Metaphors are dangerous. It may be the worst contrivance in prose – forcing a connection between a state of being and a physical reality. “Dumb as a post” works quite well for me, but I’ve never understood why any part of a witch’s anatomy would be cold given their hell bent status.
That being said, I regularly almost get into car accidents encountering a physical reality that has off-the-charts meaning to me beyond its objective presence. When the leaves die and blow away and I catch the glancing view of straight shot dry laid stone walls rolling up and down hillsides throughout New England I get a little verklempt. They represent to me the most noble and lamentable aspects of the human spirit.
Crashing into a new world a few centuries ago, settlers and succeeding generations had to eat. Survival meant farming and that meant dealing with the land as it was. They farmed where they sat and that meant dealing with a landscape that had been created by two huge ancient realities – the buckling up of the rolling hills and mountains and then the crushing rock bulldozers of glaciers that chipped every ridge, peak, and promontory off of those mountains. Those rock-dozing glaciers rolled millions upon millions of rocks across thousands of miles of landscape crushing them deep into the ground as they went along finally dropping off their lightest till to create Long Island.
So three or four hundred years ago settlers encountered hillsides fraught with rocks that needed to be removed (along with old growth trees of course) to create something that simulated farmland.
The only option was for these desperate and dogged land tamers was to remove the rocks, leave the soil and make the rocks into boundary lines either between properties or between sections of larger farms.
If they were fortunate, there might be an ox or two to help in the effort, but mostly backs were broken in an endless fight to undo thousands of years of natural forces. When done they were left with a thin layer of arable dirt and a climate that had a short growing season and deadly winters.
It became even more ridiculous in the 19th century as settlements further West revealed that there was an expansive country that had once been under a huge inland sea (called the prairie) where 20 or 30 inches of rock-free, beautiful, arable soil was available just by busting up the sod that covered it. But many New England farmers stuck to their guns, and crops were often replaced by pastures and livestock, but ultimately even that proved to be more or less untenable and the vast majority of farms that denuded the forest land of New England gave up the ghost. People either moved to factories or “real” farms out West leaving those rock walls where they stood.
What we are left with today is the image of relatively young forests completely engulfing those stone walls. The spontaneous explosion of natural growth is completely ignorant of the millions upon millions of backbreaking hours of human labor needed to remove the stones, create walls, and farm the land.
The poignancy is undeniable. A herculean effort has proven to be futile and the never ending fountain of life-force that is our natural world took over what man had temporarily tamed. What does that fact-based reality have to do with anything other than being a graphic example of the ultimate futility of man’s efforts?
Well, if you are a Baby Boomer whose nest has been emptied things are strangely quiet, with more space around your daily activities. Into this child free void seep wistful wonderings of your mind as you drive along. I for one can conjure up many things out of scant stimuli.
Among these flights of ennui is emotional impact of the presence of these meaningless walls coursing through new forests. For me, they are an apt metaphor for parenthood in its full cycle.
We clear the raw forest of our childless lives of the many things that can’t be there when we dedicate our lives to having children. We create a fertile place where our children can grow and remove the impediments of that growth. Parents also attempt to protect their spawn from life’s hazards (drugs, bad behavior, poor grades, strange haircuts, tattoos). But in creating a place to grow and providing safety by walling off the dangers of a hard world for our children, we have only temporarily help back the inevitable transition those nurturing acts facilitated.
Our “crop”, our offspring, are only bound by the walls that we have created until their own life-force, their uncontrollable need to be who they are overwhelms those walls and careful cultivation. If we are good parents our best efforts at control should fail.
So as my children return from college, grown men, I realize that the cultivation that my wife and I did, the creation of walls to keep them safe is ultimately and inevitably overcome by the fact that the greater world takes over, our children become adults, and our ability to control and fertilize, weed, and define the edges upon which our children grow naturally, ceases to exist.
I’m not so sure what that finally means, but as with many other things these days, these abandoned walls amid raging trees makes me a little weepy…