One thing I learned from farm people: “Close the gate.” I’d pull up to my sister-in-law’s road gate in wide-open Oklahoma, and my wife would jump out of the truck, fiddle with the chain wrapped around the post and secured by a link wedged into a steel slot. She’d swing the ten-foot span of steel tubing inward until it dragged in the grass beside the drive. I’d pull forward just far enough for the truck to idle clear when she closed the gate behind us. Then she’d wedge a chain link back into the steel slot. I never imagined the many devices that folks come up with to keep a gate shut on a farm. They vary depending on what you are closing out or in. At Classic Tango Stables in Kansas, co-owner Kent welds a steel tube to the top left of a double gate and fixes a sliding bolt to the right side, as many gate latches in the country are dreamed up on the spot by men or women who have an arc welder. That gate secures an area of some dozen pens and corrals, and in this way serves a small herd of humans and horses. This latch sits on the top rail, but you need to wedge a boot toe under the right-side gate and lift slightly with your foot to free the bolt from its slot. There are many slots on gates and fences, and you just know they don’t always perfectly marry. “Rule #1,” one sign on the place asserts: “If the gate is open, leave it open. If it’s closed, close it.” Some of those spring-loaded gate anchors have me shying sideways at first, as do two-way latches with pins on each side, which you lift to open a gate one way or the other. It’s simple once you use them a time or two, but confusing if you are, like me, a visitor helping feed animals in the low light of morning. Through me, a gate seems to echo Dante, you may find hope or its abandonment. Children run into gates from the time they can crawl, blocking stairs, halls, laundries. My son’s preschool had no fence between the play area and parking lot, and when the church announced that it would fence off the area, the preschool director, a woman named Magda, quit. “My children are not animals,” she explained. Fencing human beings in — or out — is a morally complicated proposition. When you go through a gate, know what you’re doing. My sister Christine, age seven, and I, ten, who’d never been much outside the city of St. Louis, went to walk up to my Aunt Rosemary’s barn in Jefferson County, Illinois, where we were staying one Thanksgiving week, when the older man, “Dad” Wedemeyer, my aunt’s father-in-law and whose farm it actually was, began to lead a bull to a pen on the far side of that barn. We were forty or fifty feet down a slight incline from the barn and had just gotten the gate open when the bull clearly noticed us, lowered his head and started to huff. “Get back behind that gate!” yelled Mr. Wedemeyer, in a voice that catches his panic in my ear to this day. “Close the gate!” We were guests, of course, and I didn’t know Mr. Wedemeyer well, so I realized, being the older of us kids, that I had violated a fundamental protocol of a farm, which had something to do with the responsibility of opening and closing a gate. Know what you’re doing. That gate was wide, as gates sometimes are. The incident with Mr. Wedemeyer’s bull suggests that one can go through a gate and not return. Seamus Heaney’s first egress in his poem “The Barn” translates farmyard implements — harness, plough-socks — as an “armoury.” The pastoral bliss of picture books has been transgressed for another, dangerous world. From what bearing on the farm did this threat arrive? The boy of Heaney’s poem lay down on the barn floor to become, he says, actual chaff, “to shun the fear above,” he says, which, in the poem, the reader will experience firsthand. In that way, a poem swings open, asking a reader to walk into another consciousness where injury and sweat, birth and death, are common. This is why an outsider, as I am, takes seriously both the poem and the passage. There’s a backhoe out in the pasture to bury the old gray horse, and the kids watch from a distance, behind the gate. A woman my wife and I know had been alone on the farm one night, when her husband worked the late shift in town. A strange man opened their gate and went to the back of the house and began to bash the back door and the woman’s dog, alternately, with a plastic lawn chair, while the woman spent nearly thirty minutes on the phone with 911. A sheriff’s deputy was coming, said the operator, from a long way off. This intruder was one of those fellows, it turns out, who would not return through the gate. By the time he busted open her door, the woman was waiting with a twelve-gauge and blew him out onto the back porch. He was confirmed to have been on drugs — another kind of gate, some say. The intruder’s wife called several days later to apologize and say she had been in fear of her own life from the man. Folks in the country often hang padlocks on their road gates and don’t bother to snap the locks shut; or they sometimes hang a key nearby on the fence, a nod to the neighborly dust that trails each pickup passing on the road. Even now, the padlock on this woman’s gate hangs unlocked, with a sign nearby: Keep closed. Those who choose to honor the wishes of others will find the gate unlocked. “Though we could fool each other,” wrote the poet
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence