The Cattle Guard Where the Blacktop Ends

The cattle guard is a row of steel rails sunk across the road at the exact point where the county road leaves the pavement, in the upper Green River valley west of Pinedale, Wyoming. The blacktop does not taper away here; it ends in a blunt edge, darker where tires have polished the last few feet. The gravel begins on the far side of the guard. Between the two, in a short span of bare dirt, the rails run from one fence line to the other, low enough that a farm truck crosses them without slowing.

It is built of heavy steel, rails as thick as railroad iron, laid side by side across two concrete sills sunk into the roadbed. Each rail lies square across the road, so a tire crosses every bar in turn. Between the rails run gaps too wide for a hoof to bridge. Underneath, the earth has been dug out to a shallow pit, and each gap opens onto dim space. A cow at the edge sees a slot of nothing where the road used to be.

On both sides the fence breaks away from the guard and runs out into the sagebrush at an angle, pulling the line of wire into a long funnel. The wing fence is barbed wire on steel posts, pulled tight at the corner where it meets the rails. A swing gate stands in one wing, chained shut, for the times when someone needs to take a horse through without crossing the steel. For the herd, the funnel leaves one way across a gap in the fence, and the way is the bars.

Cattle read the bars the way they read water: untrustworthy. A calf may try it once, and a hoof goes through into the dark, and that step is remembered by the whole herd. Some animals will stand at the edge for a long time, testing the ground with a forefoot before turning back. After that, the guard does the work of a shut gate while the road stays open: a gate without hinges, working by being looked at.

Winter fills the gaps with packed snow, and a packed guard is no more a guard than a filled ditch is a fence. The county road crew comes through with a blade and scrapes the rails bare, because the device depends on its gaps staying empty. Summer dust fills the space from the other direction, sifting down between the rails a grain at a time, and the pit below slowly gains a floor of silt. The plow blade has left a bright stripe along the top of every rail, and under those stripes the rust never gets a start.

The concrete sills have settled unevenly with the frost, so the rails stand a little lower at one end than at the other. Crossed at speed, the guard gives off a fast clicking under the tires; crossed slow, it rings once, a note of steel on steel. Chips of gravel sit in the seams between the rails and the sills, packed in by traffic.