The Link of the Unhindered Roamer

Once upon a time the land and its spaces had three functions: as a stage for life's interactions, to provide a place for one's home, and as a means for supporting life itself. If this seems blandly obvious consider how it is no longer so simple. You must now only reside and move within the specific space that you rent or own, or in public spaces, which usually have a set of strict conditions (e. g., only at certain hours, only if you are potential client or customer, only if you're not loitering, only if you're not soliciting, only if you're not speaking to the public, only if you are dressed according to desiginated standards, only if you are not attracting a crowd, only if your presence can in no way be construed as an obstruction of commerce. etc., etc.). But what I'm really driving at in this essay is the loss of something that was taken for granted as a fundamental right even as late as the 1950s in this country: the idea that we are all citizens of the same country and therefore have a right to walk across the land of the rural landscape, regardless of who specifically owns each parcel we pass through, and that we might even sit and enjoy the surroundings or even have a picnic with friends on any given open spot, all of this, of course, with the understanding that the wanderer does not in any way harass or invade the relative privacy of the proprietors. This respectful behavior of benign trespass, which most landowners now would consider a heinous invasion, was once deemed perfectly normal behavior for the bulk of our nation's history. It had the effect of encouraging neighborliness and a sense of community. It also afforded a sense of natural freedom that nourishes the human soul. Now we live in this bizarre age of extreme distrust and officious boundary-consciousness that espouse the view that everyone's neighbor is a potential criminal invader rather than a fellow citizen of the land. In my neck of the woods, I have often heard that people feel perfectly within their right to fire upon you with shotguns ( I once worked with some young men and women who were hiking through a region of mixed pastures and woodlands, and when they had settled down to rest from their hike, this very thing happened to them -- fortunately they all escaped unscathed). So what remains to us? Our public parks surely are a place where one may get back a little bit of a sense of the spacious natural freedom our forebears once enjoyed, but the most accessible of these (the state parks) are underfunded, so their pathways are a wreck, and because of staffing cuts in rangers, it is no longer safe to camp in most of them. The national parks, on the other hand, are becoming more and more regulated because so many more people are visiting them, so starved has our species become on a global scale for an intimate experience of nature. Many cannot afford the tickets to enter these parks, and now people can no longer camp in them for more than a few days without being evicted. The authorities have presumed that they may take something which belongs to all the people by virtue of legal grant and fiscal upkeep, and arbitrarily delimit the duration of how long our free citizens might enjoy the vast spaces of sanctuary these spaces were intended to afford to the world-weary. In light of all this encroachment into our freedom to roam, I have begun to observe an interesting trend where some people now wander amidst and restfully sit in cemeteries. The people, to whom I have spoken or of whom I have read who do this, are not morbid, nor do they harbor any bizarre necromantic motives. They have simply discovered that in cemeteries they can finally enjoy the relative solitude and peaceful interaction with nature that does not remain for them anywhere else in their accessible locale. Let us hope that, in the sacred sanctuary of the final resting place of our forebears, the officious boundary-monitors do not close down this final refuge for those of us who still seek to commune with the quietus of nature.