From the Ashes of Redwall Abbey: the Brambly Hedge Story

The roots of Brambly Hedge are stained with blood. While I, like most people, fondly remembered the charming little stories as a countryside idyll from early childhood, as I read them to my daughter a darker truth revealed itself in the corners of Jill Barklem’s bewitching illustrations. While the mice of the hedge –Poppy Eyebright, Mr. and Mrs. Apple, Dusty Dogwood, and the rest – spend their days gathering berries, singing songs, and getting into innocent mischief, a close reading of the texts shows that this is a world borne of steel and desperation. It is clear to me that the Brambly Hedge series is a continuation from the epic, war-torn world of Redwall.

The heirs of violence.

NOTE – I am not going to discuss Primrose in Charge or Wilfred to the Rescue here; they are not canon.

Brian Jacques’ Redwall books, as you should all know, tell tales of animals living in and around Redwall Abbey and the Mossflower Woods (and in further-flung parts of that world, as the series progresses). Like so many fantasy series, they’re set in a fictional version of England – the species that populate the books are almost all native to the UK, and the landscapes are pre-industrial but decidedly British. They are constantly violent, like Game of Thrones with Beatrix Potter’s characters. The main protagonists – badgers, hedgehogs, hares, and especially mice – are constantly under assault by rats, wildcats, and ferrets. All but the gentlest of characters fight and kill other creatures. It’s a more or less feudal society – Mossflower has abbots but no kings or gods; other species have kings and lords – with its own myths and folkways and values. I won’t go into them in depth – with the exception of the characters being animals, the Redwall books are not very different from any good fantasy series for young adults. I’ll just leave you with the knowledge that the last book ends with no sweeping societal resolution. The Abbey is saved from the latest marauders, to be sure, but there’s no reason to think that life in Mossflower won’t continue to be defined by the sword forever.

An ordinary day in Mossflower.

Fast forward from here to Brambly Hedge. On the surface, the mice of the hedge enjoy a delightful existence; everyone is friends, everyone revels in the turn of the seasons, everyone celebrates each other…all that they need to do is gather, prepare and eat delicious food together. Such, it seems, is life in the Hedge.

However. By the 850^th reading of The Secret Staircase, you notice things. You notice that the Old Oak Palace, along with a variety of other places in and around Brambly Hedge, contains massive networks of secret or lost hallways and storerooms. Why are they hidden? By whom? FROM whom? When Wilfred and Primrose explore the further reaches of the Palace, they find suits of plate armor standing in the sumptuous ballrooms among paintings and tapestries…and thrones.

This place.

There’s more. In Sea Story, the mice voyage down to the coast in a dhow-like craft,  clearly the work of sophisticated shipwrights. In The High Hills, Wilfred and Mr. Apple go on a difficult, dangerous mission into the mountains to deliver blankets to voles. In Winter Story, the mice show themselves to be adept at subnivean living despite apparently not having seen snow in many years. All of this raises many questions.

Consider the throne room. This room could not be the product of the subsistence-gathering economy we see depicted throughout the eight Brambly Hedge books. This room speaks of an elite class of mice, mice that had assembled the resources to import marble and commission self-glorifying artworks – and that commanded the military power to collect and protect those resources. The tapestry we can make out most completely indicates a starker, harder era in Brambly history – it is an unclad mouse (in the books the mice are clothed), with a spear, on a yellow field littered with what can only be arrowheads.

All of these are clues to the origins of Lord and Lady Woodmouse’s power in Hedge society. Their position of authority is not examined, let alone critiqued or challenged, in any of the books. While they appear to be benevolent and kind, and they allow their daughter to play with common children, there is no question about their social role. They live in a literal palace, and Lord Woodmouse presides over all public occasions….except spiritual occasions like weddings and christenings. For this they’re joined by Old Vole, who lives nearby.

What are we to make of all this? The clue is in the hedge. Hedgerows, in and of themselves, indicate major environmental change. The forests were destroyed somehow, and we see enough of the landscape – the map on the inside cover of the book is quite clear – to know that the trees are not growing back. What transformed the landscape, and with it the life of the mice? Fires, followed by the influx of some sort of browsing ungulate (aurochses, I would think – in real life, they only went extinct in the 17^th century), seem like the likeliest mechanisms. Given that the evil characters in the Redwall books are almost always carnivores, the safest guess would be that at some point Mossflower was invaded by hawks, which hunted the rodents with fire – hawks actually do this – and then continued to burn in order to keep hunting grounds open and mice contained. While Redwall Abbey itself was made of sandstone and would not burn, the devastation of forest habitat and the way of life associated with it would have triggered a religious and political crisis in Mossflower.

Imagine. The fall of the woodland and the depredations of the raptors devastates Mossflower society. Whereas they’ve always been able to meet their enemies – rats, weasels – on the field of battle, the hawks really cannot be defeated. The sword of Martin is useless against air power. Traumatized mice stream into the Abbey from the countryside. In this sort of concentration, diseases run rampant through the community, and mice are forced to choose between dying of fever in the filthy, teeming Abbey, or in the talons of a hawk after foraging through the ashy wasteland that had been Mossflower. This pressure fissures the tolerant multi-species society depicted in the Redwall books, as badgers and hares retreat to Salamandastron, and shrews and hedgehogs, defended by their spines and venom, negotiate a separate peace with the hawks. The power of the abbots is broken – three die of fever in rapid succession, elevating a good-hearted but timid mouse who can provide neither defense nor sustenance nor even spiritual comfort. An archer-king rises, compelling his people to abandon the abbey for a new home. While their short bows are not enough to defeat the hawks, the mice manage to fight their way across open ground to a thick tangle of vegetation surrounding an ancient oak tree. Oaks can live for more than a thousand years; the Old Oak was probably alive in the days of Mattimeo. The holly and ivy and brambles grow over a spring, so here the mice have both a supply of water and a protection against fire. The blackberry thorns keep the hawks away. In Brambly Hedge the shattered mice build their life anew.

For the mice, there is one benefit of this societal collapse – it destroyed their ancient foes, the rats, snakes, and so on. The hawks ate weasels just as they took squirrels, and though they could not readily carry off adult foxes or wildcats, they were happy to eat the kits. The vermin gangs, which bitterly hated the hawks but lacked the social cohesion of the abbey animals, dissipated into factions and melted away. The only predator we hear about in the Brambly Hedge books is weasels, and then as a child’s passing fear – we never see them. This tells us that the predators who’d ravaged Mossflower for eons only remain as a sort of hedge boogeyman.

The survivors do not return to the abbey; in a few generations, it is forgotten. The archer-kings, having established themselves in the hedge, realize that with their limited resource base they will not be able to support their followers, or to retain power. They send out delegations, traveling under cover or by night, to re-establish trading networks between the hedge, the coast, and the mountains. The blackberries growing on the hedge are distilled into a cordial that travels well and fetches a high price from dune and alpine animals that lack access to such products. Note that we see blackberry punch as a social lubricant in Winter Story. On the coast, the mice learn how to improve their shipbuilding from the water shrews they meet there. For a time, the liquor trade supports the mouse aristocracy, and they are able to import plate armor that renders mice impervious to the hawks – heavy to lift, and impossible to eat. After many years, the hawks leave.

But the mice push the resource too hard. The blackberry crop collapses, and in the lean winter that follows, the mice of the hedge, already mulling over the socialist values they’ve learned about from the shrew union, look askance at the marble statues and oil paintings adorning the Oak Palace. A great council is held in the empty store stump. The current king, a mouse of vision and subtlety, makes a public show of humility by asking a vole to preside over the meeting. He sits amongst the common mice in the audience. The king asks the vole to begin the meeting with a prayer for prosperity and wisdom.

By doing this, the king set the locus of spiritual authority outside the hedge and curtails its reach while retaining and respecting the vestiges of Abbey-era tradition. He also removed the main challenge to his own power. Thus Old Vole (as all the vole-priests are called – it is forbidden for mice to speak their given names) blesses weddings and name days. This explains the offerings of blankets the hedge mice bring voles in The High Hills – the voles are a priestly class who do not interfere with the secular authority as long as their needs are supported.

At the meeting, the mice decide to turn inward and make the kingdom into a commonwealth, run so as to be self-sufficient, and trading only for items important to the community, like salt. The king voluntarily abdicates, retaining only the style “Lord Woodmouse,” a title that carries with it an echo of the forests that were once the hedge mice’ home. The move preserves not only the Woodmouse family’s social position but also their home in the Old Oak Palace. Without income from the cordial trade, it is too expensive to maintain the entire stately home, so the doors to the far-flung rooms are shut and largely forgotten. But old folkways persist – the tradition of naming females for flowers for instance. Matthias’ wife, remember, is named Cornflower. When young Primrose and Wilfred rediscover the dusty halls of the regal era, even her father, the 287^th Lord Woodmouse, has only the faintest idea what his ancestors did or how his family came to live in the Old Oak Palace.

 

Yellowstone is Normal

Heading to the Lamar Valley

I went to Yellowstone last week, and of course I thought it was great, just like everyone else does. But the thought that struck me on the early morning of our first day and grew stronger as we went was that people love Yellowstone not because it is remarkable but because it is familiar. It is a place that we all know, that we’ve all been, that we’ve all felt, but that we have never seen, until we drive down the Lamar Valley, and watch bison eating the dewy grass of the morning, and we remember. Yellowstone is a normal place.

Most National Parks were created because of their unusual geology – think Delicate Arch, or Mt. Rainier – and of course this was the reason for Yellowstone as well. The geysers and hot springs astounded the first Europeans (and surely the first Indians, long ago) to come across them. And indeed, these are amazing – if you go, Old Faithful and Grand Prismatic Spring are both huge tourist traps and absolutely Worth It – but along the way, the box on the map called Yellowstone National Park also enclosed a big population of animals in an America that was doing its best to destroy them everywhere else, and enjoined people from hunting them, settling the park, or extracting its natural resources.* It also enclosed a landscape that, while rugged enough, was not nearly as steep or dramatic as the Gallatins or Tetons that surround it. Outside of the travertine terraces and rainbow-colored springs, the physical landscape looks more or less like any other collection of forests and meadows. The Hayden and Lamar Valleys, teeming with tourists, are beautiful, but beautiful in a comfortable, pleasant way. If they weren’t in the park, they’d be golf courses, or wheat fields. Change the wildlife species and the elevation, and it could be in western North Carolina.

*I am WELL aware that national parks like Yellowstone have been intensively and sometimes foolishly managed over the decades. I am aware of the legacy of poaching, squatting, carnivore suppression, fire suppression, goat introduction, wolf reintroduction etc etc etc etc etc. So, to your objection, yes. I know. What I am talking about here is 1) The language of the 1872 law that made Yellowstone, and then 2) The experience people have in the park now.

**Giant caveat. Hanging over our national parks is the removal, whether through disease or by violence, of the native tribes that had lived there for thousands of years before Europeans brought the idea of wilderness to America. But while the various tribes surely had different and more sustainable relationships with nature than Europeans did, they consciously managed their landscapes, and their ancestors helped hunt mammoths and ground sloths into extinction. This post is about Yellowstone animals and the way most tourists see them and the way I saw them.

The wildlife. When I was in grade school we had posters in the classroom with titles like “Wildlife of the Rain Forest” that had a jungle scene except with about thirty different species crawling around the trees. Did you have these? The Lamar Valley was like one of those posters but in real life. We saw antelopes and elk and wolves and bears and coyotes and bison. Some of them were far enough away to require powerful binoculars and telescopes; some of them crossed the road right in front of our car.

The two most exciting animals of the day were bison (Bison bison) and wolves (Canis lupus). Bison – and if you’ve ever gone to Yellowstone yourself, you know this – were EVERYWHERE. We saw hundreds and hundreds of them. Bison are like no other animal that I’ve seen – huge and powerful, with wicked horns, majestic from a distance, but profoundly silly up close, with their roundish silly faces and their hair hanging off in patches like an old classroom carpet. At one point we got in a traffic jam because a big herd of them rolled across the road in front of us. The herd kept coming for hours, just a stream of animals hustling out of the trees, to the point where it actually got kind of funny – when would it end? There were a lot of little bison calves in the group also, latte-colored Newfoundland-sized things with just the barest nubbins starting up from their foreheads. My daughter decided that this meant it was a day care class of bison.

We saw just four wolves. The first two were trying to take a pronghorn antelope calf, and the mother pronghorn, confident in her horns and her ability to outrun the wolves if necessary (they can go 50+ miles per hour) was doing her best to run them off. The wolves kept leaping around, making it hard to get a good look. They never got the calf, that we saw. Later on we got a better fix on a different pair of wolves, one of them sitting conveniently still, and we got a good long look. It was black and, sitting there, looked not very different than a husky; but a husky with a hundred people pulled over on the road to look at it.

Bison and wolves. I had never seen either of them in the wild before, and probably you haven’t either. Our ancestors would find this ridiculous. Bison were once the most common ungulate in America – 30 million of them, from western South Carolina to eastern Washington. You could not spend a year anywhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies without seeing many, many bison. Wolves, for their part, were even more common – they were once the most widely-distributed mammal in the northern hemisphere (other than people). You shared the landscape with wolves if you lived anywhere from Maine to California.*

*The American South, a region distinctive in this as in so many other things, had its own wolf species, the red wolf (Canis rufus). It status is under debate, politically and ecologically, but whatever it was in the 1700s, people called it a wolf and shared the landscape with it.

Also interesting…it’s not clear if western or southern California ever had wolves. Wolves can live anywhere, but they may not have made it over the Sierra Nevada.

So bison and wolves were ubiquitous American animals. Why did I have to go to Yellowstone to see them? Well, because they each, in their different ways, were the targets of what I can only call military policy that drove both species to extinction across most of the United States. The wild bison population got down to about a thousand. Wolves were eventually pushed to a little shred of their historic range in northern Minnesota. But times change and both species have rebounded a bit, but the best place to see them, in their natural environment and in the company of all the other large mammals with whom they shared North America since the Ice Age, remains Yellowstone National Park.

At this point, in 2018, it seems like the main impact that Yellowstone leaves on its tourists is the animals. To be sure, the geology is very popular, as anyone who’s sat in the traffic line to get in to Grand Prismatic Springs knows, but when people come back from Yellowstone (and having worked in the environmental field all my life, most of my friends have indeed been there) it’s the animals they talk about. In the cavernous, teeming gift shops, animal stuff outnumbers geological stuff about five to one. If there was a park just like Yellowstone but with no volcanic geology, people would still flock there from all over the world. If there was a park with Yellowstone’s geology but without the cool wildlife…it would be a cool regional attraction. In fact, there is one – have you been to Lassen Volcanic National Park?* Probably not.

*Lassen is great and you should go there if you can and it gets one fifth Yellowstone’s visitors despite being in California.

The reason for all this, I think, is that Americans live with the idea that the places they live, even if it’s a strip mall or a skyscraper, were wilderness just yesterday. That mountain lions once walked where my yard is now, and passenger pigeons roosted in the trees, is part of way I understand my life in South Carolina’s piedmont. But most of us get to visit only little shreds of our ancestral landscapes – hikes in state parks and quail hunts on ranches and so on. When we go to those places, the only sizable mammal we’re likely to see, particularly in the East, is a deer.

The preservation of Yellowstone’s perfectly normal landscapes, and the perfectly normal fauna the park supports, and the way they bring pilgrims from all over the world to northwestern Wyoming…they got me thinking. Imagine if every region had a Yellowstone. Imagine if the southern third of Florida, or the San Joaquin Valley of California, or the middle third of Illinois, or the northern half of Maine, had been set aside for 150 years. Imagine the wildness we would gain. Of course I am not suggesting doing this now – these places have cities and economies and so on. But…as America becomes an increasingly urban nation, more and more landscapes hold fewer and fewer people. Most of these landscapes don’t have geysers or hot springs, but they all have some wildlife, and perhaps they could, in time and with management, regain most of their native fauna. Bison and wolves all ‘round!

 

The Antiquities Act and the Maine Woods

Two weeks ago President Trump and High-Horse Rider Ryan Zinke tossed the Antiquities Act off the top of a waterfall. What’ll be left of it after everything washes out below is anybody’s guess. Most of the focus, in the media and around the environmental community, has been on Bear’s Ears and Escalante-Grand Staircase. Understandably so – they got announced first, and Trump’s shrinking them. Or trying to; I think he’ll succeed. But the monument nearest to my heart isn’t any Utah canyon or California mountain, carved out of dusty BLM land. It’s in Maine. It’s mostly damp woods. And it owes its existence to chapstick. Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument (an awkward name, so I’m calling it KWW the rest of the way) is a gift to America that may allow us to return, a little, to the primeval New England that my Puritan ancestors found when they trudged up the beach after sailing from England. But with the release of the Zinke Report, it’s probably going to get logged. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. The key is in the quirky language of the quirky old Antiquities Act.

The Antiquities Act of 1906 allows presidents to turn any stretch of federal land into a national monument – almost the same thing as a national park – more or less immediately, on their own, after hardly any consultation with anyone. This is unlike any other power that the President wields. Some of our most iconic national parks –Zion! Acadia! The Grand Canyon! – started out as National Monuments. The Act originated in a desire to preserve archaeological treasures like the famous cliff dwellings of the Southwest; the first and third sections of the Act are specifically about these sorts of site. But the second section’s “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” were understood, from the get-go, to include landscape-scale preserves. Zinke wrinkles his eyebrows at landscape preservation under the Act (this is one of roughly a hundred things wrong with the report) but there is no reason that ecological wonders are any less important than geological ones. If Zinke doesn’t like it he can take it up with the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt, who surely rides bumptiously through the hallways of the Department of the Interior to this day. In 1908, with the Act still fresh, President Roosevelt protected 800,000 acres of Grand Canyon.

While he was doing this, in the other corner of the country, the woods of Northern Maine were about the last wilderness left in the Northeast. Northern Maine had wolves, and even caribou, until the 1890s. Also, unlike in many parts of New England, there was (and is) a strong Native presence as well – the Penobscot Nation has been there since time out of mind.

The Maine woods, whether you’ve been there or not, have a lot to do with what you, as an American, think about nature. If any landscape in America is an Antiquity, a treasure of America’s cultural heritage, it is this one. Everyone knows that environmental founding father Henry David Thoreau sat in his cabin at Walden Pond and thought profound thoughts about nature there, but he was still pretty much in Concord, Massachusetts when he did this. As his critics will gleefuly tell you, his mother did his laundry for him in those days. For Thoreau, real wilderness was the forests and hills around Mt. Katahdin, and his mixture of awe and terror when he actually went up there, in the 1840s and 1850s, has been felt by many a backpacker ever since. In 1879 Theodore Roosevelt, a citified young man of 21, went up to northern Maine himself, and it was there that America’s great environmental president began to carve himself into the rugged outdoorsman that we remember now. On into the 20^th century, as Americans began to explore the National Parks and Forests that Roosevelt established, thousands of them did so adorned with packs, boots, jackets, sweaters (the list goes on) that carried the name of Leon Leonwood Bean. LL Bean dominated American outdoor gear for decades, and from its canoes to its ads to its Tinder-esque catalogue, Bean showed Americans how to thrive in the North Woods, and everyplace else.

One of the Americans swept down the same stream as Thoreau, Roosevelt, and Bean was Roxanne Quimby, a tent-dwelling Seventies hippie in rural Maine. Living a hard scrabble life, she eventually partnered with her beekeeping friend Burt Shavits, started making lip balm, and built up the skin care company Burt’s Bees. You’ve seen Burt’s face in stores all over America. In the mid-2000s, Roxanne sold her parts of the business, and made hundreds of millions of dollars.

She decided to buy land. “I can think of no better thing to do with Burt’s Bees profits than to return them to the earth,” is how she put it. She turned her eyes to the forests of northern Maine. The main(e) industry there had been timber, but by the 21^st century, the timber companies weren’t making much money, and Quimby was able to buy huge tracts of land relatively cheap. Her hope was to buy enough to make a national park. Eventually, she had 87,000 acres – not huge, but bigger than, say, Arches, or Acadia – adjacent to 210,000-acre Baxter State Park (where Mt. Katahdin is). Along with a vision of conservation, she hoped that a park would bring a stream of tourists – 21^st-century versions of young Teddy Roosevelt – to one of the most economically depressed parts of Maine. But a lot of people in Northern Maine opposed it, and still do.

The core of the problem (along with the usual rural suspicions about outsiders and the federal government) was a fear that this would impinge on “traditional uses” like hunting, fishing, and snowmobiling. Funny thing is, these traditional uses…were of other people’s land.

At this point I have to say that I have a lot of sympathy for the people of northern Maine in this. When I was a kid in New Hampshire, the hills behind my house were mostly owned (or operated, anyway – I never knew the specifics) by a forest company. It was on a smaller scale than in Northern Maine, I am sure, but we’re still talking about a landscape of hundreds of acres. Some of the most joyous times of my life have been spent hiking or skiing through the forest company’s trees. More broadly, in the village where I lived, it was usual to run into a neighbor in your woods. Nobody thought much of it – if anything, it was a nice surprise when it happened. It would have been weird to bar other people from your land. So I understand the feelings at play here.

However. My fear (a fear that I still feel) was that the forest company would sell the land to a developer and turn the hillsides into condos. But I never, even at my teenager-est, believed that the company owed me anything. The only response, to prevent this from happening, would have been to buy the land myself. Our familiar woods and hills may feel like public property, but they are not.

So. While the timber companies in the Katahdin area were happy to let the public hunt around their trees – it was cheap public relations, at least – the companies were not beholden to the public in any way. When they sold their private property to another private party, the new owner could do what she wanted, within the law. America is not Sweden, where anyone can travel through anyone else’s land. I’ll bet that the same people who complain about losing traditional uses would also call themselves property rights advocates, and would hate it if the government passed a law opening up their land to the public.

Even after years of meetings and negotiation between the Quimby/St. Clair family (Roxanne’s son Lucas St. Clair is the point person on the issue) and other stakeholders, the pushback was such that the Maine delegation, wishing to get some votes from the North Woods, declined to introduce legislation to make a national park. The next option was the Antiquities Act. President Obama created KWW in August 2016.

Funnily enough, the lands’ transfer to the federal government gave Mainers more say over Katahdin Woods and Waters than they’d had before. As long as Roxanne Quimby owned the land, it wasn’t really their business.

Local fears are a little overblown – you can hunt and fish and snowmobile in KWW, though not in all parts of it. The only traditional use that’s missing is logging. Presumably if the land was full of valuable timber, the companies would be cutting that timber, and wouldn’t have sold their land away. But the trees, of course, keep on growing. Eventually, Katahdin Woods and Waters will be attractive timber land again.

Enter the Zinke Report. The terms of the monument will be amended to allow for “active timber management.” The understanding, at this point, is that this will apply to ensuring that forests are healthy. But the Park Service was already able to do this. So why make an spell it out this way? My guess is that it’s a marker for the future. If “active timber management” is enshrined as a managing principle of the Monument, eventually someone will want to actively manage that timber. It will be easy for a sympathetic Interior Department to interpret the phrase broadly, state that a cut is necessary for forest health, and let in the chainsaws. This is a well-established practice on other public landscapes. If (well, when) someone sues the government can point to the phrase “active timber management” and expect deference from the court in its interpretation thereof. Done and done. And while the landscape will surely retain some of its wild qualities, it will be more like a National Forest, with their many conflicting uses, than a National Monument.

What about the Antiquities Act, overall? There are lawsuits in motion right now challenging Trump’s shrinking of Bears Ears and the others. I imagine that, in the end, the administration will succeed – while I don’t favor shrinking monuments, it seems to me that the Act allows a President to do this. It’s not in the text, of course, which may give conservative judges pause…but not that much pause. The decision will stand.

Once it does, pandemonium. If a president can shrink monuments, will any monument be safe? What other landscapes will an emboldened Trump Administration target? This will, I predict, be the end of the Antiquities Act, as environmentalists worried that they might lose their beloved protections join hands with conservatives who want no new monuments, and vote for repeal. I think this will happen in the next three administrations. In the meantime, who knows what will transpire in Katahdin Woods and Waters? I bet Roxanne Quimby will wish she’d held out for a National Park.

 

 

Scull and Crossbones

Friend or foe?

Craftsbury Common, Vermont is a town that belongs in a Robert Frost poem. It is the Vermont that the state’s department of tourism wants you to imagine. As you drive up here from the outside world, you follow the paved road – the only paved road – uphill past the old common and its dignified white buildings, by the dairy with its on-brand cows and their off-brand smell, then down through open meadows, Mt. Mansfield’s craggy ridgeline across the valley in the distance, and see, below you, boats on Great and Little Hosmer Ponds below. But, just like in a Robert Frost poem, doubt, fear, and anger flow through the bucolic landscape.

Craftsbury, like so many towns in rural New England, relies on outsiders driving their Subarus up from Boston and New York, and indeed Burlington, to spend their money having fun in the landscape. On Great Hosmer Pond, two groups of outsiders are at loggerheads: summer cabin owners, who want to waterski on their vacations, and rowers, who want to scull without being clotheslined by a tow rope. An understandable controversy – the waters of Great Hosmer belong to the public, and both rowing and waterskiing are very fun. The rowers, it’s important to mention, are mostly under the auspices of the Craftsbury Outdoor Center. The Outdoor Center has been on the pond for decades, training scullers from sleek Olympians who look like Greek statues to wobbly middle-aged executives who look like Greek salads.

But these rowers take up great swathes of Great Hosmer. The situation’s gotten pretty angry – in 2015 some of the cabin owners even picketed the Outdoor Center, massing their kayaks and motorboats and barring rowers from the water. Now the state of Vermont is drafting rules that would keep rowers off the pond in the afternoon and late evening.

But really, Great Hosmer shouldn’t have water skiers at all. The pond is 160 feet wide at its narrowest point, and according to Vermont law, boaters aren’t allowed to go more than 5 miles per hour in such places. But the cabin owners, having been there since before the rule was made, get their skiing grandfathered in. Now, credit where it’s due – the cabin owners have to be deeply committed to water-skiing to fight so hard to clear the lake that’s barely wide enough to turn the boat around. But why should they get to keep vrooming around, when the state of Vermont has (correctly) identified doing so as harmful and dangerous? Should we let people in Nantucket kill whales because it’s traditional? Should chemical companies get to dump toxic sludge in the nearest creek because that’s what they did in 1927? Of course not.

(Some scullers can get beyond 5 miles per hour, it’s true, but these people are rare enough to be a non-issue here. Coaching boats should be subject to the same restrictions as skiing boats.)

We see a lot of grandfathering in environmental policy, and in the short term, it’s understandable – people need time to adjust to new ideas. But an indefinite extension of harmful actions, and the restriction of others’ use of the public waters to facilitate those actions, is absurd. I could see some sort of grace period – five years, maybe, after the rule was made – that would give people a chance to get used to the idea and maybe sell their motorboats, but that’s about it. We live in a free society, and freely we decide amongst ourselves how to value nature and shape its future. If we’re going to make laws protecting the environment and the public’s enjoyment thereof, let’s make actual rules.

The other takeaway, from my perspective, is that the Hosmer Ponds, and the Black River into which they drain, need a watershed council. If a group of water users and property owners, and agency personnel, met regularly, knew and trusted each other, and were empowered to decide and manage the uses of their waterways within the bounds of the law, this sort of problem might have been resolved long ago. There have been some starts in this direction, and ideally the wrangle over skiing and sculling on Great Hosmer would let these efforts coalesce into something more permanent. If the vacationers and the rowers and the town got to sort these things out themselves, I bet we’d get more or less the same result, with far less acrimony. As someone once said, good fences make good neighbors.