With and without walls

Nov. 2, 2006

Dear Julie,

Our friend Dave built our dogs a stairway to our bed. It consists of six tiny steps that lead to a platform 2 feet into the air, the exact height of the bed. Lucy and Alvie immediately figured out how to use the stairs. Hank, unfortunately, doesn't equate these stairs with the stairs he uses every day to reach the second floor of the house.

I tried to show him by walking up the stairs myself, a tricky accomplishment considering the miniature steps, and got sideswiped by the ceiling fan. Hank still didn't get it. He has to be given a leg up.

Maybe these aren't stairs to him because they have no walls.

Walls help define things. A house without walls is a pavilion. A university without walls offers online degrees. A community without walls refuses to accept any barriers between the groups who live there.

Walls don't have to be barriers. The miraculous Vietnam Veterans Memorial has helped salve the wounds from that war. As she walked on the site before designing the memorial, Maya Lin felt the impulse to cut the earth open. Grass would grow back but the cut would remain, she knew. "I thought about what death is, what a loss is," she said. "A sharp pain that lessens with time but can never quite heal over."

Maybe Hank needs walls. Walls can make us feel safer, even if the security is an illusion and comes at a dear price.

The Great Wall of China, all 4,500 miles, protected the Chinese from invaders but insulated them from the exchanges of culture that have shaped the rest of the world. The Berlin Wall was built to stop an exodus of people from East Germany under communism. It worked only for a while.

Now the United States plans to build 700 miles of fencing to keep out people who want to come here to live. My country 'tis of thee is becoming Fortress America.

Most walls are made of fear.

Rumi:

"Love is the water of eternal life, cures every woe;

Gardens where lovers reunite drive away all sorrow.

They say there is a window that opens from heart to heart;

If there are no walls, there is no need for any window."

The wall might accomplish its goal for a while, but people brave and desperate enough to wrangle with coyotes -- both the human and canine kind -- will find ways to circumvent a wall.

What becomes of a nation that's fortified against its neighbors?

Hank is limping now, we think because he jumped off our towering bed too many times. If he can't figure out the stairs, we might have to go back to sleeping on a mattress on the floor like I did in college.

DC and I unintentionally created a wall between us and our dogs. Walls are harder to tear down than to erect.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is managing editor of the Southeast Missourian.