The things you speak of are the wages of profound overshoot. By the time the barbed wire was strung there were already far too many of us here to do without it. When all is in its proper scale, a great many liberating things are possible that are not possible when all is out of its proper scale. We are living an era where things are vastly out of their proper scale with us like never before witnessed. There is no cure for this, other than when much larger forces than the human return us to our proper scale.
I think I can see what you're saying here, but the introduction of barbed wire had to do with cattle, not with dealing with populations of people. It's maybe oblique within this essay, but here I'm talking more about the kind of worldview that barbed wire and cattle ranching represent, as well as the real-life physical harms caused to ecosystems and wildlife. I'd like to see a world without ubiquitous barbed wire where I live, but in the meantime adapting these technologies to better live with wildlife--with all life--isn't a bad thing. It's good to know that pronghorn herds can move more easily across that landscape!
Thank you for reading and sharing thoughts. "Scale" is definitely another huge subject that I've barely touched, except when it comes to profit and commodification.
It had everything to do with populations of people. When the first cattle ranchers set up shop on the Great Plains of this continent, there were no fences, only "open range" as it was known and brands to know whose cattle was who's. Cowboys to keep them more or less within a prescribed area. The cattlemen of those days were pastoralists, feral people who couldn't be considered truly "wild" only because they had homes with fixed addresses at which they spent more or less time. But with ever more people wanting their hunk of the land, came the need for barbed wire. The old cattlemen themselves decried it, considered it a real degredation of the landscape and their way of life, which of course it was, but they could not resist it, same as the smaller cattlemen of a later era could not resist the plow, a further degredation. My own great grandparents homesteaded the northern Great Plains setting up as would-be ranchers. They were finished-off like many of their ilk with the great blizzard of 1906-07, which froze every last cow they owned solid out on the open range. With the big cattle barons thus disposed-of for the time being, the smaller operations - and larger populations - came in and carved-up the landscape with barbed-wire. I totally agree that it's a nuisance. I collect grizzly bear hair off the barbs on my road and adjacent ones, for the DNA and often ponder what a damned nuisance it is to them alone, and yes, the pronghorn which i've seen hit fences at full-speed. But it's the reality what with so many people vying for their little patch and animals to keep-in. That's where the issue of scale comes in. None of these subjects being discrete, something you can compartmentalize. All being intertwined. There isn't a single ecological subject today that hasn't got at the root of its issues the ghastly load of primates this planet now hosts.
On the pro-side of ranching on the Great Plains, it is ranching that has saved what native grass remains from a much worse fate - cereal crop rotations. The most intact ecosystems on the grasslands of my region are the cattle ranches. They still support rattlesnakes and badgers and ferruginous hawks and elk and pronghorn etc. The great swathes of land devoted to vegetarian palates are an utter biological wasteland. They may support a few mice.
My homesteader ancestors were among the fortunate few who managed to make that life work for them. A cousin of mine still runs the original ranch that my great-great-grandparents homesteaded in 1911. It was, as you know, not an easy life.
Much of the perspective in the essays here come from my work on the losses of the commons, both in Europe and North America, so when I look at the miles of barbed wire across Montana (where I live), including on my own family's land, it's overlaid on a vision of what all of that land once was and how it was related to and managed. This is not a romanticized view, but a very practical and sustainable way of living with land and animals, which was true in many places of the world before enclosures of the commons. Commons management systems of land, water, and wildlife contrasted with private ownership that asks for technologies like barbed wire, much like enclosures of the commons in England starting in the 1200s needed stone walls and hedge rows to privatize once-public land for sheep farming.
I buy my beef from a rancher who is passionate about imitating how bison once roamed the land. It's interesting to talk with him. And there's another rancher who sells locally who says he sees his work not as raising cattle, but as raising soil and using cattle to do so. It's pretty cool and much better for soil than monocrops of soy or other commodities.
I’m 100% with you here. As far as i’m concerned the best of human lifestyles ended at the pastoralists and then it was all downhill. I raised for years a herd of yaks up here in Alberta, fantasizing about a human dieoff that spared me and my beasts (of course ;) ) to roam the now vacated wastes, Alberta being the Outer Mongolia of the New World that she is. Mob-grazing was my deal at any rate. I just wrote this the other day: “When i’m driving around my little corner of the modern world looking out at it, baseline to my script is the knowledge that we committed genocide on the Blackfeet in order for what i see around me on my daily errands to exist. And nothing screams out in more certain terms that it wasn’t worth it like driving past a country club. Witnessing the shambling flaccid humanity (those who even bother to shamble rather than ride some perverted little go-cart) in their terrible little outfits on landscapes controlled to the penultimate level of neuroses hacking-at and chasing little white balls like pathetic lapdogs. My mind revolts in epic disgust - ‘We killed the Blackfeet for THIS??!!!’”
And yes, I think about that all the time, living where I do — passing landfills and strip malls and oversized pickup trucks and freeway overpasses and and and …
Camas was one of the plants mentioned in Lost Journals of Sacajawea that made me feel illiterate to the world. Your article reminded me, so I looked it up on that great borderless knowledge commons, Wikipedia. The section on food use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camassia#Food_use) had a "citation needed" (added in 2012!) for the fact that camas fields were "once immense," and I thought "hey, I know a good source for that." If you know any other sources, feel free to add them!
Thanks for all your hard work, removing that barbed wire from the land and from our minds!
I like how you put that, "illiterate to the world." That's how I felt, and continue to feel, when I first started learning about all of this. The mind-barbed-wire is everywhere!
And awesome, thank you! I'm actually meeting up with that botanist this week or next, and will ask him for more sources. Great idea.
I enjoy how you are manifesting one of the themes of your writing in the physical world, by removing barricades to animal (human and nonhuman) movement. And I am excited to hear more about your litephone journey. I'm getting close to tipping over that edge, myself...
Next post will be about the Light Phone journey! (It's a maddening phone to text on. I recommend it but only if someone is seriously committed to the lifestyle change. I like texting! But I think it'll be worth the tradeoff.)
THANK YOU. As with my walking book, it is turning out to be very important to me, vital even, to walk the walk, so to speak. Practice what I preach. Whatever! Which means the writing takes excruciatingly long, but is, I hope, fed by the practical action.
You are the best kind of dork. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, and thank you for the audio of your campsite breakfast. Those sounds were like music to my ears. They brought back a flood of happy memories.
I am intrigued by the concept of private property rights trumping other's right to survival--unless, of course, those efforts to survive are conducted in a way that comports with, and contributes to, the dominate social and economic system; unless they contribute to the wealth and power of those who own the resources and make the rules. I will ruminate some more upon this theme.
We'll see how I manage to navigate it! The camera is DAUNTING. I am actually hunting up your photography course so I can go through it again with an actual camera and figure out what the heck I'm doing.
"Technology." That's the key - the teaching to people that borders and barriers and property ownership are human inventions, as much as barbed wire. They don't exist, except where we've imagined them up, usually hand in hand with theft from each other (and then, logic whispers, they can be imagined back down again). The hardest of tasks. Not an impossible one, hopefully.
This might be an interesting topic to dig into, actually. What in the human world objectively exists and what is a human invention that wouldn't exist without us willing/conceptualising it into being? I bet there are plenty of things that would be on an unexpected side of that line...
Not an impossible one and you know what makes it INTERESTING as well as probably and possible? Curiosity! I might know a newsletter about that ...
Is this almost a question of "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody was there to hear it, did it make a sound?" Or more like "is mathematics discovered or invented?"
In Scandinavia there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing…I’m worried for your arms! Uninvited lecture over…just next time: long thick sleeves, please!
I really like the clearing of the wire to give the pronghorn a chance not to injure themselves.
And…no smartphone. Oh man. The whole technology shtick in this piece is interesting…I think what you’re saying is that some technology is cool, braid not barbed wire, and needed to just keep things moving enough. But the wrong technology, in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, owning the wrong thing is just bad news for all of us…radical or not so radical (I guess I’m the not so radical guy in this very specific domain).
I grow camassias (which, I think are related to camas) in the garden…their celestial blue is…well, it’s celestial.
Lecture welcome! I had meant to bring a sturdy long-sleeved button-up that I usually throw on for this kind of thing, but it had been a long week and I forgot. Lesson learned! And the scratches are healing, though I did go update my tetanus shot.
Technology is something I think about in this way all the time, yes. What we choose, what destroys versus what promotes life (like, pesticides and herbicides are a technology that helps people grow food but so was, and is, carefully-managed fire, and the spillover consequences of each of those are very different).
I just looked it up and it looks like camas IS camassias, of the asparagus family. How lovely!
Oh golly, those minutes of listening to you make breakfast conjured so many emotions, memories (backpack trail crew, Mule packer life)— and hopes/ plans for future such breakfasts.
Back in my Selway- Bitterroot packing days, we used to weigh down the mules as we hauled out rolls and rolls of the #9 phone wire that once criss- crossed the wilderness, lookout to lookout and all along the river. Hurrah for the volunteers who did the rolling! You 40 years ago…
Thank you for sharing that memory, Sarah! How beautiful. And , thank you in particular for hauling out that wire! Isn't it wild to think of people installing that across the mountain ranges all those years ago?
I love the feeling of making camp coffee with the sunrise. There's nothing quite like it, is there? Love that you share that!
Thank you, Nia. That was lovely to first read and then listen to. I can't wait to hear more about the moving away from a smartphone. The audio sounded very good, but mostly hearing you brings life to your words. I also wanted to point you to a podcast, which you might have heard: 99% Invisible and their episode called, "Devil's Rope." https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-rope/ Be well!
I need to listen to that episode! It's not a podcast I listen to unless someone sends me a particular episode, and this sounds like a good one.
There was one section of fence that had a strand of antique wire on top. I might not have recognized it, but one of the older guys on the crew knew it instantly. Even when I want this stuff to disappear, I find it so interesting.
So beautiful Nia. I want to be out there with you removing that damned wire. Camas always has such a profound place in my heart, mourning what was done to the lands that once held such sustenance and beauty, as you write. Small moments of healing are still worth it in a world that insists on borders, fences, and privation.
I remember you writing about camas where you grew up in Oregon, I think? It's amazing to realize how much of the entire Pacific Northwest must have been abundant in food before being taken for cows and wheat. So much to repair ... but seeing camas blooming anywhere is such a gift.
That sky behind you in the first set of photos is amazing & what a great way to spend a day. Thank you for sharing your insights and I look forward to hearing more about your new phone endeavor!
Thank you, Lindsey! And yes, the phone thing is an adventure! I've already run into a lot of unexpected snafus but am managing. Biggest thing is I really need to learn how to use my camera (this is not in my skill set). Also, I am taking a few days off with a couple friends and we bought a tarot deck yesterday. It's so pretty!
Universal Tarot with Robert de Angelis's art. I thought it was the most approachable one that didn't feel like proclaiming a kind of expectation of the deck, if that makes sense?
I shall be ordering Elementals! I'm glad you've been off having fun and doing important work.
We're in Boise for the night on our way back from a road trip from Boulder to Santa Fe to Durango. We've seen a couple of pronghorn ruminating at the side of a farmer's field in San Luis valley, cows on public land in a wooded valley at 8500 feet, center pivot irrigated alfalfa all over the southern Idaho plateau, destined for export or dairy cows, and barbed wire everywhere there's sagebrush.
We also visited Taos Pueblo. There's a water story coming.
All the stories of the American West and hubris and water, right there in one paragraph ... The alfalfa is such a huge one. And it's simply for cow food.
One of the things that makes the work hard is that the sagebrush is tough and the wire often has to be cut out of it, or the sagebrush itself cut. They're not very compatible.
In California's eponymous Antelope Valley, 30,000 pronghorns died of starvation when they declined to cross a railroad laid across their migration route.
First time reading you. I'm truly impressed. You offer so very much. Thank you.
That is very kind of you, thank you!
The things you speak of are the wages of profound overshoot. By the time the barbed wire was strung there were already far too many of us here to do without it. When all is in its proper scale, a great many liberating things are possible that are not possible when all is out of its proper scale. We are living an era where things are vastly out of their proper scale with us like never before witnessed. There is no cure for this, other than when much larger forces than the human return us to our proper scale.
I think I can see what you're saying here, but the introduction of barbed wire had to do with cattle, not with dealing with populations of people. It's maybe oblique within this essay, but here I'm talking more about the kind of worldview that barbed wire and cattle ranching represent, as well as the real-life physical harms caused to ecosystems and wildlife. I'd like to see a world without ubiquitous barbed wire where I live, but in the meantime adapting these technologies to better live with wildlife--with all life--isn't a bad thing. It's good to know that pronghorn herds can move more easily across that landscape!
Thank you for reading and sharing thoughts. "Scale" is definitely another huge subject that I've barely touched, except when it comes to profit and commodification.
It had everything to do with populations of people. When the first cattle ranchers set up shop on the Great Plains of this continent, there were no fences, only "open range" as it was known and brands to know whose cattle was who's. Cowboys to keep them more or less within a prescribed area. The cattlemen of those days were pastoralists, feral people who couldn't be considered truly "wild" only because they had homes with fixed addresses at which they spent more or less time. But with ever more people wanting their hunk of the land, came the need for barbed wire. The old cattlemen themselves decried it, considered it a real degredation of the landscape and their way of life, which of course it was, but they could not resist it, same as the smaller cattlemen of a later era could not resist the plow, a further degredation. My own great grandparents homesteaded the northern Great Plains setting up as would-be ranchers. They were finished-off like many of their ilk with the great blizzard of 1906-07, which froze every last cow they owned solid out on the open range. With the big cattle barons thus disposed-of for the time being, the smaller operations - and larger populations - came in and carved-up the landscape with barbed-wire. I totally agree that it's a nuisance. I collect grizzly bear hair off the barbs on my road and adjacent ones, for the DNA and often ponder what a damned nuisance it is to them alone, and yes, the pronghorn which i've seen hit fences at full-speed. But it's the reality what with so many people vying for their little patch and animals to keep-in. That's where the issue of scale comes in. None of these subjects being discrete, something you can compartmentalize. All being intertwined. There isn't a single ecological subject today that hasn't got at the root of its issues the ghastly load of primates this planet now hosts.
On the pro-side of ranching on the Great Plains, it is ranching that has saved what native grass remains from a much worse fate - cereal crop rotations. The most intact ecosystems on the grasslands of my region are the cattle ranches. They still support rattlesnakes and badgers and ferruginous hawks and elk and pronghorn etc. The great swathes of land devoted to vegetarian palates are an utter biological wasteland. They may support a few mice.
My homesteader ancestors were among the fortunate few who managed to make that life work for them. A cousin of mine still runs the original ranch that my great-great-grandparents homesteaded in 1911. It was, as you know, not an easy life.
Much of the perspective in the essays here come from my work on the losses of the commons, both in Europe and North America, so when I look at the miles of barbed wire across Montana (where I live), including on my own family's land, it's overlaid on a vision of what all of that land once was and how it was related to and managed. This is not a romanticized view, but a very practical and sustainable way of living with land and animals, which was true in many places of the world before enclosures of the commons. Commons management systems of land, water, and wildlife contrasted with private ownership that asks for technologies like barbed wire, much like enclosures of the commons in England starting in the 1200s needed stone walls and hedge rows to privatize once-public land for sheep farming.
I buy my beef from a rancher who is passionate about imitating how bison once roamed the land. It's interesting to talk with him. And there's another rancher who sells locally who says he sees his work not as raising cattle, but as raising soil and using cattle to do so. It's pretty cool and much better for soil than monocrops of soy or other commodities.
I’m 100% with you here. As far as i’m concerned the best of human lifestyles ended at the pastoralists and then it was all downhill. I raised for years a herd of yaks up here in Alberta, fantasizing about a human dieoff that spared me and my beasts (of course ;) ) to roam the now vacated wastes, Alberta being the Outer Mongolia of the New World that she is. Mob-grazing was my deal at any rate. I just wrote this the other day: “When i’m driving around my little corner of the modern world looking out at it, baseline to my script is the knowledge that we committed genocide on the Blackfeet in order for what i see around me on my daily errands to exist. And nothing screams out in more certain terms that it wasn’t worth it like driving past a country club. Witnessing the shambling flaccid humanity (those who even bother to shamble rather than ride some perverted little go-cart) in their terrible little outfits on landscapes controlled to the penultimate level of neuroses hacking-at and chasing little white balls like pathetic lapdogs. My mind revolts in epic disgust - ‘We killed the Blackfeet for THIS??!!!’”
Raising a herd of yaks sounds like quite a story!
And yes, I think about that all the time, living where I do — passing landfills and strip malls and oversized pickup trucks and freeway overpasses and and and …
Camas was one of the plants mentioned in Lost Journals of Sacajawea that made me feel illiterate to the world. Your article reminded me, so I looked it up on that great borderless knowledge commons, Wikipedia. The section on food use (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camassia#Food_use) had a "citation needed" (added in 2012!) for the fact that camas fields were "once immense," and I thought "hey, I know a good source for that." If you know any other sources, feel free to add them!
Thanks for all your hard work, removing that barbed wire from the land and from our minds!
I like how you put that, "illiterate to the world." That's how I felt, and continue to feel, when I first started learning about all of this. The mind-barbed-wire is everywhere!
And awesome, thank you! I'm actually meeting up with that botanist this week or next, and will ask him for more sources. Great idea.
I enjoy how you are manifesting one of the themes of your writing in the physical world, by removing barricades to animal (human and nonhuman) movement. And I am excited to hear more about your litephone journey. I'm getting close to tipping over that edge, myself...
Next post will be about the Light Phone journey! (It's a maddening phone to text on. I recommend it but only if someone is seriously committed to the lifestyle change. I like texting! But I think it'll be worth the tradeoff.)
THANK YOU. As with my walking book, it is turning out to be very important to me, vital even, to walk the walk, so to speak. Practice what I preach. Whatever! Which means the writing takes excruciatingly long, but is, I hope, fed by the practical action.
You are the best kind of dork. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, and thank you for the audio of your campsite breakfast. Those sounds were like music to my ears. They brought back a flood of happy memories.
I am intrigued by the concept of private property rights trumping other's right to survival--unless, of course, those efforts to survive are conducted in a way that comports with, and contributes to, the dominate social and economic system; unless they contribute to the wealth and power of those who own the resources and make the rules. I will ruminate some more upon this theme.
It’s fun hearing from people who have visceral associations with those camp sounds! It’s always the same for me, too.
I got a chance to write about private property rights/ownership and survival for High Country News (will share on next post), but there’s always so much more to say: https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-theft-of-the-commons/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
As someone said in a comment a couple years ago, “skin in the game” counts for a lot more than “skin” in capitalism (but other, older, systems, too).
What a great way to spend your time! I feel inspired to try and take down some barbed wire now...
It is very satisfying but don’t forget the long sleeves!
The phone is gone! Yay! Yet another reason you're my hero! (I'm here for camera advice.)
We'll see how I manage to navigate it! The camera is DAUNTING. I am actually hunting up your photography course so I can go through it again with an actual camera and figure out what the heck I'm doing.
So beautifully put, all of this.
"Technology." That's the key - the teaching to people that borders and barriers and property ownership are human inventions, as much as barbed wire. They don't exist, except where we've imagined them up, usually hand in hand with theft from each other (and then, logic whispers, they can be imagined back down again). The hardest of tasks. Not an impossible one, hopefully.
This might be an interesting topic to dig into, actually. What in the human world objectively exists and what is a human invention that wouldn't exist without us willing/conceptualising it into being? I bet there are plenty of things that would be on an unexpected side of that line...
Not an impossible one and you know what makes it INTERESTING as well as probably and possible? Curiosity! I might know a newsletter about that ...
Is this almost a question of "if a tree falls in the forest and nobody was there to hear it, did it make a sound?" Or more like "is mathematics discovered or invented?"
Hey Antonia,
In Scandinavia there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing…I’m worried for your arms! Uninvited lecture over…just next time: long thick sleeves, please!
I really like the clearing of the wire to give the pronghorn a chance not to injure themselves.
And…no smartphone. Oh man. The whole technology shtick in this piece is interesting…I think what you’re saying is that some technology is cool, braid not barbed wire, and needed to just keep things moving enough. But the wrong technology, in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, owning the wrong thing is just bad news for all of us…radical or not so radical (I guess I’m the not so radical guy in this very specific domain).
I grow camassias (which, I think are related to camas) in the garden…their celestial blue is…well, it’s celestial.
Lecture welcome! I had meant to bring a sturdy long-sleeved button-up that I usually throw on for this kind of thing, but it had been a long week and I forgot. Lesson learned! And the scratches are healing, though I did go update my tetanus shot.
Technology is something I think about in this way all the time, yes. What we choose, what destroys versus what promotes life (like, pesticides and herbicides are a technology that helps people grow food but so was, and is, carefully-managed fire, and the spillover consequences of each of those are very different).
I just looked it up and it looks like camas IS camassias, of the asparagus family. How lovely!
Oh golly, those minutes of listening to you make breakfast conjured so many emotions, memories (backpack trail crew, Mule packer life)— and hopes/ plans for future such breakfasts.
Back in my Selway- Bitterroot packing days, we used to weigh down the mules as we hauled out rolls and rolls of the #9 phone wire that once criss- crossed the wilderness, lookout to lookout and all along the river. Hurrah for the volunteers who did the rolling! You 40 years ago…
Thank you for sharing that memory, Sarah! How beautiful. And , thank you in particular for hauling out that wire! Isn't it wild to think of people installing that across the mountain ranges all those years ago?
I love the feeling of making camp coffee with the sunrise. There's nothing quite like it, is there? Love that you share that!
Thank you, Nia. That was lovely to first read and then listen to. I can't wait to hear more about the moving away from a smartphone. The audio sounded very good, but mostly hearing you brings life to your words. I also wanted to point you to a podcast, which you might have heard: 99% Invisible and their episode called, "Devil's Rope." https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/devils-rope/ Be well!
I need to listen to that episode! It's not a podcast I listen to unless someone sends me a particular episode, and this sounds like a good one.
There was one section of fence that had a strand of antique wire on top. I might not have recognized it, but one of the older guys on the crew knew it instantly. Even when I want this stuff to disappear, I find it so interesting.
So beautiful Nia. I want to be out there with you removing that damned wire. Camas always has such a profound place in my heart, mourning what was done to the lands that once held such sustenance and beauty, as you write. Small moments of healing are still worth it in a world that insists on borders, fences, and privation.
I remember you writing about camas where you grew up in Oregon, I think? It's amazing to realize how much of the entire Pacific Northwest must have been abundant in food before being taken for cows and wheat. So much to repair ... but seeing camas blooming anywhere is such a gift.
Ooh elementals 😍
That sky behind you in the first set of photos is amazing & what a great way to spend a day. Thank you for sharing your insights and I look forward to hearing more about your new phone endeavor!
Thank you, Lindsey! And yes, the phone thing is an adventure! I've already run into a lot of unexpected snafus but am managing. Biggest thing is I really need to learn how to use my camera (this is not in my skill set). Also, I am taking a few days off with a couple friends and we bought a tarot deck yesterday. It's so pretty!
Yay! May it bring you lots of fun and insight!! Which deck??
Universal Tarot with Robert de Angelis's art. I thought it was the most approachable one that didn't feel like proclaiming a kind of expectation of the deck, if that makes sense?
Thank you for doing such necessary work, Nia, and I’m looking forward to Elementals!
Much gratitude, Greg!
What a great contribution you made to the world with those hours of work. It might feel small to you but it isn't.
Thank you, Michael!
I shall be ordering Elementals! I'm glad you've been off having fun and doing important work.
We're in Boise for the night on our way back from a road trip from Boulder to Santa Fe to Durango. We've seen a couple of pronghorn ruminating at the side of a farmer's field in San Luis valley, cows on public land in a wooded valley at 8500 feet, center pivot irrigated alfalfa all over the southern Idaho plateau, destined for export or dairy cows, and barbed wire everywhere there's sagebrush.
We also visited Taos Pueblo. There's a water story coming.
All the stories of the American West and hubris and water, right there in one paragraph ... The alfalfa is such a huge one. And it's simply for cow food.
One of the things that makes the work hard is that the sagebrush is tough and the wire often has to be cut out of it, or the sagebrush itself cut. They're not very compatible.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-03-28/alfalfa-hay-beef-water-colorado-river
And so on.
In California's eponymous Antelope Valley, 30,000 pronghorns died of starvation when they declined to cross a railroad laid across their migration route.
So very sad.
God, that's heartbreaking.
https://digital-desert.com/antelope-valley/antelope-of-antelope-valley.html
Boise-based singer-songwriter Eilen Jewell has a song "Boundary County" in which the protagonist sings:
"I miss the barbed wire and the sage
On that wild northern range"
Incompatible, but intertwined, literally and metaphorically.
There's a romance to it.
Here's one for you, "Before Barbed Wire" by Montana composer Philip Aaberg: https://open.spotify.com/track/2EHfKnqfodgkOJsSX4kzh6?si=9353333c8e6c40a1
Thanks. https://open.spotify.com/track/5yPBPkEKIRbAlxBib2eXBZ?si=c51ea1cca5c04ef8 Boundary County