Retro Blog: Greenhorns at the gate

If you have just moved to a small-town rural area, someone will eventually invite you to “take a ride in the country”. This can also be phrased as “wanna see my ranch?”, “let’s head up the mountain” or any number of cleverly concealed requests.

At first blush, you will think these folks are doing you a favor by showing you more of the country you liked enough to move to.

This is not so. There are ulterior motives involved.

Folks around here are going to be mad at me for spoiling their fun, but all these people want you along for is to open their gates for them.

Going alone up to “their spot” means every time they get to a gate they have to stop, get out, open the gate, get back in, drive through, get out, close the gate, get back in and continue to the next tedious barrier.

If they have you with them, they can sit in their car and laugh while you open the gate, so they can drive through and chuckle again while you shut the gate and walk over to where the vehicle (usually a truck) is now.

The giggling is not solely because they have you along to do their dirty work.

Nope. They are chortling because they have just driven to a spot where the “road” has just gone under, what looks like, just another stretch of fence.

They will contain their howling until they see you, standing by the “gate”, trying to figure out just exactly how this thing opens.

You yell back, “Is there a magic password to this thing? ... Open Sesame, maybe?”

They will not tell you.

The reply normally given in this situation is meted out with a healthy side of sarcasm: “You have to be smarter than the gate!”

So there you stand, your hope dwindling like an American on the wrong side of Checkpoint Charlie.

Then you spot it.

“Hey, that post has two pieces of barbed wire around the top instead of a single strand! By Jove, I think … yes it is! It’s a loop!”

You try to pry the loop off the post.

Sometimes these are tighter than others and some muscle has to be used.

Be careful because if you happen to snag yourself on the barbed wire you are trying to wrestle free you will only be adding injury to the insult you are getting at the truck.

Once you have the loop free, you will most likely try to drag the post away from the piece the loop is still attached to.

This will not work most of the time.

You will have to lift the post out of the loop concealed in the grass at the bottom before you can try to drag the mess of post and barbed wire to a distance safe enough for your “tour host” to drive through.

Then you have to drag the mess back and reattach the barbed loops.

Try to be on the correct side of the gate when you shut it. If you are not, you will never hear the end of it.

So you jostle down the trail a bit, both a little proud of outsmarting that wiley gate and slightly embarrassed that the person next to you still has tears of laughter running down their face.

Eventually you encounter a metal gate and think “Oh, this will be easy.”

Then you walk up to the gate and try to figure out just how that piece of chain is holding the gate shut.

After you determine that the chain just drops into a slot cut into a metal tab on the gate and won’t open because the links are at 90 degrees to each other, you wiggle the gate enough so you can slip the link out and swing the thing open.

If the gate doesn’t swing (for any number of reasons), you will have to pick up your side and basically carry it out of the way.

Try not to run your knee into the gate while you do this.

You climb back into the truck where the driver is starting to sympathize with your newfound cuts and bruises.

“There’s only one more gate left.”

After some more bumpiness and looking out the window at the beautiful countryside (so you don’t have to make eye contact), you finally come across your final gate.

It’s another metal one.

You think, “Okay, I’ve got this”, and jump out of the truck ... only to find there is no chain.

Instead, there is a little handle sticking out of a sleeve on one side of the gate.

After wiggling it around a bit you discover that if you pull up on the lever, a bolt slides out of the ground that lets the entryway move.

After a short trial and error you learn that you must hold the bolt up while moving the gate so it doesn’t drag into the ground and stop your progress.

Once again, you have mastered a new gate and finally get to see or do whatever it was the driver actually took you up there to see or do (the gates were just a side joke to them).

You have a great day and are beginning to feel pretty good overall when the driver says, “Hey, let’s go back another way”.

***

I thought that last bit was a good place to end the story. I did, however, want to share one more secret with you. You, as a newbie, should be aware that the reason your gate stumbles were so funny to them is actually because they went through the same thing (just like I did).

Nobody is born knowing how to open a gate.