Authors: Bill McKibben
Wandering Home (16 page)
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.
ERMISSIONS
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 Time: Jeanne Robert Foster
, edited by Noel Riedinger-Johnson (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY 2003). Reprinted by permission of Syracuse University Press.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
M
OST 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.
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
B
ILL
M
C
K
IBBEN’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.
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
v3.0