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’sa 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
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’sa 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
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