There is some force that doesn’t like walls. It causes the frozen ground to swell underneath a wall, and the wall's upper stones then topple off in the warmth of the sun. This creates gaps in the wall so big that two people could walk through them side-by-side. And then there are the hunters who take apart the wall—that’s something different. I often have to come and fix the spots where hunters haven't left a single stone in place, as they tried to flush out the rabbits that hide in the wall in order to make their barking dogs happy. No one has seen or heard these gaps in the wall being made. We just find them there in the spring, when it comes time to fix the wall. I reach out to my neighbor, who lives over a hill, and we find a day to get together and walk along the wall, fixing these gaps as we go. He walks on his side of the wall and I on mine, and we deal only with whatever rocks have fallen off the wall on our side of it. Some of them look like loaves of bread and some are round like balls, so we pray that they’ll stay in place, balanced on top of the wall, saying: "Don’t move until we’re gone!" Our fingers get chafed from picking up the rocks. It’s just another outside activity, each of us on our side of the wall, nothing more.
There’s no need for a wall to be there. On my neighbor’s side of the wall, there’s nothing but pine trees; my side is an apple orchard. It’s not like my apple trees are going to cross the wall and eat his pine cones, I say to him. But he just responds, "Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors." Since it’s spring and I feel mischievous, I wonder if I could make my neighbor ask himself: "Why are they necessary? Isn’t that only true if you’re trying to keep your neighbor’s cows out of your fields? There aren’t any cows here. If I were to build a wall, I’d want to know what I was keeping in and what I was keeping out, and who was going to be offended by this. There is some force that doesn’t love a wall, that wants to pull it down.” I could propose that Elves are responsible for the gaps in the wall, but it’s not exactly Elves, and, anyway, I want my neighbor to figure it out on his own. I see him, lifting up stones, grasping them firmly by the top, in each hand, like an ancient warrior. He moves in a deep darkness—not just the darkness of the woods or the trees above. He does not want to think beyond his set idea about the world, and he likes having articulated this idea so clearly. So he says it again: “Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors.”
