Fence me in (part 3)

Just beyond the southern edge of our land there's a tall female cypress that rises out of wild grass, the land sloping upwards behind it, climbing to the clutch of homes named Romita, with its playground and general store. When my friend and materials supplier Francesco Bacci bought the parcel separating Poggiosole's upper grove from Romita I was glad, and intrigued by his intention to plant wildflowers or lavender on it. But early this year, the track marks left by a digger hired by the phone company to clean up the tangled mess left by a fallen oak in our valley got me thinking... what if I stayed on top of mowing the grass along the path beaten by that digger and invited guests to walk it to get to the Nieddu Minimarket and, a five-minute walk beyond that, the wonderful Ristorante La Fattoria? Wouldn't that be sweeter than having guests walk the entire length of the road's shoulder to our main gate, especially at dusk or perhaps at night, returning from the restaurant?

The idea led me to ask our earth-moving vendor Massimiliano to erect a final length of fencing along the southern border of our upper grove, from the Strada della Romita to a point where the land drops off steeply and, in a zig-zag, bridges our upper and lower olive groves. We've left a two-meter gap for a gate near the top of this length of fencing: the point where the above-mentioned path-in-the-grass crosses into Francesco's parcel. The plan is to light that access point with a small floodlamp which we'll install when the iron gate goes in. That'll make the gate easier to spot and operate even on moonless nights.

As happened with the first sections of fencing we refreshed in 2021, I'm always a little surprised at the effect these structures have on Poggiosole's expanses of meadow and olive grove. Constructed as they are, of chestnut trunks and medium-gauge steel wire (heavier gauge in the lower third to discourage wild boar from tunneling under and around the posts), they're easy on the eye and blend well with their surroundings, especially as they age. But they nonetheless evoke a feeling of formality, of a boundary separating "in" from "out", of invitation and its opposite. Above all they're an elemental form of building, in the sense of a structure imposed on and dividing nature: a mark of human habitation.

I sometimes pause to imagine how animals experience our fences. Our cats flit straight through the lower, generously-spaced squares of wire; the younger and more athletic amongst them can scale and perch herself atop any given post with relative ease. But a young male deer I encountered last October had an awful time after getting separated from his mates on an early morning walk. I'd inadvertently left our lower gate open the night before, and sometime early the next morning he had casually veered inside our inner grove's perimeter while the rest of his posse stayed out. By the time he made a move to join them the open gate was probably well behind him, nowhere in sight, and the steel wire proved impenetrable. I was in Florence and was alerted to the situation by a couple staying in Le Rose, which faces that section of fencing. By the time I arrived, that young buck was very agitated but still hadn't found the open gate he'd passed through an hour or two earlier. I proceeded to open all our gates, including the powered wooden gate at the end of our driveway, and then gave gentle chase to keep him moving along the perimeter instead of staying stuck on the same section of fencing through which he had last seen his friends. After about 20 minutes I could no longer see nor hear him; he was free. But he left signs of his struggle: the wire mesh stretched in a few spots where he'd rammed it, attempting to push through.

And a short antler, evidently torn from his head in the panic. Even if he hadn't left us that part of him, I'll always remember the encounter: we were but a few meters apart at one point, his vitality a multiple of mine, his terror palpable. I was trying to help him find his way out, but there was no denying I was also the reason he was in his predicament: I'd left that lower gate open the night before, and, more importantly, I was the "author" of the structure – to him invisible, unknowable, unbreakable – that trapped him. And somehow he knew that.