June 2007, The Country Today
Many Fences: the Work of Wendell Berry
By Dena Wortzel
Fences are something we often take for granted, yet in much of our countryside they are a defining feature of the landscape. Just imagine what rural Wisconsin would look like if all the fences suddenly disappeared. Between Fences, a Smithsonian exhibition that will be coming to Wisconsin, explores the history and cultural meaning of fences in the United States. It shows how the country as we know it simply could not have been settled or built without them.
I have been thinking about fences quite a bit lately because the Wisconsin Humanities Council, where I work, is organizing the Between Fences tour. Starting this fall, we are bringing the exhibition to Waupaca, Hales Corners, LaFarge, Sauk Prairie, Clear Lake, and Cable. (For tour information go to www.wisconsinhumanities.org.)
What I love about the exhibition is that it makes connections between everything from the invention of barbed wire to what fences suggest about our notions of neighborliness.
It illustrates how the white picket fence became a symbol of home, considers the worm fence as an example of American ingenuity, and explores the differences between fences that simply decorate a lawn and fences that mark our national borders.
My new fascination with the meaning of fences led me to a short story called The Boundary, by Kentucky novelist, farmer, poet, and conservationist Wendell Berry. Berry has been lauded by literary scholars and rural activists alike for his gorgeously written fiction and nonfiction in which he argues that agriculture and rural life are critical to American democracy. Berry’s vision is both utterly contemporary and deeply Jeffersonian, as is noted in a Smithsonian Magazine article about him in their series, “35 Who Made a Difference.” (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/issues/2005/november/berry.php).
In the tradition of Aldo Leopold, about whom I wrote in a past column, Berry is a passionate proponent for the land. But his concern for the land is no greater or lesser than his concern for human relationships and community. In Berry’s world, it is the harmonious work of good farming that nurtures both land and people. As Leopold wrote, “The landscape of any farm is the owner’s portrait of himself.” Berry’s fictional portraits of farmers and their farms probes the heart of what makes us human. Much of that, for Berry, is about love.
The Boundary is the story of Mat Feltner, an elderly farmer who takes a walk to check the state of a line fence. Mat’s walk takes him to the boundary of his farm, but also to the boundary between his life and approaching death, of his past and the present day, and to the boundaries between himself and all the people he has loved. Just as a fence can be crossed, none of these boundaries appear rigid in Mat’s life. The story ultimately speaks not about what divides things, but about love and continuity. The Feltners’ love for the farm and each other, and the continuity needed to protect the farm for subsequent generations are revealed in Mat’s memories of the fence.
Seventy-five years ago, Mat was a boy who watched his father build the fence that he is now worried about. It is a memory about people more than about fences, as he recalls who was there and the fun that they had along the way. Forty years later Mat took his own son, Virgil, to repair the fence. Once again, it is a memory more about the people than the work, although it is clear that the work was done, and done well. That is assumed and thus needs no comment.
At the time of the story Mat is eighty-two, and while he is still aware of everything that happens on the farm, the work is no longer his. So it is not surprising that one morning Mat is suddenly filled with panic at the thought that Nathan, the man who now runs the farm, might have neglected to check the fence. When he goes to have a look, Mat finds that Nathan has, in fact, been there before him and repaired the fence. “I am blessed,” thinks Mat, as he praises Nathan in his mind while imagining this most recent bit of work on the fence.
There is much more to Berry’s story, which I hope you will read for yourself. Since I cannot do it justice, I will simply say that what moved me most in it was the boundless joy in life that Mat felt within the bounded space of his family’s farm.
Here’s how Berry expresses Mat’s joy as he walks in the woods: “‘Wonders,’ he thinks. ‘Little wonders of a greater wonder.’ He feels the sweetness of time. If a man eighty-two years old has not seen enough, then nobody will ever see enough. Such a little piece of the world as he has before him now would be worth a man’s long life, watching and listening. And then he could go two hundred feet and live again another life, listening and watching, and his eyes would never be satisfied with seeing, or his ears filled with hearing.” (Wendell Berry, That Distant Land, The Collected Stories. Avalon Publishing Group, 2004)
Wonders. The same can be said of the work of Wendell Berry.
Dena Wortzel is co-director of the Wisconsin Humanities Council and makes her home on Birch Run Farm in Iowa County. 608-265-5593, dwortzel@wisc.edu.