Let's talk about fences

After you buy a house it's fun to walk around the surrounding neighborhoods and get some good ideas for your own home.

M: Oh,would you look at that. They put a green astro turf mat right over the front porch. Brilliant. You can play a game of mini-golf or just walk outside barefoot.

M: Oh, would you look at that! (The exclamation mark really denotes my excitement) They paved right over all that ugly grass and made a nice impervious surface parking lot in their backyard. That's great.

M: Check out that kiddie pool. I never would have thought to put it on the roof of the front porch like that. Awesome!

The original fence was created by Native Americans. This fence was known by the name of land. Land was pretty much free for people to use as they saw fit. Europeans saw this practice and came in and built fences. Thus, our first option in the history of fencing would be to take down our chain link and share our yard with the neighbors.
Ex:

M: Hey their neighbor. I see you're smoking some weed in the kiddie pool while your rabid dog gnaws (it took me an inordinate amount of time to spell gnaws correctly) on the entrails of our children. Do you mind if I pull up a folding chair and some lemonade. Note: This is a dramatization. None of our neighbors have kiddie pools.

Neighbor: Get the f out of my yard!

M: Wow there friend. I thought we might just share this space Stalin style.

Neighbor: Did you just say Stalin style?

M: Let's share it comrade!

Needless to say the idea of not having a fence in your backyard is communist, and neither I, nor Joseph McCarthy (bless his Irish heart and brain) will stand for it. Good fences make good neighbors. If it's good enough for Robert Frost it's good enough for me.

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."


Let's just ignore the fact that Robert is clearly against the idea of fences because it weakens my argument. I'm wondering if I can get my hands on this old stone savage to come make our fence...

The second type of fence is a chain-link one. We currently have a beautiful little piece of chain link spanning the length of our yard. The chain-link is a slight step up from the free land of the Wild West. A chain-link fence says, "Hey, look, I'd prefer if you stay off my property. And to reinforce that idea I've put this crude small fence together. Now, I'll grant that you can still see over, through, under my crude fence, but I'd rather you stayed out of my yard. This is my crappy yard. It's not your crappy yard. And no, I didn't care enough to do something better. Who do yo think I am? an old stone savage?"

Plus we all remember the chain link fences of our childhood, hopping the fence and getting stuck on the top. Or not really hopping that many fences as I was afraid of heights.

Chain-link fences are a slight step up from Communist non-fenced yards. Chain-link is a crude kind of socialism. It indicates a certain lack of status that you just don't get with any other brand of fence. It says, "I care, but not very much, in fact, maybe I don't care. Maybe I'm just leaving this rusty old piece of crap fence up because I'm too lazy to pull it out. Now stay the hell away from my dog or it will gnaw on your child's entrails."

The old stone wall that Frost describes is pretty much only for people from New England. People from New England love things like old stone walls and trees to climb through. They love to talk quietly and whisper about their childhoods romping through the forests of New England while listening to episodes of Garrison Keeler. These are the sorts of folks who might shush you during a really good political conversation just to try and identify a bird's call. People from New England are genuinely regarded as pretty obnoxious by the rest of the known world because of their proclivity for being different, and for the Patriots winning, and because even if a snowy owl is hooting away nobody likes be cut off when they are getting really wound up about the state of US health care. (accepting my brother-in-law, who though he is a New Englander through and through manages to be a pretty great guy. I suspect that he and his family are going to discover at some point in time that they are actually from the West Coast).

People from New England enjoy a good stone wall because it looks rustic and reminds them of something they saw in an L.L. Bean catalog. We don't go in for that kind of crap in the big city. If we want to see trees we'll cut them down and make a building out of them. We listen to NPR, but we do it for All Things Considered, not the funny Saturday shows. We take public transit and lament the fact that people still live off in the woods where they have to drive miles and miles to get anything done. We don't build stone fences because we're not from New England.

(I'm going to go ahead and just try and offend everyone in the known world by the end of this blog post. Thus, if you are from New England you probably are a wonderful person, who enjoys the outdoors, but in a healthy way. And sure, your friends might describe you as earthy-crunchy but they say it with a bit of delight in their voices. They love you. And if you have astro turf on your front porch it's just so you don't have to repaint the damn thing every spring. And if you have a kiddie pool, it's because kiddie pools are great. And you just can't afford to own anything more than a chain-link and maybe you like being able to call to your neighbors over the chain-link fence and show them that your dog can be loving.

But probably not...More on fencing choices tomorrow. When I'll finally let everyone know what the top of the line is for us big city folk.