Feeling sheepish after my involuntary outburst, I slunk toward a phalanx of grumpy DMV minions, who sat behind a long counter that receded toward a vanishing point at the far end of the cavernous building. I walked up to the DMV lady who sat beneath the flashing number 462 and took a seat—wire mesh again, but it felt like a different grid pattern, which provided some relief for my cheeks, which were already molded to the texture of a waffle. I politely presented a folder that contained all the required documents: registration, smog check, proof of insurance, and receipt of payment for custom plates. The DMV lady sat motionless, staring at me with an expressionless face. She uttered not a single word.
“Um, OK,” I stammered. “I’m here to pick up customized license plates. I have all the necessary paperwork.”
She continued looking at me with an unblinking, reptilian stare. Even more surreal was the backdrop for her inexpressive countenance: on the wall behind her was a large poster featuring the smiling face of a pleasant looking woman above a morale-boosting motto that read, “I’m the DMV. Yes, I can help you with that!” I glanced down the long row of actual DMV people and saw not a single smile, either from them or from my fellow citizens, many of whom had been waiting for so many hours that they now struggled to utter a single word in any human language.
After a pause that seemed interminable, the lady rose stiffly from her chair and shuffled silently away like an overmedicated zombie. She may have gone to get my plates, but that was not at all clear, and after five minutes I began to wonder if she had simply gone on a cigarette break or maybe even left for the day. Or perhaps she just stepped into the mailroom to pour some bourbon into her coffee, a sensible measure that I regretted not having taken myself.
After about fifteen minutes, zombie lady shuffled back into view, mechanically reoccupying her place in front of me. Slowly extending her arm, she set a large, manila envelope on the counter between us. When she finally spoke, her entire discourse consisted of only two words, which were intoned as a question: “Ten bucks?”
I was confused. She had examined none of my paperwork, had explained nothing of the procedure, and now seemed to be inquiring whether I thought ten dollars was a reasonable price for whatever was in the envelope that now rested between us. I pulled out my wallet, plunked an Alexander Hamilton on the counter, and waited to see what might happen next. The lady slowly slid the manila envelope toward me across the counter, completing the motion by sweeping the ten spot toward herself, where she simply folded her hands over the bill. “Have a nice day,” she said in an expressionless monotone.
It was not until I staggered back out into the light of day that I opened that envelope and pulled out what, to this day, remains the finest birthday gift I have ever received. Beneath the word “Nevada,” the vanity plate read, in screaming all caps:RANTER.
The beauty of being a writer in love with humor is that everything in life that is not pleasure is still material, and in that sense my literary rantings have inoculated me against despair. In the life of a high desert Ranter, a good day becomes a memory, a bad day becomes a story, and even a visit to the DMV can have a happy ending. Still, even after a good laugh,IH8 DMV.
WHEN YOU LOOK at a fence, you are seeing something more than a material object. You are also seeing the embodiment of an idea—a form of symbolic communication that not only marks a boundary but also stakes a claim about the land and its uses. In feudal England most land remained in the “commons,” shared fields where even peasants were allowed to practice subsistence agriculture. By the sixteenth century, however, wealthy landowners began to fence off the commons for their own benefit, dispossessing poor laborers and farmers and privatizing a natural resource that had long offered sustenance to the entire community. While we will never know who raised the first fence, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a guy who thought harder about the social contract than I’m willing to, wrote that “The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine,’ and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.” In establishing a new kind of relationship both with his neighbors and with the land, that first fence builder caused some problems we haven’t yet solved.
Here in the American West we have long had a complicated relationship with fences. The “commons” of the frontier West was the open range that was utilized by wildlife, by Native American peoples, and, much later, by ranchers whose livelihood depended (and in many places still depends) upon the use of public lands. But legislation like the Homestead Act (1862) and the Desert Land Act (1877) granted legal possession of land to anyone who could “improve” it, and a fence was (and still is) considered an improvement to land. In other words, the fence functioned as the primary marker of possession and public assertion of ownership. The Range Wars of the nineteenth-century West were feuds over the right to fence off parts of this open range commons, particularly the parts that harbored the region’s limited water sources. If skirmishes in those wars sometimes ended with six-guns, they usually began with barbed wire—a technology invented not long after the Civil War, and one that profoundly transformed the landscape of the West.
Beneath the politics and economics of the Range Wars is a different kind of conflict, one that is more a battle of ideas than one of land use. It is a war we’re still fighting in the West today. Two of the strongest human impulses are the desire for home and the yearning for freedom, a pair of noble ideas that are sometimes at odds with each other. In erecting a fence between ourselves and the so-called “outside” world—a world that is rendered “outside” by the fence itself—we define and proclaim our home ground. In the parlance of the cultural geographer, the fence converts “space” into “place” by declaring the occupant’s intention to separate a piece of land from the commons and stay put on it. Seen in this valorizing light, a fence encloses and protects a place that we care for, improve, nurture, and treasure. A fence communicates, both to ourselves and to our neighbors, an ennobling concept of home.
At the same time, we have always wanted the West to symbolize freedom, independence, and openness; we fantasize about it as a landscape in which we can be liberated from constraint. In the back of our minds, where we store the indelible images from old John Ford films, the West will always be a place that provides room to roam. To move “out” West from “back” East has long implied a movement from bondage into freedom, and nothing is so powerful a symbol of that emancipation as the sublime fencelessness of the iconic western landscape. This desire for liberty from constraint, which is expressed in so many western novels, films, and songs, is at the heart of the much-covered 1934 Cole Porter classic “Don’t Fence Me In,” which includes these lyrics:
I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences
Don’t fence me in
Like Porter’s crooning cowboy, we Westerners “can’t stand fences.” How, then, are we to reconcile our celebration of openness and freedom with the fact that we have run an inconceivable amount of fence—that our region is in fact an immense, tightly latticed grid of mesh and wire? While hard numbers on fencing are difficult to come by, it has been estimated that the 350 million acres of western rangelands managed by the BLM and US Forest Service (USFS) contain over 100,000 miles of fence. Make that a five-strand fence, which it often is, and you have enough wire to get from anywhere in the West to the moon and back again (yes, literally). And this monstrous reckoning entirely omits fencing on private lands. Does all this fence define our home, or limit our freedom? Does it protect us from the outside, or simply create more outside from which we then feel the need for protection?
Here on Ranting Hill I too have a complicated relationship with fences, one brought to my attention recently when a new neighbor on our rural road had his property fully fenced before moving in. He chose a six-strand wire fen
ce, fifty-two inches high with a bottom strand just a few inches above the ground. I should add that this approach of immediately fencing one’s property with five- or six-strand wire (usually barbed) is the default approach here in Silver Hills, and that in choosing to leave our property unfenced I am expressing a dissenting opinion on the subject. I have done so because we are close to public lands, and because our land is on pronghorn routes and mule deer winter range. “Oh, give me a home…where the deer and the antelope play.” It is an old idea, and still a good one. One of the pleasures of sitting at my writing desk gazing out over our property is seeing pronghorn and deer move freely across the land. If they didn’t, I might have to quit looking out the window and actually work.
The negative impact of these kinds of fences on wildlife is all too real. Although moose, bighorn sheep, elk, and deer can jump fences, fatal entanglement is disturbingly common, with studies suggesting that each year one ungulate ensnarement death occurs for every 2.5 miles of fence. And fences present significant barriers to pregnant and young animals. The same study indicated that when ungulates were found dead near (but not entangled in) fences, there was one annual death per 1.2 miles of fence. Ninety percent of these fatalities were fawns that were unable to cross the fence to follow their mothers. Multiply those casualty numbers by 100,000 miles of fence and that’s a lot of carnage. Fences are also a serious hazard to birds such as swans, cranes, and geese, as well as the grouse, hawks, and owls that are native here in the sagebrush steppe.
Like all landowners, I have firm ideas about what I do and do not want on my property. Although I do want pronghorn and do not want off-road vehicles (ORVs), I have plenty of rural neighbors who don’t care about wildlife but choose to live in this remote area precisely because they enjoy their ORVs; other neighbors value both ORVs and wild animals. But that’s exactly my point. Each of us moved out here because we found town life too constraining, because we wanted to do what we damn well please with our own property and not have to conform to someone else’s rules, or the values those rules codify. I am no different from my neighbors in this respect: I am here to indulge the fantasy that I can stake a claim to home without forfeiting my freedom in doing so.
It is a truism that you should never take down a fence until you first understand why it was put up. But around here most fences, which are both labor-intensive and expensive to build, aren’t keeping much of anything either in or out. Technically this is open range, but there aren’t many cattle on the public lands hereabouts, and in any case those few head mosey around on the other side of five barbed strands of BLM wire. With the exception of some practical horse fencing, the miles of wire that crisscross this swath of hilly high desert serve a mostly symbolic purpose. Just as it has for centuries, fencing in Silver Hills functions primarily as a proclamation of possession. Speaking as a guy who is especially fond of antelope, which have the most trouble navigating the kinds of fences we build out here, I believe that the loss of pronghorn on this land is too high a price to pay for a symbolic assertion of ownership.
Henry Thoreau once declared that “any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.” The problem with Uncle Henry’s bold assertion is that each of us is convinced that we are the one who is right. So let me back up a hitch and say not only that I recognize that some folks need fences but that I believe all folks should have them if they want them. I’m not after anybody’s barbed wire, six-guns, or rights. So in the spirit of compromise I’d like to offer some practical suggestions for how we Westerners might have our fences—have them to fulfill all the real and symbolic purposes we want them to—and still radically reduce the slaughter of wildlife they currently cause. A few simple, cost-effective modifications can turn our fences from impenetrable death traps into navigable obstacles.
What I am about to tell you in this short paragraph summarizes the key findings from fence mortality research by wildlife biologists. Fences should be no higher than forty-two inches, a height above which some ungulates find jumping perilous. The distance between the top two wires should be at least twelve inches, because leg entanglement most often occurs between the top and second strands. Those of us in antelope country need to pay as much attention to the bottom of the fence as the top because, unlike deer, pronghorn are much more comfortable crawling under a fence than they are jumping over it. The bottom strand should be at least sixteen inches off the ground. While the middle wire (or wires) may be barbed, the top and bottom strands should be smooth, since these will contact passing animals, whether leaping over or shinnying beneath. If possible, the top strand should be made visible, either by using a white wire or by means of any of a variety of simple flagging techniques.
That’s it. The modified fence I’ve just described will effectively keep cattle or horses in (or out) in most situations, and will generally be no more expensive to construct (and often less expensive to maintain) than the hazardous barricades we’re currently building. If you have fencing needs not related to cattle or horses—or if you don’t like the design I’ve suggested here—there are still many affordable ways to make your fencing safer for wildlife. These include seasonal and/or moveable electric wire fence, high-tensile electric fence, modified post and rail fence, wire suspension fence, adjustable fence, underpasses and goat bars, lay-down fence, PVC fence, dropped rail fence, and modified worm fence. The main thing to know is that a fence can accomplish whatever you need it to while also being cost-effective and wildlife friendly.
Will Rogers once observed that there are three kinds of people: “The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.” But when we fail to consider the effects of the kinds of fences we build, it is not we who are harmed by the fence but rather the deer and the antelope, the grouse and owls. With a little thought about how we mark and enclose our territory, we can declare our own freedom without depriving the wild things of theirs.
OUR YOUNGER DAUGHTER, Caroline, has a knack for inventing characters, which she animates with distinctive traits, attitudes, accents, and even signature catch phrases. Among a half dozen others there’s a crotchety old lady named “Grandma Chuck,” a nameless, bloviating Scotsman (complete with a thick brogue), and Guido, a pizza impresario whose Sicilian, Jersey-inflected catchphrase is “If it ain’t my pie, fuggidabawdit!” Lately, though, Caroline has come up with an entirely new persona, this one a space alien who, in an irony clear enough to grown-ups, she tells us is named “Norm.”
Norm is far from the norm in every way. He has a wonderful, modulating, guttural voice, as if his vocal chords were pitched to perform in a very different atmospheric pressure and gravitational field than the one here on earth. Norm can answer any question you might have about his home planet, and his replies are so amusing that Caroline’s big sister, Hannah, keeps the questions coming. What does Norm like to eat? Earwax, belly button lint, and toenail clippings, though here on Earth he must occasionally resort to pinecones. What does he like best about Nevada? The ground is firm rather than spongy, as on his home planet, and is thus much better for hiking. What is his greatest frustration with living in Nevada? He hasn’t managed to find a cowboy hat that will fit his enormous, bulbous alien noggin. Norm is also a bit of a rascal, often using his professed ignorance of human customs to excuse his poor table manners, failure to finish his homework, or unwillingness to make his bed. I confess that it is difficult to lay down the law when I’m laughing at the same time.
When Norm joined our family I was reminded of the most prominent alien from my own youth, the waddling, endearing little creature from Steven Spielberg’s 1982 summer blockbuster ET. Eryn and I decided that we would screen this pop gem for the girls, just to see what Norm’s reaction might be. In watching ET again I was reminded of the film’s power to elicit our sympathy with the little alien. ET is a creature who is lost, who wants only to find his home, who feels isolated, misunderstood,
uncertain, and insecure. That is to say, he’s a lot like us earthlings. We empathize with ET because he feels alienated, a term that speaks both to his condition and to our own. Equally important, his appearance in the enchanted woods that survive along the edge of a homogenous, suburban subdivision reinforces what every kid knows instinctively: there is magic just beyond the asphalt fringes of the adult world. Hannah and Caroline loved the film, and when it reached its happy ending I asked Norm what he thought of it. “I know ET,” he replied. “He visited my planet one time. His real name is Earl.”
Caroline, along with Spielberg, might be forgiven for her fascination with creatures from outer space. After all, American popular culture has long been obsessed with aliens, which have provided reliable fodder for novels, movies, comics, video games, and TV shows. Occasionally we are terrified by these aliens, as in Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio performance of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, or the obscenely profitable Roland Emmerich flick Independence Day sixty years later. Sometimes we love these otherworldly beings, as in the Spielberg classic that our daughters so enjoyed. Aliens are a durable staple of our entertainment culture and also an important part of our imaginative landscape. The other day I noticed something that redoubled my certainty about the centrality of the alien in our daily lives: my smart phone has an alien-head emoji, right there next to the similarly iconic happy face. An alien emoji. Too late to turn back now, earthlings!
Here in Nevada our obsession with aliens is everywhere evident. Our state leads the nation in UFO sightings, extraterrestrial abduction conspiracy theories, and alien spacecraft recovery and cover-up narratives. Perhaps this is because we Nevadans aren’t the least bit afraid of bizarre, creepy, insane stuff—as anyone who has visited the Las Vegas strip can attest. Nope, we roll out the red carpet for aliens here. We welcome them much as we do other odd tourists, high rollers visiting from out of town, looking for the kind of good time they can’t get back in their home galaxy.
How to Cuss in Western Page 14
