Wandering Home

by Bill McKibben

  At Abbey’s funeral, Berry read a poem he’d written for the occasion:

  I pass a cairn of stone

  Two arm-lengths long and wide

  Piled on the steep hillside

  By plowmen years ago.

  Now oaks and hickories grow

  Where the steel coulter passed.

  Where human striving ceased

  The Sabbath of the trees

  Returns and stands and is.

  This idea of a reconciliation between the wild and the pastoral is not something I’ve just worked out. In the last decade or so, conservationists have become more and more aware of the need to work with, not against, traditional users of the land. Partly that’s a response to the antienvironmental political mood in Washington, which requires making allies instead of enemies; partly it comes from a growing scientific understanding that, say, good forestry and wolf habitat can overlap. Part of it, too, comes from an increasingly sophisticated sense of the scale of our environmental problems—that protecting wilderness in Vermont is not really an “answer” if it leads directly to the destruction of forests somewhere else for a paper-hungry world. And in some measure it comes, I think, from the sense of pleasure at working at the very human tasks of food and shelter—and community. It’s not surprising, anymore, to find some of the nation’s most innovative farming and ranching being done on land owned by the Nature Conservancy, whose brief never used to extend past saving endangered species.

  But there are very few regions that illustrate the possibilities in as close proximity as this region I am trying to construct across the New York–Vermont border. The two sides of the lake are different—the Adirondacks are higher, with a different geology and hydrology, and a harsher climate. Not a lot harsher, but enough so that most attempts at farming didn’t last more than a generation. Vermont is famously pastoral—pick up any calendar. And yet Vermont has some real wildlands. I’d begun my hike in the Breadloaf Wilderness, the state’s largest; if a new wilderness bill passes this year, as it should, 2 percent of the state will be designated wilderness, and considerably more is wilderness of the de facto sort. Meanwhile, the Adirondack Park has plenty of honest-to-God residents, who are trying to figure out how they can make their living at the same time and in pretty much the same place as the rest of creation. The line between these places is really more of a blur.

  It reminded me of something John Davis had said as we rowed away from the Vermont side, looking back at the broad farmlands of the eastern shore. “There’s a lot of little patches of trees there, you know. Just by strategically allowing a few of those fields to grow back to forest, you could link a lot of those shards.” You could, that is, Abbeyize a little of the domesticated valley floor, just as preserving Black Kettle Farm will Berry a patch of this Split Rock wildway. Blur, not line.

  JOHN DAVIS MAY think a little differently than he did at twenty-two. But he doesn’t live much differently. His cabin is one room, in a dark hemlock grove above a beaver flow. It’s off the grid, as we say these days. But there’s no solar power—there’s no power at all. Just a woodstove and some oil lamps. No running water, just a privy. No phone line. No driveway, and nothing to put in it. “The Adirondacks are very bike-friendly,” he says. If your average American said that, he would mean something like: the Adirondacks are a good place to ride a bike. They have well-paved roads with wide shoulders. What Davis means is, they’re a good place to only ride a bike. “If you want to live in a wild landscape and not use a car, you couldn’t ask for a better place.” Meaning that, many times a year, he’ll ride twenty miles or so to the base of some high mountain, bushwhack up it, bushwhack back down, and ride home to his cabin. Meaning that when he needs to go to the airport in Burlington so he can fly to California and do some wildlands philanthropy organizing, he rows his bike across the lake, ties up his boat, and pedals forty miles to the terminal. Meaning that he rides the talk.

  And meaning that he’s in insanely good shape. We push off early in the morning, walking back roads and old fields west, toward Elizabethtown and then the northern edge of the High Peaks. We cross the Boquet River a couple of times, stopping in the morning heat for a swim, and eventually pass underneath the Adirondack Northway, Interstate 87, which thunders overhead. The highway, built in the 1960s, runs from Albany past Plattsburgh to the Canadian border. It slices through the eastern Adirondacks, just on the edge of the High Peaks, and Davis calls it “the worst ecological disaster in Adirondack history,” worse even than the massive clearcutting at the end of the nineteenth century. Partly that’s because it opened up the territory for tens of thousands of new second-home owners: what had been a ten-hour trip from the city was now five or six hours. But the Northway also serves as a physical barrier for any animal trying to move east to west across this region. Lake Champlain freezes more winters than not, making migration relatively simple. But the trucks keep coming down 87 all night. “When they built it, they put in some token wildlife tunnels,” says Davis. “But what’s using them is mostly people on ATVs.” A key portion of the Split Rock wildway he’s trying to build will be the corridor where the north branch of the Boquet passes beneath the highway—if a bear or a moose or a wolf makes it through there, she’s managed to pass one of the worst obstacles between the Atlantic in Maine and the shore of Lake Ontario. But at the moment the fence that should exclude motor vehicles is down, and signs of dirt bikes are everywhere.

  This day is the hottest yet of this trip, and it ends with a couple of uphill miles along Route 9, heat kicking off the blacktop, pickups dopplering by. Which makes it all the sweeter when we finally reach the trailhead, and within a few short steps drop into another world—the transition is as abrupt as if we’d gone from a hot Manhattan sidewalk through a door into a hushed and air-conditioned movie theater. It’s a real, deep Adirondack woods, this back side of Giant Mountain. After several hours of pavement, the thick red carpet of hemlock needles feels like a trampoline beneath my boots. We walk perhaps a mile and then make camp along a little stream, with a pool just big enough to submerge in.

  From his small pack John hauls a plastic bag of granola—it emerges that this is pretty much all he eats while in the woods. “A stove might break, and I’m not very good at fixing things,” he says, which is almost certainly not true. It’s more likely that a stove is…not strictly necessary, kind of like a car or electricity or a phone. I’ve been dragging my stove every step of the way along this journey, and though it’s called a Whisperlite, in fact it’s a pretty hefty chunk of steel, especially once you factor in the bottle full of white gas, which if you start thinking about it probably connects me straight back to the Persian Gulf. I’m grateful for my soup and my hot chocolate, but the pack felt awfully heavy the last few miles. I fell asleep considering whether, all in all, I’d allowed myself to get a little top-heavy with possessions—with needs—over the last couple of decades. Considering what it would be like to live in a cabin in the hemlocks with a privy out back. Or at least what it would be like to be carrying twenty pounds on my back instead of fifty. At the trailhead where we’d left the road, there’d been a sign announcing that Giant Mountain, which we planned to reach by noon the next day, was 3,327 vertical feet above us, which is quite a ways to tote your perhaps not fully considered way of life. I slept a bit fitfully, even before a crashing thunderstorm hit around midnight.

  THE FIRST FEW miles in the morning are often the sweetest part of a day’s hike, and so it was this day. The thunderstorm had, temporarily, washed a little of the humidity out of the air, and the trail climbed gently upward through a lovely forest, with some big stands of old, shaggy yellow birch. We were alone in this woods, at least as far as other humans. Though the High Peaks see a lot of hikers, almost all of them come in from Route 73, the main road that bisects the mountains. That means almost every one climbed Giant from the southern side, where we’d be descending this afternoon. By contrast, this trail was hiked just enough that it was easy to follow, but it hadn’
t turned into a muddy trench the way some of the busier paths do. As we hiked, John and I chatted about old friends—Walkin’ Jim Stoltz, who bushwhacked every year from Mexico to Canada through the most deserted territory, following goat paths and writing songs on the guitar strapped to his pack. Or the Maine writer Gary Lawless, who was poetry editor for the Earth First! Journal and who titled one of his collections Caribouddist. So the walking was easy, and by ten we’d reached the morning’s first objective, a knob called Owl’s Head.

  Owl’s Head stuck up in the middle of this wilderness area like an … owl’s head. We rested atop a boulder and took in the 360-degree view, which was composed entirely of mountains, rocky slides, climbing ridges, and trees, with the single exception of a fire tower visible on Hurricane Mountain to our north. Quoting George Wuerthner, another old friend and outdoors writer, John said, “It’s hard to match the wildness of the viewscape from an Adirondack mountaintop. Out West you can almost always see a clearcut.” (Which is true. I can remember climbing Washington state’s great volcano, Mount Rainier. We set out for the summit under a full moon just after midnight, and the view was sublime, endless peaks in every direction. But as the sun came up, I could suddenly see with sad precision the exact boundaries of the national park—that was where the checkerboard of clearcuts stopped.) It always rouses us Adirondack chauvinists to hear any comparison like this. We want it recognized that we’re in country just as tough and rugged as those North Dakota badlands or those Montana High Plains or those Idaho river canyons. We’re out West, too, except back East.

  But the very idea of being out by yourself in capital-W Wilderness raises a whole other set of philosophical questions. Ed Abbey and Wendell Berry, as I have said, had a pleasant set of discussions over the years about the relative use of leaving land alone and managing it well, and concluded, sensibly, that some of each, in its proper place, was just what was called for. (The sensibleness of their conclusion is in no way undermined by the fact that the larger Economy continues at breakneck pace to wreck both wild places and small-scale farms in the name of More and Cheaper.) But a few years later, in the 1990s, the ground of debate, and its temper, shifted. The question now became: Is there any such thing as wilderness? And is trying to protect it a pointless delusion?

  I hesitate slightly to wade right back into a more intellectual dispute on what I intended to be a pleasant walk in the woods. But when you walk through wilderness, you walk through an idea, and in fact you walk through an idea that has its roots partly in the Adirondacks. Five or six days hence, if all goes well, I will bushwhack through the wilderness within a mile or two of the cabin where a man named Howard Zahniser spent his summers, enjoying the Adirondack scenery and drafting the federal wilderness statute, the one that stated: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” Passed by Congress in 1964, that language may represent the single most philosophical stand our legislators have ever taken; it has also allowed the protection of tens of millions of acres free from (except where political concessions were made) cattle grazing, mining, tree-cutting, roadbuilding, dirt-bike riding, and pretty much every other intrusion except wandering around on your own two feet. For most of the next three decades, the battle over wilderness was pretty much between those people who wanted more of it and those who wanted to graze, mine, cut, build, and roar around.

  In the mid-1990s, a new critique began to emerge. Its most prominent advocate was an environmental historian named William Cronon, who had already written several truly classic books—most notably Changes in the Land, the story of how both the Indians and the settlers had thoroughly and permanently reshaped the landscape of New England. Instead of imagining that Native Americans had inhabited a primeval Eastern paradise that colonists corrupted, he said, his project was “to locate a nature which is within rather than without history.” So it was not completely novel for him to argue, in a paper he published in 1995 called “The Trouble with Wilderness,” that land truly “untrammeled by man” was unlikely to be found, and that the insistence on a kind of wilderness purity was in fact doing the environmental movement harm by leading to a neglect of more-ordinary (and much larger) landscapes. That, in fact, by going out of their way to excise humans from these sacred cathedrals, environmentalists were alienating people from the land. Worshiping wilderness, said Cronon, “we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorably human place in nature might actually look like.”

  Now, talk like this excited a number of academics, because it fit reasonably well with the deconstructionist agenda of the time. A generation of thinkers had become used to the idea of looking at a book and saying it was, in and of itself, nothing more than a reflection of its author’s subjectivities, something to be “read” with an eye not to plot or character or language but to gender, class, and other such categories. A few years earlier, a feminist academic named Donna Haraway had scored a great coup with an article that argued that humans themselves were, happily, on the verge of finally becoming totally unnatural: cyborgs, connected to computers and soon to be genetically engineered, and thus liberated from the idea that we were “men” or “women” or even “human beings” and hence from the idea that we had to act in certain ways. To them, Cronon seemed to be saying that wilderness, too, was not exactly real, that it was mere construction, simply another category. That I was hiking not through the Giant Mountain Wilderness, but through an abstraction—and perhaps even a dangerous abstraction, one that kept me from dealing with much more serious environmental problems.

  Wilderness defenders, predictably, reacted badly to this news. Partly they thought: Damn, this is all we need. Having soldiered on through Ronald Reagan and James Watt, through the attacks (literal attacks, often) of the Western antienvironmental “sagebrush rebellion,” and the billions of dollars thrown against them by timber and mining interests, now we have to contend with a bunch of professors (who had held their key conference in Irvine, California, a place about as spiritually far removed from the wild as it is possible to get) telling us not to bother? Cronon was seen to be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but in a particularly sneaky way. He’d quoted the poet Gary Snyder (along with Abbey and Berry the third star by which I navigated) as saying “A person with a clear heart and open mind can experience the wilderness anywhere on earth. It is a quality of one’s own consciousness.” But Snyder—in a special issue of Wild Earth, edited by John Davis—said he’d been quoted out of context. “I must confess I’m getting a bit grumpy about the dumb arguments being put forth by high-paid intellectual types in which they are trying to knock Nature, knock the people who value nature, and still come out smart and progressive,” he wrote. In general, then, environmentalist sentiment was: Give us a break. Call it what you will, we’re out here protecting landscapes big enough for animals to flourish and for people to occasionally get a little lost in, and that’s a good thing, not a bad one.

  To his credit, I think Cronon recognized that truth largely from the start. “It is not the things we label as wilderness that are the problem—for nonhuman nature and large tracts of the natural world do deserve protection—but rather what we ourselves mean when we used that label,” he wrote. And he’s gone on to write wonderful and sensitive investigations of both the human and the natural meaning of particular places. In general, the controversy died away. We could still stand here on Owl’s Head in midsummer 2003 and say, “This is a wild place.”

  But I don’t think the questions about wilderness and its meaning will in fact stay tamped down for long. A few years before Cronon, I wrote a book called The End of Nature that grew in part from my years in the Adirondacks and that raised a somewhat similar challenge to the idea of the wild. It was the first book for a general aud
ience about global warming, and half of it was pretty much straight science reporting: here’s how much the temperature is going to go up, here’s how we might rein it in a little. But the other half explored the reasons that the prospect of massive climate change made me so sad—basically because it threatened my newfound love affair with the wild world. I had found the place I belonged, I knew that in my bones. But suddenly the meaning of that place was in question. Say people, in their carelessness, pushed the temperature up four or five degrees this century, which is the current middle-of-the-road prediction. In that case, Owl’s Head might never overlook another real winter, just one long mud season. In the fall, instead of the birch and beech turning yellow and orange in this vast wood, those trees would be dead, replaced if at all by the drab brown of oak and hickory. In the first warm days of March, there’d be no maples left to bleed their sweet sap. Since it’s already started getting warmer, is this still the Adirondacks, still the Champlain Valley? Was our place wild, or natural, anymore? For that matter, was any place? The peculiar physics of global warming mean, in fact, that the North and South Poles will be hardest hit—that is, the places that really are free of any other human history, really are wild if any place is wild, might just as well be in the middle of the eastern megalopolis or the SoCal suburbs.