I’ll not stoop to bowdlerizing Frost and talking about virtues of good fences, but I was struck by the fencing in my Houston neighborhood during my stay there. These fences are shoulder-high or higher. Usually iron, some have decorative finials at the posts. Some cover palings with a unique feature of plastic carpeting mimicking a boxwood hedge or ivy covering, affording privacy to a small porch and sometimes a patch of grass whose green may really be astroturf.

I have seen urban properties bordered by fences but associated them with Europe, in Italy or the ornamentation of Paris. Perhaps the Houston fences were an echo of New Orleans, so close to the east. Although I don’t remember seeing an other urban area where every townhouse, every street-level apartment, and every free-standing house had a fence with locking gates. Especially electronic gates that groan slowly, usually laterally, to allow cars to enter or exit the parking spaces or garage.

Fences continued outside Houston through the suburban gated communities, expected as they are so named, and into the countryside. These demarcations transitioned from barriers contra humans to wire fences to pen animals within their space. The fences did not disappear until the huge farms of the Missouri flatlands approaching the Mississippi River. These farms, whose fields stretched the length of a freight train running the tracks bordering the highway, also stretched to a far distance where trees were smaller than a thumbnail held at arm’s length. Sometimes there stood an isolated farmhouse, surrounded by shade trees as if moored in the middle of the field. More awe-inspiring were the huge silos, gantries, and conveyor belts. It was as if a Sheeler photograph had been plopped onto the landscape like a billboard. 

Crossing into Kentucky, fences, often split rail, returned as the farms became an imaginable size. Then the uneven lands and river courses of the west gave way to the rolling bluegrass about Lexington. Here the fences became an ornament to the landscape. Rail fences bounded paddocks, a dark black deeper in the country becoming classic white on getting closer to the horse farms raising the thoroughbreds for the tracks. These are tourist images. Blue green rolling hills, white fences, a dark horse or a bay in a private pen. Mature shade trees line driveways to large and tidy barns; perhaps an exercise track or short training track run next to a stable.

Traveling down through Kentucky to Tennessee and motoring east, I lose the rolling hills and get steeper, curvier roads, often tracking ridges. Then flat valleys with an odd protuberance, geologically an inselberg, like Brazil’s Sugarloaf Mountain, although not so large. As I look over the landscape of small farms in the valleys or flat lands leading into a holler, there are no fences. In small towns, houses sit on their aprons of grass, one yard leading to the next. There is not even a semblance of a delineated border between the property and sidewalk (when there is one) as a common in some Pennsylvania or New England towns where knee-high or lower, almost retaining walls, indicating one side private, the other, public.

I had heard about yards quintessentially American with one blending into the next where American children in illustrations, the boy always wearing a red plaid shirt and the girt a yellow dress, played over a vast landscape. And of course, the ogre, a gruff old man, whose pleasure was to shoo and torment the wayward kids. Such stories and drawings, without fences, only freedom.