Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

As I ponder the picture above, with the forbidding barbed wire encircling the tanks and mill, I can't help but feel a little sad. And Robert Frost jumped into my head, so I thought I'd share a portion of his poem, "Mending Wall":

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.

When Morrison Ranch was in the conceptual phase, there was much discussion about walls. In short, we were no lovers of walls. When you look at the farming homesteads around the town, you will not see big cinder block fences around the back yards. At most, there will be a chain link fence, but generally there is some sort of split-rail fence, or nothing at all. This proved to be impossible for us to replicate; many families have pools that are required to be fenced, and if not, they have grown accustomed to private backyards. We were going to have to succumb to cinder block-enclosed back yards.

The next question became, "Is there any way to keep the development from looking like a fortress from the arterial streets?" Most new housing developments place the house's back yard facing the street, and the fronts of the houses turned inside. We decided to do the opposite; where possible, our houses face outward, and the ones on the arterials are buffered by a frontage road and two rows of trees. This opens up the feel of the neighborhood.

Next we discussed whether there was a place for the split-rail fence; the answer is obviously yes, as it is one of the aesthetic themes that ties together all of Morrison Ranch.

What about the barbed-wire topped fence that surrounds the mill and the tanks? Back to Frost:

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
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.

Last week I posted about the problem of kids partying at the tanks and the mill, and then doing a little climbing. The answer to Mr. Frost's question about what we are walling out? Late-night revelers whose pickled brains have erased all common sense.