The fence line

The first cold morning of the season. There is mist in the creek and it has not burned off yet.

Bo walked the whole way down that lane like it was the only thing happening on the property. That’s Bo’s whole religion and I’m not going to argue with it.

Bo stopped at the same spot he always stops at, about forty yards down the lane. He put his nose in the cold air and looked back at me as if I’d asked him a question.

Down in the creek I could hear the water going and I couldn’t see any of it. That happens maybe ten mornings a year, and every one of them is a good reason to talk to nobody for an hour.

I want to tell you about a gate. That’s the whole morning, and it took me four minutes I didn’t mean to spend.

I noticed the gate because I put my hand on the rail, the way you do. The rail was cold enough to be worth putting your hand on, and there was frost on the part of it a hand can reach.

The cove past the lane is doing what a cove does before the sun clears the ridge. Nothing in it moves.

I want to be fair to my own morning. I wasn’t out looking for a lesson. I was walking, and I put my hand on a piece of iron because it was cold.

The lane runs off the trail and ends at a gate. I’ve walked that lane maybe thirty times this year and never had a thought about the gate at all.

Today it was standing open. Wide open. Not a person-through-open, a truck-through-open.

There was a flat rock leaning against the bottom rail. That’s how it was being held, and it was doing its job perfectly.

The hinge on the latch side is one solid piece of rust. I’ve seen enough gates to know what that means. That gate has not latched in a long time.

So it can’t be shut. That’s not a sad thing, that’s just the fact of that gate.

And there I stood, in the lane, with the mist coming up off the creek. I was holding a gate open that somebody else’s somebody had propped open, and I couldn’t get past those two facts to a next one.

Bo lay down in the leaf litter ten feet away and put his chin on his paws. That’s what he does when he has decided I’m going to be a while.

Here is the part I’m not proud of. Somewhere in the second minute I made a rule for myself. The rule was that a gate left open that can’t latch should be left the way it is found.

That’s a good rule. I still think it is a good rule. And I noticed, about two seconds after I made it, that it is a rule about somebody else’s gate.

Then, because I couldn’t stand there doing nothing like a grown man, I tried to close it. That’s the part where the plan doesn’t survive contact with the gate.

I got the gate to about a foot shut and then I stopped. A gate that can’t latch has one closed position, and that position is a gate leaning on something else.

The rock was heavy and in a bad place for a knee. I put it back the way I found it, which took longer than closing it did.

And then I couldn’t tell whether I had improved anything or made it worse. That’s the honest state of my mind at this hour most days.

I went on up the lane and left it propped the way I found it.

Here is the other half of the morning. About two hundred yards past the gate, the lane bends, and at the bend I stopped to see whether anybody was up at the house.

There was. One light on, low down, in a kitchen, at the hour when people are standing up.

And I stood in the cold and waited to see whether that light went off.

Nobody asked me to check on anybody’s morning. I did it anyway. I did it badly, and I’ve been thinking about it since.

So here’s the question for today.

What is a fence line for, when nothing on the other side of it is coming?

I don’t have a clean answer to that. I have a bad one and I have a book.

The bad answer is that a fence line is for keeping other people’s morning out of yours. That one has the great virtue of being obvious, and it is what I believe when I’m tired.

The book answer is older and stranger. I want to go slowly with it. I’ve gotten things wrong about books like this before, and the getting-wrong doesn’t stay in the telling. It stays in me.

Here is where I’m borrowing from. I’m standing outside that whole way of thinking and taking one thing out of it.

That’s the polite way of saying I’m borrowing.

The name is Epictetus. You have heard him twice before. He was born about the year fifty of our era, at a place that’s in a different country now. He was a slave for a while in Rome, and he taught near the coast when he was an old man.

Nothing under his name is in his handwriting. A student wrote all of it down, because that’s how we have him.

The first one was his habit of sorting the day into what’s yours and what’s not. I’m not going to redo that. I want the other half of the same habit.

Now the part I want is small. A great deal of his teaching comes down to one question. What is actually in your account. Not what you wish were in it.

I’m not going to say his line. I’m going to say mine.

A person gets to decide what their own morning is for. Not their whole life, just the morning.

You don’t get a vote on it, and you don’t get to stand off to one side and watch what they do with it.

Put that next to my kitchen light and see how small I am.

I stood up because I thought I had a claim on it.

What I actually had was an old habit of watching people through a window at six in the morning.

It was dressed up as looking out for somebody.

Here is where that idea starts costing me. It is easy to like a rule about what’s not yours. It is also an excellent place to stand if you never want to have to knock on a door.

I’ve watched a man use it that way.

He didn’t want to ask a neighbour for a thing, so he decided the asking wasn’t his to do. Then he was remarkably relaxed about the whole subject for a year.

The politeness gives it away. Nothing has been agreed, everybody is at ease, and the door doesn’t get knocked on.

Not deciding is still a decision. It is just the one without your name on it.

There’s a second name on this walk, and I’ve been more careful with him than with the first one.

The name is Aldo Leopold. American, a forester and a conservationist, eighteen eighty seven to nineteen forty eight.

He spent his working life as the man in charge of other people’s land. That’s an odd place to grow an idea like his, and it is the only thing about him you really need.

He wrote one book anybody has heard of. A Sand County Almanac.

It came out in nineteen forty nine, which is the year after he died. So the book arrived the way a great deal of useful thinking arrives. It arrived without the man there to explain it.

It is a year of notes about one piece of ground in Wisconsin. There’s an essay in it with a name people say out loud like a slogan, and the name of the essay is about thinking like a mountain. I’m going to say the name, because the idea has no other handle.

I haven’t read the book all the way through. I read that essay twice and I read it badly, at half past ten at night, the way you do.

Here is where the idea came from, and this part I’m certain of, because it is the part he told on himself.

He had shot a wolf. He watched it die, and then he kept going back to that same mountain over a long stretch of years. He watched what the wolves not being there did.

The deer came up. With nothing eating them they got to be more deer than that mountain could feed, and they ate it. The plants went. Then the ground went.

I’m not going to say his line. I’m going to say mine.

A mountain can look fine from the middle of it, if you’re only counting the things you like to count. That’s the essay. Everybody likes the deer.

The bigger idea is the one the fence line is actually about. He argued that the ground is not a thing you hold. It is a community. You are inside it, along with the deer and the weeds and the living things nobody has a name for yet.

He has a phrase for that way of counting, and I’m using it as the name of the idea, and not as a sentence of his. That’s the only safe way I know to use a name like that.

Here is what I take from it, and this is my reading and not his. A boundary on that reading is not a wall between two things. It is an agreement about who has to knock.

So my gate is not telling me what’s mine. It is telling me what the crossing costs the person on the other side, and the crossing costs them a stop and a decision every time.

A gate that will not latch is a boundary with an appointment. It has no memory. Every pass through it is the first pass.

There’s something in that I had not seen, and I’ve been walking past that gate for years.

Now the hard part, and I’d rather be honest in here than comfortable at the end.

That idea can put a person in a strange chair at home.

I have got a few acres. Not many, but enough that the grass gets high in August.

And enough that every year something gets into the beans, and I have to decide what to do about it.

So when I say the ground is a community and I’m inside it, that is true.

And it is also a sentence that can be used to come at me. The community reading does not stop where my fence stops, it goes right on past my posts and out into the county.

Now tell me what I do with that at seven in the morning, looking at a tire track in the beans?

There’s an older version of me who would have said none of this applies to a man with a fence.

And he wasn’t wrong. He had simply never had to stand in somebody else’s lane at six in the morning. He had never waited for a light to go off.

And here is the other objection, which is the one I actually agree with.

The word community does a great deal of work for a person who is not proposing to do anything. Say it out loud across a whole county. The water is in it. The deer are in it. The weeds are in it. The man standing in his own beans at seven in the morning is in it.

And if everything is in it, then nothing in it is on anybody’s side of the line.

That’s what a word like that’s for. It lets everybody off.

A boundary that can’t say what it is for is not a boundary. It is a mood with a fence around it.

So I still want the fence there in the morning. I’m not giving it up over one essay.

And I’ll say who this idea is bad for. It is bad for anybody treating his whole life as a job with a due date on it. A community that’s already finished is a hard thing to be told about at your age.

The part I have to add is that a fence nobody has ever had to explain is only half tested.

Here is the partial answer to the question, and it is partial on purpose.

A fence line is not there to keep other people out. It is there to say who has to knock.

I’ve had that sentence in some form all my life, and I’ve never once said it out loud. I said it this morning, at a gate, to nobody.

Now, the part I’ve been circling all morning. What it costs to be the one standing on it.

Here is what it costs. As long as a fence is a fence, I get to be on my side of it, and I don’t have to hold an opinion about anything.

The moment you can see the other side as the same ground, the neutrality is gone. There’s no neutral place to stand when there’s one community and it is the dirt under your own boots.

So the idea doesn’t take the fence off me. It takes the chair out from under me.

Concretely, on Tuesday I wanted to leave my own gate standing open.

A man coming up my lane in a bad truck should not have to stop and shift to get through.

That’s a decent thought, and it is also the thought of somebody who has been on the right side of that argument his whole life.

So if that gate stands open, I’ve decided something about his morning, on his behalf. I didn’t ask him, and I wouldn’t have liked it if he had asked me.

That’s the cost. It is a small cost, nobody’s arm is broken by it.

It does mean the kindest version of me has to stop and check himself. That’s the whole of what I have for you.

Back out onto the lane, because the air has gone warm enough that the mist is coming off the water.

Here is what I’ve actually done about this in the last week. A lesson with nothing done in it is only a talk.

The gate at the end of that lane is not ours. Not mine, not the studio’s, not anybody who makes anything. It belongs to the man whose kitchen light was on.

So I couldn’t photograph it. I couldn’t stand at that gate and look thoughtful beside it.

I wrote the man a message and I waited.

And I’ll be honest about the waiting, because it was the longest part of my week.

I did it twice. The first message was three sentences long and I could hear all three of them.

So I sent a second one that was shorter, and said what I actually wanted.

He said yes.

Mind the gate. Don’t block the lane.

That was the whole of it, and it was more than I had asked for.

And here is the part that embarrassed me. In the first message I explained what I meant to do with the gate. Two whole sentences of it.

It did not need explaining. It needed asking.

The studio has a rule. Private land, written permission, every time, including for something in the background for three seconds.

I wrote that rule down once, at a desk, in an afternoon, and I’ve thought about it roughly never. Not until a man about whose morning I know nothing at all said yes in two lines.

Then I went back out to the lane with the permission. It didn’t make me one bit less careful. It just moved the worry, and now I was careful about a thing I had been invited to. That’s a new kind of uncomfortable, and it is not a better one.

The light was wrong anyway. It was about eight minutes past seven, and the sun had not got over the ridge behind the house. So the whole gate was in flat blue shade.

And Bo went through the gap, because there’s a gap. Then he stood on the far side looking back at me, and his expression said he had been asking about this all week.

So I got the frame and it is a poor frame. I stood on a lane with a piece of paper in my pocket that told me I was allowed to be there.

And I did not feel one bit different.

Which is probably the real answer to the question. It took me a gate and three days to get to it.

That gate was never about the beans, and never about the deer. It was never about one light in one kitchen. It was about four minutes of being careful and doing nothing.

Careful is what I was doing. Not trespassing. Nothing so bad.

Careful is not a word anybody would put on a sign. I’d put it on mine if I could.

Being careful is a way of standing on a fence line every day without ever getting off it. It has never once cost me a thing I could measure.

Nowhere out there, you have crossed four or five of these this week. You did not slow down for one of them.

The gravel where the road becomes a track. The edge where one lawn becomes the next lawn. The line at the counter. The door of a house you used to live in.

You went through every one at walking pace and you didn’t notice one. Every one of them was somebody on the other side having to decide a thing about you.

Here is a distinction I had to be taught by a piece of iron, out here, in the cold.

There are three things out on this ground that all look like a line.

A fence stops animals, and it doesn’t care in the slightest who you are.

A gate changes who has to stop. It is the same fence, and now there’s a person making a decision every single time.

A courtesy stops nothing at all. It is a person hoping, on your side of the line, that you’ll go ahead and do the thing you would have done anyway.

Same posts. Three different boundaries. Only one of them has a hinge in it.

The ones that are easy to see are the fence. The ones nobody can see are the whole of it, and those are the ones you can’t count from inside your own walk.

Which is why I’m giving you something to count.

Here is the thing to try. One walk, one number, and it fits inside a walk to the mailbox.

On the next walk out of a door, count the boundaries you cross.

A road becoming a track. One piece of ground becoming another. A gate. A driveway. The line where you start being responsible for something that’s not your own body.

Count them once each, and count them when you cross them. Not when you notice them. When you cross them.

Say the number out loud when you get back to the door. To a dog, to a wall, to the inside of your own car. Somebody has to be able to hear you say it, and that somebody is allowed to be a dog.

Then notice one more thing, and this is the whole of the assignment.

Notice which one you stopped at.

There is almost always one, and it is almost never the fence. What is it, then?

It is the thing that made you slow down without deciding to. You can walk back through your day and find it in about nine seconds.

If you only get as far as the end of the street, the number still counts. It is a small walk, not a lesser one.

If you want a longer version, this part is optional in a way the first part is not. Then keep a scrap by the door, and every boundary you cross gets one word next to it. Not the boundary itself. The word it gave you.

I won’t ask you about that again.

Here is the part I only know because it went wrong on me.

You will want the ones that come out. You will go back over the hard one twice, on the same walk. The number you end up saying out loud will be the comfortable one.

That gate did it to me. I nearly walked it four times to see whether I could do it properly, and the whole thing would have been me doing a job nobody asked me to do.

And if you skip the whole of it, you’ve got twenty six minutes of this instead. A man and a dog standing at a gate for no reason at all. That’s its own kind of exercise.

That’s the whole assignment. One walk, one number, and one thing that made you slow down.

I’m not going to ask you about it. You have got a number, and that’s the end of it.

The fog is off the creek now. The light has come down off the oaks and put one long shadow across the lane.

The gate is still open.

Bo is on my side of the line. That’s my whole legal standing.