Having written in a previous column that I’m not keen on New Year’s resolutions, I begin with a confession: I am endeavoring to practice a dry January, and in 2026, I am reflecting, in broad and general ways, on boundaries.
What is a boundary? So. Many. Things. Borders, boundaries, lines, doors, walls, fences, rooms, guidelines, buildings... and more. Some boundaries are actual and physical, some are psychological or emotional. This will be a two-part column that interrogates the meaning and significance of the words boundary and boundaries.
In the agricultural and mountain west, we are a territory of fencing and fences, an absolute and understandable necessity. My husband and I live in town and have fenced in our backyard, which saves our dog from losing his mind. There are other benefits of fencing.
Farmers and ranchers fence in their livestock and their crops. When we moved here from the east, the “open range” signs struck me as equal parts funny and terrifying. On a hike with our dog at Scout Mountain a few years ago, a verifiable cowboy on horseback appeared and asked me if I’d seen his steer. Fencing might have saved him some heartburn. (And I had seen a solitary cow on the side of the road on my way to Scout Mountain.)
I work with many folks who were raised in rural Idaho; these good people curse the tumbleweed/fence combo. I get it. That’s part of the great conundrum of boundaries, fencing, border – do we love them or hate them, appreciate them or resent them? I can’t speak for Idaho, but in New England, surveys of rural properties often referenced markers such as “the old oak tree” or “10 paces due north of the fork in the road to the Gray Farm.” Um, trusting, but terrifically inexact. There was a horrifying land grab by developers in the 1980s that exploited the lack of fencing and clear, physical boundaries related to deeds of property. In the countryside of western Maine, my dad’s family farm lost acres of land to such culprits.
There are barriers that keep us in line and keep us safe. I think of highways and roadways, the things that separate us for purposes of management and instruction: classrooms, waiting rooms at healthcare facilities, courtrooms, operating rooms. We go to the library for one purpose and the gym for another. At the pool, we swim, at church, we worship. The kitchen is separate from the living room, the bathroom is separate from the garage. Traffic lights and crossing signals are barriers that are foremost installed for public safety and order. So when we think about barriers and boundaries, we might pause to consider how we 1) interact with them and 2) how we respond to them – it’s a little thought exercise.
In places where the ground is rocky, stone walls abound. Farmers and those with farm animals used the rocks and often, boulders, that plagued their land to fashion walls. Often, these walls were not just utilitarian but remarkably beautiful: built with math and geometry and eye appeal. A person can walk or hike in the woods and come across a series of stone walls, probably hundreds of years old, that tell of sheep and cattle, hogs and goats. Similarly, you can find the remains of a stone foundation. Who lived there? When? At what point did they leave or move or die? The storyteller in me wants to know.
Other parts of the country have hills and dales, what they call mountains, rivers and valleys. True enough. But in the West, our geological boundaries are real and monumental. The first time I saw the Rockies, from the airport in Denver, I found it unbelievable that anyone crossed those peaks with family, wagons, oxen. I still find it amazing that people had the grit and courage to make such a trek. Our mountains are truly mountainous, our rivers immense and treacherous. These features of the western landscape don’t just place us and divide one region from another (for good or ill, I’m not entirely sure), but they also culturally define us. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide what those cultural signifiers might be.
In a similar way, borders indicate places, peoples, nations, cultures. Do they simply define, or do they exclude and prohibit? Again, I will let the reader ponder and come to his or her own conclusions.
In his poem “Mending Wall,” the poet Robert Frost employed the phrase “good fences make good neighbors” (actually, a neighbor uses the phrase in the poem). People who own property of the land variety (yet another boundary) will say amen to that. And as someone who owns a house, I take no offense, have no objection to, even embrace the practice of fencing. You can interpret Frost’s meaning after you read the poem, which is a verse in which he is in conversation, kind of, with a neighbor. If he were here, I think Frost and I would be in agreement about fences (a stone fence in his case that he and the neighbor are fixing in springtime) and have an animated discussion. He is playing a bit with the notion of fences. And he’s playing with his neighbor. On the neighbor’s side of the fence are pine trees; on Frost’s side is an apple orchard. Are the apples jumping the fence to eat the trees, and what is the point of a fence in the countryside in the early twentieth century? Here are the four opening lines of the poem:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Which is to say, I think, that even our hard and determined borders and boundaries are subject to change, to weather, to human/cultural/geological/political reconsideration. And so, I’ll leave it there.
(0) comments
Welcome to the discussion.
Log In