Hope you don't mind if I begin with a pet peeve about words. Schizophrenic does not mean of two minds. Schizophrenic means something else. In that tawdry late-1950s movie where the therapist's patient, a shy, reserved young woman, suddenly becomes a raging sexpot speaking with a totally different voice - that isn't schizophrenia. It's multiple personality disorder. So when I go off on a rant about how every piece of flowing water should belong to all the people, then, abruptly change course, smile, and start talking about how much fun I've had as a guest fishing private water I'm not being schizophrenic. What I'm suffering from is multiple personality disorder.

It's a genetic defect, and I come by it honestly.

The populist bit of my heritage came from my blue-collar father who grew up in a rough factory town in the industrial northeast, a boy who left school after eighth grade to go to work. A man who fought in World War II as an airborne infantryman in the Pacific and came home from that war with too many emotional wounds to be career minded. He made his living fixing machines owned by others.

My mother came from a family of wealth, a family of Ivy Leaguers, bankers and businessmen. A family that hired men like my father to fix their machines.

They got married in that buoyant time right after the war when American princesses married blue-collar American warriors with medals. I sometimes imagine my conception as a scene from a Woody Allen movie in which human gametes, eggs and sperm, become actors in costume. My sperm is a rag-wearing peasant sneaking into the castle. My egg is a privileged princess in a gossamer robe waiting in a canopied bed for somebody from outside the court who isn't boring. The child who appears in the next scene is wearing a crown. And a suit of rags.

Property law in America is a patchwork quilt, the patches clearly seen on any map that shows state boundaries. When you cross one of those imaginary lines, the law changes, especially when it comes to flowing water.

In Montana, for example, any navigable waterway is open to fishing between the high water marks. Navigable has come to mean you can float a Popsicle stick down it, and the high water boundary is usually blazed on streamside trees with paint. In New Mexico, if the water moves and you can float it, well, you can float it and fish it, but the bottom belongs to the property owner and you can't drop anchor or get out and wade. In Colorado, a landowner can post flowing water and close it to fishing altogether.

The notion that any person can own land is an odd one. The land's been there for billions of years in one form or another. Humans have been walking across the land for millions of years; kept walking, to follow game, forage and weather. We have only just put down roots to grow food and raise meat. In that context, the notion that somebody might post a river, close it to access, keep others out is an abomination. The closing of land and rivers was rare, even after the law sanctioned ownership of land and water, rare until the population exploded and open space began to shrink. Rare, until there were so many of us that nearly everything we touched became tracked, littered, spoiled. Landowners with flowing water who allowed access to their property watched as their rivers were ruined by hordes of careless visitors. Today, few property owners allow unlimited access to water they have the legal right to close.

Every time I see a posted sign on a stretch of beautiful river, the populist in me rants. "How the hell can anyone be so arrogant, so selfish! That river no more belongs to anyone than the air we breath!"

But when I've been invited to fish on private water, my mood suddenly changes. Those places are almost always in better shape than easily accessible public water. The riverbanks are not as trampled. Often, the landowner has spent a great deal of money to improve or protect existing habitat, and the consequence is richer insect life, larger and more plentiful trout. Litter is usually non-existent, and even in a populated river valley, you can find some solitude.

Maybe the best way to deal with the paradox is to remember that we live in a region blessed with millions of acres of wild, public land. To remember that a backpack and strong legs can take you to healthy, litter-free, wild water where solitude is still available, places where wild trout are abundant and the world looks (even if it is not) as if it is the same place it was ten-thousand years ago.

But rivers closer to home present us with a paradox.

I will continue to believe in my depths that posting a river is a violation of a law higher than property law. Yet, I will be grateful to those who own land with flowing rivers for protecting, and sometimes sharing them. When invited to fish on private water, my rag-covered legs will glory in the tug of cold water, and my crown will weigh heavily on my conflicted head.

Steven J. Meyers is the author of On Seeing Nature, Lime Creek Odyssey, Streamside Reflections, The Nature of Flyfishing, Notes from the San Juans and San Juan River Chronicle.