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 awayby 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, Iimagine, 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 movesthem, 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
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 awayby 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, Iimagine, 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 movesthem, 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
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