Spring/Summer 2006: Land

Edges

By Todd Schwartz

The edges are everything:

The smallest sliver of any plot of land, any farm, factory, homestead, or nation, is given to the fence around it--yet without that thin line of wood or steel or cement, we wouldn't know how to think about land or behave on it. Lord knows we couldn't own it.

As philosophers and country-western singers have made clear, fences are a love/hate proposition. Barbed wire ended the Old West. Pickets lead us home. Chain link surrounds both playgrounds and ground zero. Without a fence you couldn't hit a home run--but without a fence you could watch the game for free. Good neighbor fences amble between backyards. Bad neighbor fences bristle on troubled borders. There are fences that will shock you (2,000 volts per 1 mm of hide thickness of the animal to be fenced, just so you'll know) and invisible fences that will only shock your dog. You would be shocked to know how many millions or tens of millions of miles of fence have been erected in America--but nobody can even venture a guess. In the mid-nineteenth century, a large percentage of the population knew that it took 8,000 split rails (each one four ax-handles long, just so you'll know) to fence 40 acres. The mule knew, for sure.

The only creation of humankind visible from space is, yes, a very long fence.

The edges are everywhere:

There's no doubt that we live between fences, and a forceful case can be made that we live for fences. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," Robert Frost wrote--but whatever that thing is, it isn't us. We love to know what's ours and what's theirs, who's in and who's out, where to draw the line. Since land first became property, the rock piles, thorn bushes, hedgerows, the fences of every sort have shaped and sealed our history, our society, our culture. We are not alone in this, of course. Most living things establish and defend territories--we simply lack the teeth and the bladder capacity to do it the way our fellow creatures do.

Around 8,000 years ago, farming began, people started settling in one place, and civilization as we know it was born. You can bet that two weeks later the first farmer was stacking up the golden stones of the Fertile Crescent to keep the varmints out, four legs or two. That's when civilization as we see it was born. The industrial revolution almost immediately brought about the industrialization of the fence--now they are as familiar in the landscape as rocks or trees or Starbucks. Depend on this: at any one moment, half the people are worried about being fenced in, and the other half are worried about being fenced out.

So why do we define our land by the edges when we can only live in the spaces? As with wayward children and bamboo plants, it's all about setting boundaries. You can hear the gods laughing: without clear boundaries there is no real freedom. Fences, like democracy and dinner reservations, while imperfect, are the best solution we've come up with to balance individual freedom with public peace. Fences symbolize both the barrier and the connection between Us and Them. And every plank and picket and link and cold sharp barb is also a reminder that They is Us.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities