I’m old enough to have actually attended a poetry reading by Robert Frost, one of the 20th century’s most famous and favorite poets, when I was a student at the University of Illinois. My date that night was someone I'd met at Chinese Student Club, and I'm not sure if he understood anything, but he was polite and listened carefully. In high school I can remember our English teacher, Mrs. Price, reading to us, “Mending wall.” One of the most famous lines is, “Good fences make good neighbors,” but the poem actually begins with “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” which is his real message.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44266/mending-wall
Frost tells of meeting a neighbor who owns the property on the other side of the wall in the spring to repair the damage to their wall of boulders and stones, each one walking his own side, and in some areas because of the terrain, no wall is needed. But Frost wants to ask his neighbor, why do we need a wall, we don’t have cows who can escape or wander away? “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and causes it to fall, like the hunter and his dogs chasing and shooting rabbits, or maybe elves? His neighbor seems to move in darkness, just repeating what his father said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” So it isn’t Frost who says this—he’s too cosmopolitan and sort of sees his neighbor as a rube—it’s his old neighbor born and raised in the 19th century quoting his own father whose wisdom and fears go back even further. (It’s actually an almost universal proverb common in many languages.)
So with all the talk about a wall--it’s called a fence in the legislation Democrats Obama, Schumer, Clinton and Pelosi voted for—what does it keep out and what does it keep in? But like Frost’s neighbor there are reasons, seen and unseen, to believe we need walls.
- Those who are anti-wall would not deny a security firewall for the Wi-fi at their office or home. It keeps others from cyber mischief, or stealing bandwidth or passwords and codes.
- Those who are anti-wall would not deny themselves a guard dog—maybe a Rottie or shepherd mix, or more than one—to protect their home and children. They may just have a small poodle or Chihuahua to make noise and alert them someone is on their property.
- Those who are anti-wall have keys or codes to lock their house, their car, their safe, their work files. Yet all those things may first be secured within a gated community, and some gated communities have a guard in addition to walls, fence, gate, treacherous terrain and alarm bells.
- Those who are anti-wall would not deny us privacy and safety within our own person. We have Constitutional guarantees that wall off government from telling us where we can go to church or what we can think or say.
- Those who are anti-wall believe we have a right to personal behavior codes of modesty and safety that wall off our bodies and which should protect our sexuality and personhood from rape, assault, insult and bigotry, some are even codified in law, even if they aren’t in common sense or tradition.
- Those who are anti-wall are also in the midst of a big cultural controversy brought about because the only wall left for sexual behavior seems to be “consent,” and that’s a "he said, she said" unwritten law wall. A pat, slap or flirt of 20 years ago has become grist for a law suit or career failure. There were/are no clear boundaries.
And then there are the municipal invisible fences or walls, like when I drive one mile north on a snowy day, I clearly know where Upper Arlington ends, and Columbus begins because the streets aren’t plowed. There’s no sign or fence, but there is an invisible and actual boundary which provides different schools, tax rates, building codes, environmental regulations and city services which in turn put different values on homes and a variety of rents on businesses, insurance rates, and regulations for shopping centers.
The Scioto River has a bridge, as does the Olentangy, and they have flood plains which prohibit building, but the real wall is the different township lines and city limits jurisdiction of Hilliard, Columbus, Upper Arlington, Grandview Heights, Clinton Township and Dublin. The birds and wildlife go back and forth freely, and to some degree, so do the people. These communities with their visible, invisible and natural boundaries all cooperate on certain things, but no one I’ve ever met who lives in them has suggested we just become one big municipal blob called simply the Columbus Metropolitan Area, even if map makers and politicians think of us that way.
Back to Robert Frost. Although he lived in a rural area when he wrote “Mending wall” he wasn’t a farmer, and he culturally wasn’t rural. He was born in San Francisco, had lived in the Boston area and had been living in Europe before purchasing his New Hampshire farm. He’s sort of poking fun at the ideas of his neighbor’s concept that the wall actually improve their relationship. Would Frost have purchased property where no one knew the boundary? Were there once cows or sheep kept by former owners, but they were stolen or wandered away before the wall? Were the boulders and stones he and the neighbor replace when they’ve fallen down, once brought there by a glacier and by repurposing them into a wall, was the land made more useful?
And of course, by living in a rural farmhouse surrounded by a fence and inhospitable terrain as well as peace and quite, Frost himself built another kind of wall, at least temporarily, so he could write, teach and lecture. And become famous.
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