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Park Service should leave friars alone For more than 100 years, the Franciscans of Graymoor have been providing food, shelter and spiritual support to homeless men and recovering alcoholics on a mountain 90 miles north of New York City. And since the creation of the Appalachian Trail, the friars also have provided food and shelter to any hikers who might amble by. What the National Park Service is doing to the friars in return for their favors would be enough to anger any good Samaritan. The Park Service, on a mindless mission to protect the Appalachian Trail from every possible real or imagined threat to tranquility, is not content with a 58-acre easement it purchased from the Franciscans in 1984. Now the Park Service wants to take 18 acres of heavily forested land from the friars who have maintained it since 1898. "We want to guarantee that this property will be preserved in perpetuity," says a Park Service spokesman. "Our job is to protect that corridor. The way it is now, townhouses could be built within 50 feet of the trail." Yes, and Russian paratroopers might drop in someday, too. After 102 years of stewardship, the Franciscans have more than proven their inclination to keep the land hospitable to things natural. But that's not the way Park Service land acquisitions people think. They not only have a bureaucratic mission to acquire ever more land for the feds, but they also hold generally dim views of ordinary Americans' relationship to the land. Considering the awful scenarios dreamed up by the Park Service to run roughshod over property owners, we'd venture that any gathering of Park Service acquisitions bureaucrats would make a convention of paranoids look like an Optimists' Club. The Park Service ought to back off and leave the friars alone. Surely, if the Park Service really needs to add to the vast holdings that it already lacks the funds adequately to maintain, then it could find far more threatened land than a few acres more or less left alone by a bunch of monks for 102 years.
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