And yet it was a full world, too, absolutely full. She tells about a neighbor, Cy Pritchard, who had heard about Johnny Appleseed, and who decided to do the same thing on a smaller scale—visiting his neighbors, eating their apples, saving the seeds.
He liked Seek-No-Furthers and Gill Flowers and Greenings,
Tolman Sweets and Russets, pippins and spice apples.
If you had a Sheep’s nose, he’d pick that one….
He’d put the seeds into a little bag and thank you.”
She describes wax-on-snow at the height of the syrup run, and the giant elm on Landon Hill, and the old pine tree by the baseball diamond in Chestertown, its roots
So large, so old they were a gallery
For all the tired when the baseball nine
Played Schroon or any other North Woods town.
AND IF JOHNSBURG PEOPLE were not perfect, they did build and protect a key stop on the Underground Railroad (“and on Emancipation Day they / Set candles in the windows to proclaim / that man’s triumphant spirit rules his clay”). They had every kind of frolic—skating parties, square dances. People who’d never had security found it—Foster writes about one Irish family, refugees from the potato famine, who wouldn’t leave their land even to go to church:
I know you’ll think we are queer folks.
We feel sometimes that we are deep in sin;
We’re happy to stay home, sit on the stoop,
And look out on our fields of oats and rye
And watch the cows down in the pasture lot,
And sheep and the young lambs up on the hill.
It’s strange to you who never wanted land
To call your own that we are filled with fear
That some old spell might sweep it all away.
No spell swept it away. Just slow time, the steady spread of an economy that made these most marginal of hill farms impossible. That filled them first with field pine and birch, and then slowly with real forest, till you need to know where to look to find a sign. (But it’s still easy to see the cellar hole on the Putnam Farm beneath Crane Mountain where Foster lived, and the wolf maple that grew outside the kitchen window.)
So—is that sad? In a sense, of course. It’s a passing, and passings are sad. If the last grassland sparrow leaves Vermont, its call will be missed. In one poem, Foster imagines the ghosts of the two Putnam brothers, come back to survey their land. Enos, frantic, sees the white house rotting, the beehives gone, the cattle and the sheep missing.
I must find a man who still loves the soil
Walk by his side unseen, pour in his mind
What I loved when I lived until he builds,
Sows, reaps, and covers these hill pastures here
With sheep and cattle, mows the meadow land,
Grafts the old orchard, makes it bear again
Knowing that we are lost if the land does not yield.
His brother Francis is calmer, though; he wants only one thing from his visit, “the scent of sweet fern in the August sun.”
I can feel both moods. There is a surpassing glory in our right habitation of a place—it’s the orderliness of the college garden, the calm of Mitchell’s pasture, the humming industry of Kirk Webster’s hives, the sweet draught of Granstrom’s wine, the endless slow bounty of David Brynn’s forests. It’s the glory of the land and the human making sense of each other. That conversation has almost died out in our nation, drowned by the roar of thoughtless commerce, pointless ease; that’s why it’s so fine to see places like the Champlain Valley where you can still hear it going on, indeed hear it growing a little louder.
But here on the western shore, there is another—equal—kind of glory, the glory of the human voice growing quieter and quieter till it’s only a whisper. Foster’s last poems return, relentlessly, to Crane Mountain, the mammoth, steep-sided hunk of rock, twin-summited with a big pond in the saddle between, its high flanks carpeted with berries and hence fertilized with bear scat. In one verse, two sons ask their father why he sold the family timber lot on one side of the mountain to the state for part of the forest preserve.
I gave the mountainside to keep it wild,
Free for the life that it has had so long
The trail will always be what it is now.
The summit, with its scrubby balsam trees….
I listened to the brook. The yellow
Lady-slipper grows there, and the pink,
And other flowers that fly the feet of men.
I touched the trees; somehow they sing to me;
The pine and hemlock leaning to the wind;
The birdseye maple and, where the sun could touch,
The slippery elm we used for medicine.
There are still two hundred acres of cleared land,
The beaver meadows, and the sugar bush and orchards
For my sons. In future years you will come here
And touch the trees as I have done,
And think that I did right.
Some passings, in other words, are sadder than others. The conversion of a farm into a strip mall or a tract of pasteboard mansions saddens because it’s irrevocable, at least on a human time scale; it replaces the particular, the appropriate-to-this-place, with the general, the one-size-fits-anywhere. Whereas the slide of a farmstead or a woodlot into wildness—or vice versa—merely trades one appropriateness for another. It’s like the passage of a youth into an adult, a slow change and maturation that, with luck, never strikes the observer as too abrupt or ungainly. And if one is truly lucky the passage from adult to corpse will go as smoothly, seem a natural shift that leaves us sad for what is no more, but not shaken. That renews our sense of the propriety of things. A blur, not a line.
I HAVE THE great good fortune to have found the place I was supposed to inhabit, a place in whose largeness I can sense the whole world but yet is small enough for me to comprehend. If, when it comes my turn to die, I really do see again that view from Mount Abe, I know it will contain all these things: farm, field, forest, mountain, loon, moose, cow, monarch, pine, hemlock, white oak, shepherd, bee, beekeeper, college, teacher, beaver flow, bakery, brewery, hawk, vineyard, high rock, high summer, deep winter, deep economy. Yes, and cell phone tower and highway and car lot and Burger King. This is part of the real world. But what’s rare in that real world, and common here, is the chance for completion. For being big sometimes and small at others, in the shadow of the mountains and the shade of the hemlocks.
1. When I first arrived at Middlebury, I wondered where they were hiding the fat, ugly, shy children, imagining some special dorm on the edge of campus. But I never found it.
2. I did not escape their wrath entirely, however. Google allows one instantly to dredge up sentiments like the following, a quote from Mike Medbury of the Idaho Conservation League in a November 1996 issue of High Country News: “This whole Bill McKibben Bill Cronon thing about the death of nature and the death of wilderness as a concept is utter horseshit. These guys are getting into this heady philosophy about wilderness; they’re trying to deconstruct us or something. I would just like to put them out there in it somewhere and see what they say.”
3. One thing he didn’t do was record a lot of albums of Adirondack folk songs—that’s another Christopher Shaw.
4. In subsequent years the entrepreneurial driver of that stagecoach reportedly sold as souvenirs many dozen horseshoes that his team had allegedly worn that night.
PERMISSIONS
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
COUNTERPOINT PRESS: Excerpt from “Sabbath Poem Number 2” from The Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997 by Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.
SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS: Excerpts from “The Boiled Shirt,” “The Apple-Eater,” “The Old Pine Tree,” “The Mooneys,” “The Brothers Return,” and “State Land” from Adirondack Portraits: A Piece of T
ime: Jeanne Robert Foster, edited by Noel Riedinger-Johnson (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY 2003). Reprinted by permission of Syracuse University Press.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MOST OF THE PEOPLE who aided me in this trip are described in the text. But of course a book requires assistance from many others as well. They include my colleagues at Middlebury, including Chris Klyza, Steve Trombulak, Jon Isham, Connie Bisson, Helen Young, Pete Ryan, Becky Gould, Kathy Morse, Janet Wiseman, and crucially, Nan Jenks Jay. At Crown, my dear old friend Annik La Farge was her usual wise and cheerful self; I am also grateful to her crack coworkers Mario Rojas, Jackie Aher, and Lauren Dong, and to copy editor David Wade Smith. Justin Allen and Katherine Fausset help make my agent, Gloria Loomis, the finest in the land.
I am most grateful to all the many people who have helped preserve and protect the landscapes described herein. And especially to the two people who have helped me enjoy them most: my wife, Sue Halpern, who captured these places so powerfully in her recent novel The Book of Hard Things, and my daughter, Sophie Crane McKibben, who truly is a child of the mountains on both shores of Lake Champlain.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BILL MCKIBBEN’S first book, The End of Nature, was also the first book for a general audience on climate change; it appeared in the New Yorker and has been translated into twenty languages. His eight other books include The Age of Missing Information and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. His work appears frequently in Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Review of Books, Outside, and many other national publications and has been widely anthologized, including in the Oxford and Norton books of nature writing and in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Spiritual Writing, and The Best American Travel Writing. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is the 2000 winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.
A list of permissions appears on page 158.
Copyright © 2005 by Bill McKibben
All rights reserved
Published in the United States by Crown Journeys, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN JOURNEYS and the Crown Journeys colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKibben, Bill.
Wandering home: a long walk across America’s most hopeful landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks/
Bill McKibben.—1st ed.
1. Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.)—Description and travel.
2. Champlain Valley—Description and travel. 3. Vermont—Description and travel. 4. Adirondack Mountains (N.Y.)—Social life and customs. 5. Champlain Valley—Social life and customs. 6. Vermont—Social life and customs. 7. McKibben, Bill—Travel—New York (State)—Adirondack Mountains. 8. McKibben, Bill—Travel—Champlain Valley. 9. Hiking—New York (State)—Adirondack Mountains. 10. Hiking—Champlain Valley. I. Title. II. Crown Journeys series
F127.A2M357 2005
917.47’5—dc22 2004016455
eISBN: 978-0-307-54897-9
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