Wandering Home

by Bill McKibben

  I’d planned the first part of my route around this house, for John and Rita are among my favorite people, and John is the great writer of these few mountains, this small valley. Not that he’s from here—like Robert Frost, he’s from California. He grew up to be a literature professor, and moved in the there’s-a-job-open fashion of academics to Middlebury College in the early 1970s, never intending to stay. “We always figured we’d eventually go back to the West,” he says. But like many of us he found himself falling under the spell of the new breed of nature writers whose great teaching was place: Barry Lopez, Ed Abbey, Wendell Berry. (His particular guru was the poet Gary Snyder.) Just as important, John was falling under the spell of the Green Mountains. Before long he was teaching one of the college’s most popular courses—“Visions of Nature.” His seminars and symposiums originally met in classrooms—but increasingly on mountaintops and by the shores of ponds, and in the spreading fields of the college’s Bread Loaf campus, Frost’s old summer haunt.

  Elder—tall, skinny, goofy warm smile, constant twinkle—nonetheless lives up to his name. He has an innate and generous sobriety, an earnestness a little out of place even in the not-very-cynical world of Middlebury College. You want to be thinking your least selfish thoughts in his company, which is what we mean, I guess, when we say that someone “brings out the best in you.” And more and more he was trying to bring out the best in the land around him. After years of describing these slopes and pastures, he’s begun to work the land as well.

  Which is why in the morning I left my pack on his porch and headed off for a morning of labor in his sugarbush, a hundred acres of prime maple woods in nearby Starksboro. With his sons Matthew and Caleb, he’s built a stout sugarhouse near the bottom of the land, and now he’s ready to put in a bigger boiling pan, allowing him to expand his operation from 175 to 500 taps. Today we’re hauling out the old plastic tubing that drains the spiles and carries the sap down to the evaporator. It’s companionable work, especially since John interrupts it every few minutes to show off some particular delight: “There’s blue cohosh, and that’s maidenhair fern,” he says. “They indicate lime-rich soil. So does that plantain-leaved sedge. We counted thirty-one species of wildflower up here one day.” The slope was likely clearcut sixty or seventy years ago, but the rich soils have bred another stand of big trees. And now it won’t be clearcut again, not ever; earlier that week, John and Rita had donated a conservation easement on the land to the Vermont Nature Conservancy, assuring it would never be developed—except for two small house lots, one for each son. “See those huge ice-wedged erratics over there? That’s where Rita and I want our ashes scattered.”

  Driving back to Bristol in his pickup with the old tubing piled in back, we pass example after example of just the kind of careful reinhabitation he’s been promoting. On the northeastern edge of town, for instance, a tidy farm occupies the one broad stretch of flat land. A group of Elder’s neighbors have been trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to buy the land because it would serve as a natural plug on further sprawl. To pay off the note, they’d need to lease some of the land for a community-supported agriculture farm, an ecologically sound woodlot, perhaps a fishery on the brook that flows through. On the ridge above the land, the same group of neighbors is trying something even more exciting: the Community Equity Project is helping buy a big piece of timberland, and then selling shares in the property, allowing residents without much cash to become joint owners and managers of the landscape. If they have no cash but own a backhoe, they can help maintain the skid roads and pull logs out—sweat equity will do. All of the logging will be done according to the strictest set of environmental criteria. So, no second homes sprout, local people find work and ownership, the forest flourishes.

  Back in town, we head for the Bristol landfill. A few other guys in pickups are unloading debris, and so is the town’s sole garbage truck, a flatbed pulled by a phlegmatic pair of Percheron draft horses. Their driver bid low for the town contract a few years ago, and ever since then he’s ranged the town’s compact streets, picking up trash bags and recycling bins. The team walks at a pace that lets him load easily—indeed, he can usually count on the assistance of one or another young girl eager for the chance to be near the massive team. We came home, washed up, and then headed out for the short walk to dinner at Bristol’s new Bobcat Café, built with money loaned by community residents. Many of the financiers were lined up at the bar, enjoying their 25 percent discount on the Bobcat’s home-brewed beer. Do you see what I mean? People are trying things here.

  And so to bed—it wasn’t precisely the same glow I’d felt in the sunset on Mount Abe, but it was a glow nonetheless.

  LIKE JOHN, I am primarily a writer. We are, that is, good with words, verbally dexterous, jugglers of symbols. And so we have a role to play helping to nudge our communities toward some more reasonable path, toward something that might not rely quite as deeply on the environmental ruination of cheap oil, on the human ruination of cheap labor. We can coax, we can alarm, we can point to possibilities. But let’s face it—the Western world is knee-deep in symbol-manipulators right now. We verbally facile folk form an enormous tribe—throw a rock in Vermont and you’ll hit a published author, who will let out some creative oath. What we need more of are people who actually know what they’re doing out in the physical world—who know so well that they can not just carry forward old tradition but work out new and better ways of doing things. And so the next morning I resumed my walk again, this time in the company of one of John’s neighbors, a man named David Brynn.

  Oddly enough, Brynn is tall and skinny, too, with a smile about as sunny as Elder’s. He grew up just across the border in Massachusetts, but swears he was conceived in Montpelier, Vermont’s capital; his wife, Louise, is a sixth-generation Bristolite. He studied forestry in school, and now serves as the Addison County forester—but he’s never been swallowed up by the industry status quo. He founded a group called Vermont Family Forests (VFF) in his spare time, and many of the best ideas in this slice of Vermont sprang full grown from his brain. Or sprang half-baked—he has plenty of colleagues, who help make real his multitude of visions.

  So it’s always a pleasure to walk with him in the woods. There’s guaranteed to be a mix of down-to-earth and pie-in—well, pie hovering in midair, not yet quite in reach but getting closer. When he ventures onto a woodlot, oddly, trees seem to be the last thing he notices. Instead, it’s the condition of the logging roads: have they been built away from steep slopes, for instance, and with enough waterbars to keep soil from eroding? “I get emotionally involved with broad-based dips,” he says this morning as we stroll. “There’s a formula to getting them right. You divide 1,000 by the grade, and that’s where you need them—so this is a 7-percent grade, you need a dip every 140 feet. Yes! Right here! We’re going to get a deluge this afternoon, and there will be water on this surface, but there won’t be any erosion.”

  Once the thrill of road maintenance subsides, however, it’s clear he can see the forest, too. We haven’t been walking five minutes when he drops his voice, motions me off the trail, and leads me to a little grove. “These are two of my favorite white oaks on earth,” he says, patting a pair of lovely straight trees. “I get goose bumps when I come over here, and I’m getting them now.”

  VFF enrolls woodlot owners who agree to follow the program’s strict ecological standards—not just about sound road building, but leaving lots of dead trees as standing snags for wildlife, staying far away from streams, and a hundred other details. The guidelines fill a thick manual, but of course there’s a rub: building all those waterbars and broad-based dips takes longer than cutting an eroding track straight to the trees you want to harvest. It takes longer to be responsible, in logging as in every other thing on the Earth. And time is money, so in some sense bad logging is efficient.

  Brynn’s basic task, then, is not just figuring out how many trees you need to leave standing for birds’ nests—it’s figuring out h
ow to increase the return to landowners and loggers so that they can afford to be responsible. “We find bare-bones logging around here costs $150 per thousand board feet, and doing it the right way costs $220 to $260 per thousand board feet. So we had to come up with some way to pay for that difference.” VFF has played with many schemes to make up that gap; most of them come down, in the end, to eliminating some of the middlemen and to branding the wood as local and sustainable so that people will pay a slight premium. “Right now the Vermont timber industry is worth more than a billion dollars, but stumpage—the money paid to the guy who owns the woodlot—is only 3 percent of that. It’s exactly the same as growing potatoes for McDonald’s. You’re completely at the mercy of the mill.”

  But localizing the timber supply is just half the battle. The other half is convincing consumers that what they want in their homes is the same thing that the forest wants to yield. A few years ago, for instance, Middlebury College decided to erect a vast new science building, Bicentennial Hall. The architects specified, as architects usually do, that the interior wood be “Grade 1”—by the standards of the Architectural Woodwork Institute, that means it should be uniform in color and grain, with few “flaws.” That kind of wood, though, comes only from big trees with few knot-forming side branches, and removing those trees from the forest (“high-grading” is what the loggers call it) has left the forests of the Northeast filled with smaller and weaker trees. It’s as if we were some species of wolf that, instead of culling the sick and the feeble, only went for prey in its prime. The alternative is to decide, as Middlebury College did, that what you used to think of as flaws could be reimagined as character. “That tree has been standing there two hundred years, taking whatever nature can fling at it,” says Brynn. “That’s not a problem, that’s an asset.” If you walked through Bicentennial Hall, you’d immediately see what he was talking about, for the walls are filled with little streaks and swirls and flickers that please the eye like the dance of flames in a fireplace. Before long you’re beginning to think in other ways that used to be heresy—like, why does my floor have to be all one type of wood, a big expanse of unbroken oak? Why can’t it be like the forest that surrounds us, which is roughly equal parts birch and beech and maple? VFF supplied the timber for the home we built in Ripton a few years ago: local wood, local mill, local carpenters. It looks beautiful to the eye, and to the mind’s eye, too, because I can walk you to the forest it came from and show you that it’s still intact. Show you the broad-based dips.

  If you can make the economics work, then there’s a chance the people who won the woodlot won’t sell it for subdivisions. Brynn and I reach the edge of the forest and peer off into a new clearcut with a nice orange No Trespassing sign. “This was a beautiful forest. But the owner has cashed out, and he’s going to put in houses. And the people who buy them—well, they’ll be here a couple of years and then we’ll come up to do a new cut so this guy can net enough money to keep his forest intact, and those new owners will be outraged we’re cutting trees.”

  “It’s never going to be a huge wildland here,” Brynn says as we come to the edge of this small forest. “It’s always going to be more of a patchwork quilt. But there are so many people who could develop a positive experience with their piece of the quilt. See this stump? A beautiful white pine, shot straight up, not a pimple on it. Then it got blister rust, right about the same time that the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum came looking for clear white pine for the mast of a replica pilot gig they were building. The schoolkids who were doing the work came out here, one cold day in December, to harvest it. They weren’t the luckiest kids—a lot of them wouldn’t look you in the eye. But by the time they’d finished building that boat, well, each of them was able to stand up and give a little talk to the three hundred people who came to see the launch. That’s the real harvest of this place.”

  BRISTOL MARKS THE divide between forest and field—between cutting trees and growing corn—in this part of Vermont. Upland, to the east, Addison County tends toward woods broken by occasional opening. West, as the valley levels out toward the lake, more and more of the land is open field, interspersed with woodlots. Brynn and I came out in one of those fields around noontime, a vast expanse of cow corn already higher than our heads. We set off down parallel rows, two feet apart but invisible to each other, and David began talking about how agriculture presents many of the same paradoxes as forestry in this area. There’s the same pressure to produce food and timber as cheap commodities, because most customers buy on price. But cheapness always carries a cost. In the forest, it’s clearcuts and eroding roads. It’s not so different for farmers.

  This field, for instance, belongs to one of the county’s biggest dairies—they bought the land, ironically, after they made a bundle selling off a parcel near Burlington that became Vermont’s first big-box development. On the one hand, they are reasonably conscientious farmers, not spreading their ocean of liquid manure until there is enough spring growth to make sure it won’t flow straight into the river. On the other hand, says Brynn, “there used to be fifteen different houses filled with people farming this land. Now it’s all one big farm.” The cows are confined to a huge barn instead of walking in the fields, standing all day on pavement like city commuters waiting for the bus. The farmers are producing milk at commodity prices, hoping to stay big and efficient enough to compete with the mega-dairies of California and Arizona and Wisconsin, hoping to defy the odds that have shut down 80 percent of Vermont’s dairy farmers in the last thirty years. For the hardworking family it might mean a necessary path to survival, but for the region it didn’t really replace the smaller-scale farming that had once thrived here. It was, perhaps, a kind of holding action—keeping the land in use, unsubdivided, till an economy emerged that could allow it to be more diversely farmed.

  And so, when we finally reached the edge of this sea of corn, emerging on a dirt road, I bade David farewell and set off again to the west—interested to see, among other things, if there were signs of that new economy emerging anywhere. If the same kind of creative thinking he was bringing to forests had begun to bubble up on area farms. If the trend toward bigness was inevitable, or if other visions beckoned.

  All morning, walking the back road from Bristol toward Middlebury, I was in open country. There were fields in corn, and meadows and pastures, and there were abandoned fields growing in. An awful lot of former farms had been divided up into house lots—until recently, Vermont law exempted parcels over ten acres from state septic laws, so the houses tended to be spaced about the same distance apart. Many had expanses of grass out front, and for some reason, probably because a thunderstorm was threatening for later in the day, it seemed as if every single man above retirement age was out on his rider-mower. Some had clearly cut their lawns just a day or two before—their passage left no discernible wake, like the Russian babushkas forever brooming their spotless patch of sidewalk. But it was a sign of atavistic devotion nonetheless. Farming may have all but disappeared in this country (fewer than 2 percent of Americans list it as their occupation, making farmers scarcer than prisoners), but some desire to tend the soil persists.

  And occasionally it erupts, despite all efforts at suppression. I reached Chris Granstrom’s farm about one in the afternoon, and slung my backpack down in his garden shed because the rain was clearly just minutes away now. Granstrom is, come to think of it, tall and skinny, with a broad smile. He arrived in the region twenty-five years ago to attend Middlebury College. “Between my junior and senior year I worked the summer for a dairy farmer a little ways west in Bridport,” he says. “As any good farmer should, he did his best to talk me out of staying with agriculture. But I loved the whole thing.” And he loved it still, though a little more sadly and wisely. “We’ve farmed U-pick strawberries here for twenty-one years,” he says. “Between that, and my wife teaching, and a little freelance writing, we’ve made it. On a Saturday in the spring we’ll get vast crowds. But you know, we’ve been growin
g them in the same soil. Rotating them, of course, but still, by the fourth rotation, they just weren’t as vigorous. And I was learning about all this,” he says, with a sweep of his hand that took in a small pile of cuttings, his daughter Sara who was busy transplanting them, and a greenhouse beyond. “This” was his new project: wine grapes specially bred for the North, a concept he stumbled across at a website called littlefatwino.com.

  ONLY A YEAR after planting, Granstrom now has row upon row of sturdy vines where his strawberries once grew. We’re walking them, clipping promising-looking twigs that his daughter—a few weeks from heading off to Middlebury College herself—is transplanting by the greenhouse. “This whole idea of taking cuttings and making them root is kind of magical to me,” says Granstrom. “It’s sort of astronomical the way it multiplies.” Indeed, his business plan relies on that magic—he plans to concentrate on selling nursery stock to others in the area who want to start vineyards of their own.

  “Look, the wine will be really nice wine. But probably not world class. So it will be for local supply”—that is, for people who want the pleasure of tasting it not only on their tongues but in their minds as well, who will appreciate the story that comes with it, the same way I cherish the local wood in my house. “There’s a huge glut of wine right now in California, New Zealand—that’s why you can get Two Buck Chuck or whatever in the supermarket,” he says. “But in places like the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, it’s worked out better—it’s for a local market.”

  Right about then the thunder finally cracks and the downpour starts, so we retreat back into the shed. Granstrom opens a bottle of the wine he’s made from his initial harvest—crisp, like a Riesling, delicious—and he and Sara engage in what is clearly a long-running debate about what to call their winery.