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Imagine a 200-mile circle around your home. What's it contain? What stories from history,
both native and more recent? How does the topography change? When it rains, what's a
random droplet pass on its sea-ward journey? How do people make a living, and how
dependent are they on those outside that circle? What's the future hold for that
region, your home?
In a culture that prizes new starts and an economy that enforces relocation, "home"
isn't primarily a place. Speaking personally in From Where We Stand: Recovering a
Sense of Place, Deborah Tall says, "it has been friends, poems, certain paintings
and melodies, horizontal lines".Home is a bed to lie down on, a desk to write at,
a few talismanic objects hovering nearby." Typically, then, hope comes from work,
families, maybe larger issues or communities transcending our physical region.
Whatever it is, we have to be able to pack it with us when we move.
For me, the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York is home, amid rumpled Appalachian
foothills, the Chemung River which empties into the Susquehanna en route to the
Chesapeake Bay, but my circle dips into Lake Ontario to the north and another
watershed to the northeast. It's the state's third most sought-after tourist
destination -people flock here for Watkins Glen's races, for Corning's Glass Museum,
for the serenity of the slender lakes', and for the wineries along them, before they
head off for Niagara or New York City for whatever they've got to offer. I've lived
here for a decade now, but I hesitate to call myself a "New Yorker," and still think
of myself as a "newcomer." In the midst of this landscape, which I love, where does
my hope spring from?
Bill McKibben's Wandering Home is a lively account of a hike through his region
bordering Lake Champlain. "I've not been able to drag myself away from this small
corner of the planet." His connection to place, and ideas from Edward Abbey and
Wendell Berry, inspire a way of imagining "home" that could transform it. For him,
it is a motive for living: "what I've done, in my daily life and my political work
and my writing, I've done because of these woods..." He says the wild schooled him
in what was possible in life -his and more broadly- but it's more than intellectualism.
"I fell in love... And having fallen in love, the usual braided combination of
selfishness and selflessness led me to try to do what I could to protect them."
What can we draw from his walking tour of this unnamed area? First, his account
is entertaining. A clever writer, he can turn a musing on Jet Skis into insights
about environmentalism, and his phrasing is witty, like when he's hiked through
downpours in sweat-trapping rain-gear: "I've been wetter in my life, but I've
never been damper." Or after describing America’s sixth-largest lake, Champlain,
he drops in, "Not Great, but great."
We can also reconsider our landscape, neighbors, and wider culture. Concepts are always
introduced in the context of his surroundings, and generally, the region he's walking
through embodies hopeful ways forward for McKibben. The Vermont side is New England,
while the New York side is the Adirondack wilderness -both settled, but the values and
skills each has honed and maintained in this era of what he calls "hyperindividualism"
can be instructive. "New Englanders have learned a great deal, mostly through trial and
error, about how to successfully inhabit a land, experiments that continue to this day;
and Adirondackers, often against their will, have learned as much about how to leave
land alone."
In his journey from near Middlebury College to his home on Crane Mountain in the
Adirondacks, McKibben introduces us to "people who actually know what they're doing out
in the physical world" -organic farmers, rangers, microbrewers, sustainable loggers, and
many more. This lively cast of characters can carry forward the skills of this country's
roots while experimenting with new ways of doing business. For instance, Chris
Granstrom, a farmer, could only make ends meet through freelance writing and his
spouse's teaching. After years of U-pick strawberries, Granstrom's breeding northern
grapevines. He comments on clipping twigs off the vines to transplant elsewhere:
"This whole idea of taking cuttings and making them root is kind of magical to me.
" Coming from a man working with plants for nearly three score years, that delight
is one source of hope, and the book is full of quietly remarkable people like this.
Another source is to embrace contradictions. As we get to know the intricacies of making
a living in a region, we inevitably encounter the horns of a dilemma. Corning, like all
tourist-sensitive places, must balance year-rounders' with visitors' needs. Ask New
Orleans about it. In sprawl-prone places and land-tracts desirable to developers,
economic realities threaten attempts to "preserve" the texture of the community.
McKibben shows a host of cooperative ventures, micro-corporations, and community
enterprises that reveal true Yankee ingenuity, and he's honest about environmentalism's
internal contradictions as well.
Finally, as he walks, McKibben muses. Clearly knowledgeable, he's also humble. He
easily, even eagerly, shares stage with companions who raise good questions about the
nature of "nature," the meaning of "wild," and the extent of responsibility for the
workings and fate of a landscape.
These mental detours are wonderfully practical, like the logging dilemmas of woodlot
owners. David Brynn explains the business of logging in stumpage and boardfeet. Then
McKibben adds that the other half of the battle is "convincing consumers that what
they want in their homes is the same thing that the forest wants to yield." Like grain
variation. Instead of calling it "flaws," and weakening our forests to produce trees
without them, re-imagine it as "character," as Middlebury College did in their new
science building. Local lumber, local mills, and McKibben says, "It looks beautiful
to the eye, and to the mind's eye, too, because I can walk you to the forest it came
from and show you that it's still intact."
Easy to read, Wandering Home does the magic of a good book: after transporting
you from
your surroundings, it returns you to the farms and businesses, the strip malls and
natural resources -with a new perspective, wider questions, and maybe renewed hope.
© Edward A. Dougherty
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