by Bill McKibben
Crown, 2005
Hikers in the Adirondack Mountains of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont often share a common reward when they emerge from the wooded lower slopes to the open summits: a marvelous view of the other range, etched on the sky, seen across Lake Champlain and its north-south-running valley.
To the hikers, it often seems like a single marvelous landscape, with its own wonders – a clean northern light and its hard, worn underpinning of granites and limestones.
In many ways, however, the Adirondacks and the Greens are different countries, politically, socially, and even geologically. Northeastern New York encompasses some of the poorest counties in the U.S. There are dairy farms in the Champlain Valley of New York, but once you get into the foothills and then the higher peaks, you realize that, as Bill McKibben points out in Wandering Home, New Yorkers have essentially left the countryside alone.
Vermont, by contrast, has been quite heavily used. Dairy has faded in the last two decades, but its impress is still clear not only in the valleys but also in the hills. Moreover, Vermont has become a center of light industry, with a base in technology. And it has become in the process quite progressive, politically and socially. The Adirondacks are a bastion of conservatism.
McKibben, a writer with homes in both the Greens and the Adirondacks, attempts in this book to tie the two regions into one, which he calls “America’s most hopeful landscape.” The book is a chronicle of a walk McKibben took from his home in Ripton, Vermont, where he lives while serving as a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College, to his second home in Johnsburg, New York, deep in the Adirondacks.
The long route he chooses is the spine for his story, which is both a rumination on what he sees as an integrated landscape and his own attempt to see his way forward to an integrated society worthy of it. To this end, he talks to a variety of people along the way, noting that Vermonters are trying all sorts of ways to live lightly on the land: they operate small truck farms, vineyards, diners devoted to locally grown foods, and the like.
On the New York side, he celebrates the efforts of his friend John Davis and Jamie Philips of the Eddy Foundation to establish a wildlife corridor from the west shore of the lake across the floor of the valley to the foothills of the mountains.
The sum adds up to the case that McKibben has been making in many of his books: that we belong to this corner of the earth as well as to the community that occupies it, and we need to take care of both.
If there is a criticism here, it might be that he is a little too sanguine about the prospect that the counter-culture enterprises he likes so much can deflect the march of economic greed and suburban sprawl that have disfigured so much of Vermont, especially in its northwest corner.
Nonetheless, I would sign on to the epitaph he sets out for this work:
I have the great good fortune to have found the place I was supposed to inhabit,
a place in whose largeness I can sense the whole world but yet is small enough
for me to comprehend. If, when it comes my turn to die, I really do see again that
world from Mt. Abe, I know it will contain all these things: farm, field, forest,
mountain, loon, moose, cow, monarch, pine, hemlock, white oak, shepherd, bee,
bee keeper, college, teacher, beaver flow, bakery, brewery, hawk, vineyard, high
rock, high summer, deep winter, deep economy. Yes, and cell tower and highway
and car lot and Burger King. This is part of the real world. But what’s rare in
that real world, and common here, is the chance for completion. For being big
sometimes and small at others, in the shadow of the mountains and the shade of
the hemlocks.