 Great Grandpa's
Dream Zeb Engstrom,Chester High School  "It's six o'clock! Time to get up!" my dad yells from the living room. We need to fix a few miles of fence today and we need to get started as soon as possible. I crawl out of bed and throw on work clothes. I can barely walk to the kitchen were Cap'n Crunch is waiting for me. "As soon as you're done eating get your butt out to the shop so we can leave," my dad says. Finally I put my boots on and eventually make it out to the shop. We load the supplies and take off. Along the way to the fence, my dad tells stories of him and my great grandpa and how they used to fix fence together all day long. We get to the job at 6:45 and I think to myself that I would rather be in bed, but I'm not. We start to fix fence and my dad's stories get me thinking about my grandpa moving up here in 1902. There wasn't any fence post sticking in the ground All the land was naked. My grandpa and his hired hands put in this long stretch of fence. They drove every post and each staple by hand, and he had to haul all the wire and posts to the area on horse back. As I set a new corner post, I pull out the one that was probably put in place by my great grandpa. He had to dig this huge hole in the hard prairie, and I picture him stretching the wire with a fencing jack, wrapping it tight around the corner. The farther we move down the stretch of old, worn-out fence, the more real the memories and thoughts of my great grandpa seem. I imagine him riding up into the Hills on horseback, cutting posts by hand to use in the fence. As I work the hot sun blazes down on my arms and neck, and blisters start to form on my hands. I feel old calluses rubbing off as new ones form. A bead of sweat runs off my head. For a moment I wonder why I'm doing this, but I've been taught that it takes a special kind of a man to do this work. As I swing my hammer, I feel my great grandpa next to me. I feel that God put me on this world to work with my hands and to follow in my great grandpa's footsteps. When we finally stop for lunch, we walk by the old calving shed and the cabin where the hired hands stayed through the winters. I notice for the first time that the tin siding on the shed is made partly with heavy-duty tin but that a bit of it is sided with a lighter material. I ask my dad why this was, and he said that grandpa ran out of money, so he had to buy the cheaper materials to get it ready before winter. I studied the building more closely, the barrier of time between me and the man who built it thinning and shimmering in the summer heat. I walked over to the cabin where the hired hands stayed. As I walk in the front door, I can almost feel the old hired hands sitting around the stove telling jokes and stories, and the air smells faintly of the soup that boiled on the stove. I see the table where they used to eat their meals and the beds they slept in. As I turn to leave, I stumble over an old leather cowboy boot. The wind, the water, and the sun have faded it to a pale, grayish color and the heel is worn down to the nails. I come out of my trance. Everything seemed to shift. Now I see the stove had been knocked over and the table had been broken into many pieces. All that remained of the beds where the old box springs. It would have been hard, living here all winter. After lunch we went back to fixing fence. Dad told more stories about grandpa and how and why he came here. I thought about my grandpa's life and how much easier we have it compared to back then. It was on that day that I stopped complaining about fixing fence or building buildings. I know how much easier it is for us to do things with our new technology and machinery than it was for those who lived in my grandpa's time, and I don't take things like that for granted. Without my grandpa's work and my dad's work, my life would be a lot harder.
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