Fun Is Not Recreation

Published in the Desert Valley Times
August 19, 2005

Once upon a time, the term “recreation” was nearly synonymous with “fun.”
Unfortunately, thanks to the stuffed shirts who sit in various state and federal legislative bodies, one no longer has anything to do with the other.
There was a time when people could jump on their ATVs, head into the endless wasteland known as desert, and enjoy a ride across wide open desolate spaces.
Then some legislative loser found out about it, heard that someone dared to use a natural resource for something as frivolous as “fun,” and rammed through law after law to curtail the enjoyment of four-wheeling.
Today, inmates sweeping up the jail have more freedom than an ATV enthusiast intent on riding through any land owned by the federal government (which, in Nevada, is nearly all of it).
Riders hear “No!” more often than a four-year-old in the candy aisle at Smith’s.
Now, it appears that someone spilled the beans about the fun that you used to be able to have in a boat.
I owned and operated my first boat when I was 13 years old.
Today, I would be an outlaw, since you must be 14 to operate a motorized watercraft.
You must also take a boating course, and keep proof of that course with you at all times on the water.
(“Your paperz, pleeze! Ve must zee your paperz!”)
It’s a good thing Christopher Columbus never tried to navigate Lake Mead.
And Heaven forbid you get caught without wearing a lifevest, a cumbersome device that sort of defeats the purpose of enjoying a day in the sun working on your tan.
Last Saturday, the DUI Gestapo set up a “safety checkpoint” at Cottonwood Cove on Lake Mohave.
They’re proud of the fact that they stopped 153 boaters that day.
I guess the freedom to travel without government interference and warrantless stops ends at the water’s edge.
Of course, it’s all in the name of “safety,” which makes anything short of a strip search and a cavity probe an acceptable government activity.
This time, they were in search of the “demon rum.”
It’s funny how the effects of Prohibition linger even 70 years later.
A Nevada game warden mentioned that an officer was “amazed by the amount of beer, wine coolers, and other alcohol that was being placed into boats” while manning a boating information booth at a launch ramp.
Wow.
Drinking beer while fishing.
Who’d a thunk it?
Hopefully, nobody mentions to lawmakers that people actually drink beer in the parking lot before football games, or the Oakland Raiders will be out of business.
And before I get a stack of hate mails from “BADD” or the Carrie Nation club telling me that X number of people lose their lives to drunk boaters, save your AOL time.
I get it.
I agree that anyone who kills someone while operating their boat while under the influence should be locked up.
But I also believe that anyone who kills someone while operating their boat while NOT under the influence should be locked up as well.
At what point do we consider prophylactic justice as going too far?
(“Prophylactic justice” is the practice of arresting people because they MIGHT break a law, like locking up a guy in a canoe because the three beers he drank MIGHT lead him to run over a pontoon boat full of nuns.)
And I’m saying this as a guy who doesn’t drink beer.
But the point is that legislators have run out of annoying ways to manipulate, stifle, and control our lives in business, commerce, travel, education, marriage, child-rearing, and even in our homes, and are now extending their treacherous tentacles into our recreation.
Men and women have managed to navigate entire oceans for thousands of years with nothing but a compass and an incomplete map bearing warnings of sea serpents, but the state of Nevada feels we need a whole new layer of rules and regulations to survive the treacherous waters of Lake Mohave.
I guess the next round of watercraft legislation will involve size requirements and an operators license for rubber duckies, and a whole section of state regulations so people don’t become victims of drive-by splashings in their own bathtubs.
It’s a shame we can’t invoke “logic checkpoints,” where we line up all of our government officials and test them for common sense.
Like innocent boaters who are forced to take breathalyzers, any official who tests positive for stupidity or registers less than an I.Q. of 45 would be forced out of the legislature.
Of course, that would leave a state law-making body composed of around nine members and a janitor.
Then again, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
To those nine, I would ask simply and humbly:
Please stop trying to regulate and eliminate fun.
It’s supposed to be one of the fringe benefits of freedom.
Even the Declaration of Independence specifies our right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Your illegal and immoral DUI checkpoints are violating the second and third in the dubious attempt at protecting the first.
Go back to making inane laws about things like the proper size of road gravel and leave our recreation alone.