WWTD? (What would Thoreau do? Fly a helicopter)
Last weekend I drove out to the Berkshires for a wedding. It was my first roadtrip since buying the helicopter and I was struck by how difficult it was to get an idea of how things were arranged and how people were living. The vast majority of the land in the Berkshires, a branch of the Appalachian Mountains, is inaccessible to the ground-bound due to the fact that it is fenced-off and private or simply that there are no roads. Great Britain has a tradition of “right to roam”, now codified (see http://www.countrysideaccess.gov.uk/), that would enable a sturdy walker to poke around on foot, and citizens of former Communist countries were able to walk most places, but the U.S. has no such tradition.
Henry David Thoreau saw our modern confinement coming in his June 1862 Atlantic magazine essay, Walking:
… most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. … I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since … the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, … but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. …
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.” …
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? …
There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. …
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.
Are Thoreau’s “evil days” here? For the ground-bound, certainly, but I don’t feel them when I’m up in an aircraft. In more or less the entire United States, it is possible to fly anywhere one wishes for the simple pleasure of looking. We members of the public have lost some airspace to the military, for training. We have lost some as a result of fears of additional attacks by angry Muslims. We have lost some as a result of politicians being paid off by corporations who did not want their captive audience seeing advertisements from banner towing airplanes (Disney grabbed airspace above its theme parks and the professional sports owners grabbed the airspace over stadiums; they’d been trying for years, but the FAA’s staunch resistance was too great until the September 11th attacks enabled the transfer of public property on the grounds of security).
Thoreau would today be arrested if he tried his old trick of walking around the beaches of Massachusetts, which, unlike in most states, are owned right down to the low tide waterline by the private property holder. Upon his release from jail, would he come down to our flight school (not far from his home in Concord) and learn to fly a helicopter?
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