Notes from Maine - 2022/10/09
Gates are hard.
When I bought this house (twenty years ago), it didn’t have any fenced-in pasture. I rented a post hole auger and invited a bunch of friends and family over on Memorial Day. We had the grill going. A lot of people were nice enough to donate their time. I don’t remember how many posts we put in. One fifty? Two hundred?
I put up most of the rails by myself. It took me from Memorial Day until July eleven to finish.
But gates are hard. I wanted to make rectangular gate sections with diagonal supports, kinda like big Ws. My first version of gates had half lap corners. After five or six years, they were falling apart so I reinforced them with flat L brackets. Those fell apart and were replaced. At one point, I consulted with Todd (an actual rocket scientist). He told me that the strongest approach would be to sandwich my frame with plywood, so I did that. They were very strong, until they too rotted.
The other day I went outside for morning chores and saw that one of the gate sections had finally fallen. The horses didn’t notice—there are strands of electric tape inside the gates, so they wouldn’t go near the wood anyway.
With a sigh, I figured it was the right day to make yet another batch of gates. That’s an all-day chore.
But wait—what about metal? With a quick search, I found that Tractor Supply had plenty and I could purchase them online and pick them up. On the trip over there, I discovered that my hair was sticking every which way, and my shirt was buttoned wrong. Did you know that hand sanitizer makes a passable hair gel?
By noon, I was done. They’ll last longer than wood ones I hope. Finn doesn’t like the new gates. He could step through the triangle of the old ones when we went out back. Now he has to wait until I open it.
I shaved my head again then next day. That got rid of the hand sanitizer smell.
The horses still haven’t noticed the change. They don’t seem to have any desire to leave their pasture. Way back when, my first horse figured out how to open one of the small gates. I think he leaned over the top and used his mouth on the “horse proof” latch. A neighbor found him gazing over her fence, watching her horses with a faraway look in his eyes. She brought him back with no harm done. I double-latch that gate to this day even though I think he was the only horse I’ve had who expressed a strong desire to wander off.
Earl likes to sneak through to the side yard at night. It’s roped off for the dogs, but inside the wooden fence. Even with the electric fence on, he’ll find a way through. In the past, I would come downstairs, open the laundry room door to let the dogs out, and they would freeze in the doorway. Recently, Albert has decided that it’s his job to chase Earl off. Earl weighs twenty times what Albert does, but he makes that horse move fast. This morning, Earl held his ground and Albert barked. I told Albert to go back inside and gave Earl an apple. I suppose I haven’t decided whose side I’m on.
In a way, it was nice that the old gate fell down when it did. It was on my list to replace before winter, and I was forced to bump it up in priority. Because of the crisis, I found an easier solution. One more thing crossed off my fall list.
