Our littlest dog of three, a cat-sized Boston terrier, was the first to notice.
As she got to the edge of our property, she nudged ahead one paw after another. She must have noticed that the beep-beep of the invisible fence — it warns her that her collar is about to zap her with electricity if she strays further — wasn’t going off.
She made for it, crossing over into our neighbor’s yard, which, even for a dog, is always greener. Lots of yelling from me and she eventually sauntered back to our side of the line.
Instead of beeping in her collar when I tested it, I heard the warning wail coming from the system’s command box in the garage indicating it wasn’t working. There was a break in the line somewhere.
Anybody who has an invisible fence knows that sinking feeling of trying to figure out where the break is since most of the line is buried a foot deep. Ours is also about 300 yards long, circling nearly six acres of land, and it crosses the creek twice.
When it works, the fence is excellent. Out go the dogs in the morning, and there’s little chance they’ll test the fence to make a break for it. They’re not cheap, but we had little choice and had to get one after our lab sneaked over to the neighbor’s house and killed a prized chicken right under their kitchen window.
We had a pretty good idea where the damage to the fence was this time.
A day of heavy rain had just ended when the alarm started. More than likely, the break was in our little creek, across which I’d run the line in a galvanized pipe, which I’d held in place with a few boulders. We went looking for it, and my wife found it resting downstream, the wire snapped off at one end and dangling in the water.
We debated the best solution, run the wire over the creek where we could see it, or try again with the pipe in the creek, only deeper this time. I wasn’t giving up on the pipe yet, so I put on my fishing waders and loaded the 4×4 with a shovel and pick. I’d already hit the Lowe’s in Leesburg to load up on waterproof wire connectors, the ones filled with Vaseline or something, and electrical tape.
First I had to find where the wire was coming out of the ground. Check. Next was digging in a rocky creek bottom on hands and knees. That sucked. The shovel didn’t work much, so I had to dig out rocks by hand, rubbing my fingers raw.
Scooter, the little terrier, hung out with me, and mockingly crossed back and forth over the property line. Eventually, she got bored and took a nap under the 4×4.
Finally, I dug deep enough that the pipe would lie flat across the creek bottom. I ran the wire through the pipe, connected the wires, and went back to the house to flip the switch. Voila, success!
Back to the creek to finish the job. This time I put the big boulders on the upstream side to protect the pipe from the next flood carrying logs and rocks. Last time I put them on the downstream side to hold the pipe in, and they washed out. After I finished, I started up the 4×4 as Scooter looked like she was going to mock me again with a break from Stalag Bedard. Then I heard the faint chirps coming from her collar, and she stopped short. The sense of disappointment in her eyes was pretty clear, but life was back to normal.
Paul Bedard is a senior columnist and author of Washington Secrets.
