It's an Old-Fashioned Fence-Raising

Vince often says of his neighborhood, "I live in Whoville. Sometimes people ask me how I can stand to live in Utah and whether I am uncomfortable being a non-Mormon among so many Mormons, and I tell them, it's like living in Whoville. My neighbor to the left plows my walks when it snows; the neighthbor across the street wheels out my garbage can if I forget. Whoville."

The natives of Whoville have outdone themselves today. Vince shares a fence with his neighbor to the right and during one of the vicious snowstorms this winter, when the wind came tearing down the mountainside at more than 60 miles an hour, the old wooden fence blew over.

The woman next door apologized profusely, but waited 3 months to have it fixed. In the meantime, spring has arrived and the tipped-over fence has been killing Vince's yard and garden. Today I came over to his house to find about 20 men of all ages in the yard, ripping down the old fence. The men seem to be taking shifts. New men keep arriving all the time, the fence posts have gone into the ground now, and cement is being mixed. Jackets and sweatshirts hang from the trees, since the heavy labor has heated everyone up. Women stop by every once in a while with liters of soda. The boys that are too young and therefore too skinny to help with the hard labor are tossing around a football while they wait for their fathers to finish. I feel like I am witnessing an Amish barn raising.