Lazy Days of Youth are gone
Fencerows
© 2012 Fencerows By Abraham Lincoln. All rights reserved. 

When I was a boy, sagging fences of rusted wire crisscrossed the countryside. Old cedar and locust fence post, burdened with vines, stood askew at regular intervals like rows of weary soldiers.  

Fencerows separated fields so farm animals could not get into the fields and eat the crops. Some fences were like new but others were old, broken down, and rusty. The rusty wire fence was overgrown with weeds, raspberry thickets and mulberry trees. I loved to stop and eat mulberries when they were black and ripe and falling all over the ground. 

I knew about the wild creatures that inhabited fencerows: Foxes in dens; rabbits in nests; groundhogs in tunnels; deer in beds; and quail, and pheasants. We hunted all of them in the winter of hard times. 

Mother said the railroad tracks did not have hobos tramping past our house in the winter. She said that they rode trains south to get out of the cold winter months. Many of them only went as far south as Tennessee but some rode all the way to the Florida panhandle. I guess they did. I never saw a hobo along fencerows or along railroad tracks in the winter. 

But local wildlife flourished in fencerows where food and shelter was abundant. And they, in turn, fed a lot of hungry kids. Most farm boys and their friends from town headed for the closest fencerow when rabbit-hunting season was underway. We all knew that rabbits lived there and more than once rabbit ended up on the dinner table, fried to a golden brown. 

We gathered raspberries and took them home for pies and strawberries and strawberry shortcake were summertime favorites, courtesy of the fencerows. The mulberries turned our hands black, a stain that had to wear off but the taste was worth having stained fingers. 

Some fencerows eventually grew ten feet or more, on both sides of the rusty wire, out into the fields. What had originally been a wire field fence about a foot wide became a kind of habitat for wildlife and was as wide as the farmers left it get.  

Horses and wagons drove up and down the fences and created paths or lanes worn deep in the ground by teams of huge horses pulling heavy wagons loaded with corn, hay and other crops. Between these paths, where the wheels rolled, was a grassy ridge the horse never walked on and wheels never rolled over. These paths were referred to as “lanes”— rain made them muddy where the wheels rolled and the grass in the middle was sweet and tender and the favorite of teams pulling wagons. 

My dog and I explored the fencerows but avoided the rock piles because they might harbor a snake or two and I was afraid of snakes.  

Dung beetles rolled marble-like manure balls down the dusty lanes. That was something city kids never got to see. Those lazy days of youth are gone now. Not even the fencerows remain — I wonder where all the animals that lived there went? Most people are still out to kill wildlife that wanders in from out there somewhere.  

Patty saw a large, all white skunk wandering around on the patio and our dog, Pepper Jax was eager to go outside. Patty didn’t let the dog out because he would have been sprayed and if I remember right, a dog sprayed by a skunk always smells like a dog sprayed by a skunk.