Wandering Home (7 page)

A walk with Warren is an ambling, happy disquisition, interrupted frequently by sightings of one thing or another, often things with wings. “There’s a black-crowned night heron,” he’ll say. “At this point we don’t know where in Vermont they nest. Isn’t it nice to have some pieces of information still out there to discover?”
Or, “Look, there’s a yellow warbler. As bright as any taxicab you’ll ever see, but with brown and red streaks on the chest.” Or, “Oh my, there’s a red-spotted purple. That’s a white admiral subspecies. Butterflies are kind of a new thing for me.”

But 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 [that is, Warren and Barry spent weeks pulling the plants up by the roots], 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, and 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. “Oh, there’s an interesting battle going on here. This is a Eurasian buckthorn, an invasive species. And this is a gray dogwood, which is supposed to be here. Over here the buckthorn has ascendancy, but here the dogwood is still king.”

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 stratagems that evolution puts in play?

And the questions get more complicated than that, even. A few hundred yards west of the creek, we wandered out into a big hayfield. “Grassland is an interesting subject in this part of the world,” Warren said. “There are a small number of species—bobolink, upland sandpiper, eastern meadowlark, grasshopper sparrow, savanna sparrow, Henslow’s sparrow—that require it. They make their nests in the tall grass.” But in recent years, as farms have been abandoned, much of that grassland has grown into scrub forest. And the grass that’s left has become more intensively managed, with farmers trying to get an extra cut of hay—which means harvesting prior to mid-July, before the birds can get their broods safely off. “So the question is, do you manage for them, or do you let nature take its course?” That is, do you set aside some fields to maintain in grass, cutting them even though no one is farming, and cutting them late so that the birds
have time to nest? Or do you let nature and the economy take its course? “Henslow’s sparrow is already gone from the state, the grasshopper sparrow is down to a few pairs in the state. Bobolinks aren’t at any great risk yet, but that’s the general tendency.” Maybe that’s bad, and maybe that’s “right.” I mean, the only reason those birds were here in the first place is that farmers came in and opened up the woods. Or maybe not—maybe they were opened up first by the Indians who lived in this valley. Are Indians different—more “natural”—than the rest of us humans, and does that change our relationship to the bobolink? Maybe our attachment to grasshopper sparrows is only sentimental, romantic.

These questions of what constitutes the natural, what composes the real, when you draw the baseline, how much change a place can stand before it loses its essence—they are the questions that will grow stronger and louder the farther west we go, into the Adirondack wild (whatever “wild” means). For now, it’s enough perhaps to note what Warren and Barry King have done: they’ve pulled up the water chestnut and the purple loosestrife, because those exotics were overrunning everything in their path and decimating the food supply for a wide variety of animals. They have not fished every carp out of Dead Creek, or cut down every buckthorn. When the snow geese come through in the fall, they stand by the roadside with their spotting scope so neophytes can take a look. Once a year, under the auspices of the local Audubon
chapter, they organize Dead Creek Wildlife Days—which features plenty of birdwatching, but also hunters showing off the retrieving skills of their bird dogs. That is to say, they do what they can, guided by a certain tropism toward “the natural” but governed by common sense and a dose of wry humility.

Mostly they make sure to marvel. “Do you hear the flicker calling just now?” asks Warren—I hadn’t, of course, but now I did. “Oh look, that’s a harrier. The white rump patch, the wings held at a slight dihedral. Now this, this is a native—it’s prickly ash. It’s a tough customer. Get in a thicket of that, and you’re going to give blood. And speaking of thorns, look over here. This is a hawthorn. Look at the size of that thorn. You know who likes hawthorns? A bird called a shrike. It looks like a mockingbird, but it’s a predator. They catch smaller birds, they bring them to a spine like this, and they hang them up on it just like a local butcher would hang up a side of beef.” That’s nature, or something like it.

W
ARREN TURNED BACK
to the east finally, and I kept on my trudge, near enough now to the big lake that I could catch glimpses of it through the fields. The closer I got, the bigger the houses became, as if in observance of some iron law of real estate. Finally, down right on the lakeshore, the most oversized manse of all sat on a sloping
lawn, every tree cleared for hundreds of yards. After all the quieter places I’d been in the last week—Don Mitchell’s tucked-in farm, the lovely knoll of the college garden, John Elder’s sugarbush—this place looked naked, bald, without a trace of modesty. Two big signs on the driveway announced the obvious, that the road was “private,” that wanderers on foot could find some other way to reach the lake. Two golf holes were cut into the lawn, little flags hanging limp in the hot afternoon. This place was by any definition an invasive, a blight or a fungus spread by money pouring in from the south. The kind of place that suppressed natural life, community life, just as thoroughly as the water chestnut in the creek.

But again I held the sermon back, calmed a little by the lessons on flux and resiliency that Warren had been teaching, and calmed, too, that I knew another route down to the shore of Champlain. Before half an hour had passed, my feet were in the cool water, in a little bay under a limestone bluff covered with cedar and oak. I’d come to the edge of Vermont, and New York beckoned across the water. Or, as I’d started to think, I’d come to the middle of this watershed, this cultureshed.

I
N THE MIDDLE
distance a big aluminum rowboat came steadily across the lake. As it grew nearer I could make out the oarsman—a small man, shirt off, as wiry and
muscled as a statue. Tanned and smiling, he looked like a photo from a muscle magazine before steroids turned physiques grotesque.

I’d planned the route and timing of my trek in part because I wanted to cross Lake Champlain with John Davis, whom I’d known for half his life and half mine. We’d met first in Tucson, Arizona—well, this is going to require more explaining.

I hadn’t always been particularly interested in the outdoors. I went from college straight to
The New Yorker
, where I was the steadiest writer for the Talk of the Town section, about as urban a job as it’s possible to imagine. But in my mid-twenties—in the mid-1980s—two things happened. One was that I started to work on my first long piece of writing, an account for
The New Yorker
about where every pipe and wire in my Manhattan apartment came from and went. I followed the water pipes to the Catskill reservoirs, and traveled to Hudson Bay to see the enormous dams producing power for Con Ed, and spent days on New York harbor with the giant garbage barges—and along the way had the sudden insight that the physical world
actually mattered.
That this came as an insight says much about how I—and perhaps most good suburban Americans—had grown up. But suffice it to say that all of a sudden things that had always seemed like scenery and props for the great drama of ideas and money and politics now seemed much more central to me: air, I’m talking about, and water, and oil.

At the same time, by a fluke, I came to the Adirondacks for a winter—to the writers’ colony at Blue Mountain Lake, where I actually wrote the piece about my apartment. I spent that winter falling in love with these woods, which would transform my life. And one day, in the bathroom at Blue Mountain, I came across a copy of the
Earth First! Journal
, which would help transform my sense of the world.

Earth First! was still young in those days, a radical environmental group that rose in the Southwest desert in the time of James Watt and Ronald Reagan. Less a group, really, than a style: cantankerous, uncompromising, convinced that the fire had gone out of the wilderness movement and that it was their duty to reignite it. Founded by a few friends, Earth First! drew its inspiration from the pages of the great desert writer Edward Abbey, and in particular his novel
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, an account of a small redneck band that crosses the desert blowing up coal mines and highway bridges in defense of the wild. Earth First! was launched in an illegal ceremony atop Glen Canyon Dam, the concrete plug that had flooded deep, gorgeous canyons of the Colorado into Lake Powell (Lake Foul, to Abbey). The small band gathered atop the dam and unrolled a massive plastic crack down its face, symbolizing their hope that it would soon disappear. These guys (and they were almost all guys) fascinated me—their frank and joyful denial that humans mattered most (
Earth
First!), their pugnacity at a moment
when Reagan and the Right were rolling over every more responsible advocate of a normal, balanced America, their willingness to tip over every sacred cow, even the environmental ones (Abbey would, proudly, toss beer cans out the car window as he finished them, arguing that if the government was going to graze and mine the land into oblivion, worrying about litter was sentimental camouflage, especially along those linear landfills called roads). And so I set out to investigate, traveling to Utah to hike with Abbey, and to Idaho for a hard-drinking week in the glorious Challis National Forest at the group’s annual encampment. And to headquarters, such as it was, in the Tucson home of founder Dave Foreman. Outside, it was a normal Southwestern ranch-style home in a cul-de-sac kind of neighborhood. Inside, it was marvelous chaos—people bunking here and there, planning one mysterious action or another, maps of wilderness areas on every wall, phones ringing constantly in the way they used to
—ringing
, not playing the first measure of some pop hit.

The one calm human being in the middle of all that storm was also the youngest, the most clean-cut, and by far the healthiest looking. John Davis was the editor of the
Earth First! Journal
, which was the glue that held the anarchic group more or less together. I watched him paste up a few stories—a blockade of a road into some planned clearcut on an Oregon national forest, an early tree-sit by some protesters in redwood country. Every
half hour or so he would rise from his desk, walk over to the doorjamb, and do twenty or thirty pull-ups. Refreshed, he’d get back to his labors. The journal he was editing reflected the group’s prevailing ethos: new editions were published not in accord with the conventional months, but with the pagan calendar (Beltane, Samhain); the lively letters column was called “Dear Shit-fer-Brains”; and the most-read column was doubtless “Dear Ned Ludd,” where readers would write in with questions about, say, what type of sugar to pour down a bulldozer’s gas tank if you wanted to disable it. It was, in other words, thoroughly irresponsible. Except that in a world where the rise of radical conservatism still seemed fresh in its craziness, this response also seemed thoroughly necessary. As if someone was actually giving as good as we were getting. And I was twenty-five at the time—it seemed deeply romantic, this idea of wilderness as the ultimate good.

In retrospect, I realize I saw Earth First! near the end of its glory days. Two things happened. One, as with all cool scenes, it was soon inundated—since it was the only fighting game in town, activists from a dozen other causes descended, most of them more hippie than redneck. “They weren’t all that much concerned with wilderness,” Davis recalled as he rowed, steady and powerful, across the lake. “The last straw may have come at one of the annual rendezvous, when one of the newcomers stood up and demanded that Earth First! get
involved in rent control.” Two, the FBI arrived. In our post-9/11 world, it seems hard to believe that the Feds left the group alone as long as they did: they were, after all, advocating a dozen creative varieties of sabotage. But it wasn’t until fairly late in the game that they swooped down, arresting Foreman and charging him with instigating a scheme to tear down a bunch of power lines in the Arizona desert. In truth, the charge was nonsense—the trial, when it finally happened, featured a government informer so drug-addled that the prosecutors had to argue that LSD didn’t interfere with his ability to be a cogent witness. But that was much later.

“I’d been traveling when the arrests happened, and friends and colleagues back in Tucson said not to come back,” remembers Davis. “So I spent most of that summer traveling in the East. Not on the run, but keeping a low profile.” Within a few months it was clear that things would not return to normal. And so the movement began to split apart. The hippie wing kept some of the old spirit alive, still publishing the
Journal
, still marking the pagan holidays. But Foreman, Davis, and a good many others were a little tired of the bravado, and no longer convinced direct action would deliver much except police harassment. They split off to start a new, very different, journal, this one called
Wild Earth.
Now a decade old, it’s become the intellectual center of a new movement for wilderness, working with some of the country’s leading conservation biologists to draw detailed maps
and plans for the eventual rewilding of big chunks of the planet. But at the beginning, the most interesting question was where it would be located.