Alleys and Back Fences
Liminal spaces in the everyday
I’m hesitant to use the phrase liminal spaces, because it seems a bit overworn of late. It’s a good and useful phrase, though, to describe those places that exist between boundaries. A transitional space, when you are moving from one kind of place to another. It shows up a lot in horror.
These spaces have been showing themselves to me more often recently, partly because I’ve been stumbling into them during my walks. I’m tired of all my routes, and so I’ve been seeking out new paths. This has meant lots of muddy sandals, and several U-turns where I’ve had to retrace my steps after some unscalable obstacle, like a fence, or a culvert, or a river, or the Interstate. But it also means the occasional breakthrough: the grimy concrete overpass that bridges the highway, the water tower that can only be accessed by one alleyway.
I like alleys. A few weeks ago, when visiting a town I used to live in, I walked the alleyway behind the houses in the neighborhood before I did anything else. I didn’t go there consciously, my feet simply took me there, understanding before my brain did that it was the best way to view the neighborhood, and changes that have been made (for the record: it has grown more dilapidated). An alleyway is the liminal space between the public and the private. It’s where you keep the garbage cans. It’s where you park the cars with no plates. It’s where you tuck in the substandard wiring. I have more memories connected with the alleyway than I do with the public front yard. More of my life took place back there.
The idea of alleys sends me time-tripping back to my first visit to New York City, and my friend Dan giving me an eccentric and very personal tour of Manhattan. At one point he gestured into an alley. He said, “You see this alley? Don’t go into alleys. People live here. It’s their home.” He wasn’t trying to scare me, he was telling me how Manhattan worked. It was practical advice, and true. People built their homes, and their lives, inside that liminal space, surrounded by fire escapes and dumpsters and free-hanging telephone wires. I didn’t belong there.
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There’s a fence in the back yard of the home my wife and I live in. Behind it is NOT an alleyway, but a strip of weeds and tall grass, and a chain link fence beyond that, which encloses a dog park. No one ever goes back there. I never went back there, until a thunderstorm blew one of the sections of fence off its post and I needed to repair it.
It became evident pretty quickly it need to be repaired from behind. That’s where access to the vertical rails is. Many of them are warped and broken, showing their years. I won’t go into the process of the repair, but the first time I went back there I realized that after repairing the fence I’d have no clear way back to my yard. After the obligatory Cask of Amontillado jokes, I walked behind the back fences of several houses, looking for a way out. No spaces between the fences of the homes, no gates, no alleys. No exits. If I repaired the fence, I’d have no way out.
My wife and I pondered setting up two ladders, one on each side of the fence, but ultimately sounded too Rube Goldberg-ian for us. We finally found a section of fence that used to be a gate, and wrenched it away from its hinges enough to let me back in. Knowing I had a way out, I made the repairs, replaced the section, got through the gate, and then repaired the hinges. The space is no longer easily accessible to us.
That last of egress has stuck with me, and I ended up creating a story out of it, involving a transformation that takes place behind those fences, away from the eyes of others, in a space halfway between the public and the private, a place where I was potentially trapped.
The liminal is a perfect place for horror.
Peace.
