Wandering Home (6 page)

This is what Vermont is like right now—a lot of fascinating dreams, some of them fever dreams, about how
this place might be successfully inhabited. Wine grapes, sweat-equity community forests, college gardens with solar pumps, high-tech wood energy, diners serving local ham and eggs, community slaughterhouses. Ferries running on local biodiesel! Every one of them is an attempt to interfere with history, which at the moment looks as though it should go this way: dairy farms fail or consolidate; farmland turns into second homes or retirement homes or just home-homes, as Burlington sprawls south and north. Interfering with history is hard, because its momentum is so strong: the march of the big box stores, the decline in the number of farmers, the demographic tides of our population. But sometimes that history churns up its own countercurrents. If the future seems unlikely to answer enough yearnings, then people will look for exits.

The last time that happened, of course, was the 1960s and early 1970s—which was also the last moment when there were as many dreams across this landscape. Like northern California, rural Vermont was one of the places that drew yearning counterculturalists. Don Mitchell, whose farm I was now wearily approaching, was perhaps the single perfect specimen. Born in Chicago in 1947, he’d made it to Swarthmore College by the time the sixties were in full swing. From there, with his girlfriend Cheryl, he’d hitchhiked around the country, including Big Sur, Carmel, San Francisco. At twenty-two, based on his experiences, he wrote his first novel, with the
Ur-title
Thumb Tripping.
It was an instant hit—“a pilgrimage to nowhere that slices neatly across the current scene,” the
New York Times
declared—and Mitchell was hired to write the screenplay. Directed by a twenty-three-year-old, it co-starred Michael Burns and Meg Foster as what
TV Guide
called “two happy-go-lucky flower children,” not to mention Bruce Dern as one of many creeps the pair encounter on their hitchhike through paradise. By the end, said one reviewer, “with the audience numb from the ghastly parade of subhumanity lurking out there, the two youngsters tire of each other and go their separate ways.”

In real life, however, Don and Cheryl stayed together. With the money they made from the movie, they bought a Porsche and then they bought this farm in the central valley town of New Haven. It’s a spread of undulating meadow set against the rocky outcrops of a low mountain, one of the most thoroughly Vermont settings imaginable. They had their share of adjustment problems—one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard was his description of coming out one morning to find the cows licking the chrome off his sports car—but unlike so many of their peers, they stuck. Stuck to a place, stuck to each other, built a life. And slowly changed. When their children began to arrive, they took up farming with real seriousness: “Caring for livestock and making hay and managing a large garden became a wonderful project to bond our family together with a sense of shared purpose,” he says.
He raised lambs, in part because the land was suited to them—at its height around the Civil War, Vermont, where grass grows easily, had been sheep pasture to the world. But the business had gone into terminal decline once competition from big Western ranches, and then Australia and New Zealand, caused the price to plummet. (At the moment you can’t clear enough selling wool to pay the shearer.) But Mitchell did find one market: Easter lambs for the ethnic market in the big city. It meant breeding his ewes with one eye on the Greek Orthodox liturgical calendar, so that he could time his slaughter for the right week. And it wasn’t exactly a living—he kept writing, especially essays about the country life for
Yankee
magazine and the
Boston Globe.
“When I think of all the inappropriate talents, the varieties of ignorance and wealth of misinformation,” he wrote in one collection of those pieces, “I am filled with laughter and amazement. Imagine people like me helping to create a new agricultural industry.” But he was indisputably a farmer. And there were, indisputably, 260 sheep in the pasture this night, softly baaing.

During thirty years of caring for those flocks, Mitchell developed a certain allergy to romanticism. The week I wandered through, he was making final changes to the galleys of his first novel in two decades,
The Nature Notebooks
, which could almost be described as antienvironmentalist. It tells the story of a handsome and charismatic eco-warrior who arrives in Vermont
from parts west, seduces three local women, and manages to employ them all in his scheme to sabotage the transmission towers and ski lifts atop Mount Mansfield. Told through the journals of the three women, it offers Mitchell a chance to lampoon the excesses of modern nature writing, “a jug of milk in which very little cream has risen to the top—because very little cream is present…. I’m particularly annoyed,” he writes, “by a histrionic strain within this genre that tends to be self-absorbed, self-congratulatory, and vaguely autoerotic. Its modern practitioners strike me as exploiting nature for their own selfish purposes, just as surely (although admittedly more benignly) as loggers, miners, whalers, and oil drillers.” You could say he’s become a mild curmudgeon, or a modern version of the slightly cranky Yankee farmer: “I happen to dislike what I take to be a preachy and self-righteous strain among environmentalists who wear their values on their sleeves,” he says. “Environmentalists will have a better chance of succeeding when people adopt its perspectives simply because they make practical sense.” It seems unwise to raise the prospect of hemp, or even biodiesel, although I do mention Chris Granstrom’s fine new wine as we eat dinner with his extended family out by the pond.

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 is 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”?