Walling them out or walling us in? Questions raised about our borders
Walls provide stories, inspire poetry, and provoke disputes. First, a story. A retaining wall defines the northwest side of my Midtown property. It stretches 32 yards from the sidewalk to my back door. The attractive cinder block wall, 17 inches high, predates my ownership. It serves well by keeping my oak leaves from blowing on my neighbor’s yard and her soil and grass from spilling on my driveway.
It also attracts post-toddlers. Successive 4-year-olds routinely mount it and walk boldly all the way back. Wide enough for safe walking, the wall ideally suits them. They board from my neighbor’s lawn, an easy, seven-inch step. I’m always surprised to see them.
Here’s one instance. While coming out my back door, I saw a child on the wall. I greeted her and then her mother who waited on the sidewalk with a baby carriage. Introducing myself, I said her daughter was welcome on the wall; I realized she enjoyed the adventure. I asked the mother, for any future walks, to please ring my doorbell and ask me to join her in watching her child.
Several days later while gardening, I again saw the daughter dancing on the wall at my back door. The mother, at the sidewalk with the carriage, quickly summoned her. Rushing away, the embarrassed woman said, “She does what she pleases.”
“Mmmm,” I thought, musing the incidents.
Second, the poet Robert Frost wrote about a wall in “Mending Wall” (1914). The 45-line poem is compelling both personally and nationally.
Frost writes beautifully, searchingly, on common issues between property owners. His classic work has two characters: the speaker (the “I”) and the neighbor. They meet each spring “to walk the line”; each takes a wall’s side.
The poem begins jarringly – “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” – a foreshadowing of upcoming tensions. The speaker comments throughout.
Since last year the ground has shifted, making gaps where “two can pass abreast.” This soundless, natural swelling contrasts with non-natural destruction. Hunters had tossed rocks off the wall, determined “to please the yelping dogs” and scare “the rabbit out of hiding”. Failing to tidy up their devastation, the hunters had left “not one stone on a stone.”
At the spot where a natural boundary of apple orchard and pines keeps order, the speaker wonders about a wall’s need. The speaker jokes that his apple trees will never cross over “and eat the cones.” Displaying no humor, the neighbor says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
The speaker in a whimsical mood – after all, it’s a sunny day – observes “there are no cows” and thinks “elves” might want the wall down.
The neighbor picks up two stones. As a biblical scholar I wonder, will he throw them? Could the now-armed neighbor actually stone the one with whom he shares the outing, if he doesn’t get his way regarding the wall? The poem pre-
sents this possibility, although fleetingly.
The neighbor obviously lacks any serendipity, and the poem ends with his repeated ultimatum: “Good fences make good neighbors.” But do they always? “Mending Wall” leaves me unsettled. Great literature does that; it invites self-examination. Am I too territorial? Maybe I can befriend the woman and her family by having a plate of brownies ready in the freezer as a welcome.
Third, the poem engages our national border dispute thusly:
❚ Walls need constant maintenance
❚ The land itself works against a wall
❚ Disrespectful trespassers (like those hunters) leave messes
❚ Bygone needs (like roaming cows) don’t justify a new wall
❚ Physical walls poorly mask relational barriers
America, let’s examine, like the speaker, what indeed we are “walling in and walling out”.
Robin Gallaher Branch, a Fulbright scholar, is an adjunct professor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Christian Brothers University. She can be reached at rbranch3@cbu.edu.