Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saalweachter | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know about thousands of years off hand, but if you spend some time in New England you will see the truth to the poet's words:

  Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
  That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
  And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
  And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Many, most, all of the dry stone walls once in pasture and now in forest used to be straight, neatly stacked walls, and are now linear heaps that only outline and no longer divide old paddocks.

While Frost is beautifully right here, of course, there is a mild irony in that many of the rocks in New England walls were brought there by repeated glaciation, so cold both made the walls possible, and, as frost-heave, both surfaces buried rocks, and breaks down dry walls made with the generally rounded glacial rocks.

A secondary cause for spilling the upper boulders is the behavior of herds of dairy cattle, with each cow reaching over the wall to reach that one extra blade of tasty grass, with eventual wall collapse.

I have a friend there and they say it's pretty common to hire someone to restack them

The title of the poem is, in fact, "Mending Wall", and the overall subject is the yearly work to maintain the stone walls and musing on the necessity of the work.

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