When the going gets tough, the clever go fishing. Few pastimes connect a person to the natural world like standing in a free-flowing stream casting for smallmouth or trout. The distant noise of commerce and the clamor of politics fade to nothing. For others, a long walk on the beach, the cry of seagulls and the eternal slap and sigh of the surf provide similar therapy.
So naturally, there are wealthy landowners who want to keep it all for themselves. No peasants wading in their private Colorado rivers or spoiling the view from their Florida mansions. Some would declare property rights to the Gulf of Mexico if they could.
If the phrase “private rivers” strikes you as odd, check out Ben Ryder Howe’s recent New York Times article about the ongoing conflict between fly fishermen, rafters and tycoons in Colorado.
Howe explains while federal law establishes that all navigable streams are owned by the states in trust for the public, “a series of unusual rulings have given landowners leeway to bar the public from riverbeds adjoining their property — and the water covering them, even if people float onto it after entering legally elsewhere.”
In extreme instances, Howe reported, fly fishermen have been shot at, although nobody’s been killed or wounded.
To sportsmen and women elsewhere in the United States, the Colorado situation is bizarre, although not particularly surprising to anybody familiar with the growing sense of entitlement among America’s cash-swollen new plutocrats.
In Arkansas, where I live, the conflicts described between landowners and outdoor recreation enthusiasts would be well-nigh unthinkable. Back when Bill Clinton was governor, and then president, I used to spend hours at a time wading up to my waist casting for trout in the White River adjacent to the failed Whitewater real estate development. I had no idea who owned the land.
With a state Game and Fish Commission access point a half-mile downstream, it never mattered. A non-native species, trout flourish below a hydroelectric dam run by the Army Corps of Engineers; it’s basically a federal river. It’s also among the best trout fishing in the world, although fly fishermen prefer mountain streams.
I once accompanied an Australian TV crew on a float trip past Whitewater. After a couple of days in the Arkansas outback, I asked what they thought of the idea, then popular among right-wing cranks, that Clinton presided over a corrupt police state.
“Couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, mate,” one said. Arkansas, he added, made him homesick for New South Wales.
But I digress. Down on the so-called “Redneck Riviera” on the Florida panhandle, another former Arkansas governor recently displayed a lordly sense of entitlement that might sound familiar to Colorado sportsmen.
Two-time GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee bought a beachfront lot on the gulf near Destin, circumvented state environmental codes by building an artificial sand dune and constructed an elaborate three-story mansion. Huckabee then fought a protracted legal battle to prevent people from walking on his personal beach (Florida law guarantees public access) before finally selling the place for a reported $9.5 million and moving back to Little Rock.
His daughter, former Trump mouthpiece Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is expected to be elected Arkansas governor come November. She has vowed to abolish the state income tax, which will save Daddy a bundle.
Meanwhile, out in Colorado, an 81-year-old fly fisherman with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics has filed a lawsuit to prevent the state government from turning public rivers into private, members-only enclaves. Roger Hill told the Times he can remember when gaining access to his favorite pools and rapids wasn’t a problem.
As long as he was friendly and asked permission, the elderly angler said, he had no problems. “Nobody ever said anything,” he said.
All that has changed with Colorado’s rapid population growth, as outsiders with money moved in and what some call “amenity ranches” proliferated. “Along sections favored by trout and Mr. Hill,” Howe wrote, “‘No Trespassing’ signs sprouted up as real estate developers bought and subdivided the adjacent land.”
“Properties along rivers are luxury items,” Hill told the reporter. People who own them are all too often reluctant to share them.
“There’s a bigger issue here, which is the privatization of the commons,” Montana author and public access proponent Hal Herring told the reporter.
Some of the largest landowners in Colorado are media moguls like CNN founder Ted Turner. Michael Bloomberg bought a ranch there five times larger than Central Park in New York, where he used to be mayor. Farther north, Fox News and Wall Street Journal proprietor Rupert Murdoch owns a Montana spread that’s the largest in the United States.
Like fisherman Hill, who professes “a childlike faith in the legal process,” I don’t see how he loses his lawsuit. Unless we’re just going to go ahead and declare the U.S. a hereditary monarchy, the rivers belong to us all.
Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and author of “The Hunting of the President.”
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