Public Lands and Why They Matter More Than People Realize

You’re listening to Miles of Quiet. Episode Nine. This morning I woke up on a piece of land that belongs to me. It also belongs to you, and to a few hundred million other people, which is a strange kind of ownership, but it’s a real one. I was parked on a national forest road in the Cascades, a few miles up a gravel track, nobody around. I made coffee and watched the light come up through the trees. I didn’t pay anyone for the privilege, and nobody could tell me to leave.

I’ve woken up like that thousands of mornings now. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to really understand what makes it possible. It’s not the van. The van is just the tool. What makes this life possible is that there is land in this country that belongs to all of us, that you don’t have to be wealthy to set foot on. That’s what I want to talk about today.

So. I’m Henry Wilder. Last episode I talked about solitude, about getting far enough from everybody that you can finally hear yourself think. Here’s a thing I didn’t say clearly enough. Every one of those solo trips happened on public land. The quiet I go looking for, the empty country, the places with nobody around.

I can only get to them because that land is open to me, and to you, without a gate or a fee or a name on a deed. Here’s the thing about that. I live the way I live because public land exists. That’s not an exaggeration. Without it, none of this works. I think the first public land I ever loved, I didn’t know was public land.

My dad taught me to fish when I was twelve, and the water he took me to was a stretch of river anybody could walk down to. We didn’t own it. We didn’t know anybody who owned it. We just parked, and walked down through some trees, and there it was, ours for the afternoon like it was everybody’s. I didn’t think about it once. You don’t, when you’re twelve.

You assume the world is just arranged that way. That of course there’s a river you can go stand in, of course the woods are open. It wasn’t until I was living out of the van, decades later, driving from one open place to the next, that I understood that arrangement was a choice somebody made. That it could have gone another way. That in a lot of places, it did. The river my dad taught me on was a gift, and neither of us ever called it that, because it never occurred to us it could be taken back.

Let me make it concrete, because I don’t want to talk about it in the abstract. I’m not a wealthy man. I do all right. But I don’t own a piece of the mountains. I don’t have a cabin, or forty acres, or a lake house, or any of the things that let people with money have the outdoors whenever they want it. What I have is the same thing you have, whether you’ve ever thought about it or not.

Hundreds of millions of acres of public land. National forests, wilderness areas, high desert, river corridors. Land held in common that any one of us can walk onto. Without that, being outside would be a rich person’s hobby. You’d need to own the land, or know somebody who did, or pay for access to somebody else’s. The mountains would be a gated thing.

And a life like mine, driving from one open place to the next, sleeping on ground nobody can charge me for, would simply not be possible. It would be illegal, or unaffordable, or both. I think about that more than you’d expect. Every time I pull up a forest road and park for the night, I’m using something that people a long time ago decided to keep in common hands. And I did nothing to earn it except be born in a country that happened to hold onto it. And it almost didn’t go that way.

I’m not going to give you a history lecture. That’s not what this is, and I’m not the guy for it. But the short version is worth knowing. There was a long stretch where the assumption was that all this land would eventually get sold off. Carved up, handed to whoever could make the most money off it. In most of the world, over most of history, that’s exactly what happened.

The reason the American West still has these enormous stretches of open country that belong to everybody is that some people, a long time ago, decided that was worth protecting. That it was better to keep some of it in common than to sell all of it to the few. That decision is why I can do what I do. It’s why you can drive to a trailhead this weekend without asking anyone’s permission. We inherited that. We didn’t build it.

We just get to use it. And things you inherit are easy to take for granted, right up until somebody suggests taking them away. I’ve watched things change in my time out here, in small ways that add up. Places that used to be open, quietly closed. A forest road gated one season that was open the season before. A dispersed camping spot I’d used for years posted with new limits, or shut down entirely.

Some of that is fair, by the way. Places get loved to death, and sometimes closing an area for a while is how you save it. I’m not against every gate. But some of it is the slower thing, the thing that actually worries me. The steady sense that access is something that can be narrowed, a piece at a time, and that most people won’t notice until the piece that mattered to them is the one that’s gone. Nobody wakes up to a headline that says the outdoors is closed.

It goes quietly. A road here, a permit there, a stretch of river you can’t get to anymore because the only way in crossed land that changed hands. You don’t lose it all at once. You lose it the way you lose anything you stopped paying attention to. I’ll give you a specific one, because it still bothers me. There was a stretch of river I fished for a couple of years, up in the high desert, that you reached by a road running along the edge of a big private ranch.

The river itself was public. The water always is, in Oregon, up to the high water line. But the only reasonable way in crossed a corner of private land, on a track people had used for decades. And one year, that corner got posted. New owner, new signs, and just like that a few miles of public river had no public way to reach it. The river was still everybody’s on paper.

In practice it belonged to whoever owned the ground around it. Nothing illegal happened. Nobody did anything wrong, exactly. But a place that had been open my whole time out there quietly stopped being open, and most people never even knew it was a place to lose. That’s how it usually goes. Not a fight you can show up to.

Just a gate, and a sign, and a road that used to go somewhere. I want to try to say what this actually means to me, and it’s harder to put into words than the practical part. When I stand on public land, I feel like I have a stake in something. Not ownership exactly. I said it’s a strange kind of ownership. More like belonging.

There’s a piece of this country that is mine as much as anyone’s, and no amount of money can buy somebody a bigger share of it than I’ve got. A billionaire and I have exactly the same right to that trail. There aren’t many things left like that. Almost everything else, money buys you a better version of. A better seat. A better room.

A better view out a window somebody owns. But the view from a public trail is the same view for everybody who walks up to it. The mountain doesn’t know what’s in your bank account. That’s rare, and I don’t think we appreciate how rare it is. And it’s not just me it matters for. It matters most for the people who have the least.

If you’re a kid whose family doesn’t own anything, public land might be the only place you ever get to feel like the whole world isn’t fenced off from you. The only nature you can afford is the nature we hold in common. Take that away and the outdoors becomes one more thing that belongs to the people who already have everything. A country club with a mountain view. I’ve met people out on the trail from every kind of life you can imagine. Retired folks in a beat-up camper, kids sleeping in a sedan to make a weekend work, families who saved all year for one trip.

Not one of them could do it if the land weren’t free to stand on. That’s the part that gets me. It’s the most democratic thing we’ve got left. The one luxury that isn’t sorted by income. There’s a tension in what I’m telling you, and I’d be lying if I pretended there wasn’t. The more people who use these places, the more crowded and worn-out they get.

I’ve watched quiet spots turn into busy ones. I’ve complained about it, same as anybody. There’s a selfish part of me that would love it if fewer people discovered the country I love. But I’ve had to make my peace with the fact that you can’t have it both ways. Land that people use is land that people fight for. The empty places nobody visits are the easiest ones to sell off, because there’s no one around to notice or object.

So the crowds that annoy me are also the thing that protects the place from something a lot worse than crowds. I’d rather share a trailhead with forty people who care than have the whole valley to myself right up until the day it’s gone. That’s a trade I didn’t want to accept for a while. I accept it now. So here’s the part where a lot of people expect me to get political, and I’m not going to. I don’t care who you vote for.

I really don’t. The outdoors doesn’t care either. The land doesn’t know your politics, and the people who love it come from every direction you can imagine. I’ve shared campfires and riverbanks with people I’d disagree with about nearly everything, and none of it mattered, because we were both there for the same reason. That’s actually the whole argument. This is one of the few things left that people across every line still share.

All I’d ask is that you notice it. That you understand the access you have wasn’t guaranteed and isn’t permanent. That the ability to drive up a mountain and sleep under trees that belong to all of us is a thing somebody has to keep choosing to protect. Pay a little attention to who’s making decisions about these places. Show up to them, use them, so they stay valued. Land that people use gets defended.

Land that people forget gets quietly disposed of. That’s the whole ask. I’m not going to tell you what to do beyond that. I’m just telling you not to take it for granted, because I did for years, and I feel a little ashamed of that now. I used to think of public land as a backdrop. The place my life happened to happen.

Now I think of it as the thing that makes the life possible at all. Every morning I wake up in the quiet, on ground that’s mine and yours both, I’m spending an inheritance I didn’t earn and can’t replace. The least I can do is not pretend it’ll always be there on its own. I’ve started doing small things about it, and I want to be honest that they’re small. I pay attention to who’s deciding what happens to these places, in a way I never used to. I show up to the ones near me, and I try to leave them the way I found them, or a little better.

When somebody’s organizing to keep a piece of land open, I put my name on it, or a few dollars, or a day of work. None of that is heroic. I’m not out here chaining myself to anything. I’m just a guy who finally understood he’d been living off something he never once said thank you for. And saying thank you, for a thing like this, mostly means not letting it disappear on your watch without noticing. You don’t have to be political about it.

You just have to show up. The land doesn’t care about your politics. It just needs people who care about it. Next time I want to talk about why I don’t keep the fish I catch. People ask me about that more than almost anything else, and the honest answer tends to surprise them. I fish to fish, not to eat.

The fish is kind of beside the point. I want to get into what catch and release actually is, and what it has to do with the difference between taking something and just appreciating it. I’m Henry Wilder. This has been Miles of Quiet. There’s a piece of country out there with your name on the deed, same as mine. Might be worth going to look at it.