Wandering Home

by Bill McKibben

  SOMETIMES I GET to cross something off, however. Today, for instance, which is the very last day of this journey. The trail through the Siamese Ponds wilderness ended at Route 8, the north-south two-lane that cuts through our township. It’s about the loveliest road I know—glimpses of the Sacandaga again and again as you drive south toward Speculator. And it’s also about the loneliest. There aren’t any towns for twenty-five or thirty miles south of Bakers Mills. Or rather, there are a couple of towns but no one lives in them anymore. Ghost towns out West desiccate, preserved by the arid sun. Ghost towns in the central Adirondacks (Griffin is the one I know best, an old tannery town just south of here abandoned near the turn of the century) simply rot, cellar holes filling with birch trees, the forest reclaiming its own.

  I walk down Route 8 about a mile, just one log truck passing me, and then cross over, heading east into the woods along a short trail to Kibby Pond. Two old and dear friends are waiting for me. Peter Bauer just may be the most effective conservationist in the Adirondacks. For a long time, it was outsiders who saved this place: rich New Yorkers who looked upon it as their vacation paradise and so exerted the power to draw the Blue Line, amend the constitution; many of the locals were bitter, resentful. But with each generation that feeling mellows some, and Peter has built a group, the Residents Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, that speaks with complete credibility on behalf of the park and the people who inhabit it. Steve Ovitt, who I’ve known almost since the day I came here, looks like a forest ranger even when he’s not in uniform—he’s clean-cut, broad-chested, strong-shouldered. Steve works for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, and he’s responsible for a vast tract of land centered on this forest. We’ve hiked and winter-camped all through these woods; he’s taken me along on all-night searches for lost hunters and lost hikers and lost kids; there’s no one I feel more comfortable with in the woods.

  Which is good, because today we’re leaving the trail altogether. After the quick hike into Kibby Pond, the path ends and we will bushwhack across the top of the Wilcox Lake Wild Forest, another hundred-thousand-acre chunk, and one with just as few trails and even fewer visitors than the Siamese Ponds Wilderness I’ve just come through. On the other side, seven or eight miles away, is the house where I’ve spent most of my adult life, but I’ve never made quite this trip. Nor for that matter has Peter, or even Steve—the woods is a big place.

  As we start our wander, Steve is telling stories of his summer so far. Most of it’s been spent out West, leading the state’s firefighting crew that annually flies out to help in the battle against the biggest blazes on the vast national forests. Invariably they’re met with a certain amount of bemusement—what could New Yorkers know about forests? “I just tell them Teddy Roosevelt was our governor before he was president, so we have state land, not federal land,” says Steve. As it turns out, the New York crew are regarded as crack firefighters by the bosses at fire command in Boise—this summer Steve was in charge of five miles of fire line on the Crazy Horse blaze near Glacier National Park in Montana. He was calling in bulldozers, coordinating air attack—and flagging the driveways of houses whose location, or cedar shingles, made them indefensible. “You can’t have timber to your doorstep,” he says. “There or here.”

  Which is an interesting point. Because it’s usually so wet, the Adirondacks have a reputation as an “asbestos forest.” But Steve got his expertise right here, battling stubborn small fires in piney ledges around the park. “We have a thirty-year fire cycle, and we’re forty years into it,” he said. “We’re due—the incidence of small fires is up every dry year now. The fuels are built up.” I’ve fought Adirondack fires with Steve a couple of times—hacking away at duff with a mattock, sprinkling water from the Indian can carried on my back. Their smoldering persistence is uncanny, a little unsettling—you think you’ve got it out, and then it’s up and running again. And fire in the Adirondacks seems to favor steep, hard-to-reach spots. “Compared to this stuff we’re whacking through right now, the West is a walk in the park,” says Steve. “That land is all open out there. If I got a crew of those guys out here, they’d be having a fit right now, talking about being in the jungle.”

  Indeed, the witch hobble was thick on the ground. Not only that, but it’s awfully easy to get turned around in these woods once you leave the trail. Even if the sun is out, it’s usually hidden by the trees; beavers make last year’s small stream into this year’s big marsh. I’m competent with a map and compass, but not competent enough. (That is, I almost always find where I’m going, but I have to worry every step of the way that I might not.) So it’s a pleasure for me and Peter both to be walking with Steve, who never gets rattled even if he does get turned around.

  TODAY HE’S GOT one site he wants us to see on our meander, an illegal hunting camp he discovered some years ago on state land not too far from Kibby Pond. During the fall season, hunters can get permits to set up temporary outposts deep in the woods: a platform tent, usually, that stays up for six or seven weeks and serves as a base of operations. But sometimes sportsmen decide they want something a little fancier, and so they build permanent cabins—and these woods are big enough that without real detective work you’re unlikely to come across them. Steve’s predecessor as ranger hadn’t been especially aggressive in his patrols, and so for the first few years of his posting, Steve had easy pickings—many hunting camps where he either surprised and arrested the occupants or, finding them unoccupied, waited till the ground was safely covered with snow and simply burned them down. This one had been particularly grand: a nice wooden floor, a woodstove, windows out over a small marshy pond. A mile from the trail, in a place that the builder must have been sure no ranger would ever bother to visit. When Steve found it, he staked it out for a while; finally, when he couldn’t catch the builder, “I chopped up the floor and poured a lot of Coleman fuel everywhere. When I lit it, it took the roof right off.” Now a few charred timbers remain, as a reminder to anyone else who might get the cabin-building bug.

  Which is not to say Steve is against hunting—he’s about the most enthusiastic hunter I know. Or Peter Bauer, either, though that’s often the caricature of environmentalists. The Adirondacks were first protected by an alliance that included hunters and fishermen as well as backpackers and birdwatchers; class and culture have tended to separate that coalition in recent decades, and it’s taken a toll, both on politics and, in some ways, on biology. Next to the charred cabin, for instance, we come out on a marshy little beaver flow, hopping from one grassy hummock to the next to keep our feet dry. “This water’s so warm—look at that green algae,” said Steve. “These brooks used to have all kinds of trout, but that’s because people were trapping some of the beavers.”

  “A couple of decades ago, they’d take 20,000 beavers a year out of the park,” added Peter. But the demand for beaver pelts has dropped past the point where not much of anyone wants to trap them anymore, and so the dams proliferate everywhere. Which is not such a good thing for brook trout, who can’t tolerate the warm still waters.

  Of course, you might be able to help the system more directly by reintroducing the timber wolf, the most important animal that has yet to return to the Adirondacks. Wolves are strong enough to tear through the tops of beaver lodges—they’re almost the only effective predator the animal has. But…so far efforts to reintroduce the wolf have stalled, largely because hunters worry that they will kill too many deer, too many being defined as “deer that I was going to kill.”

  Nothing is easy, not politics or biology, when the question is how to recalibrate a balance inevitably altered by our presence. I’ve watched state officials poison everything in an Adirondack pond with a chemical called rotenone. It’s designed to wipe out all the “trash fish” like perch, so they can be replaced with “native” trout. (No one really knows which trout were native to which waters, however; and anyway, anglers with bait buckets full of minnows usually manage to reintroduce the other species ins
ide a decade. Some ponds have been poisoned three or four times.) Or say you did reintroduce the wolf—what if the main effect was to make life hard for coyotes, who seem to have filled some of the wolf niche in the Adirondacks, switching their diet to deer and learning to hunt in packs? Do you let forest fires burn? Do you fight them to protect the vacation homes people have built on their fringe? Do you go in and cut the little trees out of the wild so that the fires won’t burn as hot? “Management” of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.

  Still, there are a few things one can say with some confidence. At the moment, in both the Adirondacks and Vermont, one of them is: keep the ATVs out of the forest. Yesterday I made a philosophical argument, but today, walking with Peter Bauer, I get a small update on the down-and-dirty facts. Dozens of volunteers from his Residents’ Committee have been monitoring the situation across the park, and uniformly they report the same thing: the four-wheelers are ignoring every rule and regulation designed to control them, and they are turning trail after trail into a rutted, muddy mess. No surprise, really: he tells us about the ads they’ve collected from off-road magazines. “The basic message is ‘Get Muddy,’” he says—every picture shows the big machines leaping over boulders and plowing through ponds. In Japan, where the companies that build them are located, users are restricted to a few privately owned tracks, sort of like our go-kart circuits. But here, until a recent state ruling banning them on the forest preserve, users have been claiming the right to take them anywhere, and arguing, in a parody of political correctness, that restrictions on their use discriminate against people who can’t hike.

  “People say, ‘I’m too old, I can’t get where I used to,’” says Steve. “To me, you get a certain amount of time, and then you get your memories. And if you’re driving in to some place on your ATV, you’re messing it up for the people who are making their memories now.”

  BY NOW—MIDAFTERNOON—we’re completely enclosed within the kingdom of my memories. We’ve crossed the trail to Fish Ponds (what did I tell you about names?) and we’re climbing up an unnamed stream toward a height of land on the shoulder of Ross Mountain. We’re seeing lots of bear scat, which leads to bear stories. Steve tells about spending an anxious hour with a big guy a few miles south of here; I show the place where I surprised one while carrying my toddler daughter years ago. We watched it amble away—for us, ever since, the unnamed creek has been Bear Stream. This is deep woods now, but I know a place right off the brook where a cellar hole reveals an old farmstead. There’s an apple tree there, and, even better, a hop vine, still bearing a century after anyone stopped harvesting—I cut some of the bitter flowers once and brewed beer with them. There’s the yellow birch where our old dog Barley once treed a raccoon and then sat there, calmly, for two hours watching her like she was the movie of the week. There’s the slope where I kicked over a yellow-jacket nest and came away with seventy stings. Here’s a weird rock—a big boulder with a hole through it almost as if someone had bored it with a drill. The state geologist, Yngvar Isachsen, came to see it one day, and he looked at it for a long time, and then he said, “Damned if I know how that happened.”

  We’re on our own parcel of land now, the one I bought in my mid-twenties when I left the city, 130 acres that run imperceptibly on to the vast state land. We stop for a moment at the swinging bench Sue and I got for a wedding present—I spent a week tromping around looking for the perfect spot, eventually hanging it here between two white pines, where it offers a perfectly framed view of Crane Mountain. Our daughter’s middle name is Crane; by now this place is in us deep.

  DOWN THE SMALL trail and out into the cleared field. Once there was a barn here, but it had caved in by the time we arrived, and so the local fire company burned it for practice, all of us in our turnout gear on a cold fall day, amazed by the heat that comes from a “fully involved” building. Now there’s just grass, and a small fire pit, where we roast marshmallows and swat no-see-ums in high summer. It’s right above the pond—the pond where the otters come a few times a year to play with the dog, the pond of a thousand hockey games. And across the pond, the house, where our daughter had her start, and our books, and our marriage. At dusk on a December night, when you take one last swooping turn around the ice, there’s no warmer sight in the world than the yellow light spilling out of the kitchen window through a scrim of icicles.

  Not today, though. Today it’s hot and we’re tired, and a journey is at its end, and so of course beer is in order. A little Saranac pale ale from this side of the lake, and a little Otter Creek copper ale from Vermont—we mix them together and drink a toast to this whole territory, indivisible in my mind anyway. Tall granite, high corn, lofty pines. Big people but not too many.

  THIS TREK BEGAN, literally, in Robert Frost’s backyard; it ends in the domain of a different poet. Jeanne Robert Foster is hardly known at all, but her life coincided with Frost’s; she was born five years later than he, in 1879, and died seven years later, in 1970. Only one book of her poems remains in print, a posthumous collection-cum-biography called Adirondack Portraits. In the foreword the great literary critic Alfred Kazin writes of his amazement at coming across her work for the first time, “an astonishing duplicate of Frost’s slow-moving, artfully conversational pastorals.” But, as he also noted, she lacked his “great ego;” in the end, “she was less interested in poetry than in the world it could report.”

  That world was the one I’d been walking through the last week. Born near Olmstedville, not far from where I’d emerged from the Hoffman Notch Wilderness, she lived a childhood of deep rural poverty, often “farmed out” to other families to earn her keep when there wasn’t food enough at home. And so she’d lived in Griffin, the ghost town down the Sacandaga; and in North River above the Hudson; and here, a twenty-minute walk from our house, even closer up against the side of Crane Mountain.

  And then she made an almost miraculous breakout—she was a great beauty and, at seventeen, she wed a man twenty-five years her senior who had met her on vacation and took her south to New York, to Boston, where she found herself, all of a sudden, near the center of American culture both popular and high. A drawing of her appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair; soon she was one of the Gibson Girls, supermodels of the day. She next worked her way into journalism, first as a newspaper reporter and then as the literary editor of the American Review of Reviews, the largest-circulation serious magazine in the country—she wrote eight or twelve pages of book and poetry criticism for the magazine each month, and then went to Europe to help cover World War I. Back in New York, her headquarters was Petitpas’ Restaurant, where her circle included the great portrait painter John Butler Yeats (father of William)—an unfinished drawing of Foster was on his easel when he died, and she took his body to the Chestertown, near Olmstedville, for burial. Later she worked closely with John Quinn as he assembled the greatest collection of contemporary art in America—she became friends with Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, Pound; there’s a picture in Adirondack Portraits of her teeing up a golf ball in a foursome that includes the sculptor Brancusi and the composer Erik Satie.

  But all the time she was writing poems, poems about this small slice of the Adirondacks, and the people and the trees she had known in her youth. She published two collections around the start of World War I—Wild Apples, and Neighbors of Yesterday. Her biographer, Noel Riedinger-Johnson, says that the books “completed a trilogy of distinguished literary portraits by American women” that also included Willa Cather and Sarah Orne Jewett. More than that, they left the best record of what life was like in Warren County at the turn of the century, in the decades when conservation was gaining the upper hand and the state was starting to buy up huge tracts of the Adirondacks, letting them revert to wildness.

  The first thing to strike a reader was how much more crowded it was—almost Vermont-like in its density. The margins of Crane Mountain, now mostly trees with a few v
acation homes, then comprised farms small and large. Most of these were subsistence farms, and the subsistence was bare; the growing season up here is probably forty or fifty days shorter than in the depths of the Champlain Valley; I’ve seen frosts well past Memorial Day and well before Labor Day. One poem, “The Boiled Shirt,” describes a family farming sandy soil on the upper edge of the mountain, where “even the hens were lean from always chasing grasshoppers.” A photographer comes to take their picture, the only one they’ve ever sat for, but as he waits he hears the angry voices of the father and the two grown sons. They’re arguing, the wife explains, because

  Each one of them is bound he’ll wear the shirt

  We’re poor; we never had but one boiled shirt.

  I hand stitched it of white cloth; the bosom

  Is all little tucks that will hold the starch.

  They’ve always took turns about wearing it,

  But today each one wants to wear the shirt.

  I said Pa should have the right; all the brunt

  Of the hard farm work always fell on him….

  Here they come now. I’m glad I’ve had my way.

  Put Pa in front when you take the picture.

  You can see that he’s wearing the boiled shirt.

  Subsistence farming did not automatically breed “community” or “neighborliness” or any of the other virtues we sometimes imagine; Foster tells of a farm wife up and leaving her husband and five children (“I’m only hands and feet for George, / Someone to put the food on the table, / Someone to have more children for him”), and of the last, abortive, tar-and-feathering in town.