"Wandering Home" by Bill Mckibben

"Wilderness and Ghandian nonviolence were the two most potentially revolutionary ideas of the twentieth century, percisely because they were the two most humble: they imagine a whole different possibility for people." Bill Mckibben, from Wandering Home

"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." from Wandering Home

The full title of McKibben's book is "Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks." The book's title is nearly as long as the walk.

"Wandering Home" is about a journey by foot that Bill McKibben takes us on in order to show (not examine) the landscape of the present day Champlain Valley and the Adirondacks. It is hopeful and optimistic. KcKibben demonstrates the power of caring for the land and culture of Vermonters and inhabitants (both past and present) of the Adirondacks. On the way we meet students who built a practical garden at Middlebury College, a winery entreprenuer, a hemp retailer, a recluese/activist and a little known dead poet, among many others. These people demonstrate the spririt of the land and the spirit of the people who own and/or care for the land.

Mount Mansfield

On a more personal side, I was excited to read "Wandering Home" because a portion my childhood summers were spent in the Champlain Valley. My father grew up on a dairy farm in Bridport, Addison County, right on the lake. At least one week of each year of my childhood was spent in my uncles cabin on Lake Champlain watching the barges slowly float by while searching for Champ (the legendary lake monster) in the whitecaps. For me the cabin was heaven on earth - the quiet, fishing, skipping stones, taking walks, rowing the boat dangerously far out into the Lake without an adult or a life preserver, visiting my realtives.

I fell in love with Middlebury - the typical samll quaint town green on a sloping hillside, with a bandstand and a top-notch well respected college, where my grandparents are buried. I loved driving along the countryside through Addison County, hoping to get peaks at Lake Champlain through the trees or over the next hill. Vermont's farms always seemed cleaner and classier than farms in other parts of the country. Everything has a freshness in Vermont, even the homes of my relatives. My sister lives on a farm in Whiting. Some of my fondest memories are chatting with my sister in her living looking out across the almost wild landscape. Seeing the huge barn with "Otter Creek" in huge letters of discolored shingles on the barn roof, always made things seem simpler.

My Father mentioned Camel's Hump often when he reminisced about his birthplace in the Champlain Valley

My nephew Johnny, who was a year older than me, always could entertain my brothers and I in a special zany way. We would go fishing at Otter Creek, which was a journey of about a mile or two from the farm winding through fields containing the fiercest cattle known to man. We ventured through the fields bouncing and flying hopelessly on an antique tractor with our crazy nephew yipping and screaming and spitting snuffjuice from the wad in his mouth. Every once in awhile he stop and pop the tractor into high gear. The front two wheels would come off the ground a couple of feet. He'd give a "whoooeee" and I'd have to catch myself from slipping off the big red fender I'd be sitting on. If I didn't I'd be under a four foot tractor wheel.

One of my most memerable expeiences was getting lost with my parents for hours in the mountains behind Ripton and ending up in the boondocks. At one point we stopped at a beaver pond in some random tight valley on a dirt road. I got out of the car to take a look at the water. When I walked over to the pond I was startled by the jolt of life that that pond contained. A snake went off to my left, hundreds of tiny frogs scattered into the water, while fish ripples moved about everywhere, sensing the movement at the edge of the water. I was astounded at the amount of life that one beaver pond, no less than twenty feet across, could support. That pond in the Green Mountains defined the term "ecology" for me.

Anyway, I think that you get the picture. Vermont, in my ideological mind, is a little slice of heaven. I appreciated McKibben's assessment that the hope for the future lies in the people of the Champlain Valley and the mountain people of the Adirondacks. One thing that someone in my family always remarked about on our way home from our annual trip from Vermont to Womelsdorf, PA, our hometown, is that every person you see in rural Vermont, would wave or say hello. They were the friendliest community I have ever seen. I hope they can keep their way of life alive and can innovate and find ways to set an example of how to tread lightly on the land and preserve community at the same time. Lord knows, they are a rare breed in America today.