Wandering Home

by Bill McKibben

  Even in the dusk I could make out four or five white beehives a few yards away on the edge of the garden knoll. They were, as a curator would say, on loan from the collection of Kirk Webster, one of the most artistic small farmers of the Champlain Valley. He lived a few miles south of my route, so I wouldn’t actually get to visit his apiary on my trek. But I’d been thinking of him as I wound my pastoral way through the valley, and one of the lighter burdens in my pack was a photocopy of an article, “The Best Kept Secret,” that he’d written a few years before for Small Farm Journal. Part memoir, part practical guide, part moral meditation, it told of his long and slow maturation as a beekeeper. “It has been my great privilege, despite having very little to start with and many setbacks, to have started on the path of farming when I was a teenager, to give up doing all other work when I was thirty-seven, and to reach my mid-forties with the prospect of continuing for the remainder of my life,” he wrote. “Like a person carrying one tiny candle and trying to find his way in a vast underground cavern, I needed all my faculties to find the right course and put the pieces together into a harmonious whole.” Indeed, one of the continuing themes of his essay is the difficulty of learning to farm when the chain of transmission that operated since the start of agriculture has broken down—when there is no parent to teach you how, or to leave you a working farm. “This state is literally crawling with people bringing their money from elsewhere and investing it in some kind of a ‘back to the land’ venture. These are some of the nicest and most well-intentioned folk you will meet anywhere but…their main contribution has been the very patriotic one deemed essential to democracy by Jefferson and Madison—dispersing the fortunes accumulated by the previous generation so that succeeding generations can rise according to their own wits.” In general, he says, these neophytes pick the wrong locations and invest too much capital before they figure out a workable system. By contrast, his own story involved endless trial and error (what to do when tracheal mites plague your bees, or a late spring rains out even the dependable flow of dandelion honey) as he discovered how to propagate queens and nucleus colonies for sale to other beekeepers.

  Eventually it all worked. Selling queens, and 30,000 pounds of honey, now netted him 50k a year—that is, half again as much as my enthusiastic students had calculated for their baseline. “After living, and enjoying life, for so long with so little, this frankly seems like an enormous fortune to me,” he writes. His only sadness, he wrote, was a certain loneliness. He’d never married, and had no one to pass his carefully collected knowledge on to. “If there are young people any more interested in beekeeping as a way of life, I’d like to have a few of them come here to learn the trade,” he wrote at the end of his essay. “I’d like them to get a better start and better grasp of the basics than I did,” and if even one or two took up such work as their life’s own, “I’d be able at least to approach my own definition of successful beekeeping.”

  Jean had read Kirk’s essay in our class, and he came to our final feast (more pies!). It wasn’t many months more before he was teaching her the trick of picking queens from a hive. (“I did fine until the end of the day,” she said. “When I started getting tired, I started getting stung.”) Soon Jean and Bennett and Kirk and Susannah and Missy and a jumble of other real farmers and would-be farmers and boyfriends and girlfriends were off to visit the organic guru Eliot Coleman at his Maine farm, investigating the possibility of using his novel winter greenhouses in the Champlain Valley. Meanwhile, a local master gardener, Jay Leshinsky, was spending most of his summer in the college garden, offering sage advice; and the dean of the county’s organic growers, Will Stevens, was dropping by regularly to look in. (He’d visited our class, too, bringing his account books, which demonstrated the unlikelihood of getting rich in this business, and a pile of his best vegetables, which declared the possibility of prospering nonetheless.) “No one knows better than I do how vulnerable real farming is today,” Kirk had written. “But when new farms are spawned, and become associated with the others, some real strength, resilience, and comfort starts to emerge. If we reach the point where communities are farming again, then the flywheel will start to turn on its own, and a movement will emerge that no government or corporation can stop.”

  Jean and Chris crawled inside the new garden shed to sleep, and I rolled out my tent and lay in it happily. All the wine had long since washed from my system, but I still felt unaccountably happy. To be around young people, who haven’t yet made all the compromises and concessions that life will urge them to make, and to see them finding older people who can help them go a different way, is to be reminded that the world really is constantly fresh, and that therefore despair for its prospects is not required.

  I PROPPED MY BACKPACK against the trellis of the outdoor patio at downtown Middlebury’s Otter Creek Bakery the next morning and gorged myself on sticky buns. Not organic, but sticky. Sated, I strode off to meet Netaka White, who’d agreed to keep me company on the day’s saunter.

  Netaka is very Vermont—lean, bearded (no ponytail, but it wouldn’t look out of place). He was walking slowly today because he was still recovering from a run he’d taken from Vermont to Washington to protest the war in Iraq. “When my wife and I first came to Vermont, we had a craft business,” he says. “We were very involved in weaving. And that led to hemp.” Ah, hemp. At the confluence of the environmental movement with, say, the drum circle/aromatherapy/crystal movement, hemp has been a hot topic for quite a few years. Did you know that the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp? That Thomas Jefferson grew hemp? That if only we grew hemp now we could save the forests, stop global warming, and have chakra-realigning Tantric orgasms? If not, you might want to visit some of the several million hemp sites on the Web. The week I was writing this chapter, an e-mail arrived from someone who had read one of my books. “You missed the boat on hemp, Bill, in The End of Nature. We could have already independicized our nation from OPEC! We could have reversed the Greenhouse Effect, saved the rain forests, fed the Third World…. Everything that soy does, hemp does better.” Anyway, Netaka had once been a kingpin of hemp. He’d started by weaving the fibers into cloth and sewing the cloth into backpacks and bags. Soon he had a little business going: Artisan Gear. Then the Japanese discovered hemp clothes—discovered them in usual Japanese style, which is to say everybody all at once. Suddenly Netaka had a multimillion-dollar company. Then, just as suddenly, the Japanese moved on to something else—snowboarding clothes, maybe, or fast-food uniforms. Anyway, the company more or less imploded, and Netaka was left with the small retail store he’d started with his wife, Claire, in downtown Middlebury, a place called Greenfields Mercantile. “We made the decision to open it almost overnight—the site became vacant because the previous tenant, a lingerie store, turned out to be doubling as a child-porn download site. They were busted, they tossed their stuff out on the street, and since it was a prime Main Street location, we moved in.”

  Greenfields Mercantile had specialized, of course, in hemp. When it first opened, thirty manufacturers supplied a wide range of hemp clothing, hemp accessories, even hemp vinaigrette. But the supply steadily shrank—federal agents cracked down on one manufacturer after another. “The feds have taken the position that all cannabis is bad cannabis. The stuff we use is incredibly low in THC. The industry has standards to make sure that hemp oil is THC-free, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all politics.” Anyway, Middlebury couldn’t really support an eco-fashion store, so they branched out, adding a coffeehouse and café.

  Still, old dreams die hard. As we wandered toward the northern border of town, past the covered bridge, past open meadows and woodlots, Netaka said, “There’s no reason we shouldn’t be walking by fields of hemp right here. The University of Vermont did a study, it showed that Addison County was the very best place for this stuff in the whole state, all the right soil types. Heck, there’s still feral hemp growing in Addison County from before the legislative ban in the 1930s.” A few paces
farther and he said with a resigned sigh, “Do you know they’re building houses with hemp in Canada? It’s fantastic insulation—high R-value, very breathable, completely sustainable.” There’s something sweet and noble and for the moment utterly quixotic about this particular quest, so Netaka continues to branch out. He’s taken out some of the shelves of slow-moving hemp shampoos—more and more his store is specializing in free-trade coffee and in soups made from local ingredients. Before we’d gone more than a few lots farther down the road, in fact, he’d pulled himself out of the dumps, his entrepreneurial gene had reasserted itself, and he was imagining a sign in the window keeping track of what percentage of that day’s food came from Addison County. “There’s a bakery in Crown Point—all they use is organic Champlain Valley wheat and they’re doing great,” he said. “I bet we could do that. Local really could be the new organic!”

  Two things interrupted our reverie before it could really take off. One was a hawk, perched out at the end of a big pine branch by the side of the road; it screeched several times, and then began to fly in looping dips, back and forth over us, time and again. The second was a driveway that led to the University of Vermont’s Morgan Horse Farm. Now, we’d each driven past this big barn dozens of times, and we knew that it drew tourists from around the Northeast, but of course neither of us had ever gone, any more than New Yorkers visit the Statue of Liberty. When you’re on vacation you have time to take in sights, but when you’re at home you drive by them on the way to somewhere else, somewhere you’re supposed to get. On foot, though, there’s no reason not to stop. So we paid our five dollars, shucked our packs, and joined the tour guide, who was just beginning her spiel.

  Justin Morgan, it turned out, was a local music teacher who lived in Vermont in the years following the Revolution. Someone in Massachusetts owed him a debt, and though he’d been counting on cash, Morgan was forced to take his payment in the form of a small bay colt. He started walking him home, hoping someone would buy him along the way, but the horse was smaller than the draft animals settlers were using to clear New England’s fields. As it happened, Morgan was lucky: his horse turned out to be something of a miracle, able to outrace and outpull every other horse in the neighborhood. “And he was a great breeding stallion,” the guide said. “We understand now that he was a genetic mutant with dominant genes, something that hasn’t happened before or since. He always bred true. By the time he died at the age of thirty-two, he’d sired enough foals to establish a breed. The Morgan horse has a beautiful crested neck, and a compact body frame with a sense of refinement. They’ve been used for everything from cavalry horses to family horses.” (Frost has a gorgeous poem, “The Runaway,” about a Morgan colt leery of his first snowfall.) Still, the breed was about to die out in the late nineteenth century when Addison County’s great benefactor, Joseph Battell, built this beautiful farm to save it from extinction. Now owned by the university, it houses sixty to eighty horses, and breeds twenty new foals a year. Apprentices bustled everywhere—young women, who compete for the chance to put in fifty- and sixty-hour weeks, were training horses on a lunge line, currying horses, leading horses to the “breeding phantom,” which functions as a kind of equine inflatable love doll for efficient semen collection. Demand is high for the steeds, who are truly handsome in their muscled sleekness—raffle tickets for a chance at one of this year’s foals were going fast.

  All of which was enough to get us talking again as we walked away. Here was a story about some agricultural innovation that appeared pretty much from nowhere and, with the right nurturance, took. Hemp hasn’t taken yet—and won’t, until we come to grips with our drug hysteria. But hey, there are other possibilities. “I’m helping coordinate a local group that’s looking into biodiesel,” Netaka said. “You can run a car on soybean oil, on rapeseed. Or you can use one hundred percent vegetable oil, or create blends with petroleum, stretching the supply and lowering emissions. We’d like to have a local bio-refinery—and a pump right in Middlebury, with Addison County–grown gas.” I felt him growing more alive, energetic. “You can use it for home heating oil, you know—a fuel one hundred percent locally derived. Even the ferries crossing the lake could run on it!” On we strode, arms swinging.

  This is what Vermont is like right now—a lot of fascinating dreams, some of them fever dreams, about how this place might be successfully inhabited. Wine grapes, sweat-equity community forests, college gardens with solar pumps, high-tech wood energy, diners serving local ham and eggs, community slaughterhouses. Ferries running on local biodiesel! Every one of them is an attempt to interfere with history, which at the moment looks as though it should go this way: dairy farms fail or consolidate; farmland turns into second homes or retirement homes or just home-homes, as Burlington sprawls south and north. Interfering with history is hard, because its momentum is so strong: the march of the big box stores, the decline in the number of farmers, the demographic tides of our population. But sometimes that history churns up its own countercurrents. If the future seems unlikely to answer enough yearnings, then people will look for exits.

  The last time that happened, of course, was the 1960s and early 1970s—which was also the last moment when there were as many dreams across this landscape. Like northern California, rural Vermont was one of the places that drew yearning counterculturalists. Don Mitchell, whose farm I was now wearily approaching, was perhaps the single perfect specimen. Born in Chicago in 1947, he’d made it to Swarthmore College by the time the sixties were in full swing. From there, with his girlfriend Cheryl, he’d hitchhiked around the country, including Big Sur, Carmel, San Francisco. At twenty-two, based on his experiences, he wrote his first novel, with the Ur-title Thumb Tripping. It was an instant hit—“a pilgrimage to nowhere that slices neatly across the current scene,” the New York Times declared—and Mitchell was hired to write the screenplay. Directed by a twenty-three-year-old, it co-starred Michael Burns and Meg Foster as what TV Guide called “two happy-go-lucky flower children,” not to mention Bruce Dern as one of many creeps the pair encounter on their hitchhike through paradise. By the end, said one reviewer, “with the audience numb from the ghastly parade of subhumanity lurking out there, the two youngsters tire of each other and go their separate ways.”

  In real life, however, Don and Cheryl stayed together. With the money they made from the movie, they bought a Porsche and then they bought this farm in the central valley town of New Haven. It’s a spread of undulating meadow set against the rocky outcrops of a low mountain, one of the most thoroughly Vermont settings imaginable. They had their share of adjustment problems—one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard was his description of coming out one morning to find the cows licking the chrome off his sports car—but unlike so many of their peers, they stuck. Stuck to a place, stuck to each other, built a life. And slowly changed. When their children began to arrive, they took up farming with real seriousness: “Caring for livestock and making hay and managing a large garden became a wonderful project to bond our family together with a sense of shared purpose,” he says. He raised lambs, in part because the land was suited to them—at its height around the Civil War, Vermont, where grass grows easily, had been sheep pasture to the world. But the business had gone into terminal decline once competition from big Western ranches, and then Australia and New Zealand, caused the price to plummet. (At the moment you can’t clear enough selling wool to pay the shearer.) But Mitchell did find one market: Easter lambs for the ethnic market in the big city. It meant breeding his ewes with one eye on the Greek Orthodox liturgical calendar, so that he could time his slaughter for the right week. And it wasn’t exactly a living—he kept writing, especially essays about the country life for Yankee magazine and the Boston Globe. “When I think of all the inappropriate talents, the varieties of ignorance and wealth of misinformation,” he wrote in one collection of those pieces, “I am filled with laughter and amazement. Imagine people like me helping to create a new agricultural industry.” But he was indispu
tably a farmer. And there were, indisputably, 260 sheep in the pasture this night, softly baaing.

  During thirty years of caring for those flocks, Mitchell developed a certain allergy to romanticism. The week I wandered through, he was making final changes to the galleys of his first novel in two decades, The Nature Notebooks, which could almost be described as antienvironmentalist. It tells the story of a handsome and charismatic eco-warrior who arrives in Vermont from parts west, seduces three local women, and manages to employ them all in his scheme to sabotage the transmission towers and ski lifts atop Mount Mansfield. Told through the journals of the three women, it offers Mitchell a chance to lampoon the excesses of modern nature writing, “a jug of milk in which very little cream has risen to the top—because very little cream is present…. I’m particularly annoyed,” he writes, “by a histrionic strain within this genre that tends to be self-absorbed, self-congratulatory, and vaguely autoerotic. Its modern practitioners strike me as exploiting nature for their own selfish purposes, just as surely (although admittedly more benignly) as loggers, miners, whalers, and oil drillers.” You could say he’s become a mild curmudgeon, or a modern version of the slightly cranky Yankee farmer: “I happen to dislike what I take to be a preachy and self-righteous strain among environmentalists who wear their values on their sleeves,” he says. “Environmentalists will have a better chance of succeeding when people adopt its perspectives simply because they make practical sense.” It seems unwise to raise the prospect of hemp, or even biodiesel, although I do mention Chris Granstrom’s fine new wine as we eat dinner with his extended family out by the pond.