Wandering Home

by Bill McKibben

  The one calm human being in the middle of all that storm was also the youngest, the most clean-cut, and by far the healthiest looking. John Davis was the editor of the Earth First! Journal, which was the glue that held the anarchic group more or less together. I watched him paste up a few stories—a blockade of a road into some planned clearcut on an Oregon national forest, an early tree-sit by some protesters in redwood country. Every half hour or so he would rise from his desk, walk over to the doorjamb, and do twenty or thirty pull-ups. Refreshed, he’d get back to his labors. The journal he was editing reflected the group’s prevailing ethos: new editions were published not in accord with the conventional months, but with the pagan calendar (Beltane, Samhain); the lively letters column was called “Dear Shit-fer-Brains”; and the most-read column was doubtless “Dear Ned Ludd,” where readers would write in with questions about, say, what type of sugar to pour down a bulldozer’s gas tank if you wanted to disable it. It was, in other words, thoroughly irresponsible. Except that in a world where the rise of radical conservatism still seemed fresh in its craziness, this response also seemed thoroughly necessary. As if someone was actually giving as good as we were getting. And I was twenty-five at the time—it seemed deeply romantic, this idea of wilderness as the ultimate good.

  In retrospect, I realize I saw Earth First! near the end of its glory days. Two things happened. One, as with all cool scenes, it was soon inundated—since it was the only fighting game in town, activists from a dozen other causes descended, most of them more hippie than redneck. “They weren’t all that much concerned with wilderness,” Davis recalled as he rowed, steady and powerful, across the lake. “The last straw may have come at one of the annual rendezvous, when one of the newcomers stood up and demanded that Earth First! get involved in rent control.” Two, the FBI arrived. In our post-9/11 world, it seems hard to believe that the Feds left the group alone as long as they did: they were, after all, advocating a dozen creative varieties of sabotage. But it wasn’t until fairly late in the game that they swooped down, arresting Foreman and charging him with instigating a scheme to tear down a bunch of power lines in the Arizona desert. In truth, the charge was nonsense—the trial, when it finally happened, featured a government informer so drug-addled that the prosecutors had to argue that LSD didn’t interfere with his ability to be a cogent witness. But that was much later.

  “I’d been traveling when the arrests happened, and friends and colleagues back in Tucson said not to come back,” remembers Davis. “So I spent most of that summer traveling in the East. Not on the run, but keeping a low profile.” Within a few months it was clear that things would not return to normal. And so the movement began to split apart. The hippie wing kept some of the old spirit alive, still publishing the Journal, still marking the pagan holidays. But Foreman, Davis, and a good many others were a little tired of the bravado, and no longer convinced direct action would deliver much except police harassment. They split off to start a new, very different, journal, this one called Wild Earth. Now a decade old, it’s become the intellectual center of a new movement for wilderness, working with some of the country’s leading conservation biologists to draw detailed maps and plans for the eventual rewilding of big chunks of the planet. But at the beginning, the most interesting question was where it would be located.

  In the United States, heads have always turned west when we’ve thought about nature. Our vocabulary and grammar of wilderness came most of all from John Muir’s summer in the Sierra; our picture of the wild came through the lens of Ansel Adams, traveling the mountains and deserts of California and Nevada. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Alaska, the Rockies—those are the icons. And for Earth First!, too, it had always been the vast Western wildlands—the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana, the Siskiyous of Oregon, all home to wolves or grizzlies or rattlesnakes, giant firs, ancient bristlecone pines, the charismatic flora and fauna of wild America.

  But John Davis had grown up in New Hampshire. “I’d been in Tucson five years. I was starting to really miss fresh water,” he says. “I have the Eastern forest in my bones. I can be away for a little while, but then I start to pine for it.” Not only that, he had a point to make: “that wilderness was not just a Western thing.” And so he turned eastward, and in so doing turned, almost inevitably, to the Adirondacks, the biggest and wildest patch of land this side of the Mississippi. “I knew about the Adirondacks because I’d read an article in National Wildlife magazine,” he says. “My grandmother gave me Ranger Rick, and then, when I was a little older, National Wildlife. Anyway, I was in sixth grade and I read about the Adirondacks and I was amazed by it. Very taken by it. I knew I wanted to go there someday.” His first trip, however, was less than idyllic. It was shortly after he’d left Tucson, and he was with a friend. “It was hot, muggy. We stopped somewhere to camp, and it was completely miserable. Tom managed to get a solo tent up amid the blackflies. I stayed in the cab of the truck. With the windows closed, it was too hot. If I opened them the bugs were impossible. I finally got up at 4:00 a.m. to go for a very fast walk.”

  “Once I really started exploring the Adirondacks, though, I knew I wanted it to be my home region,” he said. “There really was no place else.”

  By now we were almost completely across the lake, pulling into a small cove in the woods. Looking back at the Vermont shore, we could see dozens of those big second-home mansions, mile after mile of development. On the New York coast, however, the woods run almost unbroken down to the water’s edge; much of the land we were approaching south of Split Rock Point is state-owned, “forever wild” under Article 14 of the state’s constitution. The Adirondacks aren’t all wild—within the 6-million acre Adirondack Park, only 3 million acres are protected public land; the other 3 million are in private hands. Most of that is timberland, but there are also small towns scattered throughout, and ever more vacation homes. Still, that 6 million acres makes it roughly the same size as Vermont, only with 140,000 people instead of 700,000. It makes Vermont—statistically America’s most rural state—seem densely populated. It is not, as I have said, pure wilderness, any more than Vermont is purely settled. But it tends toward wildness. And one of John’s missions is to make it wilder yet.

  We landed the rowboat and struck off through the woods, first on a path and then on a track and then just cross-lots through the puckerbrush. The afternoon was steamy, and within minutes a cloud of mosquitoes descended. By dint of topography, and because so much of the Adirondacks have never been tilled and drained, the region seems infinitely wetter than Vermont. No placid agricultural rivers like Otter Creek, but ten thousand little streams backed up into a million beaver pools. The cartographers claim three thousand lakes for the park, but it all depends on definition—if you’re a mosquito, the number of places to call home is many orders of magnitude higher. I slathered on some toxic DEET, John a bit of organic repellent, and we continued toward his house. And he continued to tell his story.

  “When we started Wild Earth, I was actually getting a salary. Not much, but I was saving every penny. And I knew I wanted to buy land. All those years of reporting and editing bad news—I wanted the satisfaction of seeing a place saved.” His father actually found the parcel, forty-five acres with a listing log cabin. “As soon as I saw it, I thought immediately: ‘This is the place.’ Hemlock Rock Wildlife Sanctuary, I started calling it. One of the first things I did was to climb a big white pine—to the west I could see Coon Mountain and nothing but forest. I looked on the map and, sure enough, that area was protected in part by the Nature Conservancy. And to the other side was Split Rock Wild Forest, 4,000 acres of state land. We were right in the middle.”

  Anywhere else in the east, it would have seemed wild indeed. But in fact the Champlain Valley is the least protected part of the Adirondacks; the few miles between the lake and the start of the high mountains were traditionally farmed, and the state acquired much less land there than in the more rugged uplands. “Conservationists
have tended to see the Champlain Valley as a buffer,” Davis said. “But there’s important wildlife habitat here. People think of it as bucolic—from Willsboro to Port Henry it looks a lot like Vermont, and people love that, don’t want it to change. Environmentalists have generally assumed their job here is to maintain that bucolic landscape. Which is fine, but it’s not enough. You can’t completely consign the valleys to human dominance. That’s the western model—wilderness in the rocks and ice, people everywhere else.” So John quickly had a second job: trying to build a truly intact corridor connecting the lake with the High Peaks.

  John’s friend Tom Butler—who eventually succeeded him as editor at Wild Earth—met us a few miles on, and together we all climbed Coon Mountain, a rocky little knob smack in the middle of the proposed corridor. The view from the top showed plenty of little squares of hay meadow, but it also showed the obvious forest connection they were trying to enlarge and protect. “You get up here and you ask yourself: ‘If I’m a bear, how do I get from the lake to the mountains,’” Tom said. “From up here, too, you can see what a dramatic place this is. The elevational gradient is astounding—the lowest place on the continent is the bottom of Lake Champlain, which is 300 feet below sea level just off Split Rock. From there it’s just a few miles to the top of Giant Mountain, which is 4,600 feet.”

  “We have this opportunity at Split Rock partly because of geological accident,” adds John. “There’s a band of bedrock underlying the High Peaks that extends through to the lake right here. It’s much more rugged, cliffier, ledgier than the rest of the valley, and so it was less farmed. At one time or another, any given point was probably cleared for sheep pasture, but usually they gave up. Because of that challenging geology, we have this possibility for a corridor.”

  BECAUSE OF THAT challenging geology, and because of another accident, too. After a few years, John left Wild Earth to take a job with the Foundation for Deep Ecology, promoting “wildlands philanthropy.” Which is to say, rich people buying tracts of land in order to conserve them. (The prototype, and John’s mentor, is Doug Tompkins, who purchased a huge slice of Chile and has recently bitten off a chunk of Argentina.) At a conference he helped organize on the subject in Boston, John met Jamie Phillips, a Manhattan fashion photographer whose stepfather had made a small fortune, set up a foundation, and then died. “Jamie ran the show at the Eddy Foundation, and he could have gone in any number of directions. But he told me he wanted to be able to walk a piece of land he had saved.” Within a few weeks John had him up in a small airplane flying over the proposed Split Rock Wildway; within a few weeks after that he’d bought his first parcel, 535 acres on the Boquet mountains. “And after that he really had land-buying in his blood,” says John. So far the foundation has acquired about 2,000 acres of the 10,000 they someday hope to protect.

  Phillips relocated to a small house in the middle of the property, its walls lined not with his photos but with maps full of pins marking possible land sales. I pulled off my pack in his yard, happy for the rest. Overjoyed, in fact, when he proposed a drive around the area so he could show off some of their acquisitions. “Until five years ago, I knew the Adirondacks was a place where they made chairs, but that’s all I knew about it,” Jamie said, as we climbed into his hybrid-electric Toyota Prius. We drove down Lake Shore Road toward the small town of Essex, passing Webb-Royce swamp. “That has long been a birders’ mecca; there was a big heron rookery. But then the beavers were trapped out and the water levels plummeted. By protecting the parcel, we’re hoping the beavers may recolonize.” As he said it, we passed a porcupine dead in the road—a good reminder that wildlife corridors are not an abstraction, that animals are constantly on the move following their own imperatives.

  A little farther on, though, we came to something quite different—a beautiful little spread, Black Kettle Farm. “This may be the oldest farm in Essex County,” says Jamie. “Now, initially John wanted everything to grow back to forest, but there was just too much community spirit here. So it will be a wild farm.” The farm property ran from a heavily logged high ridge—which will be left alone to recover its wildness—down to the Boquet River. “Down along the fields we’re letting the swales between the meadows go wild. Over on the left is where we grew wheat last year—we sold it all to the mill in town, and to Yannick’s bakery in Crown Point. Everything he makes, he makes with Champlain Valley wheat.”

  And a little farther on, by the nearly nonexistent hamlet of Whallonsburg, we came to another Eddy Foundation property. “Habitat for Humanity asked if they could have land to build a house. And we said, ‘Sure, here’s a parcel.’ But in the lease we disallowed any two-stroke engines, and said they had to leash all their pets so they wouldn’t bother the wildlife. And the people have been cool about it. They called us to say they got a Weedwacker—but it was an electric one!”

  The Split Rock wildway is still in its infancy, and the Eddy Foundation lacks the money to finish the job. Some of the neighbors seem unmoved by the vision—one of Ivan Boesky’s former business partners, for instance, has a big spread and farms it as if he were in Kansas, removing every hedgerow to make life easier for his tractors. But it’s an impressive idea, an impressive start, and an impressive example of how people like Davis and Butler can hold true to their ideal—wilderness!—and yet adapt a little to the world around them, and of how they can understand that a small farm can have its own kind of beauty, and a house for someone without much money. “We want a wide swath of real green reaching through the valley,” John says. “And around it good selection forestry, good organic farming.”

  The conversation between the wheatfields of Black Kettle Farm and its expanding hedgerows, between Earth First! and the Eddy Foundation, between the tendency of Vermont and the tendency of the Adirondacks, echoes the conversation between Ed Abbey and the other greatest essayist of the real world in our time, the Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry. Here’s my truth: a rootless child of the suburbs, I came to wilderness partly through the written word. Through Abbey, following Bob Marshall and John Muir and Henry Thoreau. And I first came to care about the good use of land—forest and field—again less through experience than through books, in particular Berry’s. He is, in many ways, the utter opposite of Abbey. One left the Appalachian uplands for the raw West, saying that the “fuzzy hills” of the East made him feel trapped; the other returned from school in California to make his life in the Kentucky farming town where he’d been raised. One, “Cactus Ed,” was wildly and rudely funny, irresponsible in marriage, likely to be drunk in the evening or at least to imply that he had been. The other is very nearly solemn in his writing, valuing fidelity above all else. One seemed most alive in motion (his essay on the joys of abusing rental cars is a masterpiece); the other draws his strength from what he has called “sticking.” It seemed at first to me as if a reader had to choose one vision or the other. But both appealed enormously to me, and as I got to know both men, they were deeply appealing, too. As it turned out, in fact, they were great fans of each other, attempting on the backs of various books to pin each other with the title of our finest national essayist.

  The admiration came, in part, from simple appreciation of craft. “A sort of law at our house is that I should not read an Abbey book after bedtime,” Berry once said. “For if I did, I would be apt to laugh loud enough to wake people up.” But much more, I think, it stemmed from the sense that they each held part of the puzzle: the iconoclastic, individualistic, rebellious defense of the wild as necessary for our sanity; the communalistic, enduring defense of the pastoral as necessary for our culture. The point is, they were appropriate in different degrees in different places (which, of course, is the great insight of ecology to begin with). Abbey makes intuitive sense in the desert country where he landed, and Berry in his fertile fields.

  But both knew they needed at least a smidgen of the other. In his last and greatest novel, A Fool’s Progress, Abbey’s alter ego, dying, makes his way home from the West to the East
ern mountains where he’d grown up, home to his family. His brother finds him as he nears the house, tells him they’ve been expecting him “for weeks. For years. Come on down to the house now. Supper’s almost ready.” At which Henry “felt a great bewildered joy rising in his heart; fifty-three years—maybe that was enough after all.” For his part, Berry took time from his unceasing defense of the small farm and the small farmer to write, among other things, a passionate and effective defense of Kentucky’s Red River Gorge. It was threatened with flooding by a dam in the same way that Abbey’s beloved Glen Canyon had been submerged, to generate power and to “provide recreation” for powerboaters. “The Gorge, dammed, would be like Hamlet rewritten for the feeble-minded,” he said in his book The Unforeseen Wilderness. And what do you know—the dam was never built.