough to keep critters in or out.

     Heavy board gates.  Now here’s a real treat.  Have you ever seen one that wasn’t sagged down on the end?  When you try to swing it open it’s like you’re the mule in front of a single bottom plow.  Tug, pull and lift until you’ve dug a respectable furrow in the dirt and then just maybe you can coax it to swing wide enough to pass through if it doesn’t fall off its rusted hinges before you can persuade it back where it came from.

     Nothing worse than slippin’ the looped wire off the top of a pole on a wire gate and watching in dismay as three or four poles down the fence fall to the ground like they've been shot dead.  They’ve been rotted off so long you can’t even see where they were planted when the fence was built a hundred years ago.  If you’re in a hurry, you’re out of luck.  When you try closing the gate, you have to pull the weight of all the downed poles back into the upright position while the wire goes out of its way to tangle on everything it can find.  You end up laying the whole mess down two or three times while you walk back and forth cussing and untangling the dead fence.

     Those same fences always have different size loops of wire on the top or bottom. If you expect the post to fit back in the bottom hangar as easy as it came out, you’ve got another thought coming.  It won’t go without bending down and forcing it onto the pole.  The cussin’ starts when the top wire just won’t fit back over the post no matter how hard you try.  You try different ways to lever it back with all the muscle you can muster but it just won’t slip over that last quarter inch to fall over the post and lock in place.  Bad enough you can’t seem to summon enough strength, but a glance back at the pickup where your partners sit giggling as they watch the gate make a fool of you is the last straw.  Your manhood is at stake, so in desperation you summon something from somewhere and finally slide that half-ounce wire loop over the skinny post.  “What took so long,” they snicker when you climb in the truck.

     “If you’re in a hurry, why don’t you open it next time,” you say, while deep down you’re thinking them pals of yours are gonna’ run into that same gate sometime when they’re ridin’ shotgun and then it’ll be your turn to laugh.

     Driving to town one day I saw a saddle horse minus the rider loping down a fence line.  His head was cocked to one side as he loped for home.  He was dragging the bridle reins and I could tell he knew just what he was doing.  He must have been experienced at dragging reins cause he held his head to the side just enough to keep his hooves from coming down on them. 

     Somebody’s been thrown, I thought.

     A short ways down the road I spotted a horse-less rider.  He had chaps on so I guessed he belonged to the rider-less horse and had been recently removed from the saddle.  Past him, I could see a wire gate laying tangled on the ground.  The story was clear to the naked eye.  His horse saw an opportunity to depart for better places while the rider struggled to open or close the gate.

     Embarrassed for him, I looked away as I passed so he wouldn’t suffer total humiliation at being caught afoot after losing his horse.  I drove the rest of the way to town with a grin on my face.  I couldn’t wait till the next time I had coffee with him and drew sweet revenge for his past assaults on me and that same gate.~

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                                                                                                  Horseman's Press 2009