Blue Highways: Wellesley, Massachusetts

Unfolding the Map

As we leave the madness of Boston, we find walls in Wellesley.  Why do we need fences, walls and barriers?  It is the subject for a nice reflection on my part, as William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) heads southwest again through Massachusetts.  Linger here and reflect with me, or hang out with the accomplished women of Wellesley College.  Here is Wellesley on the map.

Book Quote

"...I found Massachusetts 16, a quiet road out of Wellesley, that ran down through stands of maple, birch, and pine, down along brooks, across fens, down miles of stone walls covered with lichens.

"Many New England stone fences built between 1700 and 1875 were laid by gangs of workers who piled stone at the rate of so much a rod.  Edwin Way Teale says that in the latter years of the past century, before economic and social developments began obliterating some of the walls, there were a hundred thousand miles of stone fences in New England.  Even today, for many of them, the only change has been the size of the lichens, those delicate rock eating algae that can live nine hundred years."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 4

Downtown Wellesley, with the Boston Marathon passing through. Photo by "redjar" and hosted at Nabewise. Click on photo to go to host page.

Wellesley, Massachusetts

One of my favorite cartoon strips in the 80s and 90s was The Far Side by Gary Larson, and one of my favorite cartoons in that strip showed a man pointing out the secrets of nature to his son.  "And now, Randy," the father says, "by use of song, the male sparrow will stake out his territory...an instinct common in the lower animals."  The pair are standing in their back yard, looking a sparrow in a tree in a neighboring yard separated by fences.

What is in a fence or a wall?  A lot, I think.  I have been pondering this question recently as I have watched our (as in society) collective efforts to individually and in groups define our territory and establish and maintain boundaries.  While I understand this need and I know that reasonable boundaries are not only good but healthy, I find myself increasingly troubled.

I grew up in a world of fences.  My parents' property was fenced off from the neighbors and, while my father was alive, was well maintained.  There was a sense that this was OUR property, as opposed to our neighbors.   Yet there weren't many prohibitions.  We often walked through our neighbor's property and down their road as a shortcut to my grandmother's house. People walked through ours too on the way to someplace or another.

Yet, despite fences, my father was notoriously dismissive of others boundaries and fences.  He was a poacher, and would often go under or around a fence that was meant to keep him from hunting deer on other's land.  He was never caught, but he had a close scrape or two.  However, that was his modus operandi.  His personal fences were meant to keep people out but he was very good at crossing knocking down others' fences and disregarding their boundaries.  That's part of the reason why, at age 48, I am still in therapy.

As I get older, this conundrum of fences, barriers, walls, boundaries and borders becomes more fascinating and more troubling to me, especially the clash between our desire to mark off what's "ours" and provide us with privacy and protection and the insistence upon personal freedom regardless of whether it affects others or not.  We extol the virtues of the United States as if it still is a land where anything is possible, where free and open space is a resource to be exploited, and where anyone can do whatever they want.  Yet, we wall, fence, make boundaries and borders, and put up signs warning people off with the promise of deadly force if they don't comply.  I wonder if, in a land where once promise and reality were almost equal and where now promise and reality have a wide gulf between them, the freedom that we extol needs to be tempered or reimagined.

A few examples.  I grew up in the era of the Berlin Wall, a large barrier meant to not only keep the West out of Soviet-controlled East Germany, but even more so to keep the East Germans in.  Even as we exert our freedom to own property by fencing it off, East Germany used walls and fences to curtail freedom and limit their peoples' access to anything non-Communist.

Just down the street our neighbors fenced off their property in front with a large steel wall, about six feet high, that obscures a view of their house and front yard.  Certainly it's their freedom to do so, but what does such a fence say?  To me, it says "keep out."  It says "we don't want to know you."  To others it might say "we have something here that we want to protect." Or, "hey potential thieves, something valuable is here."  I know the couple, who are very nice and very introverted.  In reality, they probably just want their privacy.  But the fence is a message, and that message can be interpreted in many difference ways.

In the past couple of days, this article was forwarded to me which frankly made me angry.  The author argues that museums should not try to cater to young people's tastes because it is a waste of time.  Older people with, what I assume at least, an appreciation for the "right" kind of art are more important.  She is literally arguing for a kind of fence to be built that keeps young people away from the "good stuff," while not even deigning to think that perhaps young people are innovating and creating art of their own.  I know older people who are patrons of classical music that find nothing worthwhile in newer musical forms.  I know serious aficionados of certain types of jazz that are unwilling to give more than a passing nod to other forms, and God help you if you don't know what you are talking about with them.  I know people who collect art and keep it in their homes, unavailable to the outside world unless they decide to lend it somewhere.  Generationally, we all think that the ones behind us don't know anything, yet the vibrancy and the innovation of each generation is constantly recorded in history: a Warhol, pooh-poohed by the "serious" art lovers in the sixties are now almost priceless today among modern art aficionados; early recordings by The Beatles, considered "noise" by many music lovers of the time, are considered most valuable treasures today even as new forms of music are derided now though one day, they too may be considered classics.  It's all fences and walls, put up by one generation against the "garbage" of those behind them, yet many times that garbage becomes pearls and jewels over time.

Different types of fences, two physical and one virtual.  Two you can see before your eyes, and one you can feel in words and meaning.  Yet, in my mind, they equally send a message.  This is mine, keep out, you're not wanted unless I invite you in, whatever is in here stays in here.

The not-very-well-told and therefore unknown history of the western part of the United States has been one of fences, of free ranges divided and sectioned and protected by barbed wire.  In west Texas, a war over fencing developed in the 1880s as "gypsy ranchers," who owned lots of cattle but no land, found their grazing ranges and watering holes cut off by barbed wire.  Barbed wire went up with little thought to property rights and whole towns found themselves surrounded by barbed wire.  A pseudo-war erupted, with vigilantes cutting barbed wire right and left.  The "war" ended with the Texas legislature declaring fence cutting a felony, but it also meant the end of the gypsy ranchers and the idea of the free range so celebrated in American history.  And, it further constricted the freedom of movement of Native Americans, who considered it "devil's rope."

Fences that were prevalent in the east, in areas like Wellesley, were low stone walls which demarcated property lines and whose use was imported from England and Ireland.  I'll admit, there is something pleasing about the stone walls which make a statement of ownership and yet invite communication across them.  Yet even these walls have had their critics.  Robert Frost, in his famous poem Mending Wall, writes "Something there is that doesn't love a wall..."  He also addresses the conundrum that puzzles me when he writes:

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.

In essence, fences and walls may keep things out, but they also keep things in.  At what cost do we fence and wall?  Do "Good fences make good neighbors," as Frost quotes his neighbor in the poem, or do they deny us connection?  Are they neutral or do they rebuke or provoke?  I have no answers, just questions, even though I am just as prone, in times of stress or in response to perceived slights or danger, to put up boundaries, fences and walls.  I just question whether it is always the right thing to do.

Since my father died, much of the fences at our property are in disrepair.  It's a good reminder that fences only last as long as they are maintained.  Once someone stops caring for them or about them, they disintegrate.  As history shows, over and over again, everything, including fences, are temporary.

Musical Interlude

I found two songs for this post's interlude, one about fencing oneself in, and one asking for freedom from being fenced in.

This was the first song I thought of - Roy Rogers with Dale Evans and the Sons of the Pioneers singing Don't Fence Me In.

Then I went looking, and found this modern pop song by Paramore called Fences, about trying to keep the public out by fencing oneself in.

If you want to know more about Wellesley

The Swellesley Report (blog)
Town of Wellesley
Wellesley College
Wellesley Patch (news)
Wicked Local Wellesley (news)
Wikipedia: Wellesley

Next up:  Holliston, Massachusetts

Blue Highways: Kewaunee, Wisconsin

Unfolding the Map

Kewaunee, on the shores of Lake Michigan, will technically be our last stop in Wisconsin with William Least Heat-Moon.  Today I opine on taciturnity, privacy and reticence.  In the United States, some regions might be more reserved than others, at least in their cultural norms.  To see where silence is a virtue, quietly tiptoe over to the map, and don't disturb anyone!

Book Quote

"Across the central North, conversations had been difficult to strike up.  The people were polite but reserved; often they seemed afraid of appearing too inquisitive, while at other times they were simply too taciturn to exchange the banalities and clichés necessary to find a base for conversation.

"When I walked the North towns, people, wondering who the outsider was, would look at me; but as soon as I nodded they looked down, up, left, right, or turned around as if summoned by an invisible caller.  'Stranger,' Whitman says, 'if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?'  I even tried my old stratagem of taking a picture of a blank wall just to give a passerby an excuse to stop and ask what I could possibly be photographing.  Nothing breaks down suspicion about a stranger better than curiosity - except in the North; whatever works better there, I didn't discover.   The effect on me was that I felt more alone than I ever had in the desert.  I wished for the South where any topic is worth at least a brief exchange.  And so I went across the central North, seeing many people, but not often learning where our lives crossed common ground."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 13

Kewaunee Pierhead Lighthouse. This photo by JerichoHW is posted at the City-Data.com forum. Click on photo to go to host site.

Kewaunee, Wisconsin

I've touched on the taciturnity of the upper Midwest in previous posts at stops in Minnesota.  However, since LHM brings it up again, it is worth looking at the reticence one may find in various places once again.  LHM compares the North to the South, which he indicates is more outgoing.  As one who has lived in both places, this has been my experience also.

I'll repeat my experience visiting Wisconsin after years of living in Texas and in Louisiana.  In Texas, we got used to very nice, open and outspoken people who dressed in more vibrant colors and peppered their speech with the "isms" that Texas is known for.  My wife and I were two of what is fast becoming an endangered species in Texas - liberals.  We hung out with other liberals but also had occasion, either personally or through work, to rub elbows with those ideologically opposed to us.  Regardless of any of that, Texans put a premium on being social and on conversation.  People appeared, therefore, to be open to interaction with others.

In Louisiana, we had similar experiences.  Of course, our experience of Louisiana was mostly New Orleans, where everyone just lets who they are hang right out there.  If anything, that openness and willingness to interact culminates each year in the explosion of color and celebration known as Mardi Gras.

In those states, anything you brought up was a topic fit for conversation.  How different, then, it was when we visited Wisconsin after a separation of a number of years.  With our friends, it was like old times where all kinds of issues were on the table.  But with people we didn't know, trying to make conversation on even non-political, safe topics like the Green Bay Packers was often met with one-word answers and awkward silences after.

I'm not saying that Wisconsinites are cold and rude.  Far from it.  The people I met and got to know intimately are generous and kind, and opened up once I got to know them.  I believe that the reserve and reticence is cultural.  I found the same type of reserve in Germany, which shares cultural roots with much of Wisconsin.  The dynamic, I think, is that it is not seen as polite to be overly curious about someone else's business, especially if you do not know them.  It is also not polite if someone inquires too deeply into your business.  What is left is an unwillingness to engage in small talk and to allow strangers glimpses into one's private business.  I also think that the harsh winters, so similar to those in northern Europe, separated and isolated people for a number of months.  That isolation probably left people tight-lipped and quiet.  This has filtered down as a cultural attribute.  It leaves a person like LHM in a kind of limbo - how can one pierce the walls surrounding people?  It's a Catch-22.  The more he tries, the less success he has.

There are benefits to the reserved nature of many in the upper Midwest.  Nobody knows your business, and by extension, your problems.  That privacy can be very important and very protective.  Unfortunately, my sense is that it can lead to isolation.  Growing up in a small town in a dysfunctional family, I know the harm that isolation and a lack of openness can breed.

However, contrast this with the openness that you often find in the South.  There is a lot to be said for it.  Yet, one can be overwhelmed with that openness.  Sometimes, that openness doesn't translate to a feeling that there is interest in what you have to say.  Sometimes it might seem that boundaries can be stretched.

I realize that I'm painting regions with a broad brush.  One finds very open people in the upper Midwest, just as one finds reticent and taciturn people in the South.  As for me, as I get older I tend to err on the side of openness.  I've had too much experience with the harm that can come from holding back, keeping secrets, and avoidance.  I would rather maintain an open demeanor and show my curiosity about people and the world.  Perhaps it might get me in trouble sometimes, but I feel that the rewards will outweigh any of the costs.  I also just simply like how it feels to be more open and less reticent.

The ultimate test of one's ability to deal with openness and lack of privacy often comes in overpopulated sections of the developing world.  In the late 1990s I traveled to Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world, and any illusions of privacy were shattered.  I was always in the midst of a crush of people, even in the rural areas.  Everything I did, regardless of if I was eating in a roadside restaurant, taking a walk, looking in a shop window, or looking at a landmark, was of such intense interest to everyone else that if I stopped for a certain amount of time I attracted a crowd.  At first it gave me an inflated sense of self-importance.  By the time I left, however, I was aching for that sense of personal privacy to be restored.  I often wonder, as populations grow around the world and global climate change makes some areas less easily inhabited, if more and more people will be forced to live closer and closer together and share resources.  Is it possible that personal privacy will become a true luxury, one that is unavailable to most?

Musical Interlude

I'm not exactly pleased with my music selection for this post as I wanted to see if I could capture the "taciturn" North.  But I couldn't find really anything that satisfied me.  So what you're left with is a song by Ultravox called Quiet Men.  It's a perfectly fine song, but doesn't set the mood I had in mind.  Oh well...sigh...

If you want to know more about Kewaunee

City of Kewaunee
Green Bay Press Gazette - Kewaunee County (newspaper)
Kewaunee Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Kewaunee
Wistravel.com: Kewaunee

Next up:  Somewhere on Lake Michigan