Preface: Do Good Walls Make Good Neighbors?

Summary

The inspiration for this study came, innocently enough, with a walk along a stone wall. Linda, my fiancé (now my wife), and I were on a late May vacation after I had finished my first year of graduate school. Short of money and in desperate need of some time outside, we were lucky to have a week at a ramshackle timeshare on the island of Martha's Vineyard, just off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. I wanted this trip to be a diversion from my studies of early America, and when the island greeted us with glorious sun and lilac-perfumed sea air I knew it would not disappoint. No sooner had we set down our bags than we ventured out for a hike, unwilling to watch the day pass. An arbitrarily chosen trail led us winding through scrub pine and oak trees, past the weed-choked foundations of a colonial-era farmstead, and up a gradual peak, until it ended at a boulder split by a deep diagonal crack sitting atop a wooded hill. This landmark, our tourist literature explained, was called Waskosim's Rock and figured prominently in the oral tradition of the island's Indians, a group that I mistakenly assumed – as I soon discovered much to my embarrassment – had disappeared several generations ago, leaving whatever stories they once told about this monument to conjecture now.