By SALLIE SATTERTHWIATE
sallies@juno.com

TRESPASSERS SHOT. SURVIVORS PROSECUTED.

The sign was the largest and rudest of a series of Keep Off, No Trespassing, and Private Property signs we were seeing as we meandered up Trout Creek off the St. John's River. The swampy forest to our left was labeled Deercreek Game Preserve, with a Florida legal code attached to warnings that trespassers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

For all its suggestion of being public land, I believe that acreage was as privately owned as the rundown fish camps on the other bank. As we passed a dock studded with hand-painted warnings about not “parking” boats near the gas pump and asserting the proprietorship of the ramshackle premises, we commented on how unwelcoming was the mat this business extended to passersby.

I've been thinking about some odd contrasts between our law and the customs of other societies. In a fifth grade classroom recently I was reminded of the fact that the nations that settled this continent before we of European descent arrived had no concept of the private ownership of land. The land belonged to everyone or to no one. The people used the land but did not own it, sell it, subdivide it, inherit or bequeath it. Odd then that we brought to the New World the notion that we not only could own land, but could simply claim it for ourselves in the absence of the Indians' proof of ownership. And that which we own, we believe we can prohibit others from using or controlling.

This arrogance was exemplified in a recent local editorial in which a landowner asserts that he has the right to cut down every tree on his property because he owns it and everything on it. Never mind that the air I breathe depends on trees like his to replenish it with oxygen, or that his trees add softness and beauty to the world through which I move.

I know, I know, this is one of those “rights” we Americans hold dear, and anyone who suggests that certain things — like forests and air and water and space — should be held in common is a Communist.

But who owns a butterfly?

The interesting thing about this is that our legal tradition is also pretty clear about ownership where water is concerned: generally speaking, water is considered to belong to the public where it moves through or beside property, at least to the public in transit. The right of way of mariners, in fact, is sacrosanct on bodies like the Intracoastal Waterway, where highway traffic is stopped and bridges are open to give even small pleasure craft priority to proceed.

Sure, there are cases in the courts of landowners wishing to fence creeks or prevent the passage of canoeists and rafters, but by and large, the courts grant the public the right to traverse waterways in this country. But in every country I've visited in Europe, the same is also true about privately-owned land.

So long as hikers or Sunday strollers treat property respectfully they are not only allowed on but welcomed to privately held land. Most farmers provide stiles or gates to accommodate walkers in their fields; paved paths across pastures and through woodlands are extensive (Peachtree City was by no means the first town to pave a path system).

Not that these observations mean the attitude of Europeans to strangers is warmer than ours. Au contraire, mon ami. Somewhere in these conflicting symptoms of American hubris and European commonality a flip-flop occurs. Again, commenting very broadly, Americans are among the friendliest people on earth, edged out, perhaps, by Australians.

Our German-resident daughter Mary is struck anew whenever she's in the States by how open and friendly Americans are with each other as well as with visitors. Strangers think nothing of striking up a conversation in public, shopkeepers are usually actually helpful, or try to be, and public servants here often seem to forget that servitude was historically considered demeaning.

(Public courtesy is expected in most European countries, of course, but friendliness? Not generally. Dave and I get really defensive, however, when we hear Americans perpetuate the myth that the French are rude. They are not. They may not fawn over tourists, but our experience has been that a Frenchman on the street will return a smile and an effort at conversation, whereas a German will look suspicious.)

I'm not sure what all this means, that Americans are possessive of that which they cannot really possess, yet invariably friendly toward strangers as well as acquaintances. A complex tribe, we are, shaped by the bigness of the land we purloined, while perhaps unconsciously bound by a sense of kinship in spite of our polyglot ancestries or because of our shared history.

Who owns a butterfly indeed?

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