clues at the scene

clues at the scene

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Good Fences

At left, a copyright free picture from Wikicommons. Thanks George!

This is a sectional corner. It's a mechanism for bracing and stretching wire in long-running fence. The spools are only one-quarter mile long. That's about the limit of conventional wire travel without building a corner to stretch the fence.

A suspension fence is a style of barbed wire fencing that can be considerably longer. It is a fence suspended by few poles but employing "stiffeners" tying the wire strands into a kind of wire wall. When a suspension fence is struck it will slap back before you can get away from it.

The phrase from Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" is from his collection North of Boston. The line is: Good fences make good neighbors.

Frost didn't live in my part of the world.

Fences do keep your neighbor's cows from the road in the dark of night. A black cow on a black road on a dark night is quite shock. I hit one in a tinfoil datsun back in '79. I managed to get the car slowed down enough to barely tap it when the collision happened.  Almost ended me though.

Too fast, too late, too young, too inexperienced.

New outline tonight. I've a sketch completed but I've a bit more to flesh out on the characters in the early conflict. Always good to do a little fleshing out for the handholds.

It is a grand time of year to put down my head and craft some prose. The distractions are relatively few. I could buy some trout flies tonight from an outfit in Montana I know; but, instead I'll scratch some notes and move along to bed early.

I'm going to kill some characters in a nice little backwater of the world in the next few weeks.

Chandler wrote about Los Angeles and wrong in the city.

The country is no different. It just has more fences between people.

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