Fence Line After Winter

Out here, winter doesn’t just cover the ground—it tests it.

Snow piles against the posts until you can’t tell whether the fence is holding the drift back or the drift is holding the fence up. Wind scours the wire clean in some places and buries it in others. By February, the line exists more in memory than sight. You keep walking it anyway, boot after boot, counting steps between posts you can’t see, trusting the land to tell you when something’s wrong.

When the thaw comes, you learn what held.

Some wire snapped clean, the break bright as if it happened yesterday. Some posts leaned just enough to matter, heaved sideways by frost nobody noticed in time. Staples pulled loose. Corners softened. The damage shows quiet. No announcement. Just a gap where cattle can wander—or worse, where predators learn the way in. That’s how most failures arrive. Not with noise, but with permission.

I learned that early. Not from instruction, but from watching men older than me walk a line slow, eyes down, fingers brushing wire as if it could talk back. I learned that maintenance isn’t repair—it’s attention. And attention, once neglected, always costs more to reclaim.

Borders work the same way.

Not the bright ones drawn on paper with speeches attached, but the real ones—the kind lived every day by people who cross them, guard them, or wait on one side hoping the other still holds. For years, we let ours sag. Pressure built the way it always does: gradual enough to ignore, steady enough to matter. Some who came worked hard, stayed steady, became part of the place without asking permission. Others took what wasn’t theirs and moved on, leaving the ground thinner than before. Most were somewhere in between. That’s the part people forget.

We told ourselves the line would hold because it always had. That the ground could take one more season of neglect. That fixing it would cost more than letting it lean.

That’s the lie neglect tells.

Now the work has started again. Hard work. Loud work. The kind that comes late, when everything has to be tightened at once and nobody’s sure how much strain the posts can take. Authority arrives fast. Tools come out heavy. Doors open without warning. Lives get sorted quicker than they can be understood. The wire is pulled so tight it hums in the cold air, singing a note anyone who’s done this before knows to be dangerous.

Law matters. Anyone who’s worked land knows that. Without it, things turn feral. Boundaries dissolve. You lose control of your own range. But law without care doesn’t mend—it breaks. It counts what’s removed and calls the silence improvement. It forgets that quiet can mean fear just as easily as order.

What worries a man who’s strung wire in January wind is this: when you pull everything tight at once, something always gives. Not first where you expect it. The strain finds the weakest posts—the ones weathered by time, not wrongdoing. Ground that’s held for generations gets compacted. Gates that used to open with a nod start to stay shut. Neighbors stop trusting the line, not because they oppose it, but because they no longer recognize it.

Even those who wanted the fence fixed begin to flinch. They feel it in their hands before they can explain it. Too fast. Too hard. Too little room left for judgment.

A good fence isn’t about winning against weather or proving a point to strays. It’s about endurance.

You sink posts deep enough to hold through freeze and thaw. You brace the corners against the prevailing wind because corners fail first. You build gates—not too many, but enough—so necessary crossings don’t tear holes somewhere else. You walk the line regular, not just when trouble shows up loud. And you remember the goal isn’t to clear every last stray off the place. It’s to keep what belongs here safe and fed, while letting the land breathe.

This country has room. More than most people remember. But room isn’t the same as endless. You can ruin good ground by working it too hard in the name of order, same as you can lose it by never riding out to check the line. The work lives in between. Steady. Human. Ongoing.

Winter casts a long shadow this time of year. I’ve watched it stretch across fields I knew before they were fenced at all, back when the work was learned by doing and mistakes stayed with you long enough to teach something useful. Shadows don’t shorten because you wish them gone. They shorten when the sun moves—and the sun only moves if you’re willing to wait and keep your footing.

We’ll walk the line again come morning.
Same as always.

Best we do it careful.

— Hank Redding