Wandering Home (4 page)

T
HE RAIN ENDED
, and from Granstrom’s farm I crossed Route 7, the two-lane road that is western Vermont’s main thoroughfare. (Until last year, all traffic stopped twenty miles south of here every morning and afternoon when a farmer led his herd from the pasture to the milking parlor. The state, with its usual unswerving commitment to speed and efficiency, finally paid to build him a
barn on the pasture side, and so one last small reminder of what life once was like disappeared). A little farther west I hit Otter Creek, just above the spot where the New Haven flows in. Despite its diminutive name, Otter Creek is Vermont’s longest river; it flows mostly north, rising in the hills around Rutland and eventually pouring into Lake Champlain near Vergennes. Along much of its route it winds through farmers’ fields, but this is diverse country—I met Otter Creek just at the top of a rocky whitewater gorge. But instead of exploring that canyon I turned south, walking upstream, through a large forest park that runs right into the county seat of Middlebury.

The thunderstorm had done little to cut the late-afternoon heat, and steam was rising off every puddle. But along the riverbank, giant hemlocks provided their own deep shade, and a spring-loaded carpet of red needles. Peering out through the branches, I watched dragonflies float above the lazy river, and listened to the rising tremolo pulse of insect song, and felt my belly full of wine. Leave Provence to the Provençals, and Tuscany to the Tuscans—the world was altogether sweet enough right here. Why, Provence could kiss my sweaty derriere, I thought, with the slightly sodden pleasure of someone just a trifle drunk. Drunk on that fine Riesling, but even more on the close, humid, singing torpor of an afternoon in the hemlock woods on the edge of Otter Creek. And even more on the sense that life, which in most
places seems to me to be spinning apart, was somehow slowly gathering here, deepening, threatening to make sense.

A
FTER A COUPLE
of miles, the path I was following emerged into Middlebury, shire town and gravitational center of Addison County. It’s not a perfect New England village—a sprawling suburban subdivision of cul-de-sacs and split-level ranches bounds the town to the east, and the town fathers carelessly let a short string of McDonald’s and Marriott franchises bloom south of town along the highway. But Middlebury still boasts an actual manufacturing district. At the spot where I emerged from the woods, I could see the Cabot Cooperative cheddar plant, the Otter Creek not-so-microbrewery, and half a dozen similar enterprises. And with its downtown, Middlebury hits the New England trifecta: bandstand on the green, towering white Congregational church, and at the far end a college-on-a-hill. In between, past the bank and the bookstore, you cross a bridge over a plunging waterfall on Otter Creek. There’s no other bridge for twenty miles to the south, and only a small covered one nearby to the north, so if you’re going east to west in this part of the world you pretty much pass through downtown Middlebury. As a result, there’s none of that left-out-to-dry-by-the-highway look which afflicts so much of rural America. The college and tourist trade has
driven rents high enough that too many of the stores specialize in “gifts,” which is to say things that by definition no one actually needs. Still, a Ben Franklin remains, full of venerable merchandise and heavily patronized by my daughter and others of the ten-year-old set who enjoy its penny candy, still priced at a penny. Also a movie theater and a library and an overgrown shoe store that sells underwear and dungarees. Also a fancy restaurant for anniversaries and a smoky bar and a very fine bakery and really what else do you need?

I stood on the bridge in the center of town, watching kids kayaking in the white water beneath the falls, and listening to the passing babel. Most of the year, Middlebury College is a top-tier liberal arts school, as good as any in New England (though just a trifle worried whether Williams and Amherst think of it as often as it thinks of them). In the summer, however, Middlebury gives itself over to a long-running and equally illustrious language school, an operation that has trained generations of diplomats and CIA agents and Peace Corps volunteers by immersing them in the tongue of their choice. These students sign a solemn oath not to utter a syllable of English the whole summer, and as a result much business in town turns into a pantomime of sign language and frustrated pidgin. In a foreign country, you speak the language poorly and the shopkeeper speaks it well; here, you speak the language poorly (at least at first) and the merchant doesn’t even know which of the dozen possible
tongues you’re butchering. The students take it with dire seriousness—one of the ER doctors at the local hospital swears that they have a letter on file from the dean, which they can show to students authorizing them to break their vow and describe their symptoms in the mother tongue.

I wandered on through town, stopping at the small grocery for provisions for the next few days, then at my college office to check my mail. I am a “scholar in residence” at Middlebury, a grand-sounding post that—typical of any job I might attract—carries no actual salary. But it does offer a fine garret, with a view of the Adirondacks, and a speedy computer connection. Better yet, it offers colleagues—Middlebury has built perhaps the finest undergraduate environmental studies department in the nation, and so there’s a steady supply of like-minded economists, political scientists, biologists, physicists, theologians, and writers to talk with and learn from. And though I rarely teach, there are students who find their way to my door. Middlebury has its share of handsome and self-satisfied preppies on their way to the important task of investment banking, but it also attracts a steady flow of kids for whom the bucolic setting provides more than backdrop. They start to wonder, à la Chris Granstrom, how they might fit into a place like this. Most of these regular students are gone till the fall, of course, replaced by the worried throng trying to recall how you say “What’s on draft?” in Arabic. But a
couple of my very favorite students are hanging around for the summer, and I’ll get to spend this night with them in perhaps the single most beautiful spot on this calendar-gorgeous campus.

T
HE MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE
Organic Garden lies on a knoll in the middle of a cornfield about a quarter-mile west of the campus. A year ago it was just a bump in that expanse of cow corn. But now—well, to call it a garden is not enough. It’s a good half-acre of vegetables, as well-tended and orderly a farmlet as any you’d ever want to see. A new harvest of spinach has just been dispatched to the dining hall for tonight’s supper of babel, and doubtless students are even now searching their phrasebooks to find out what they call spinach in Moscow or Madrid. Meanwhile we are sitting around the fire pit, watching our dinner of chard and corn and potatoes steam.

This place was the work of students, right from the start. Like most liberal arts colleges, Middlebury traditionally hasn’t shown much interest in agriculture. Any other kind of culture, sure: you can major in film or dance or literature, and rightly so. But colleges developed at least in part to help people escape from the farm, and that old prejudice dies hard. There isn’t even a regular course about farming at this college, though it lies in one of New England’s most fertile valleys.

A few years ago, though, when Jean Hamilton and
Bennett Konesni were freshmen, they ran into each other in the hallway outside an organic agriculture workshop elsewhere in the state. They agreed, on the spot, that Middlebury needed a student garden. And then, oddly enough, they actually made it happen. (In my days as a wild-eyed student, it was generally accepted that talk was more important than action, but times have changed.) With an ever-growing band of fellow students, they commandeered the college GIS lab, using the computers to overlay maps of soil type with maps of college-owned land; eventually they found the knoll in the cornfield, one of the few nearby outcroppings of rich loam in the valley floor, which is mostly clay best suited for cow corn. They sat down with the guys from dining services, and worked out spreadsheets of what they could sell to the college; then they visited local farmers to make sure they weren’t planting crops that would undercut their neighbors’ livelihoods. They persuaded the student government to supply cash sufficient for a well and a solar pump; the latter’s black photovoltaic panel now rises like a rectilinear sunflower in the middle of the patch. They found seed companies to donate seed, and beekeepers to loan them hives, and before too long the day came to lay down a winter cover crop of rye. And on that afternoon, once the homecoming game was finished, the college president and the chair of the board of trustees both appeared, and spent a happy hour bent over, pulling
rocks from the soil. At which point it was very clear it was going to be a success.

A few months after that cover crop went down, and a few months before the first vegetables would be planted, I taught a short course during the college’s January term on “Local Food Production.” Not because I knew much about it—I have a green mind but a black thumb—but because I was beginning to think that “local” was about to replace “organic” as the key idea in the battle to save small-scale American farming.

For a generation, a certain number of farmers scattered across the country have managed to hang on by growing organic food for consumers willing to pay more for a dinner free of pesticides. That premium was enough to make it possible to survive without the efficiencies of scale that came from vast agribusiness plantations; in Addison County, an organic dairy farmer can get twice as much per hundredweight. Just like David Brynn’s family foresters, these family farmers had figured out a way to keep their squash and tomatoes from becoming mere commodities; instead of chemical residue, they came with a residue of story, enough story to justify a living wage. A few years ago, though, the organic movement grew large enough that agribusiness began to pay attention. They started converting a few of their vast fields in the Central Valley or Mexico into “organic farms”—enormous institutions that in every other respect operated like classic
corporate giants. It’s true that those particular acres were spared the rain of herbicides, but the food grown there still has to be trucked and flown around the world—by some measures, the average leaf of organic produce travels even farther than the 1,500 miles that a bite of conventional food must journey between farm and lip. And once companies like Del Monte started becoming some of the world’s biggest organic producers, the premium for a local guy with a couple of acres of really nice organic tomatoes started to shrink. He had no niche left. For two decades, “organic” had meant more than just “pesticide-free”; it also meant “some local guy grew this with his own hands.” Now that meaning was evaporating.

But there was a possibility for another story, this one harder to co-opt. If “local” could become the new buzzword, then perhaps it would provide sizzle enough to justify a premium price again, that ten cents more a pound meaning the difference between a farmer making it, and a farm becoming Olde Farm Acres at $49,900 a building lot. That’s what Chris Granstrom had been talking about when he noted that Finger Lakes wine was still selling in the Finger Lakes. It’s why our local food co-op started posting pictures of the farmers above stacks of their cabbages. And Del Monte simply can’t do it—their economies of scale would disappear if customers in Rochester and Eugene and Tampa began demanding food from Rochester and Eugene and Tampa. That’s what we studied in our class, anyway—reading Wendell Berry and the
other prophets of a new agronomy, and taking field trips to Vermont innovations like The Farmers Diner, a Barre eatery where almost all the ingredients in the hamburgers and milk shakes and french fries are raised within fifty miles of the kitchen door. “Think Locally, Act Neighborly” is their slogan, and so far it seems to be working.

As is usually the case, the best thing about the course was the students, who turned out to be remarkably reflective. I knew from listening to them introduce themselves on day one that six or seven of my twenty-five charges thought they wanted to be small farmers someday. But I wondered if they had actually figured out what that meant—most of these kids were from the same backgrounds of privilege and semi-privilege as the rest of the Middlebury student body. They had the same handsome ease and offhand self-confidence.
¹
They were, in other words, made to order for the economy now emerging in our world, and every last one of them could grow up, if they wanted, to make a bundle of money. So one day I asked them to try to figure out how much they thought they’d need to earn a year in order to have the kind of life they wanted. They spent the night figuring, and talked about their results the next day—some said they needed to emulate the suburban lifestyle of their parents in order to feel secure, but for the rest their answers converged in
the neighborhood of $30,000. Which perhaps reflected a certain sweet naïveté—twenty-year-olds don’t value insurance quite as highly as do the rest of us—but also a certain deep understanding that I admired. Instead of working to afford certain pleasures, many maintained, they would find their pleasure in their work. Which is a good strategy if you’re planning to be a small-scale local farmer.

High on that list of pleasures was food. When I was in college, food and grease were more or less synonymous—a cheese-steak sub was my idea of just fine. I told these students that two of them were to be responsible each day for cooking the rest of us lunch, from whatever local produce they could scrounge in midwinter. Our classroom opened onto a kitchen, and all through the discussion smells would flavor the air. Before long, truly astounding dishes were emerging: leeks gratinée, smoked squash soup, gorgeous frittata. (One fellow took things to their logical extreme, scavenging the January countryside for cattail flour and high-bush cranberries the birds had missed. It tasted…local.) A kind of emerging sensual appreciation for this place kept us all in thrall—what would come next? It wasn’t like we were in Napa—this was Vermont in January. And yet we ate well, just as people ate well in Vermont for hundreds of years before anyone thought of flying in iceberg lettuce.