Wandering Home (2 page)

Indeed they are right to perceive a difference. Cross the lake and you leave behind the neat town green with the bandstand in favor of a more Appalachian look: Methodists and Baptists and Catholics. No one goes to a town meeting—political power and patronage tend to pass on dynastically. There’s poverty on both sides of the lake, but somehow it looks rawer on the Adirondack shore, the trailers more numerous and nearer the main road. Boston is suddenly no closer than Detroit. Vermont, too, seems distant, all the way across the lake, a mythical land of Saab-driving, goat-cheese-eating Democrats. The Adirondacks are higher, colder, and wilder—people have lived here for fewer centuries in fewer numbers, and have never been able to make farming work for long. And so, over time, huge chunks have been left to rewild themselves, till in places it approaches the primeval.

Y
ET IT SEEMS
to me they belong together, this Champlain Valley of Vermont and this great Adirondack woods. Every bird guide, every alumni association, every corporate sales office considers one shore New England and the other the “mid-Atlantic.” But if you stand on
top of Mount Abe and huck west, your gob will find its way into the lake and then north into the mighty St. Lawrence—a fur-trading river, flowing out into the bergy Atlantic north at the tip of the Gaspé Peninsula. Wild country. This crest of the Green Mountains is the last upwelling of the coastal geology, the last fold pushed up the colliding plates of the Atlantic shore; on its western slope you face the geology of midcontinent, the Canadian Shield. Once you’ve started down into the Champlain Valley, you really have begun the journey west.

They have so much to teach each other, these two sides: New Englanders have learned a great deal, mostly through trial and error, about how to successfully inhabit a land, experiments that continue to this day; and Adirondackers, often against their will, have learned as much about how to leave land alone. The distinction is easy to overdraw—Vermont, too, has stopped farming many of its acres, seen a smaller-scale reversion to the wild. The Adirondacks have seen an influx of tourists and retirees from the overdeveloped world to the south. And yet their dual personalities remain surprisingly intact—though roughly the same size as Vermont, the Adirondacks have one-fifth the population, with all that implies. And those two casts of mind, those two sets of skills, are rare, complementary, and extremely useful as we enter this strained century. In most places real husbandry and real wilderness are both disappearing, melted away by the economic sun of industrial efficiency and
consumer ease. But neither side of Lake Champlain is yet thoroughly suburbanized, and so these two shores offer some countercultural ideas about what might be, and some poignant reminders about how we once lived.

The sun is high, starting to bear down harder as the morning ebbs. And that’s enough airy mountaintop speculation for an entire volume. Time now, on aching calves, to descend the Battell trail down toward civilization. Time to begin the walk west.

L
INCOLN, THE TOWN
that lies beneath Mount Abe, may be the most picturesque in Vermont (if you needed to remake
The Sound of Music
, you could do it here), and among the most isolated. The only road east, a dirt track that climbs steeply through a mountain gap, is closed half the year by snow. The rest of the time, what traffic there is funnels to the west through another narrow gap on the route I’m walking today.

It’s hot, and my lope has turned into a meander. I pass the Weed Farm, a little herb nursery presided over by my daughter’s fourth-grade teacher and his partner, who gives my daughter piano lessons. Just down the hill there’s the general store, the town library, the white clapboard community church—you might as well be walking through an LL Bean catalog. It’s Ur–New England, with all the community virtues that implies: when the New Haven River flooded a few springs ago, it surged
through the tiny local library. Almost all the books were lost—every last one of the picture books, down on the low shelves for the kids. But half the town showed up shovel out the mud and fork the piles of soggy fiction into hay wagons for burial. And when local author Chris Bohjalian told the story in the
Boston Globe
magazine,
Reader’s Digest
picked it up as a picturesque example of rural life; soon cartons of new books were arriving from across the country. Everyone in town gave what they could; now there’s a handsome new library, a little farther from the river. This spring’s fundraiser: a raffle where you have to guess the birth date, weight, and sex of the first lamb born this season.

Such intense charm carries its own dangers, of course. As I walk, my eye keeps returning to a hilltop overlooking the town, where some outlander has cleared a patch and then, as if from a spaceship, plunked down a “home” huge enough to be a junior high school. You can see it from everywhere, the first of many graphic reminders along my route that the scale of this region—herb farms, piano teaching, general stores, little libraries—coexist uneasily with the high-octane national economy, and that hence the values and practices of community come inevitably up against the hyperindividualism of our time, the hyperindividualism that thinks nothing of ruining everyone else’s view with a house four times too large for any conceivable purpose. I can feel myself starting to heat up from the inside—this is a sermon I’ve preached
before, and once it gets rolling it’s hard to stop—so I find a shallow pool in the New Haven River and lie down for a good cold soak.

My destination tonight is the larger town of Bristol, most of the way down to the valley floor. The last mile or so, the road descends through a tight draw between the Bristol Cliffs wilderness and the towering bluff wall that locals call Deer Leap; since there’s only room for the road and the river, I thread my way along the shoulder in the heat, counting Subarus. (Subarus are to Vermont what bicycles were once to Beijing, so nearly ubiquitous that it’s impossible to recognize your neighbor by his vehicle. The supermarket parking lot might as well be a Subaru dealership.) As the state road turns toward town, it passes an enormous boulder, what a geologist would call an erratic, left here by the departing glaciers. On it someone long ago carved the Lord’s Prayer—apparently because the teamsters tended to use less-than-Christian language as they maneuvered their loads around this tight curve. It’s a pleasure to be walking by instead of driving, slow enough to savor the rhythm of the familiar words.

And a greater pleasure to be taking my pack off on the broad side porch of John and Rita Elder’s maple-shaded Bristol home, to sit down on their porch swing and unlace my boots. I stretch for a few moments before I knock, close my eyes and savor the sense of, as Isaac Newton would say, a body coming to rest. This was not my home, of course, but I knew the Elders would make
me feel like it was—anyway, arriving on foot gives one a slight proprietary sense. It’s not like arriving in the car for a dinner party. On foot you arrive late or early, without excuse, and settle into whatever conversation is under way. It took you a while to get there, so you’re obviously going to stay awhile. It feels like
visiting
in an older sense of the word, and you bring with you the news of the road, not the news you heard on
All Things Considered
.

I’d planned the first part of my route around this house, for John and Rita are among my favorite people, and John is the great writer of these few mountains, this small valley. Not that he’s from here—like Robert Frost, he’s from California. He grew up to be a literature professor, and moved in the there’s-a-job-open fashion of academics to Middlebury College in the early 1970s, never intending to stay. “We always figured we’d eventually go back to the West,” he says. But like many of us he found himself falling under the spell of the new breed of nature writers whose great teaching was
place
: Barry Lopez, Ed Abbey, Wendell Berry. (His particular guru was the poet Gary Snyder.) Just as important, John was falling under the spell of the Green Mountains. Before long he was teaching one of the college’s most popular courses—“Visions of Nature.” His seminars and symposiums originally met in classrooms—but increasingly on mountaintops and by the shores of ponds, and in the spreading fields of the college’s Bread Loaf campus, Frost’s old summer haunt.

Elder—tall, skinny, goofy warm smile, constant twinkle—nonetheless lives up to his name. He has an innate and generous sobriety, an earnestness a little out of place even in the not-very-cynical world of Middlebury College. You want to be thinking your least selfish thoughts in his company, which is what we mean, I guess, when we say that someone “brings out the best in you.” And more and more he was trying to bring out the best in the land around him. After years of describing these slopes and pastures, he’s begun to work the land as well.

Which is why in the morning I left my pack on his porch and headed off for a morning of labor in his sugarbush, a hundred acres of prime maple woods in nearby Starksboro. With his sons Matthew and Caleb, he’s built a stout sugarhouse near the bottom of the land, and now he’s ready to put in a bigger boiling pan, allowing him to expand his operation from 175 to 500 taps. Today we’re hauling out the old plastic tubing that drains the spiles and carries the sap down to the evaporator. It’s companionable work, especially since John interrupts it every few minutes to show off some particular delight: “There’s blue cohosh, and that’s maidenhair fern,” he says. “They indicate lime-rich soil. So does that plantain-leaved sedge. We counted thirty-one species of wildflower up here one day.” The slope was likely clearcut sixty or seventy years ago, but the rich soils have bred another stand of big trees. And now it won’t be clearcut
again, not ever; earlier that week, John and Rita had donated a conservation easement on the land to the Vermont Nature Conservancy, assuring it would never be developed—except for two small house lots, one for each son. “See those huge ice-wedged erratics over there? That’s where Rita and I want our ashes scattered.”

Driving back to Bristol in his pickup with the old tubing piled in back, we pass example after example of just the kind of careful reinhabitation he’s been promoting. On the northeastern edge of town, for instance, a tidy farm occupies the one broad stretch of flat land. A group of Elder’s neighbors have been trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to buy the land because it would serve as a natural plug on further sprawl. To pay off the note, they’d need to lease some of the land for a community-supported agriculture farm, an ecologically sound woodlot, perhaps a fishery on the brook that flows through. On the ridge above the land, the same group of neighbors is trying something even more exciting: the Community Equity Project is helping buy a big piece of timberland, and then selling shares in the property, allowing residents without much cash to become joint owners and managers of the landscape. If they have no cash but own a backhoe, they can help maintain the skid roads and pull logs out—sweat equity will do. All of the logging will be done according to the strictest set of environmental criteria. So, no second homes sprout, local people find work and ownership, the forest flourishes.

Back in town, we head for the Bristol landfill. A few other guys in pickups are unloading debris, and so is the town’s sole garbage truck, a flatbed pulled by a phlegmatic pair of Percheron draft horses. Their driver bid low for the town contract a few years ago, and ever since then he’s ranged the town’s compact streets, picking up trash bags and recycling bins. The team walks at a pace that lets him load easily—indeed, he can usually count on the assistance of one or another young girl eager for the chance to be near the massive team. We came home, washed up, and then headed out for the short walk to dinner at Bristol’s new Bobcat Café, built with money loaned by community residents. Many of the financiers were lined up at the bar, enjoying their 25 percent discount on the Bobcat’s home-brewed beer. Do you see what I mean? People are
trying
things here.

And so to bed—it wasn’t precisely the same glow I’d felt in the sunset on Mount Abe, but it was a glow nonetheless.

L
IKE JOHN
, I am primarily a writer. We are, that is, good with words, verbally dexterous, jugglers of symbols. And so we have a role to play helping to nudge our communities toward some more reasonable path, toward something that might not rely quite as deeply on the environmental ruination of cheap oil, on the human ruination of cheap labor. We can coax, we can alarm, we can point to possibilities.
But let’s face it—the Western world is knee-deep in symbol-manipulators right now. We verbally facile folk form an enormous tribe—throw a rock in Vermont and you’ll hit a published author, who will let out some creative oath. What we need more of are people who actually know what they’re doing out in the physical world—who know so well that they can not just carry forward old tradition but work out new and better ways of doing things. And so the next morning I resumed my walk again, this time in the company of one of John’s neighbors, a man named David Brynn.

Oddly enough, Brynn is tall and skinny, too, with a smile about as sunny as Elder’s. He grew up just across the border in Massachusetts, but swears he was conceived in Montpelier, Vermont’s capital; his wife, Louise, is a sixth-generation Bristolite. He studied forestry in school, and now serves as the Addison County forester—but he’s never been swallowed up by the industry status quo. He founded a group called Vermont Family Forests (VFF) in his spare time, and many of the best ideas in this slice of Vermont sprang full grown from his brain. Or sprang half-baked—he has plenty of colleagues, who help make real his multitude of visions.

So it’s always a pleasure to walk with him in the woods. There’s guaranteed to be a mix of down-to-earth and pie-in—well, pie hovering in midair, not yet quite in reach but getting closer. When he ventures onto a woodlot, oddly, trees seem to be the last thing he notices.
Instead, it’s the condition of the logging roads: have they been built away from steep slopes, for instance, and with enough waterbars to keep soil from eroding? “I get emotionally involved with broad-based dips,” he says this morning as we stroll. “There’s a formula to getting them right. You divide 1,000 by the grade, and that’s where you need them—so this is a 7-percent grade, you need a dip every 140 feet. Yes! Right here! We’re going to get a deluge this afternoon, and there will be water on this surface, but there won’t be any erosion.”