Do log jams makes good fences?

AS CONTROVERSY mounts over the consumption of British news, we in the Irish are pleased to assure readers they can continue to purchase and digest Irish news in complete confidence.

The specifications of our news/features reports are so demanding that we use only the leanest cuts from closely vetted agencies. This is essential to ensure nutritional balance.

Every last word is sourced from only the most reputable producers and conforms to the very highest quality standards. It's all stored in chilled containers, and not a paragraph goes on sale that we ourselves wouldn't be delighted to swallow whole without salt.

All right, not very funny.

I see a debate going on in the letters page about what is or isn't meant by the notion of "mending fences". One writer noted how it is regularly used about relations between Dublin and Belfast, but believes the purpose of mending fences is to make them more impenetrable, and to hinder access from one area to another. Surely, he asks, this cannot be the meaning intended? He says the erroneous use of this expression should not continue.

He was then taken to task for his literal view by a writer who pointed out that down the country, broken fences give rise to trespassing and damage, resulting in bad feeling: "The saying good fences make good neighbours' gained currency as a result."

The odd thing here is that Robert Frost's phrase, or line of poetry, was (of course) meant ironically. Frost was mad keen on wide open spaces, and took a dim view of other people's desire for privacy ("Something there is that doesn't love a wall").

When Bob told his next door neighbour that his (Bob's) apple trees would never get across and eat the cones under his (the neighbour's) pines, the latter's response that good fences make good neighbours was very mild, under the circumstances. Many another neighbour might have called the guards, or the men in white coats.

Of course looking out for Elinor and the five kids can't have been easy for Bob, the ex reporter and failed farmer.

I am glad, however, our readers keep an eye on such phrases. No doubt they have noted Mr Bruton asserting that the arms issue (join the queue at Collins Barracks) will "not be allowed to create a log jam".

Here we encounter the erroneous notion that a log jam is necessarily a bad thing. It is true of course that log jams can hold up work. In my Canada (Dry) days, back in the 1970s, I myself was a member of the small but tightly knit "Joxer McCrea" logging gang operating in the Northwest Territory.

One evening, after the usual moose steak supper, we were spread out along the banks of the Snare river, not far from Thompson's Landing, when a mistimed push (by whom I will not say) resulted in the creation of what came to be known as the Lac La Martre Jam of 74.

But this most famous of all log jams, from Saskatchewan to the north west Yukon, was not entirely bad news.

All right, so timber to the value of about half a million Canadian dollars rotted in the water. But in the three months it took to sort out, an entirely new natural habitat of wildlife, plant and birdlife had been created in the log jam environs.

The authorities later privately expressed their regret that they had ever broken up the jam, and our little group of loggers, having initially lost our jobs, suffered rejection by the community and been beaten up by frustrated fellow workers, later became minor heroes in the small township, who were frog lovers and bullrush enthusiasts to a man (there were no women).

That's why I never see the word log jam without a tear rising (well, where else but to my eye?), and why I have no time for people who use the word so casually, often without even distinguishing between natural or Napierian logs and common logs.

I am pleased to read then that more than three decades after the Glen Canyon Dam was built in northern Arizona, destroying the rhythms of the great Colorado river, partial amends have been made.

At sunrise last Tuesday, the US Interior Secretary, Bruce Babbitt, unwound a giant valve at the base of the dam and unleashed an enormous seven day torrent of water which scientists hope will re create what used to be a regular occurrence in the Grand Canyon at this time of year: a spring flood.

Like a log jam, a spring flood is not entirely a bad thing: it is expected to do for the canyon what nature used to do for it before the dam was built - scour trees and scrub, move massive quantities of silt downstream, rebuild sand beaches and create new spawning pools for fish.