“Somebody owns it,” my father
said, sweeping his hand across the Pocono Mountains zipping by the
windshield. I was a young boy when he told me this, and I can
remember being puzzled by how someone could own a mountain.
If you grew up in Pennsylvania as I did, you understood
that just about everything was owned by somebody, and if you wanted
to walk or hunt somewhere, you had to get permission. Something
like 13 percent of Pennsylvania is public land; where I grew up
none of it was. I read somewhere that in Texas only 4 percent of
its land is public so it must be difficult for someone from there
to have an appreciation for public land when they see so little of
it. It is hard for many people to understand that more than 50
percent of what they see in Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado and other
states of the West is Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management
land. They don’t know what it is like to just walk into the
mountains without permission.
Henri Louis Bergson, a
philosopher, once observed that when we enter an apartment for the
first time, it seems strange. The next time it is less alien and
eventually it is ours. He said it was élan
vital, a mysterious life force from us that embeds itself
into the walls and carpets until it becomes an extension of
ourselves.
I don’t know about élan
vital. I do know that when I go to a national park, pay
my entrance fee, walk and gawk and drive out, I’ve never felt any
ownership of the park. I know I do not feel any ownership in an
open space visited by a lot of people. It seems the fewer people
you encounter when you are hiking, the more you can own the land.
The bigger the corporation, the less I feel I own it when I work
for it. About the only thing you feel ownership of in a big company
is the cubicle in which you work. I have felt ownership or close to
that at some small businesses. There seems to be an indirect
relationship between size and ownership. Have you ever noticed,
say, in school, the desk you sit at the first day becomes the one
you own for the rest of the year? And if someone takes that seat
before you get there, you feel you have been robbed?
Something like this happens between Westerners and public lands. I
am a volunteer backcountry ranger in Colorado with the Indian Peaks
Wilderness Alliance, and over the years I have come to own those
mountains (I also own the middle section of the Wind River Range in
Wyoming).
The Wilderness Alliance is a collection of
people who saw Indian Peaks getting trashed by visitors and decided
to do something about their “property.” At first, we were called
backcountry hosts. A bad choice of names — you felt you had
to offer hikers coffee instead of warning them about hypothermia
and lightning. Ranger sounds much more macho. We dress up in junior
Smokey Bear outfits of tan shirt, green pants, patches and a badge.
The Forest Service likes to have us on the ground because their
rangers spend most of the time in an office writing forest plans
and environmental impact statements.
I get upset when
someone builds a fire too close to one of my lakes. I have a
fantasy of saying to a camper in the wrong place, “I tol’ ya’ to
move thet far, son.” I pull out my big pistola and point it at the
fire-ring and blow it apart.
Fortunately, the Forest
Service will not let me carry firearms. I proudly show people some
of the wonderful things on my mountains. I believe I am like a lot
of Westerners about our public lands. Oh, we complain about oil and
gas derricks destroying animal migration routes. We clothe these
and other outrages with the robes of environmental concern, of the
sanctity of roadless places. The truth is, in our doggy hearts we
own the mountains.
It may be as simple as emotional
ownership versus physical ownership. The public land we grow to
love is wild and free because we can walk into it any time we
please with nobody’s say-so. It’s close to pristine because no one
stores old cars and washing machines on it. We in the West don’t
need no stinkin’ paper to tell us we own something. We feel it.
Rob Pudim is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org).
He lives and draws in Boulder, Colorado.
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