Wandering Home

by Bill McKibben

  On the other hand, his daughter Anais is there for dinner, freed for the weekend from Arabic summer school and its sacred language pledge. And she is as open and confident as he must have been in his college days. She’s a singer/songwriter—a really good singer/songwriter, who draws big crowds whenever she plays on campus, who was named a top young artist at last year’s New Folk competition in Texas. Her voice is gorgeous, but it’s tough, too, and her lyrics can scratch—she plays me the tapes of a concert she gave last spring at the college, the culmination of an independent study on protest music of the sixties. It includes a tune about, maybe, the Iraq war—“Did we know, in our house on fire with all we own, what it is that makes a house a home? In the end, did we watch it all on CNN, what it is to be American?” She’s powerful, and she may have a real career ahead of her, and it’s fun to sit and talk about how to escape the monoculture of the music business, which is as deadly in its way as the monoculture of the Farm Belt. Maybe local music is the way. Maybe if everyone’s downloading everything for free off the Net, musicians will go back to earning their keep the way musicians have done since Homer—by sharing their songs live with their neighbors. Maybe all of us in Addison County will be drinking Lincoln Peak wine and listening to Anais in ten years—maybe she’ll be our bard.

  Lying in Mitchell’s field that night, listening to the occasional bleat from the flock, I keep looking for the eyes of the mountain lion he swears he saw not long ago in this very spot. (Mountain lions are one of the recurring phantoms of this part of the world, and I’ve always yearned to see one; since Don has two sturdy guard dogs, predators don’t worry him much.) Finally I drift off, only to be awakened near dawn by the suddenly more excited baas from the other side of the pond. Don and Cheryl have come out to move the light electric fence that keeps the flock confined to an acre or two a day, and with the prospect of fresh new grass suddenly close at hand, the sheep were discovering an urgent hunger. (The easily rolled wire fences are a brilliant innovation, allowing pasture to rejuvenate constantly by making daily rotation simple work.) I hustled over to lend a hand, just for the pleasure of seeing the animals go charging into their new, uneaten acre, diving in with real brio to the new green stems. I ate my cereal with gusto, too, and packed. Don, who’d built six of the eight structures on the farm, was already on the roof of the new addition he was finishing, pounding nails before the sun got too high. I said my good-byes and strode off, to the west again.

  My day’s walk would carry me to the shore of Lake Champlain and the very edge of Vermont, but first it would take me through the absolute heart of the state’s agricultural belt, the flat fine farmland of New Haven and Waltham and Panton. The map offered plenty of back roads to choose from, long, straight, unpaved lanes built to make sure that farmers could get their crops to market. The day started hot, but with just enough overcast to take the edge off the sun. And so, for a few hours, I was in my own miniature Midwest, walking corn-lined gravel roads, able to see pickups coming three miles away by the plume of dust that rose in their wake. This land still looks prosperous, for the decline of Vermont agriculture that began with the marginal soils and chilly summers on the steep hill farms 2,000 feet higher up hasn’t yet devastated these prime lands, which are warmed in the winter by the nearby lake. Even so, however, they’re not in California, and the usually dropping price of fluid milk presses on them from one side. And the ever-growing price of land for second homes presses from the other, for these farms could easily be subdivided into twenty building lots, each with a spectacular view of the Adirondacks. These farms exist in a kind of (extremely hard-working) limbo, waiting to see if some new possibility of the type I’ve been describing—a local-food movement, a biodiesel market—will actually appear, or if they’re fated for the same end as so many others.

  For the moment, though, they’re timeless—you can’t tell from a look across the landscape which decade you are in. At first it seemed quiet to me, with just the occasional bark of a dog to break the silence. Before long, though, I’d quieted down enough myself to notice that it was a noisy kind of silence. The pulsating hum of insect warble rose and fell in murmuring waves across the landscape, growing louder near wet spots but never subsiding. I don’t still myself to hear it often enough, but it’s on my own short Billboard chart of favorite sounds, right up there with Tumbling Brook, Wind in Pines, and (wooden) Bat on Ball. It’s an almost geological sound, the same, I imagine, for the millions of summers ever since those scraping wings and legs evolved. It’s pure life, just asserting its existence, announcing the triumphant biology of our sweet planet. It’s the sound we will all subside into someday, life on automatic.

  I ATE MY LUNCH in a little copse of trees and wandered on, lulled by the sound and the heat and the long, straight lines until finally I came to something new: a watery slough, Dead Creek, that stretches ten miles north to south across this section of the valley. If the shore of Lake Champlain represents the physical boundary of Vermont, in a sense this line of slow-moving water a couple of miles to its east represents the conceptual one—the place where questions of nature began to loom as large as questions of agriculture, economy, and sociology. There was a long way yet to go before I reached the heart of the big Adirondack wilderness, but those mountains were starting to loom in my mind—the questions that wilderness raises were present in miniature here. Also present, and full-sized, was Warren King, the perfect person with whom to start thinking them through.

  Warren actually lives up in Ripton, a few minutes’ bushwhack through the woods from my house. He and his wife, Barry, are the sort of people who make a place tick—there’s not a civic good work in which they’re not implicated. But it’s conservation in particular that moves them, and for Warren, it’s birds. He studied ornithology at Cornell, and his life list includes pretty much everything save the passenger pigeon (and the ivory-billed woodpecker—but he was in Cuba winter before last, just in case). Dead Creek is one of his most frequent haunts, because the northern end of it is managed as a wildlife refuge, and in recent years it has begun to draw great quantities of birds—in particular, flocks of snow geese numbering 25,000 or more arrive each October, jetting around the valley in their tight Vs, and settling in on a few fields that line the state two-lane. “It’s the premier wildlife spectacle in the state—sometimes there are a hundred cars parked along the roadside watching,” Warren says; he’s been known to set up his spotting scope and stand there all day so that others could take a gander at the geese. “Overall, Dead Creek is a pretty significant bird hotspot,” he continues. “The fields are planted to some kind of goose food, like buckwheat or corn, and then they’re instructed to do a careless job harvesting so there are plenty of kernels left on the ground. The fields are off limits to hunters, but the marsh is extensive and in good shape. It was designed as a waterfowl refuge, so hunting is encouraged”—indeed, near the main goose flyway the reeds are filled with blinds where hunters sit all afternoon, waiting for a careless bird. “But the birds very quickly get a knowledge of how far the guns can fire,” he says.

  So we might begin the muddle this way: Vermont’s premier wildlife spectacle comes about because managers plant fields in order to lure geese so that hunters can shoot them. Which might strike an environmentalist as a little crazy, except that without the hunters the snow geese might not be here. On the other hand, we’ve created such fine goose havens in the lower forty-eight that their numbers have exploded, and so when they return to the Arctic to breed they do massive damage, tearing up sedge grass by its roots and destroying the tundra. So maybe more hunting is the sane response. Or maybe not.

  If we’re going to talk about wildness, and believe me we are, we have to face the truth that it’s a little hard to separate out the natural and the artificial, a little hard to figure out exactly where we’re planting our feet. For instance: this afternoon Warren and I are standing on a little bridge above Dead Creek a few miles south of the waterfowl refuge. “You notice how the water i
s kind of mocha here?” he asks. “One reason is the clay soils—the particles can stay in suspension almost forever. And those particles get stirred up all the way along the creek by carp fanning their tails.” But carp are an exotic species, introduced from afar. So is the mocha color “right”?

  A walk with Warren is an ambling, happy disquisition, interrupted frequently by sightings of one thing or another, often things with wings. “There’s a black-crowned night heron,” he’ll say. “At this point we don’t know where in Vermont they nest. Isn’t it nice to have some pieces of information still out there to discover?” Or, “Look, there’s a yellow warbler. As bright as any taxicab you’ll ever see, but with brown and red streaks on the chest.” Or, “Oh my, there’s a red-spotted purple. That’s a white admiral subspecies. Butterflies are kind of a new thing for me.”

  But over and over we kept returning to the same kind of philosophical conundrums. It wasn’t just carp: Dead Creek was also host to a variety of other exotic and invasive species. “Ooh, water chestnut,” said Warren. “We’ve gotten rid of that on the Lemon Fair River [that is, Warren and Barry spent weeks pulling the plants up by the roots], but there’s still a little population over here in Dead Creek. The nut is an extraordinarily vicious-looking thing, like a caltrop. It gets stuck on the plumage and feet webbing of geese and ducks, and they carry it from one body of water to the next.” The scrubby meadows and hedgerows around Dead Creek were also filled with plants that, strictly speaking, Shouldn’t Be There. Honeysuckle. Wild parsnip. “Oh, there’s an interesting battle going on here. This is a Eurasian buckthorn, an invasive species. And this is a gray dogwood, which is supposed to be here. Over here the buckthorn has ascendancy, but here the dogwood is still king.”

  So do you wring your hands over this, rooting for the dogwood and the prickly ash, rooting up the buckthorn? Or do you just decide that nature is whatever it is—that since the world is in constant flux, there’s no real damage that can be done to it? For instance, Warren pointed out a small elm tree. “As you know, they get Dutch elm disease when they’re about twenty. But they start producing seed when they’re ten. So they have a decade before the fungus starts to shut them down. As a result, we’re getting increasing numbers of elm trees that get to be about that big. Not the big umbrella street-lining trees we grew up with. But they have this niche now. They’re an understory tree—that’s just what they are now.” Are we to mourn the passing of big elms? Celebrate the success of this fungus we helped introduce? Merely marvel at all the different stratagems that evolution puts in play?

  And the questions get more complicated than that, even. A few hundred yards west of the creek, we wandered out into a big hayfield. “Grassland is an interesting subject in this part of the world,” Warren said. “There are a small number of species—bobolink, upland sandpiper, eastern meadowlark, grasshopper sparrow, savanna sparrow, Henslow’s sparrow—that require it. They make their nests in the tall grass.” But in recent years, as farms have been abandoned, much of that grassland has grown into scrub forest. And the grass that’s left has become more intensively managed, with farmers trying to get an extra cut of hay—which means harvesting prior to mid-July, before the birds can get their broods safely off. “So the question is, do you manage for them, or do you let nature take its course?” That is, do you set aside some fields to maintain in grass, cutting them even though no one is farming, and cutting them late so that the birds have time to nest? Or do you let nature and the economy take its course? “Henslow’s sparrow is already gone from the state, the grasshopper sparrow is down to a few pairs in the state. Bobolinks aren’t at any great risk yet, but that’s the general tendency.” Maybe that’s bad, and maybe that’s “right.” I mean, the only reason those birds were here in the first place is that farmers came in and opened up the woods. Or maybe not—maybe they were opened up first by the Indians who lived in this valley. Are Indians different—more “natural”—than the rest of us humans, and does that change our relationship to the bobolink? Maybe our attachment to grasshopper sparrows is only sentimental, romantic.

  These questions of what constitutes the natural, what composes the real, when you draw the baseline, how much change a place can stand before it loses its essence—they are the questions that will grow stronger and louder the farther west we go, into the Adirondack wild (whatever “wild” means). For now, it’s enough perhaps to note what Warren and Barry King have done: they’ve pulled up the water chestnut and the purple loosestrife, because those exotics were overrunning everything in their path and decimating the food supply for a wide variety of animals. They have not fished every carp out of Dead Creek, or cut down every buckthorn. When the snow geese come through in the fall, they stand by the roadside with their spotting scope so neophytes can take a look. Once a year, under the auspices of the local Audubon chapter, they organize Dead Creek Wildlife Days—which features plenty of birdwatching, but also hunters showing off the retrieving skills of their bird dogs. That is to say, they do what they can, guided by a certain tropism toward “the natural” but governed by common sense and a dose of wry humility.

  Mostly they make sure to marvel. “Do you hear the flicker calling just now?” asks Warren—I hadn’t, of course, but now I did. “Oh look, that’s a harrier. The white rump patch, the wings held at a slight dihedral. Now this, this is a native—it’s prickly ash. It’s a tough customer. Get in a thicket of that, and you’re going to give blood. And speaking of thorns, look over here. This is a hawthorn. Look at the size of that thorn. You know who likes hawthorns? A bird called a shrike. It looks like a mockingbird, but it’s a predator. They catch smaller birds, they bring them to a spine like this, and they hang them up on it just like a local butcher would hang up a side of beef.” That’s nature, or something like it.

  WARREN TURNED BACK to the east finally, and I kept on my trudge, near enough now to the big lake that I could catch glimpses of it through the fields. The closer I got, the bigger the houses became, as if in observance of some iron law of real estate. Finally, down right on the lakeshore, the most oversized manse of all sat on a sloping lawn, every tree cleared for hundreds of yards. After all the quieter places I’d been in the last week—Don Mitchell’s tucked-in farm, the lovely knoll of the college garden, John Elder’s sugarbush—this place looked naked, bald, without a trace of modesty. Two big signs on the driveway announced the obvious, that the road was “private,” that wanderers on foot could find some other way to reach the lake. Two golf holes were cut into the lawn, little flags hanging limp in the hot afternoon. This place was by any definition an invasive, a blight or a fungus spread by money pouring in from the south. The kind of place that suppressed natural life, community life, just as thoroughly as the water chestnut in the creek.

  But again I held the sermon back, calmed a little by the lessons on flux and resiliency that Warren had been teaching, and calmed, too, that I knew another route down to the shore of Champlain. Before half an hour had passed, my feet were in the cool water, in a little bay under a limestone bluff covered with cedar and oak. I’d come to the edge of Vermont, and New York beckoned across the water. Or, as I’d started to think, I’d come to the middle of this watershed, this cultureshed.

  IN THE MIDDLE distance a big aluminum rowboat came steadily across the lake. As it grew nearer I could make out the oarsman—a small man, shirt off, as wiry and muscled as a statue. Tanned and smiling, he looked like a photo from a muscle magazine before steroids turned physiques grotesque.

  I’d planned the route and timing of my trek in part because I wanted to cross Lake Champlain with John Davis, whom I’d known for half his life and half mine. We’d met first in Tucson, Arizona—well, this is going to require more explaining.

  I hadn’t always been particularly interested in the outdoors. I went from college straight to The New Yorker, where I was the steadiest writer for the Talk of the Town section, about as urban a job as it’s possible to imagine. But in my mid-twenties—in the mid-1980s
—two things happened. One was that I started to work on my first long piece of writing, an account for The New Yorker about where every pipe and wire in my Manhattan apartment came from and went. I followed the water pipes to the Catskill reservoirs, and traveled to Hudson Bay to see the enormous dams producing power for Con Ed, and spent days on New York harbor with the giant garbage barges—and along the way had the sudden insight that the physical world actually mattered. That this came as an insight says much about how I—and perhaps most good suburban Americans—had grown up. But suffice it to say that all of a sudden things that had always seemed like scenery and props for the great drama of ideas and money and politics now seemed much more central to me: air, I’m talking about, and water, and oil.

  At the same time, by a fluke, I came to the Adirondacks for a winter—to the writers’ colony at Blue Mountain Lake, where I actually wrote the piece about my apartment. I spent that winter falling in love with these woods, which would transform my life. And one day, in the bathroom at Blue Mountain, I came across a copy of the Earth First! Journal, which would help transform my sense of the world.

  Earth First! was still young in those days, a radical environmental group that rose in the Southwest desert in the time of James Watt and Ronald Reagan. Less a group, really, than a style: cantankerous, uncompromising, convinced that the fire had gone out of the wilderness movement and that it was their duty to reignite it. Founded by a few friends, Earth First! drew its inspiration from the pages of the great desert writer Edward Abbey, and in particular his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, an account of a small redneck band that crosses the desert blowing up coal mines and highway bridges in defense of the wild. Earth First! was launched in an illegal ceremony atop Glen Canyon Dam, the concrete plug that had flooded deep, gorgeous canyons of the Colorado into Lake Powell (Lake Foul, to Abbey). The small band gathered atop the dam and unrolled a massive plastic crack down its face, symbolizing their hope that it would soon disappear. These guys (and they were almost all guys) fascinated me—their frank and joyful denial that humans mattered most (Earth First!), their pugnacity at a moment when Reagan and the Right were rolling over every more responsible advocate of a normal, balanced America, their willingness to tip over every sacred cow, even the environmental ones (Abbey would, proudly, toss beer cans out the car window as he finished them, arguing that if the government was going to graze and mine the land into oblivion, worrying about litter was sentimental camouflage, especially along those linear landfills called roads). And so I set out to investigate, traveling to Utah to hike with Abbey, and to Idaho for a hard-drinking week in the glorious Challis National Forest at the group’s annual encampment. And to headquarters, such as it was, in the Tucson home of founder Dave Foreman. Outside, it was a normal Southwestern ranch-style home in a cul-de-sac kind of neighborhood. Inside, it was marvelous chaos—people bunking here and there, planning one mysterious action or another, maps of wilderness areas on every wall, phones ringing constantly in the way they used to—ringing, not playing the first measure of some pop hit.