Where-To-Go Service

Do you ever see one of those magazines—usually they are outdoor recreation or healthy living magazines—that have a monthly feature article about the best place to go do this or go do that?  You'll see Outside magazine on the rack and it will have a blazing headline that says, "Top Ten Wilderness Areas to Visit this Year."  What is that all about?  I recognize that these magazines, despite their "green" editorial line, are simply celebrations of consumption, but do they really mean it?  Can you actually write an article like that?  Presumably, the reason that something is a "top" wilderness is because it has strong wilderness characteristics.  But, can it have strong wilderness characteristics if you have just encouraged your millions of disciples to consume it?

This kind of foolishness is not, evidently, new.  Aldo Leopold wrote about it 50 or 60 years ago.  This is what he had to say:  "Knowledge of the whereabouts of good hunting or fishing is a very personal form of property.  It is like rod, dog, or gun:  a thing to be loaned or given as a personal courtesy.  But to hawk it in the marketplace of the sports column as an aid to circulation seems to me another matter.  [T]hese organized promiscuities tend to depersonalize one of the essentially personal elements in outdoor sports.  I do not know where the line lies between legitimate and illegitimate practice; I am convinced, though, that 'where-to-go' service has broken all bounds of reason."

In my opinion, the only reasonable thing to do with these where-to-go services is to take careful note of them.  I, in fact, use every one of them as a means of developing my "never-go" list.  If a particular park or natural attraction in southern Utah appears on a top ten list in, say, Sunset magazine, I add it to my list of places that I will NEVER go. And, perhaps, the writers of these columns have figured that out:  If you actually like a place, don't put it in the list, because the thing you like about it will be destroyed.  If you are, on the other hand, entirely sick of the Zion National Zoo, put it on your list.  It has already been wrecked, so you might as well continue to funnel the hip-hop gangsters, the hippies, and the euros through its gates.

That is what I would do anyway.  So, if you ever see one of those lists from me, you can rest assured that I am naming places on my never-go list.  If you have, on the other hand, any interest in a quiet canyon where you might be able to sit and listen to the sound of a wren, come and ask me.  I might, as a personal courtesy, loan it to you.