A Mighty Fortress Was Our Hedge

Published in the Albany Times-Union, September 7, 2008

Hosea 2:6 Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a wall…

I grew up surrounded by a hedge. My family owned a small house on two acres of land; my father bought it when he returned from World War II. There were few other houses around and no city water and or sewer. He dug his own wells and put his own septic tank in the backyard.

He also planted a thick row of a tough, thorny bush called multiflora around the edges of the property. He had read about multiflora in a government pamphlet that promoted its use as a "living fence". It grew ten feet high and five feet thick. It was green and dense in the summer. In the winter it was brown and sparse enough to see through in places, but still impenetrable. Every spring it tried to soften its look with a spray of white blossoms, but the thorns remained.

My parents already had four kids when dad planted it; four more came along in the years after; then me. The hedge was a fact of life for us. When my brothers would lose a ball in it they would argue about who had to go in and get it back; the loser could look forward to emerging covered with painful scratches. It was easier to buy a new ball. Other things disappeared into the hedge: when my brothers started bringing rock and roll 45s home in the sixties, my Dad would confiscate any he could find and send them sailing into the hedge.

By the time I came along the neighborhood had grown up around us, but you would never know it from inside the hedge. There were only two ways in or out: the driveway and a gate set into a clearing that my dad had hacked open. The gate led to the Baptist church next door. After my dad decided that the church had gone astray he stopped hacking and let the hedge consume the gate.

We had changed churches five times before I was twelve. We belonged to a fiercely independent sect called the Bible Baptist Fellowship, but sometimes even their churches could be too lax for my dad. My dad believed that a good church was a barricade against the forces of sin and corruption; the second one showed signs of being breached the only thing to do was to fall back to another stronghold that looked more secure. A church might seem safe on first glance: men and boys with short hair, the traditional King James translation of the Bible in the pews, Christian and American flags at the front, an altar call at the end of every service...but then something would happen. A preacher might slip in a reading from a modern translation, or allow that some things in the Bible shouldn't be taken literally; if so we left and didn't come back. 

I didn't meet any of the neighborhood kids until I started school. After school I would see them walking or riding bikes down the road. I couldn't imagine doing such a thing. One day a kid on the bus invited himself over to play. Mom and Dad agreed but looked him over intently. He taught me how to ride his two wheeler around our driveway, perched behind me as I wobbled and pedaled in jerks. I started to gain stability as we turned and headed for the road. "Go! Go!" the kid yelled, but as I came to the border of the hedge I slammed on the brakes and almost sent us tumbling. I saw my Dad hurrying over as I got off. The kid gave me a funny look and rode away.