Don't Fence Me In

Some aspects of growing up as a military brat on base housing left me unprepared for life in "the real world." For example, all my ever-changing neighbors lived in nearly identical houses. To know your way around your own home was to know your way around the home of your friends; internal differences represented personal choices.

The primary difference between base neighborhoods and civilian neighborhoods, however, was fences. I don't remember any. If I wanted to visit a friend three blocks away, I didn't have to walk down the sidewalk to the head of the street. . . I could just run between the houses. In the city, neighbors three blocks away are three blocks away while on the base those same neighbors would be just three houses away. Another feature I most appreciated was that back yards were not enclosed with tall privacy fences but wide open. Our backyard joined with that of our neighbors on all sides created large open fields. If my brother and I went out back to play catch, others would join us and before too long we'd have some kind of game going. In the winter, we'd run a dozen hoses to the middle of this open back yard and create a community ice rink.

Here in the city, everything is private and mine and anyone in my backyard is either invited through a locked gate or an interloper of some kind. Because of the tall wooden fences protecting every house in my neighborhood, I have no idea who those people on the street behind me are or what they look like. The same barriers we set up to protect ourselves and possessions help foster distrust and grow a sense of dis-ease. We live in neighborhoods without neighbors, in our own alarm-protected castles with a growing sense of distrust and fear.