When I left the warm embrace of New Jersey to attend college in Vermont, I discovered public lands. I would ascend to the Green Mountain National Forest on weekends and fish for native brook trout. It was a salve for my soul.
A legal challenge by Utah and other states could risk access to public lands that we all enjoy as Americans—more on that in a moment.
After graduation, I worked and saved and eventually packed my beloved pound-hound, Gus, into an old Mercury Lynx that I managed to keep running with wire, Bondo, duct tape and prayer, until we made our way across America.
I called it “looking for America.” In the back of the car, Gus and I had a big box of Dinty Moore beef stew, a product I have never eaten since. We travelled no more than 200 miles a day. Ate breakfast every morning at a diner. Read dozens of local newspapers. Met incredibly interesting, and above all, kind and generous people.
Most important for this story, we camped out every night on National Park Service, Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management (BLM) public lands.
What a gift!
What I learned while looking for America
I learned about the Trail of Tears along the Natchez Trace in Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. I experienced the wonder of camping among a forest of golden quaking aspen in Colorado. Gus and I heard coyotes whine and yelp in Utah and pretended they were wolves.
I stood in stark wonder looking at petroglyphs in Arizona. I made a half-hearted attempt to fish the Bighorn in Wyoming before giving up because I did not know what I was doing. Gus and I walked along what is now called the Old Spanish Trail in California.
You know what Gus and I did not do? Pay for a single night of lodging under the stars, in the rain and among the wolves or coyotes. Since then, Congress has reasonably created small fees for people to camp on certain public lands, but the fact remains that our public lands remain the backyard of the little guy.
Proposals by certain states would almost certainly take those experiences away from us.
Let’s keep public lands public
The state of Utah, for example, recently filed a legal complaint with the U.S. Supreme Court that could have stripped us of that shared public land legacy. Utah sought to “only” take control of 18.5 million acres of lands managed within the state’s borders by the BLM.
Why does it matter if BLM or other public lands are turned over to the states? Because almost all western states are constitutionally mandated to use state lands to generate revenues for schools and roads. Since entering the Union in 1896, Utah has sold off half of its state lands for development and other purposes.
Eleven other states filed briefs in support of Utah’s legal argument, putting hundreds of millions of acres of lands that are collectively owned by all of us at risk.
Utah’s claim is particularly galling because it contravenes the state’s constitution, Article III of which reads: “The people inhabiting this State do affirm and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries hereof . . .”
Happily, last week, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear Utah’s case. But we know that the fight for public lands will go on.
I found America
None of my friends really understood my three-month journey, and when I got home from that cross-country trip, my girlfriend, old high-school buddies and guys I played football with in college jokingly asked, “Well did you find it? Did you find America?”
My answer then was the same as it is today. “America is our public lands. They are the backyard of the little guy, not the playground of the rich.”
Make no mistake about it, whether you grew up playing hoops in New Jersey, ranching in Utah or hiking in New England, America’s public lands are your lands.
America’s public lands are the anvil upon which the character of the nation was forged. We should not allow venal and short-sighted interests to take them away from us.
I am still looking for America, and over and over I find it on our public lands—these incredible wild places that are the sources of our coldest, cleanest water, best hunting and fishing, and perhaps most important in today’s hyper-connected society, places of solace that allow us to recharge (without electricity) and remember what it is to be an American.