Rightfully Roaming

I LIVE IN A LOWER middle class-working class 'hood in a town of two thousand souls in the former confederacy. My house is two blocks from a two lane state highway which meanders across the state, and through "my" town. I walk the three blocks to the senior for lunch each week day. Permit me to brag about the fact that whenever a car approaches a bit too rapidly. I can jog across the highway, particularly when hungry; essentially, always. I shorten the trip a bit by cutting across my neighbor's yard on the way; a concession to laziness, not age. During the twelve yearfs I have lived here, my neighbor's house has housed four different neighbors, all families, all of whom stayed on a couple of years. each time someone new moves in, I knock on their door, introduce myself, explaining that I am doing so primarily to prove to myself that I can, at times, behave like a proper gentleman. it always works out. the first thing I do is to ask permission to cut across their yard on my way to the senior center. I emphasize "senior center" because not only is it the truy, I hope to gain permission to trespass by playing on their sympathies, hoping they will accommodate an old man. It invariably seems to work. Admittedly, if and when a stranger walks across my yard, which is seldom, I feel a bit annoyed, as if my personal property rights have been violated. this, obviously, makes me a bit of a hypocrite; I won't tell if you won't. All this brings to mind just how proprietary we Americas are, myself included. What's mine is mine, and nobody else's. We Americans not only don't like anyone touching our possessions; we don't even want anyone else to look at them. we are a nation of privacy fences, secluded behind our brown wooden boxes, we are willing to prevent ourselves from seeing outside our box, in order that on one might see in. Is there something a bit, shall we say, "sick" about this? I heard a man on the radio talk about his walk from the Canadian border all the way to the Mexican border, a walk which took several months an covered hundreds of miles. He related how he encounterd all kinds of weather, all kinds of terrain, and that throughout his entire walk, hew was trespassing. On several occasions he found himself in themiddle of a cow pasture, threading his way between cows and around cow deposits. One on occasion, he said, a herd became annoyed, and about fifteen of the animals started jogging towards him. he found the barbed wire fence, quickly, and crawled under it, wondering what would have happened. In many countries, among them Scotland, Sweden, and Norway, there is what is called "the right to roam". this means that anyone waling or bicycling across those countries, beautiful that they are, are not in violation of the law, are by law not trespassing. With all the room we have in the U.S., and as harmless as most trespassing is, we might want to consider something similar. Anyone who doesn't like it is free to build a privacy fence, which, come to think of, probably ought to be illegal.