A friend and I have been chipping away at hiking Vermont’s Long Trail – a 272-mile footpath that leads from one end of the state to the other – for well over a decade now. We made good progress in our mid-twenties, when life was simpler. Now, as we approach 40 (one of us is already there), stealing away is not as easy as it used to be. Work. Kids. Life. You know.
We’d been planning this year’s hike for the weekend of September 14th for months, so rain or shine that was our window. We got some of both, though it was raining steadily on Friday the 13th as we made the three-hour journey north. We dropped one vehicle off where we planned on ending the hike, then took the other vehicle back to State forestland off Route 108, the spot where we’d left the trail the year before. We pulled into a picnic area right at dark and hastily pitched a tent.
Nine o’clock, now, the rain coming down. The two of us in our sleeping bags, headlamps on, with a cribbage board between us, talking about the 30 miles we were going to hike over the next two days. Then a voice from outside the tent.
“You can’t camp here.”
Ten seconds later there was a flashlight shining in our eyes.
I’ll spare you the details of our conversation. The bottom line is that there had been a little sign we missed that said “No Camping.” When we asked where we should go, we were told a campground. Yes it would cost us money. There was a “primitive camping area” down the road we could use, though the guy wouldn’t volunteer anything more than a pamphlet that had no directions in it. We packed up in the rain, soaking wet now, and drove a few miles down the road to camp illegally in a less conspicuous spot.
Come morning I really studied the pamphlet. I learned that while Vermont has over 300,000 acres of state forest, you can camp for free in just 29 designated areas. “Access restrictions apply to most areas, so contact District Offices for more information.” There shall be one “responsible adult” for every four campers under 14. (We smiled picturing the irresponsible adult who can apparently legally oversee three campers under 14; encourage the kids to play with matches; feed them candy for dinner.) You can only camp for three consecutive nights. Groups over ten need a permit. Your campsite has to be 1,000 feet from a road and 200 feet from a trail and you can’t get within 100 feet of a stream. (Because who likes to camp on the water?) If you have to go to the bathroom you need to dig a six-inch hole.
My favorite line was under the Campfire section, where it says: “The use of backpacker stoves with self-contained fuel is urged when primitive camping.” Fathers and sons gathering butane canisters for the evening campfire. Ghost stories and Smores around the hissing blue flame.
Right now my junior high school Vice-Principal is reading this and thinking: yup, Mance still has problems with authority. It’s a little bit true. But there’s a larger, more universal point here involving the ongoing debate around public forestland. In the media, the whole conversation is usually simplified to the ideological talking points around public vs. private ownership. Private forestland generates more taxes for a local community, usually contributes more to the local wood economy because it has to generate a return, is part of the 40-acres-and-a-mule ethos the country was built on. Public land advocates go right to New Deal populism and recreation: in a world full of posted signs, State land is your land, my land, made for you and me.
But as this experience shows, the whole idea of recreation on the people’s land comes with strings attached. And when a warden kicks you off “your land” on a rainy night for setting up a tent, it’s hard not to feel a touch betrayed by the message. It’s disturbing to me that the powers that be are not making a distinction between New York’s Central Park, say, where of course camping and open fires should be regulated, and 300,000 acres of woods in Vermont. What’s absolutely terrifying to me is the idea that maybe I’m the weird one. That what I think is common sense is just not common anymore.
This whole debate is playing out in a big way in Maine, where landowner Roxanne Quimby is trying to donate a large chunk of former working forestland she owns to the federal government so they can make a new National Park. Proponents cite the environmental benefits of the move and the “open” access. Opponents, which includes a lot of the locals, feel like I did last Friday night. They used to camp and hunt and snowmobile and make open campfires on this land when the timber companies owned it. They’ve seen some of these privileges taken away under Quimby’s ownership, and they fear that government ownership would mean more velvet ropes. More woods under glass.
Here’s the latest on this from Maine. We’ll see how it all works out.
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