With all that fence it either looks like the boundary of a military installation, or a school or prisons.
When city people buy rural land the first thing they do is fence it.
The right side of that easement was unfenced continuous apple orchard for a hundred years, running in from the county road, past
where I'm working in the photo another quarter mile to my orchard, then beyond that to the last two parcels. The right side of the lane before my place, and beyond, got fenced as parcels were sold over the past 50 years.
Then a vintner from 150 miles away who wanted to claim 'Russian River Domain' for his wine (needs only 50% to claim 'origin') bought the orchard on the left side of the lane, got it surveyed, and fenced off half the lane to maximize his new vineyard. He doesn't care that the lane is now tight, he can't even see it.
We were the last to fence, by a couple of decades. With everything else around here fenced my orchard had become the neighborhood zoo. Finally in 2017 with the deer eating new apple trees as fast as we could re-plant them, we reluctantly fenced, too. The last straw was a herd of 18 deer in the orchard that had nowhere else to go. Now so far as I know they are limited to the impassable (for humans) ravine at the back of my place that runs unfenced behind many parcels in the area.
There are still two bucks that come back, apparently scrambling under the fence. Pretty sure they were the ones born here that just days old, mama parked under the bench on our deck while she went off to graze. She apparently thought outside our kitchen window was the safest place for them. The deer here aren't tame but they wont get out of the way until its obvious the tractor is about to go past them.
2006 photo:
