We Can't Own It All

Diane Sylvain

Diane Sylvain is an artist and writer who works for High Country News in Paonia, Colorado, where she also resides. She has been drawn to wilderness since she was a child. This piece was written in response to what Diane describes as an obnoxious letter from a conservative antienvironmentalist, which was sent to the newspaper, and which raised her normally placid blood pressure to geyser intensity. She is currently putting together her first book, a collection of essays. "We Can’t Own It All” was first published in the November 4, 1991, issue of High Country News.

A river rock sits in the center of my palm as round and smooth as a world. It is smaller than a robin’s egg and a color that I have no name for, so dark a green it is almost black. This stone is older than the river that pounded it smooth. It came from the edge of the Colorado River, from the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

I found it seven years ago on a fifteen-day-long backpacking trip. I did not know then that it would be the last time I picked up rocks in the bottom of the Grand, at least after hiking in to get there. I had no idea that this small stone would come to seem to me, on some sad days, like a letter saved from a friend who had since died.

But I am not writing a eulogy to my former, able-bodied self; I am writing in response to an editorial newspaper letter in which the writer said he “would feel better if more of our public lands were ‘improved’ to the extent that people with limited time, money or physical abilities could enjoy them.”

I thought about this for a long time. I don't claim to speak for all environmentalists or for all those with physical impairments. As disabilities go, mine is comparatively minor. I have a back injury; I use a cane; I wear an orthopedic brace on one leg. After six years of exercise and physical therapy, I get around fairly well: I have even begun to hike again, for short distances on easy trails with a companion.

So in many ways — I am fully aware — I am lucky. But I have begun to accept that I will never again hoist a forty-pound pack onto my back, or stride out into the canyon country for two weeks of adventurous travel. And there are days that I find it difficult to get to the post office, or walk around the block. In this respect, I fit the letter writer’s description of one who has no “meaningful access” to many places I would love to reach.

Yet I wonder if he and I mean the same thing by those words. His concept seems to include anything from the installation of escalators in the Grand Canyon, to the opening up of wild areas to all-terrain vehicles and oil drilling.

I would be more likely to take his concern for the “infirm” seriously if I knew that conservatives like him who express it were hard at work installing wheelchair ramps, providing medical care and doing what is needed to give the disabled “meaningful access” to the places we already live in.

He misses the point anyway in this whole debate about whether wild areas should be accessible. It seems to me that a wild area is by definition a place that is hard to get to, that is remote, dangerous, and that takes time and health and strength of heart to find. It is a place that by definition is not easily accessible.

There are those of us who cannot climb mountains who still love the sight of them on the horizon. We love the idea of mystery left in the world, of open spaces and wild places, where only the creatures that are born there roam. What we receive from all this is something the writer of this letter doesn’t understand.

Six years ago, when I entered the hospital, I took that Colorado River rock with me and kept it on my bedside table. The weight of it in my hand gave me strength. It reminded me that the river it came from still ran through my heart, that even in the white room of the hospital my bones were as real as Grand Canyon rock.

If I ever do strap on a backpack again, to make my slow way down to the canyon bottom, I will give this stone back to the river because I realize now that I don’t need to keep it. The thing about this strange world that breaks our hearts and makes it all so precious is that none of us gets keep anything, anyway. None of us gets to have all that she wants or se everything he dreams of seeing.

But these thoughts will not make sense to someone who regards environmentalists as “over-paid, greedy-little-white kids that refuse to share their toys.” Unfortunately, the person who made this statement in the editorial will not understand my point until he learns to love the things can’t own, until he realizes that the natural world was never his “toy” to begin with.