Up the Creek: Neighbors, here and around the world

There’s a road between my house and my neighbor Charlie’s. It’s a busy state highway with a double yellow line down the middle and so much traffic that sometimes you feel, waiting to cross, like you’ve come upon a significant boundary — an international border or something. To a passerby, the two houses on opposite sides of the road here, mine and Charlie’s, might look like enemy encampments.

I’ve got a Black Lives Matter sign screwed to the trunk of a tree on my lawn. Charlie, meanwhile, is all about flying the American flag. “When we bought the property in 2014,” he told me recently, “there was a flag pole and I looked at it and I thought, ‘It needs a paint job and a flag.’” A few weeks later, when he lowered the flag one evening at dusk, his 11-year-old son, Chaz, stood at attention, saluting Old Glory.

Charlie began raising and lowering his flag every day. “When it rips or tears,” he told me, “I take it down like I’m supposed to. I go through two or three flags a year. And every so often, I fly a very large woolen flag that belonged to my grandfather, a Pearl Harbor survivor. I’ll only fly it at half-mast if the president of the United States dies.'"

I have a flag too, but I only put it up on the Fourth of July, and — above the protests of some of my neighbors, not Charlie — I’ve sewn into the white stripes three blocks of text reading “Free Speech,” “Human Rights” and “Democracy,” the idea being that I’ll take the stitches out and remove the text when those values are not under siege.

The differences between Charlie and me extend beyond our respective versions of patriotism, though. My lawn maintenance strategy tends toward laissez-faire, and Charlie is one of those guys who, each autumn, takes pains to make sure that his grass is not blemished by the presence of a single stray leaf. He works as an arborist, and his trees are shipshape.

I don’t know how Charlie votes. I’ve never asked him, but I do know that today’s societal rules all but demand that he and I be enemies. We are ensconced these days in a culture war. How can a self-respecting patriot lower himself to traffic with a BLM supporter? What would my liberal friends have to say about my mixing with a guy who’s dubious of the whole pronoun thing? And how does the 10th Commandment play into these questions? I’m talking about the one that goes, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself?”

Eh, that was written eons ago, on a stone tablet, and we’re in the age of Twitter now. The onus upon us is to sort ourselves and to separate into different camps — Fox News/NPR, Carhartt/Patagonia, etc. Tension between neighbors is cresting nationwide these days, but it enjoys, I’d argue, a stronghold here in the sticks of New Hampshire. People are so few and far between up here that each home can function as its own private fiefdom. The Live Free or Die hardcore line their property with signs saying, “This House Protected by Smith and Wesson,” and if your neighbor makes the fatal mistake of knocking on your door, thereby activating your Ring camera — well, it’s fair game to blanket Facebook with grainy photographs that make the poor sap look like an invading criminal.

It could well be that disputes between neighbors account for 50% of all human misery in Gilmanton. Worldwide, the number may even be higher. Just look at the relationship between Israel and Palestine. Look at our southern border and at how millions of Americans are so discontent with Mexican migrants that they want to build a 2,000-mile long wall. Conflict is everywhere. The headlines are, per usual, dominated by bad news.

But there’s a sweet, scarcely told sleeper story that I’d like to home in on here, and it’s this: In daily life all across the world, conflicts are actually the exception, not the rule. Those blowhards who get on the town Facebook page and go on for 27 paragraphs about the need for civil war in our country? Those people constitute a minuscule sliver of our total population, and 99.9% of the time folks get along here. They coexist without killing each other, no matter their differences and no matter how ravaged the world around them might be. Why? Getting along is easier — and it’s also more fun.

When I settled into my house back in 2015, I occasionally found myself needing an extra set of hands as I moved, say, a couch or a mattress. I’d find Charlie outside, plucking stray blades of crabgrass from his lawn (or whatever he does). He’d come over and help, and he soon felt enough at ease to share with me his views on property maintenance. “Would I love to see that silver maple in your front yard pruned?” he asked me one day, exasperation tinging his voice. “That tree almost looks like Moses holding out his arms with five commandments in each hand. When snow gets on those limbs — well, snow’s heavy and ... ”

In my dialogue with Charlie, a window opened for humor, so that one morning, when I saw an excavator digging a huge hole on his lawn, I texted him:

Me: Is it going to be... a swimming pool?

Charlie: Actually, just a boring old septic system and leach field.

Me: Damn. I was looking forward to doing some cannonballs.

Charlie: Next paycheck Bill. Then I will have enough for the pool.

When I hosted events in my barn, Charlie and his wife, Essie, let me park cars on his lawn. Eventually, there was even room in our text exchanges for flickers of poetry. After a rainstorm, Charlie sent me a photo of my house cast in an enchanting muticolored light. “I thought you might enjoy living under the rainbow,” read the caption. Then one March day, out of the blue, Charlie wrote me to say, “The silver maple tree in your front yard is always the first tree in the neighborhood to show signs of life in the spring. It is a welcomed sight.”

When I recently traveled to Nigeria to report a story, I wanted to bring along small gifts for the people I’d interview, so I packed several miniature bottles of maple syrup I’d bought from Charlie, who’s got a sap boiler in his backyard. The syrup was a smash hit with the Nigerians, and I came to realize that, neighbor wise, I am blessed. I told Charlie I wanted to write about him, and right away he had a concept for how to illustrate the story.

The photos you see were Charlie’s idea; they were shot by Essie. They’re staged (obviously!) and I like how they capture a rancor that could be there, but is, in fact, so remote from our lives that we can joke about it. I also like how they sync with my writing, which often engages a little tomfoolery, even as it addresses serious issues like neighborly feuding. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence they’re on the money. I feel like Charlie’s taken the trouble to figure out what I’m up to as a writer. I feel like he’s been listening.

But I better stop here. It’s springtime. The buds are already thickening on that silver maple, and I better start pruning it pronto. Because I definitely don’t want to piss off the neighbors.

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Bill Donahue has written for Outside, Harper's, The Atlantic and The Washington Post Magazine. He lives in Gilmanton, and his book, "Unbound: Unforgettable True Stories From The World of Endurance Sports," will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in June. This column is adapted from his online newsletter Up The Creek.