As always, today you are a mere visitor to a realm your kind has not yet managed to conquer. Not yet. Everything can change quickly. Just remember how your steps stopped at the sign forbidding you to leave the marked trails. You won't find it there today. Nor the path that once led you to that spot. Chainsaws tore down all the green scenery and diggers ripped their rooted remains out of the soil. One forbidding post has been replaced by twelve permitting ones – linked by a steel cable hung with chairs. You no longer have any reason to go back. Your piece of wilderness has vanished. But if you did find yourself there once more and looked back from one of those gleaming pylons, a double disappointment would overwhelm you at how far greed has gone. A wart! The traditional wooden lookout tower on the ridge opposite wasn't enough for them. It was too small. Not grandiose enough. Too modest. And you broke a sweat on the way up. Unforgivable! So a new one sprang up. Huge. With an entrance fee. With a chairlift and a slide. You can no longer gaze across the countryside without the graceful line of the mountain ridges being cut by this growth of human greed.
Your kind moves fast. Where will you retreat to for silence next time?
You know your mountains perfectly. You've explored every path that centuries of ancestors trod out and laid with stones on the steep slopes, so that with the last patch of snow they could drive their cattle up to the greening pastures, and before the coming half-year of white cover, bring down from the bare ridges hay that had breathed the crystal-clear air. You know where the tooth of time is gnawing at the last remains of old mountain huts and where granite boundary stones rise from the forest undergrowth. You've read up on the history and hold these places in sacred reverence. Your home, my friend.
But you're not allowed in. A no-entry sign may step aside for neatly pressed corduroy, but before your steps it stands unyieldingly upright. You are strong in your own moral principles, yet you can't knock down a wooden post bearing a green plate with the symbol of the Czech state. You realise it has its purpose. Even so, you may pause for a moment with the thought that your own country – represented here and now by two Bohemian double-tailed lions and two Moravian-Silesian eagles – places miserably little trust in your own sense of responsibility. After all, you understand nature. You feel part of it. But does your kind feel the same?
Do you remember that late-summer afternoon when nothing could keep you penned in behind the fence around the house any longer? You packed only the bare essentials in your rucksack and set off up the freshly mown meadow. To the ridges. Back then, too, your ears listened to a silence that sounds different every time. And just as the sun on the western side of the ridge was about to end its day-long pilgrimage, a whole herd of chamois set off from the east in pursuit. Fifteen, twenty – how many could there have been? A sight for the gods. Today reserved for you alone, my friend. Then every last one vanished into the dwarf pines, and you did the same. Your bed became the soft cushions of mountain grass, among which you spread out your blue sleeping bag. It's shared so many nights with you. Before the day was out, under the first star, you managed to light a solid-fuel tablet, and over the orange flame water for soup warmed through several romantic minutes. You finished eating. Narrowed your eyes. Fell asleep. And towards morning you were woken by the cool, damp touch of the dew-covered outer fabric of your sleeping bag brushing rudely against your face. Oh, come on! The sun hasn't even finished its night-time marathon on the other half of the globe. It's not yet time to leave the bedroom. Damp on the outside, perhaps, but warmed inside by your own body. When you later left – by now under a blue sky – all you left behind was a patch of flattened grass. Just like those chamois.
And now, my friend, as you return from your recent memory, look around you. The car park is overflowing. More cars are desperately wedged into the sloping verge. One after another. And this tin queue stretches several hundred metres up the road, from which the most popular trail in your mountains branches off along the river. You wouldn't want to push your way through the procession. Yes, the valley is beautiful. You know what draws people here. But you also sense that something bad is happening under the feet of the crowds. The noise and racket do no good here. The natural is dwindling, the artificial is growing. Surely you wouldn't want mass visits – mass disasters – to sweep over the places where a many-coloured silence still reigns. A rainbow silence. So perhaps the ban makes sense after all.
But you can't ban everything. The internet. Cerca trova! Seek and ye shall find! Like that bivouac hut with its warming stove and wooden bunks, which for years offered shelter under the quiet tolerance of all parties involved. Those initiated by older, more experienced hands knew how to behave. But once its location was splashed across the WWWeb, its end was in sight. Scattered shards, sooty walls, mess. You see? A ban isn't all-powerful. Anyone who wants to will find a way to overturn the age-old order of the mountains. Perhaps in a little box marked with a magnifying-glass icon. Or in their bottomless wallet. There are many of your kind, my friend. And they have power. The power of the powerful. What's dwindling instead is humility and the awareness that you, I and they are also part of nature. They like to think that man has become master. But that's a mistake. A profound error. One small thing is enough and... well, you know.
No ban can separate you from your mountains, the ancient paths, the moss-covered little memorials, the bubbling peat bogs and the primeval forested summits. In your eyes, an embargo isn't the right way. You see freedom and responsibility as two sides of the same coin. Rubbish gets picked up, fireplaces get cleared, animals' homes get respected. You're still a humble pupil of nature. And that's a good thing, my friend. Be proud of it.
