How Hole In the Fence Came To Be

From Fence to Proverb
HOW THE BOOK CAME TO BE

Make a Hole in the Fence is essentially a month long diary of a journey through old Russian villages that still move in the rhythm and ways of Tolstoy's Russia. It was recorded over a 2000 mile car trip from Moscow to Siberia, over the still ice bound, isolated roads of winter Russia to open small libraries in rural village schools. From start to finish, it is a touching story of the warmth and generosity of the Russian people. While the diary had never been intended as a book, it was ultimately published in the hopes of bringing a little more understanding to the subject of a so little understood country. By the time the book came out, literally hundreds of people were then involved in making the small rural libraries happen, and the book was seen as a means of sharing with them "the end of the story," what their help and caring had accomplished.
The title of the book comes from a fence in a New England Shaker village some 8000 miles away from the rural Russian villages it makes a symbolic link to. The fence, in Canterbury New Hampshire, was built with a hole in it to save a flowering branch of a hydrangea tree. Through an amazing coincidence, a gift card with a photograph of the fence made its way to Russia and into the hands of Nikolai Arjannikov, co-author of the "diary/book" who turned the image into a proverb, as well as into the title and cover of the book. As he writes in the conclusion of the preface, "There will always be something to be said for doing those things that 'reason' screams make absolutely no difference. For they are the things, like the hole in the fence, that give life."

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