Mending Fences

Mending Fences

by Emily Gibson, Washington

An old voice from the past came to me as I mended fence between our dry
field of scant pasture and our apple/pear orchard after the Haflingers
decided that no amount of voltage in the wire would deter them from
pushing it down and reaching for the sweet fruit they could see and
smell just a few yards away--

"Good fences make good neighbors"

This wasn't referring to hot tape and wire, but a stone wall in New
England. Robert Frost wrote "Mending Walls" in 1913, a poem that I
studied when I was 14 and which has stuck with me these 35 years.

Mending Wall
By Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

The British and the New Englanders know about stone walls but I've never
lived with them and had to maintain them--a daunting and exhausting
task, I'm sure! I maintain wood rail and hot wire fences, in my
haphazard and ineffectual way, pondering the necessity for them and
marveling at the Haflinger ability to overcome them. Fences to keep the
pines and the apple trees separate, as Frost muses, seems ludicrous.
Frost didn't know about Haflingers though. Fences to keep greedy horses
from gorging on apples and pears and getting sick makes complete sense.
Fences to keep my "happy wanderer" Haflingers from exploring the road
and the neighbor's fields is imperative!

As one travels across the plains and mountains of North America, fences
are everywhere to be seen. Fences that are impressive and tall,
stretching for miles, built to keep deer and elk off the roads. Fences
that are old barbed wire, falling and decrepit, no longer effective, but
still testimony to a determined farmer's desire to section off his
barren land from another's barren land, or perhaps the requirement borne
of the homesteading laws of the time. Frost's poem spans the balance
between man's sometimes irrational desire for barriers, and the
acknowledgement of the order that they bring to an uncertain and
sometimes unpredictable world that lays beyond our walls.

Fences continue to exist in many parts of the world today, created out
of political conflict and fear. New walls are going up between
Israel/Palestinian settlements (even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon quoted
Robert Frost's poem last month in his justification of a new barrier).
Much celebration accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall after its years
of imposing testimony to the lack of trust and understanding between
people who were once relatives, neighbors and friends. The Great Wall of
China still stands, now primarily tourist attraction, no longer serving
any other useful purpose other than to illustrate the lengths to which
man goes to barricade himself off from others.

So why maintain life's fences, even if there may be no hungry horses to
keep in, or predators to keep out? Even if the neighbors are best of
friends and get along famously? Even if the building and maintaining of
these fences seems a futile and foolish task when they are pushed down,
blown over in the winds, with trees fallen over them, and overgrown with
brush and wild blackberries?

Fences, like rules and laws, define order, and structure. They can bite
back if they are breached. If crashed and broken, they are hazardous in
and of themselves, not withstanding the potential dangers that lay
beyond them. Remove them altogether and we risk chaos.

So, in the best of times, we are mending walls out of continuing need
for contact with our neighbors. We meet across the barriers to shake
hands and visit while we repair the fences together, leaving the
barriers standing and strong. In the worst of times, we fortify and hide
behind the walls, making them taller, wider, deeper, creating greater and
greater gulfs between us and eventually losing touch forever as the
walls themselves deteriorate without the necessary mutual "mending".

So we must not love walls themselves, but must maintain them with our
neighbor. We don't worship the walls themselves but respect the
foundation they rest on. We must accept our boundaries with humility,
recognizing their necessity is due to our imperfections.

Now I just need to teach my Haflingers to do their part and put the
insulators back on the posts and stretch the wire and tape tight. I know
those teeth are good for something other than smiling and eating.

Emily from BriarCroft

Hit Counter