We fight for common soil

By Toner Mitchell

Growing up in New Mexico, you finished what you were doing on Friday and drove into the mountains, first with Mom and Dad, then, once you got your driver’s license, by yourself or with friends. In the fall, you hunted and cut firewood, and in the winter you skied. During summer, you fished. If you had tequila and beer, you drank. For contingencies, you threw in sleeping bags, tortillas, beans, and lunchmeat. You gave none of it the first thought, thanks to the U.S. Forest Service.

At the beginning of our freshman year at a small New England college, my best friend and I drove east across the country in three days. Having never left home in any significant way, we were probably a little afraid, but mainly we were tired and in desperate need of some ground to lie on. Every corner of every road off the highway had mailboxes on it, and we ended up draining our precious cash for a space at an RV court. Even then, it didn’t occur to us that we had entered a world where one couldn’t just pull off and camp as one pleased, a world where one didn’t camp, but Kamped.

I have no beef with Massachusetts, not now nor in my college years. Certainly there would be no reason to, given the scant basis for comparison to where I’m from. Massachusetts has more than three times the population of New Mexico, yet it is barely three times the area of the Santa Fe National Forest, which is located a short walk from where I attended high school.

New Mexico has cutthroat trout and cactus, Massachusetts has stripers and rain. Culturally, topographically, and natural historically, the two places could hardly be more different.

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Thanks to the Sagebrush Rebellion and the recent putsch by a tiny extremist minority to privatize public lands through their transfer to the states, I’m now vividly aware that New Mexico, as all Western states, has lots of public land. Massachusetts does not, which an angry majority of true Americans realizes speaks more to what these states share than what they don’t.

Truth is, Massachussetts doesn’t need to have public lands, because it already does. As members of these United States, each resident of that state owns a 330-millionth share of New Mexico’s national forests, its Rio Grande del Norte National Monument and its Carlsbad Caverns, as well as every other acre of public forest, grassland, and park in this nation.

Those who play on these lands and those who work on it derive separate but equal benefit from our common estate. And when we fight our enemies, be they foreign or in our midst, we fight for common soil.