Cattle Yards

One summer taking the opportunity to have a job close to home for a change, I took a contract to build a set of cattle yards, on a station out on the west coast. The original yards that had stood since before the First World War. To make way for the new yards I was to heap and burn the old timber. The railings where old slabs of hard wood of unknown origin; they had a weathered beaten texture to them and a character that suggested countless stories from years ago. Something stopped me destroying the old wood; I took time to salvage as much as I could; taking those that were still strong and true.

My father was in his early sixties having retired a few years earlier and at a bit of a loose end, I hired him to build the yard gates, I set him up with a generator under the shade of a stand of pine trees. Dad had been a farmer and a carpenter it was great working with him and having someone to bounce ideas off. He toiled away all summer producing gate after gate.

There were in fact three generations of our family working that summer my son Joel was ten years old. He alternated his day between eel fishing and yard construction. It was a time to remember, spent with Dad and Joel working hard and enjoying each other’s company. Dad had made a rough bench and table under the trees where we would sit during the break time, He would tell stories of growing up on a farm during the Second World War, and in comparison we had a much more convenient way of life than his early years.

 Over lunch one day my father suggested he could make outdoor furniture with the salvaged railings. Each evening we loaded a trailer, Dad transported them home storing them in his workshop under his house. They were heavy and the old trailer seamed to groan each evening as we placed plank after plank onto its deck.

Later the same year during winter dad loaded them up and delivered them to a local mill with the intention of having them cut down to a usable size. The miller thought it was the hardest timber he had ever worked with; the process had blunted two large saw blades and cost him many extra man hours. The end result was a more trailer loads of hardwood in various sizes and lengths.

In his workshop, along with two chairs, my father produced the bench and table I am writing on today. They are twenty years older now, weather beaten by even more time but still strong. They weigh a ton and having withstood the strongest Wellington winds, a large snow storm and the odd earthquake; I struggle to think of another test they could not stand up to.

Each time I sit here they remind me of him, strong, simple, a little worn, still standing the test of time. Dads gone now, but I have no doubt his furniture will outlast me.