“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…”

I have to disagree with the poet Robert Frost on this one.

Something there is that does love a wall, especially if it’s one of the beautiful stone walls you see along hedgerows and under old barns and houses in Perry County.

I’ve always wanted to try my hand at building one, and recently, I did just that. If you’d stopped by our place on St. Peter’s Church Road over the Thanksgiving holiday, you would have seen me out back by the culvert, sorting through old stones I’d salvaged from a long-buried wall next to one of our sheds. There I was, huffing, puffing, and sweating as I toted these massive old stones over to my wall, sometimes sliding in the mud, sometimes sinking ankle-deep in it. Like a caveman possessed, I’d fit the stone, turning it this way and that, shimming it perhaps, doing my best to stay plumb and true to the curve I’d laid out.

It was heavy, sloppy, puzzling work, and I loved it.

Stone structures have always fascinated me. When I was a student in England, I emptied my pockets one weekend to get down to Stonehenge. I actually ran out of cash on the Salisbury plain a few miles from the site. I was prepared to hoof it, but a bus driver took pity on me. He pulled up and asked where I was going. I told him I just wanted to see the stones. He asked me how much money I had. I dug into my pockets, picked out the lint, and came up with 23 pence. He said. “That’ll do,” and let me on the bus.

So my introduction to Stonehenge was by way of an act of human kindness.

The hours I spent wandering among the huge monoliths, taking pictures and sketching, were magical. Not in the druidical sense. I’m not a rock worshipper. But magical in a human sense, the way that touching a structure shaped by ancient hands can loosen the bonds of everyday life and open something much larger and deeper.

Not long after, they closed Stonehenge to wandering tourists like me. There were problems with vandalism. I was sad to hear that the site was to be cordoned off, but it didn’t surprise me that some visitors felt compelled to paint or carve their names in the great stones. People feel a deep need to say, “I was here,” especially when they’re confronted with ancient monuments. The sheer scale of them, the mystery of their construction, and the way they seem to stand outside of time all mocks our fragile mortality. “How small and temporary you are,” the stones tell us. “Oh, really?” we answer, and out comes the spray paint or the pocketknife.

Or, more commonly, the digital camera.

That same destructive impulse—tear down the walls that divide us!—is at the heart of Frost’s poem, Mending Wall, which I quoted above. Frost starts with nature’s seeming resentment of a dry laid wall. The winter’s frost heaves off boulders in a great annual shrug. This leads to the spring ritual of repairing the gaps. a chore undertaken with a neighbor who’s far more enthusiastic about wall-building than the poet. Why, the poet asks, does the wall need to be mended? Are his apple trees really a threat to his neighbor’s pine trees? There are no cows to be fenced in. What, then? Elves? Before he builds a wall, the poet would like to know what was being walled out—or in.

The neighbor, who is something of a caveman himself—“like an old-stone savage armed—” answers simply, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It’s something his father used to say, a saying he takes great pleasure in repeating.

There is a real pleasure in stacking up those huge, lichen-covered stones of old, some of which still bear the mark of the quarryman’s chisel. It makes you think about the last person who moved that stone, the last pair of straining arms to heave it into place, perhaps a farmer from nineteenth century. Or the eighteenth, for that matter. Did he imagine that his carefully laid wall would one day lie under the ground, or that some future stranger would be stacking its stones in a new order?

A few of the stones from my wall came from our neighbor’s property. His name was Daniel Miller, and he died this year. I know for a fact whose hands were the last to move those stones. And I remember him as I cement them in place.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 10 December 2009

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com