Chapter 12

The entire fourteen acres resided as an elongated rectangle. On the north side was the nearest road. The driveway intersected it at an angle and the veered off toward the southwest in such a way that no one could see into it easily.

The entire property was surrounded by a wall which Bryan, always miserly, had constructed out of used tires. Initially Bryan had gotten some used tires to serve as planters for a potato bed. Some people on a web forum which he frequented had reported success growing potatoes in a raised bed made of old tires.

He had begun by cutting one sidewall from each tire and filling it with the soil mixture optimized for potato growth. As the season progressed, he had added a second tire atop the first, piled more mulch and soil around the stems of the growing plants. He added additional tires as needed until the potatoes had bloomed, then let them go until they had died in the fall. Bryan had determined the experiment a success and routinely netted close to half a ton of potatoes yearly using just such a method.

From there he had decided that there must be other uses for the tires and sought out to find out. One website he located suggested using the tread portion as edging for raised beds. It involved removing the tread section of the tire from the sidewalls and cutting the loop of severed tread apart to make a six or seven foot slice of what the website called "rubber lumber."

Bryan found the material to be too flimsy to use as effective edging and had scrapped the entire idea. However, never one to start a project small, he had accumulated several hundred feet of "rubber lumber," which he neatly piled next to the stack of donut shaped sidewalls.

One day after a storm had blown over a dead tree he had been clearing the debris and noticed that the pile of rubber had survived the tree falling upon it completely unscathed. It took some creative thinking and planning but the end result was an overlapping pile of rubber strips piled almost like disproportionate bricks and screwed to the layer below.

He had designed a series of boxes to accommodate the piles of sidewalls which went along with the deconstruction of the tires and add their mass to the wall. Filled with sand and stone, the wall that resulted took literally hundreds of tires per lineal yard to construct. It was twelve feet tall and nearly five feet wide at the base, slowly tapering up to two feet at the crown.

Initially he had just left the tire wall bare but later in fear that someone would recognize the material for what it was and complain to the Environmental Protection Agency. He feared that the estimated fifty thousand junk tires would get his property condemned. In a move equally stingy, he used another practically free building material.

Bryan had discovered years before that asphalt roofing shingles were a large percentage of the waste in the local landfill. As such he had sought to use that potential waste stream for something useful. Waste roofing shingles, he had found, were often reused in road asphalt in major metropolitan areas where there was a large supply of them and a program for their reuse.

He had devised a system based on a model from California where the old shingles were shredded and melted, and used for surfaces around the farm after being mixed with gravel from a nearby creek. As such there were asphalt trails leading all over the farm, and the lengthy driveway would have cost more than the entire property in the event that it had been professionally paved.

The process did have a byproduct, however. After a melt was completed, the initial mass had been filtered to remove the fiberglass, small gravel, and any residual nails that remained. The sticky mass of goo that was left had initially found no good use on the farm. Bryan had found that it was pliable enough to be used as a sort of cement when reheated, and it was this material in bulk that he used to apply a layer of pea gravel to the wall, over top of used chicken wire stapled to the tires.

The result was a wall of immense proportions which was literally bulletproof, kept livestock in and pests of either two or four legged variety out. The wall was broken only in three places: the front gate, the back gate, and the low point on the Western boundary where water flowed from the neighboring property. With such an enclosure Bryan felt almost like a medieval lord safe inside his manor.

Bryan had, in conjunction with the construction of the wall, planted a hedge along the outside to mask the wall itself and give the impression of an impenetrable forest to those outside and those passing by.

The hedge was a conglomeration of three major tree species: honey locust, Osage orange, and red cedar. All three species were considered to be almost invasive in the area, and grew well even in marginal soils. It had been practically effortless and cost free to acquire the required trees from neighbors and friends, who were glad to be rid of them.

He had spaced the seedlings very closely, setting them about three feet apart and only one foot from the wall. The trees normally were accustomed to growing in full sun in marginal soil, but he watered and fertilized them and they became established more quickly than normal and saw three seasons worth of growth in the first year.

The second year he trimmed the trees and did his best facsimile of English hedging. He had taken each tree and bent them over forty-five degrees, alternating the direction with each tree. As the stems crossed each other he weaved them into a sort of lattice. The combination of the locust's thorns, the Osage orange's tough boughs, and the cedar's thick evergreen foliage, the hedge became nearly an impenetrable mesh.

The third year he leaned a ladder against a sheet of plywood which he had propped against the hedge and repeated the weaving process with the newest shoots that had grown out of the mass of greenery below. The second tier was much tighter and much less organized than the first tier, and the resulting lattice above ended up being almost a solid mass of wood and leaves, taking nearly three months of free time to complete.