Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley And New York's Adirondacks (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
Written November 11, 2009For the last few week's I've kept Bill McKibben's essay, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks, in my purse, for reading on the subway. This is the first bit of nonfiction that's inspired me to pick up a pencil and underline or notate as I read since I left grad school 6 years ago. I've taken extensive notes on material for work, of course, but this is the first bit of writing in a good long while that inspired me to keep a collection of my thoughts as I read. Which says something for both the depth and compelling vision of McKibben's argument.Bill McKibben isn't spoken of by the average person, or even the majority of environmentalists, as a hopeful, inspiring guy. He's better known for damning treatises on the inevitability of peak oil and dire warnings against the dangers of genetic engineering -- serious, frightening topics that don't inspire confidence or self-reliance in a reader, particularly when delivered in the part chastise/part rant tone McKibben is fond of. And yet, this piece of writing is powerfully hopeful. Wandering Home is a travel journal, chronicling a hike that McKibben made from Mount Abraham on the eastern edge of Vermont's Champlain Valley to Crane Mountain in the southern Adirondacks. His particular journey takes place within his mind as well as across the valley, across the lake, across the state line, up and down mountains.We're introduced to people -- characters in the best sense -- whom McKibben has worked and lived with; farmers, Middlebury professors, writers, geologists, birders, trackers, and hunters, some of whom have never left the tiny towns they were born in, others of whom have traveled the world over to find home. We're treated to stories: the first hike McKibben made with his daughter, Sophie, when she was four years old and insisted on taking every step herself; the mad stage coach ride that Theodore Rossevelt took down Route 9N while President McKinley dying, arriving in Buffalo with Adirondack mud on his boots to be sworn in as the 26th President of the United States; the ending and beginning and ending and beginning again of hyper-local "industries" -- grist mills, bee supplies, tourist rafting. There's the requisite disparagement of those who build enormous houses that ruin the ecology of an area, not to mention the view. (I'm guilty of this myself -- 6,000 square-foot city houses being built on tiny lakes surrounded by dwarf white pine look ridiculous, upset every environmental and societal balance, and automatically brand their residents as idiots who don't know the first thing about living well.)But the best part of the book is the thread of questioning that runs through it -- what does Wilderness look like in a world where we've geomapped and GPSed our way through every secret nook and cranny, where satellite photographs wipe away the illusion of human "discovery"? How do we create, protect, and preserve space where nature -- the flora and fauna required to keep the planet in a state of balance that allows us to survive -- can evolve and develop free from human manipulation and intervention? What does "rewilding" look like? And what is our role -- the role of people and environmentalists -- in making it happen, or allowing it to happen?If we're going to talk about wilderness ... 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 along the creek by carp fanning their tails." But carp are an exotic species, introduced [to Vermont] from afar. So is the mocha color "right"?...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 ... 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, 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... Eurasian buckthorn...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 strategems that evolution puts in play?The problem, of course, is that human beings are invested in this planet. Unlike animals and plants and winds and rain, we have the foresight and understanding of cause and effect to realize that any actions we take will have consequence -- and we have a vested interest in figuring out how to stay here for a few million more years. (Those of us with kids do, anyway.)What McKibben does with this essay is refrain from laying into his reading audience with a two-by-four, refrain from making a specific must-do list. He admits to his own failings, iterates the excesses that are so blatantly common-sensical that they absolutely must be stopped, and revels in the beauty and the mystery and the possibility of an area where more people are working to create something meaningful and lasting and joyful than are trying to tear it down. He introduces points of debate, he rants a little and then writes on. He talks of balance. He talks of personal happiness and satisfaction, of where and how he's found both. And leaves the reader to seek -- and create -- her own.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 view from Mount Ab[raham], I know it will contain all these things: farm, field, forest, mountain, loon, moose, cow, monarch, pine, hemlock, white oak, shepherd, bee, beekeeper, college, teacher, beaver flow, bakery, brewery, hawk, vineyard, high rock, high summer, deep winter, deep economy. Yes, and cell phone 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.
"It was ok."I didn't dislike this, but I couldn't really think of too many positive things to write about it, either. It made me want to visit the Adirondacks more than I did before reading, though I got rather subtle vibes that the locals and the author himself (who is not native to the area, I might add) wouldn't be all that thrilled to have me. I expected the book to be more about the landscape and the Adirondacks themselves, the wildlife and the wilderness, etc. but it's more about the people that live there and how they feel about the area. The author is seldom alone on his journey, and constantly has friends and acquaintances joining him on day-hikes as he himself makes a 16 day trip across the region between his two homes. Yes, his two homes. He often goes on long tangents not only about the people he's walking with, but friends of friends as well and I often forgot where the topic even began or what the point was. The author is an environmentalist, and I thought I would relate to him and his book there, but I disagreed with him on his stances and points almost as often as not. Clearly this book worked for some people; it just didn't work for me. Perhaps because I've never been there. Perhaps because I was expecting something else when I picked it up, or perhaps because it didn't really bring up any topics or points which I found all that fresh or thoughtful. That's not to say it doesn't bring up thoughtful points, just nothing that I haven't already thought about or read elsewhere. In fact I think this book was ruined for me by Earl V. Shaffer's "Walking with Spring", an awesome biography about being the first person to hike the entire Appalachian Trail from start to finish. I feel that his book is far more informative about the landscape and people than this book was. So go read that if you're interested in this. I don't want to tell anyone NOT to read "Wandering Home", (and this is another reason I'm reluctant to give out stars), but go read it if you're interested and make up your own mind. For me, personally, it just didn't do much.
What do You think about Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley And New York's Adirondacks (2005)?
"There is a surpassing glory in our right habitation of a place..." McKibben's reflective journey on foot from VT near Middlebury to Johnville, NY across a portion of the Adirondacks. It is a less a travelogue or walking tour than a chance to meet people connected to particular places who offer small visions of alternative lives and a deep love of place. And the places he describes are glorious. He eschews sermonizing, offers several recommendations of other authors, and provides hope, despite our consumer culture's constant demand for cheaper and for more, hope that local communities might make small inroads and his deep love for the landscape he is walking across might seem less unique and startling. A lovely book of place and of the people who make place.
—Tim
This was a Goodreads first-reads giveaway. I had expectations that this would be descriptive of his journey thru this beautiful land. There were only glimpses of those moments though. Felt the writer didn't describe the area nor his actually 16 day trip. I was a bit lost as we went off too many tangents and it really started to bore me. There were a few moments that I did enjoy- the short description of the summit of one of the mountains. The rest of the book was just so-so and was hard to finish.
—Cece
I have been a fan of Bill McKibben for several years now, but I hadn't read anything by him lately except his columns in Orion. We bought this book when he spoke at ISU, and it was wonderful! It's really just one long, rambling essay detailing his two-week hike from his home in Vermont to his old home in the Adirondacks, and it was the perfect book for my last couple of weeks when I didn't have time to read for sustained periods of time. In addition to describing the vistas he sees and the people he hikes with, he also wrestles with many of the same issues he discusses in his column. For example, what makes a section of land "wild"--does it have to be completely empty of people? Should it be "virgin" landscape (if there really is such a thing), or can it be reclaimed land that was once clearcut or overused? What is our role in all of this? Whatever the answers, McKibben remains hopeful, yet realistic, about the future of our country's wildernesses. More than anything, reading this book made me want to explore the Adirondacks and revisit some of my favorite places out west.
—Lindsey
