Public Access: It’s the One That Got Away

Some of my friends are happily stringing up their fly rods. Summer is around the bend. For weeks, they’ve been jockeying through workday traffic without so much as a single murderous thought. They are blissfully lost to daydreams of cool mountain rivers and big skies. Of trout. Of Montana.

“An angler’s dream!” Montana calls itself. For the dimwitted, the state tourism agency explains: “In Montana, great fishing is a given.”

Well, not entirely so anymore, I’m afraid.

I feel sorry for my fly-fishing friends here in the city. A surprise awaits them. A crowded world is about to muscle them out of the way.

This summer, for the first time, Montana has thrown up roadblocks to outsiders. Locals have grown tired of rubbing shoulders with mobs of vacation anglers from Dallas and Los Angeles and Detroit and New York. So Montana officials marked out some of the finest public fishing water for “locals only” beginning this season.

As Montana sees it, the state is taking back some of its trout water for itself. As my friends here in the city complain, it’s a lousy, stinking rip-off.

I say it’s part of a trend, and a wretched one, that has taken selfish root in the United States.

The imposition of private property rights on what always has been regarded as public terrain is happening from one end of the country to the other. In Connecticut, tourists are beckoned to “experience the beauty” of the state. Except cities like Greenwich reserve access to ocean beaches for residents only, leaving visitors, I guess, to drop in on the Garbage Museum in Stratford, which is open to all. Southern Californians carry the idea to extremes when private streets are gated off by wealthy residents to keep out everyone with less wealth--except maids, gardeners and, if needed, a fireman or paramedic. Cities in many states freely grant local residents preferential parking rights on public rights-of-way.

But who would have guessed that Montana, with its $1.7-billion tourism industry, would have joined the ugly urbanites?

The West, and by that I mean the Rocky Mountain West, has always been

Yes, hunters always have been given local advantage. But that has been a food issue. Fly-fishing is not about food; it’s about recreation. Catch and release. And recreation has been the backbone of Montana’s tourist industry.

This year, sections of the famed Big Hole River, known for its huge trout, will be off limits to nonresidents on weekends. Newcomers who use guides will be limited, day by day, along parts of the river all week long. Nonresidents also will be squeezed off of the blue-ribbon Beaverhead River.

“This is awful,” moaned my fly-fishing friend Eileen Padberg. “The water, the rivers, the sky, they belong to us all. And only God can decree otherwise.”

Or, it seems, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Naturally, tourism officials are trying to soft-soap this new affront to outsiders. Visitor guides call the restrictions an “innovation” that will provide “a better trout fishing experience for all anglers.” Which is like saying we’d have a better experience at Disneyland if they’d just keep the damned tourists from standing in line.

So, who’s behind this hoisting of the drawbridge? Friends up there tell me the pressure is coming not so much from old-line Montanans but the new breed of transplants from California and elsewhere.

In my years of reporting on the West, I have experienced nothing so righteous as the territorial claims of those who just arrived from yonder--those fancy people who have filled up Montana’s splendid valleys with their hobby ranchettes and fences and who don’t want to see any more like themselves on the Big Hole. These migrants fled the cities, but they brought all their bad habits and attitudes with them.

So to my friends up there, you real Montanans, I say this: If the city transplants are getting you down this summer, if they’re intruding on your once-secret spot on the Big Hole and scaring the fish, jump in the pickup and come on down to California and enjoy a week at the beach.

Don’t worry about the crowds. That’s the whole point of the beach. And virtually the whole coastline here is open to you, a mecca of sun and some of the best people-watching in the world.

Oh, but be warned. Don’t be so foolish as to paddle out and try to go surfing. The locals will terrorize you and maybe vandalize your car. The waves in California, you understand, are for locals only.