It’s been a half century that I’ve been the voice of boundaries and fencing in rural Eastern Ontario and for the first time in some while it seems like I might have someone to pass that torch onto.
I’m an old man who is very comfortable planting trees whose shade I will not enjoy. It became clear to me early in my life that the things I see and desire are often beyond what those around me see. Yet I have realized it’s not the shade I miss, but the company.
People often ask me: why fences? I’ve had various answers over the years from the architectural to the esoteric but I think it comes down to how interesting boundaries are. The lines we have had to draw between us to demarcate your space from mine and the ways in which we share the public space in-between are as fascinating as they are overlooked.
That’s particularly true of rural Eastern Ontario where those boundaries are often laughably arbitrary. The most natural boundaries are geographic: bodies of water, hills, valleys, etc. They’re the ones that come about organically and thus are naturally observed. But as the impressive Rachael Boardman recently pointed out in her beautifully poetic article, Europeans divided this wild country into orderly and unnatural grids.
Ontario can be divided into four rough regions. The north, the region above North Bay, is a sparsely populated hinterland made up of rough Canadian shield. It’s good for little other than mining and forestry. That rugged terrain penetrates into the more accessible parts of Ontario between Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park, creating cottage country. Southwestern Ontario is mainly flat world-class farmland characterized by sprawling fertile fields and little enough geographic boundaries that grids actually make sense. Eastern Ontario is an undulating mix of all of the above that refuses any attempt at order, yet order we have imposed.
It’s easy to miss a fence: they’re part of the landscape, the frame of a painting. The frame may be a beautiful work of art in itself but even the famous frame of the Mona Lisa is there to serve the subject. In the case of older fences they often become obscured by the steady and unrelenting reclamation of Mother Nature. It’s worth remembering that the pastoral agricultural landscapes we associate with the countryside are actually industrial landscapes, farming being the business of industrial food production. If you want to see how the land would look in it’s natural state you must look at the spaces in-between. Fence lines in the country are the crack in the sidewalk where nature finds a way. These spaces in-between have given me great pleasure in rumination over the years.
And so perhaps it is a surprise, or maybe not, that I am a man without fences. Here at County Fence HQ, my ancestral colonial farm, we found the whisky business more profitable than agriculture before we got around to fences. They exist, sure, but they do so on our neighbour’s property and we have had little to do with them. Rather we learned early on that fences attract attention to the very thing we’re fencing off. I don’t love attention myself and thus have eschewed any modern attention-seeking erections in favour of nondescript road frontage and a more harmonious relationship with the world around me.
It’s fitting, then, that my favourite hobby is sailing. ‘Sailing about and exploring the watery part of the world’ has been one of the great joys in life and it’s those watery bits that are the most natural boundaries. Maritime law is fascinating to me because it was once so important that these spaces in between remained public that it became irrevocably entrenched. To this day one need not keep their boat at a marina, sinking a private mooring is entirely legal and free because at one point it was crucial to our societal functioning. Only coming ashore can be controlled. Thus sailing is the exploration of boundaries, of the public spaces in-between, enshrined by law and nature.
In many ways our modern #VanLife culture is a spiritual successor to this maritime tradition. Lakes and rivers meander, often requiring us to go far out of our way in vessels lucky to travel as fast as a bicycle, whereas high speed roads link destinations quickly and conveniently. I must admit I prefer the environmental impact of sailing over driving and the automobile’s incapacity to share the road gives me pause. However, it’s been some time since I’ve met a kindred spirit who prefers to live in the in-between such as I’ve found in Ms. Boardman, who has been exploring the roads as a digital nomad for the last decade. It has been some years since I have embarked on an extended cruise and I do find myself hungry once again.
You must forgive an old man for reminiscences of the past and waxing poetic on happiness or existentialism but if there is one thing I wish to pass on to future generations it’s that life is best lived in the in-between. The best-lived lives are always bespoke because that is the most natural way. For the past half-millennia we have been operating under an industrial-colonial paradigm where the world does not fit the people but rather the people must fit the world. And for the majority that will work out well enough, it may even give a giddy thrill to know that the world is designed around you. But the second even the most platonic ideal of a human being gets some extra money they stop buying off the rack. I know, I know, let them eat cake and all that. Many will say that this is a privileged perspective and I indeed am a privileged man. However, it’s worth noting that we’ve spent most of human history living in a bespoke world and bespoke inefficient worlds create more and better jobs. I’d rather buy my goods from people living their best lives and I don’t see why the producer must subsidize the consumer. Besides, the further from the norm you get the less living a bespoke life is a choice. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we all lived our best lives?
Take this magazine, for instance. I have never pretended that it is a profitable enterprise but it brings happiness to what is, realistically, a very niche readership. At one time the newsletters and scrappy magazines that were the glue for oddball subcultures were common. A magazine subscription was in many ways your membership card. These days that landscape is changing. I would say that they have disappeared entirely but there does seem to be a new wave of niche print publications on the rise thanks to the internet and the resistance of small groups of friends to the homogenization of storytelling. It’s a time of transition, not of loss, it would seem. In any case, for some time it has looked like I would not have a caretaker to pass on this great wild ironwood thriving in the space in-between, but these days my fortune has turned. My only misgiving is that I will only have a short time with those who have just recently gathered around the flare I have sent up here in the wilderness.
These days radical life extension is all the rage among the silicon valley aristocracy. On the one hand ancient trees must fall in order to prepare the soil and let light in for the next generation. On the other the draw to even be a mere observer of that next generation is nearly irresistible. I myself once had a fascination with the fabled fountain of youth. This was less a practical fascination and more a literary one. Life is less about reality, a thing we can never fully grasp, than it is about the stories we tell about reality. History itself is just that: story. The way we tell history changes over time, historians are famously quarrelsome, and primary sources come and go at different times. That means the stories about even the things we think we understand best are constantly evolving and being told in different ways. Perhaps the fountain of youth exists, I always make a point to leave the front door open at least a crack to the fantastical even if I think it impossible. But realistically it’s more about the pursuit and the stories we construct around that grand adventure, even if it’s doomed from the start. And perhaps it’s the stories and adventure that keep us young.
In any case, I have rambled long enough and my point is simply this: life is short and you must make your own happiness. Even if that happiness is incongruous with the order imposed on the world there are always spaces in-between where one might construct a fantastical and bespoke existence. When happiness comes your way you must simply grasp it and hold it close, regardless of what others may think.
-Jules
