Trying to Walk a Straight Line
from 10,000 Days in the Woods, Two-Lane Livin' Magazine, Sept. 2016
By Russ Richardson: 10000daysinthewoods.com
(Originally published in Two-Lane Livin’ Magazine, September 2016.)
One interesting thing about working as a forester is that nearly every day I spend a portion of my time in a place I will never pass through again. The necessity for the once-in-a-lifetime visits can be as different as the job I have to complete for that particular day but, no other activity I've done in my decades in the woods has fit the once-in-a-lifetime visit category as walking (or trying to walk) old property boundary lines.
Boundary lines are supposed to be straight lines between established property corners. In West Virginia, the straight line between corners can follow the crest of a ridge, cross a two-hundred-foot deep canyon, go straight up, down, or across a 100- foot cliff, or follow the course of a narrow, rapidly flowing stream. In much of the region, the distance between two survey markers can be a mile or more. Following a line a mile through the woods can take from as little as fifteen or twenty minutes to several hours.
Even though a mile is the same distance everywhere (5,280 feet), the time and effort required to travel a mile through the woods in a straight line can easily become a tiring challenge. For more than a hundred years, wire fences have commonly been set along newly surveyed boundary lines. Today remains of the original wire fences are still in use and part of many actively maintained property boundaries while for others, complete forest cover returned as farmland was abandoned with all evidence of the line location returned to nature. After sixty or seventy years since farming ceased, most fence posts are either broken down and rotted into the ground or burned away in a long-ago forest fire.
It is difficult to decide which way of following an old line is harder, going up or downhill, but each has its’ own challenges. When going uphill it is nearly impossible to know where your climb will end or how far away the next boundary mark is and pulling yourself up an extremely steep slope on your hands and knees is tiring. When going down a hill you have no way of knowing if you will have to back away from the life-threatening danger of an unseen cliff four feet on the other side of a mountain laurel thicket you are wading through.
Although barbed wire was the traditional type of fencing most farmers set, some wealthier farmers, especially those with sheep, ran woven wire stock fences through their woods. A few years ago, while working in Lewis County, I had a unique experience with a woven wire fence. The property was extremely steep, to the point that standing still on the hillside was nearly impossible, the thin grass covering the wet, red-clay soil kept breaking under my feet in a live-action version of "one step forward and two steps back" as I repeatedly tried to climb a fifty-foot stretch of hillside.
After several attempts, I was able to climb the hill far enough to grab an old piece of woven wire fence hanging over the edge of a rock outcrop and use the fence as a ladder to reach the top of the steep that had me stuck. The fence wire was very old but still sound and thick enough to bear my weight as I climbed the slope like a pirate boarding a ship.
Upon reaching the top of the steep, my strenuousous effort was justified as the long-lost boundary marker I had been seeking became visible. After taking a few minutes to sip some water and cool down while I studied the survey map, it was time to start looking for the next corner.
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