I move into a new place in a couple weeks, one where I share maintenance responsibilities of the property with the two other co-owners who will live in the flats above me. Living on the ground floor I get exclusive use of the garden in the back, and it’s my responsibility to replace the fence before it falls over from rot, which will happen in a couple years.
Our home is on a block of the city where buildings are squeezed together side-by-side, and the backyards comprise the center. The green hole of a square wooden donut† is a luxurious refuge from the bussle and noise of the streets. Each yard is contained by a fence. My little garden seems tiny compared to the endless suburban backyard I had at my disposal as a youngster. Having no fence would quadruple its size and in the city make it a veritable pastoral expanse.
So it begs the question:
Why replace the fence at all?
A quick text to my friend at the San Francisco Planning Department asking whether or not the city requires backyard fences returns the following:
“Fences make good neighbors. No fences makes good neighbors. Your choice.”
Without the fence
Here are some things that could happen without a fence:
I catch kids smoking dope on my back steps.
I have to give back the toys that fly into my yard.
Someone more likely sees me naked at some point or many.
I more likely see someone else naked at some point or many.
The neighbors’s great dane wonders through my bedroom and drinks out of my toilet.
My other neighbor sues me because, sleepwalking, he breaks his ankle on my jiggly bricked pathway.
The burglar that somehow breaks into the other neighbor’s house, when the alarm sounds, escapes out the back and finds refuge in my daughter’s room. YIKES!!!
It’s the likes of that last nasty fantasy that make the decisions to build fences.††
What’s the chance of something like that ever happening? I’ll venture zero, yet horrific fantasies are extremely persuasive. Negative, traumatic, gory, disgusting, painful, loathsome, tragic, murderous, hideous, shameful, dirty, sadistic, rotten, evil stories stick in our minds so much more easily than pleasant ones. There are far more emotional words in English that express negative feelings than positive ones,††† and we have a clear bias for negative information when we make decisions.††††
Since I was a kid with that endless backyard the rate of reported violent crimes has gone way up. In the sixties there was for every 1000 people in the U.S. about 1 voilent crime every year, and by the early nineties it was up to 7.5. That’s when my wife and I moved from San Francisco to Petaluma, California, which at the time was the perfect picture of an idyllic community where everyone left their doors unlocked.
That all changed a month later when a very very very bad man snuck into our neighbor’s house while they slept and stole their 12-year-old daughter from her bedroom. Over the course of the next 9 weeks, she became famous, dubbed “America’s Child.” The ground search covered 1000 square miles, the air search 3000 square miles. Almost 4000 volunteers mailed over 54 million flyers across the nation and the world.
Nine weeks later when the man was caught and she found dead, everything changed.
After that, it seemed, nobody would ever be safe again.
We moved back to the city.
And California enacted its Three Strikes Law.
Even though the crime rate has come way way down since the nineties and continues to drop,††††† I get the feeling we will never go back to the days where a dog stealing into our bathroom is cute, instead of a sign of vulnerability, of insecurity— of danger.
So lock the doors and build a fence.
Robert Frost’s neighbor loves a wall, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Why don’t I?
In contrast the ten-month period in which six people were shot on my block crumbled barriers like an earthquake. People opened their homes and hearts to each other and came out to the sidewalks with candles to light and sundries to sell or trade or give away. The block that once attracted exactly zero trick-or-treaters now gives shelter to 1000′s of candy bars inside 100′s of masked mouths every year. I don’t think our fences ever did that for us.
So the question still lingers, and I put it to you, as a Neighbor…
Why replace the fence at all?
NOTES:
† The square wooden donut is such a bad analogy that I kept it in there so I can say, “At one point I used really bad analogies.” (I’ve never been great at anything, but I could fill a warehouse with “most improved” awards.)
†† Dope smoking, nakedness, and lawsuits happen in the front yards, too.
††† One study by Robert Schrauf and Julia Sanchez: The Preponderance of Negative Emotion Words in the Emotion Lexicon: A Cross-generational and Cross-linguistic Study
†††† Here is a nice summary of some scientific reasons to believe that statement.
††††† Crime rate info collected by the FBI
I think it depends on the mores of where you live. There are still plenty of communities nationwide where the lawns go to the curb and have no fences. My mother (in Brooklyn) didn’t want a fence because of her socialist principles, but it meant that the kids on the block ran through day and night (on the plants too) and dogs ran through, etc. When she died I put in a fence. That said, I put in an iron fence. Don’t get me started on the fences you have from San Jose to LA that are opaque and on the street – makes walking near them unbearably boring.
Please. Get started.
Totally love the contrast of how your SF block opened up to each other after the shootings. You bring such heart and soul – and humor – to matters of human relationship, folly, and healing. Thank you.
Thank you Lesley. It was such a stirring time for me, probably the most alive I’ve ever felt. Strange how tragedy and death can do that.
There was an ugly fence in the backyard of my house in Philadelphia when I bought it. “Just so you know, it’s your fence,” my 80-year-old neighbor told me. Shortly thereafter the wind blew it down. The good news was that I already had a dumpster out front. The bad news was I was neck deep in rebuilding the house and had no interest in a side project in the back yard. I was expressing my chagrin to the neighbor one day, when he confided that he had always hated the fence. “You mean you don’t mind if I don’t replace it?” I asked. “Actually, we’d be delighted if you don’t,” he said. “I always thought it looked like a grudge fence.”
Jack, the neighbor, had become one of my favorite people in the world by the time he died, four years later. So I have a bias toward no fence.
Lock your back door to keep the great dane out of your toilet. No concerns about being seen naked. I guarantee they will only look once. BUT, if you go the protected way, I’ll be there to help you build your fence. Love, Dad
Great commentary! Go figure, getting to know your neighbors helps keep crime down!
I leave my doors unlocked all the time…I like the suburbs
I live in a country (Guatemala) with high criminality and lots of stray dogs, so there are also fairly high walls in every urban area, including mine. I find this reassuring for my physical safety (and that of my vegetable garden), but also it keeps me from knowing almost all of my neighbors. Maybe I wouldn’t like them much anyway, or find that we have enough in common to become friends – BUT the major annual activity here that DOES bring neighbors together is creating a sawdust/flower carpet on the street during the many processions of Holy Week. It’s a beautiful experience to participate in, and gives me a good feeling about the people living behind the walls. I say “no fences”, if you live in a neighborhood where that is possible.
Wow. Strangely odd. I grew up in LA. I moved to Colorado, which seemed fenceless compared to LA. I moved back to LA, and was glad I had a fence and a bolted door. I moved to rural country in the midwest and I have 8 acres with no fence. And I don’t always lock the door. It is an area of wide open acreage to each home…and no fences. It’s strangely odd.
Now that I’m living in North Carolina, where front lawns go on for acres, I am in a tussle with my neighbors over a fence I built to separate my landscaped section from my veggie/chicken garden. I put in posts and deer netting and planted vines to grow up and cover the netting. Nope. It has to be a solid wood fence. Really? A solid wood fence is better than a lovely wall of flowered vines? “It’s not how we do things here. Maybe it’s what you folks do in California….” So big lawn or solid fence – I guess those are the only options. This is a strange strange place. You can marry your cousin but not if he or she is gay. Huh.