On the Fence

From his angle the stream was lovely. He could see a sharp right-hand bend against low cliffs, a long straight ridgetop, and a bedrock ledge-riffle upstream. Before him the creek crossed a freestone bar at the head of a big blackdeep pool, which ran through a tangle of timber and swirled into a shaded crease nearly at his feet, or where his feet should have been.

From his angle the new barbed-wire fence was lovely. It tracked string-straight along the stable ground above the water, emphatically separating the brushy bank from the clipped flat cowpasture. The pasture was level floodplain, undergrown, overmanured, with a cluster of suspicious Herefords in the far corner.

He knew the fence had been stretched by a professional outfit from Frederick. With augers and lasers and a full crew they were good for six hundred yards a day. The posts were straight and heavy. The wire was shiny and tight.

If the farmers would commit to fencing their stock away from the stream, he knew, grants and donations paid the tab. That meant no more trodden muddy swales on the riverbank, less cow manure and silt in the water, and happier fish. That was the theory. From his angle, it was a good theory.

If he seemed especially interested, it was because the fencing program was his baby. He’d thought it up, raised the money, persuaded legislatures and foundations and donors to back it, and then had talked farmers all over the Chesapeake drainage into signing up. It was a big success. So far, he had rung up over four hundred miles of professional livestock fence.

And also: He was hanging from the top strand of the fence by his right foot.

From this angle, the stream was lovely. Turning his head to the left he could see nearly straight down into the deep crease along the bank. A long angle of gravel made a hold that, even upside-down, seemed a likely spot for a big brown trout. If he stretched his shoulders to the left and extended his flyrod, he could almost touch the surface of the water.

The rod was an antique presented to him by the Penns Creek Trout Unlimited chapter in honor of his accomplishments in the field of conservation. The rod had come with an antique reel and a plaque and a title that included the phrase Man of the Year. He couldn’t remember what else. The rod was less than nine feet long, and he felt sure that a modern graphite nine-footer could touch the surface of the water. Touching the water seemed important.

The rod was made of Tonkin cane, mellowed to gold. It was labeled in French, which he could not read but considered charming. As a casting instrument it was soggy and unresponsive. As a political instrument, however, it was limber and crisp. Pledges of money and support had passed directly over it, so its shortcomings were secondary. He was glad that the misadventure that had left him upside down had not broken it, so far. He was alone, so no pledges of money and support today. From where he dangled he could comfortably lay the rod down and pick it up again. He laid the rod down in the dirt for a moment. Then he picked it up again.

From this angle, the stream was sexy and dark, even adjusting for a gloomy October afternoon and heightened blood pressure due to prolonged inversion. He idly considered whether the light was failing or whether he was suffering a stroke. He thought a stroke might come with a sudden darkening of vision, though he had no proof of it. He had read a book in which fetal humans were turned upside down for some reason. He had a good memory for literature, but he remembered only that there was such a book, not its title or the point of turning babies upside down.

For the fourth or fifth time he gently laid the flyrod in the brambly dirt and attempted a handstand-pushup, kicking his snagged foot repeatedly against the fencewire. In the seconds that he could push upward he got off half a dozen feeble kicks but the tightly strung wire held him fast. All he got for his effort was a weird telegraphic twanging sound that seemed to radiate away from him then back again. Nobody answered. He dropped himself again, bouncing slightly, heart thudding, pulse pounding in his face. He dangled.

He owned a cellphone, of course—actually, two—which he had left in his car. The cellphone did not seem welcome on a trout stream. He understood now that leaving a perfectly good phone in the car was the stupid affectation of a dilettante. He planned a lie: no service.

He wasn’t in pain. His primary annoyance was a matter of mechanics. He didn’t mind being stuck as much as he minded not understanding it. He was supposed to know something about fences. He could visualize the barbs in the wire, but not how one could hold his boot so securely. He knew that cows avoided the fence, that they learned not to rub against it, but horses sometimes would, so horses got plank fences or straight wire. He was forced to conclude that cows understood barbed wire better than he did.

Cows were not likely to be helpful. They could not be trusted to investigate or to get help. They could be trusted to stand in rivers on hot days and to shit whenever the urge took them. Cows were bred for stupidity, and speed of growth, and indolent docility, and their manure was high in phosphorous and nitrogen. They were castrated early on and didn’t seem to mind. He supposed that surprisingly intelligent cows might figure out that they no longer had access to the cool creekwater on hot summer days. They might blame him for this, and he tried for a moment to imagine a confrontation with bitter cows. He could not. His mind skittered back toward the fence, down to the flyrod, in a looping stream of consciousness. He worried that stream of consciousness was a sign of impending stroke.

He was called Bell Forest, though he had been christened Nick Forest. His father had met Hemingway once, and had settled on Nick, for Nick Adams. (Ernest had been vetoed. Ernest Forest had an odd ring.) When he had been Nick he had hated his name. It sounded like a crime fighting tree-hugger hero’s name, a cross between Smokey Bear and Dick Tracy. Then he’d been knocked silly in a high school football game, trotted dizzily off the field, and plunked himself down on the opposing team’s bench. Problem solved. From then he’d been Bell, as in “Rung my bell.” To prove it he had a grainy blowup of a Super-8 frame of himself, number 53, sitting in an open space on the Longmont bench with half a dozen enemy players looking at him.

Bell again tried and failed to visualize how the wire held his foot. At first he’d thrashed around and twisted his hips, waiting for the wire to stretch or the barb to bend and let him go. When it did he knew that he’d have to complete the fall he’d begun when his stupid plan for climbing the fence--one hand on the post, step on the wire near the post, climb the first three strands, vault over to land lightly on the other side—had gone wrong. He had realized in the moment he’d launched himself that it was a bad idea, that his effortless lightly vaulting days were over. But the fence—his fence—had been so new, and so tight, that he couldn’t stretch the strands far apart enough to limbo through in the usual way without snagging his nice goretex waders. Which were now shredded like hippie jeans. His organization bought fences; the farmers had to buy their own gate or build their own stile. There was no gate. There was no stile. He had been in an incautious hurry to float a yellow Humpy down that sexy dark stream; he climbed; he vaulted; he fell. That error was just one of the many embarrassments he was digesting. He should know something about fences, of course. Of course, of course.

In a way he was glad he’d hung up in the top strand of the fence. When the wire had snagged and held his foot, his face was about nine inches from the ground, which sloped sharply into the creek, which would be very cold this time of year. He’d never been in the Navy but knew that arresting gear was the cable that snagged a speeding jet and yanked it to a stop on the deck of an aircraft carrier. He’d been arrested in mid-accident. His face hurt a little bit, so he knew that something had hit something, but all things considered he’d gotten off easy. So far.

There was the detail of escape, though. It was beginning to seem unlikely. In the first few minutes he’d had the strength to pike up and grab at his foot, but he’d done nothing more than unwrap one of his gravel guards, which now dangled from a middle strand of fencewire. He was snagged somewhere near the bottom inside of his right boot. He couldn’t reach it or see it.

He had spent his strength thrashing and grabbing with no clear plan, and now he hung there cursing the million or so situps he had failed to do in the past thirty years. He was 54 and the height/weight charts had bad news for him. The last time he’d tried to bend upward he’d made it halfway before gravity won again. He thought to untie the boot, but he couldn’t reach the lace. He dangled.

He had nowhere to put his left leg. He worried that if he rested it against the wire he’d get that one snagged too. But he couldn’t hold it up, not with the heavy boot and fleece pants and goretex waders and, to be honest, the slack and suety muscles and tired middle-aged bones. Neglected, the leg soared off into space, pulling him into an aerial splits and making him dizzy. He’d braced it against the top wire and pushed and kicked, with no effect.

He expected the landowner to appear. His name was Marvin Grace, and he was a particularly crusty and conservative gentleman among a class who ran high to conservative and crusty. At first Mr. Grace had been suspicious of Bell’s pitch, but then he’d noticed that Bell’s surname and initials and had gathered that Bell was a namesake of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalry general and a founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Bell permitted that assumption to flourish and soon signed an agreement, and filed away an invitation to come and fish Mr. Grace’s property. The fence had been stretched, and here he was. Bell was alert to the possibility that his predicament was related to his lie. He tried to remember his Dante. In Dante’s Hell, some of the sinners were upside down. It wasn’t the liars, though. It was some other sin.

Bell was due to speak at a meeting of the Baltimore Trout Unlimited Executive Committee that evening at 6 PM, and it was now about 5. People knew where he was. He guessed that it would be 7 at the earliest before he would be discovered. That made two more hours of dangle-time.

Bell realized that this fence episode would be excellent fodder for the jokes his friends and enemies favored as political discourse. He had to admit. It was funny. The football story came up often, too.

The vest was annoying him. It had tangled with something behind him, probably his Stretch and Release Net. He could not take it off. In his initial gyrations he had lost a couple of flyboxes and a few of the miscellaneous objects that populate fly vests. He could see them on the slope below him, scattered like debris from a crash, which they were. The vest was lighter but it was inside out and hanging over his mouth and chin. He tried again to pull it off but it stayed hooked across his right armpit. It contained no tools that he could use, and figured in none of his escape plans. In fact he had no escape plans that didn’t involve intervention by cows.

Tests on the Chesapeake Bay suggested that water quality had improved. Actual scientific tests were good, but the politically valuable test seemed to be some guy who waded out in the Potomac and looked at his feet. Lately he’d been seeing the feet deeper than before. Plus there were more young striped bass and perch. He had indeed caught a lot of striped bass just a few weeks before, the guest of a jaunty and knowledgeable guide named Brady who had driven him to a place where he had caught fat stripers on nearly every cast for five hours. That seemed a good sign to him. He didn’t even regret this very fence, come to think of it. The fence was not the problem.

Mr. Grace did not appear. The sun was behind the ridge now, and though it was getting cooler Bell was not uncomfortable. The cows did not come and disentangle him. The river chuckled at him, but he didn’t blame it.

He tried again to jerk and bounce his way off the fence. The wire was very tight. The barbs were little four-sided caltrops; he could see them clearly on the lower strands. He could not figure out how one of them could hold his foot. The wire had been installed only two weeks before, and Mr. Grace had called him with thanks, and a reiteration of their understanding about the War of Northern Aggression. People forget that Maryland had been a slave state. Mr. Grace had assured him that the river was rich with big fish, limestoney with sweet riffles and lots of cress in the slower runs.

Bell had made his fortune selling oil and gas futures, but had avoided fleecing Californians or going broke with massive unfunded pension liabilities. Once he started changing fences and wooing Barbour-wearing trout clubs bam! he was in the thick of it. The biggest shock had been learning that most of the legislators were petty and flawed and unreliable and, in some cases, quite stupid. The characteristics cut equally across party lines. Getting government support had almost nothing to do with merit. He’d found the political environment comfortable, and his simple, easily-remembered program had become popular. Money had grown on trees. Trout clubs had showered him with fancy gear. Fish, he had been told, thrived.

By turning his hips and foot to the left, Bel could generate real tension against the fence wire. It seemed that he had leverage from heel to mid-foot, though he couldn’t see it. This was his most promising maneuver and the most painful. Something about the angle and the weight gave sudden scary jolts of pain in the knee he’d injured while wrestling for the University of Colorado. He’d gone 4-7 before the knee. He had recovered but quit wrestling to maintain his grades, and his deferment. The draft had ended that year but the habit of grades and study had expanded until it displaced his energy for predawn workouts and making weight. His knee hadn’t hurt this bad since 1972. He quit twisting

So he dangled. From his angle the top fencewire dipped only slightly under his weight. Bell admired the workmanship. He knew the materials were first rate. He could see the wire against the grey sky as a line with small flowers spaced along it. If he concentrated he could see that the wire was actually two strands twisted together. It was good wire.

A slight new sound intruded on his thinking. It went with the stream noise, tenor burbles and a dim rushing sound from the riffles upstream. It was one of those noises you remembered as part of a pattern, hearing one then remembering the rest. It happened again. It sounded near. It was a kind of musical “ploop.” He turned and looked at the stream. A trout rose with a half-splash in the pretty little crease ten feet below his head.

He had rigged a Humpy, expecting to begin fishing well before any real evening hatch. But of course he’d spent that afternoon attractor time hanging from a fence. He picked up the little rod, disengaged the fly, and started cane-poling it into the pocket where the trout rose.

He was pushing eight feet of tippet and leader. He had to keep it high to avoid the brush. He had no backcast, of course. On about the fourth try he hung something up and to his left, and when he yanked it popped loose with the blank sensation that every trout angler knew, and he didn’t even look to see if the fly was still there.

His flybox was about four feet downslope, stuck on a clod of dirt where it had slid after falling out of his vest. He scraped at it a time or two with the stripping guide, but got nowhere. The fish, or another one, rose again. He idly waved the rod at it. The gloom was almost dusk, and he could feel the cold rising up out of the creekbed, flowing past him downstream. A sudden flicker of birds cut and fluttered above him. Cows lowed in the pasture, and he realized that they had been doing it for a few minutes now. Maybe, he thought, the cows were coming home. That was a change, anyway. He put his rod down. He picked it up again.

He tried again to pike upward, really trying this time, and grabbed the loose fabric of the waders to help him. The handholds gave him another 18 inches and his fingers closed around the dangling lace-end of his right boot, but when he pulled the string made an inch of progress then froze and the end pulled free from his quivering grip. He flopped down to the vertical again, and with a soft tearing sound and a muted “koing-kakoing” he kept going, landing finally on his left shoulder and somersaulting forward down the bank. His free slide was so enjoyable that he did nothing to stop it until he was testicle-deep in the stream and taking water from a dozen tears in his now hyperventilating Breathable Waders. As the current pressed against his legs he crawled up out of the water like the first amphibian, feeling the tingle of reorganized circulation, smiling happily.

The felt sole of his right boot had pulled away an inch, and part of the upper was pierced and stretched, but there was no other evidence of the mysterious physics which had held him. He looked closely at the fence, but couldn’t even identify the culprit barb. In the last light he gathered his belongings and resettled his fly vest. He picked his way along the stream. At one point he walked through an old riverside swale, still pocked with hoofprints but firm and overgrown now. He crossed the fence uneventfully at the place where three courses converged. There were two posts together at the junction and crossbars for footholds. Once over he walked sloshingly up the lane to his car. Mr. Grace was nowhere to be found. He decided to make his date in Baltimore. Maybe he would have a story to tell.