Wandering Home by Bill McKibben Read Free Book Online Page A

knew that it drew tourists from around the Northeast, but of course neither of us had ever gone, any more than New Yorkers visit the Statue of Liberty. When you’re on vacation you have time to take in sights, but when you’re at home you drive by them on the way to somewhere else, somewhere you’re supposedto get. On foot, though, there’s no reason not to stop. So we paid our five dollars, shucked our packs, and joined the tour guide, who was just beginning her spiel.
    Justin Morgan, it turned out, was a local music teacher who lived in Vermont in the years following the Revolution. Someone in Massachusetts owed him a debt, and though he’d been counting on cash, Morgan was forced to take his payment in the form of a small bay colt. He started walking him home, hoping someone would buy him along the way, but the horse was smaller than the draft animals settlers were using to clear New England’s fields. As it happened, Morgan was lucky: his horse turned out to be something of a miracle, able to outrace and outpull every other horse in the neighborhood. “And he was a great breeding stallion,” the guide said. “We understand now that he was a genetic mutant with dominant genes, something that hasn’t happened before or since. He always bred true. By the time he died at the age of thirty-two, he’d sired enough foals to establish a breed. The Morgan horse has a beautiful crested neck, and a compact body frame with a sense of refinement. They’ve been used for everything from cavalry horses to family horses.” (Frost has a gorgeous poem, “The Runaway,” about a Morgan colt leery of his first snowfall.) Still, the breed was about to die out in the late nineteenth century when Addison County’s great benefactor, Joseph Battell, built this beautiful farm to save it from extinction. Now owned by the university, it houses sixty to eighty horses,and breeds twenty new foals a year. Apprentices bustled everywhere—young women, who compete for the chance to put in fifty- and sixty-hour weeks, were training horses on a lunge line, currying horses, leading horses to the “breeding phantom,” which functions as a kind of equine inflatable love doll for efficient semen collection. Demand is high for the steeds, who are truly handsome in their muscled sleekness—raffle tickets for a chance at one of this year’s foals were going fast.
    All of which was enough to get us talking again as we walked away. Here was a story about some agricultural innovation that appeared pretty much from nowhere and, with the right nurturance,
took.
Hemp hasn’t taken yet—and won’t, until we come to grips with our drug hysteria. But hey, there are other possibilities. “I’m helping coordinate a local group that’s looking into biodiesel,” Netaka said. “You can run a car on soybean oil, on rapeseed. Or you can use one hundred percent vegetable oil, or create blends with petroleum, stretching the supply and lowering emissions. We’d like to have a local bio-refinery—and a pump right in Middlebury, with Addison County–grown gas.” I felt him growing more alive, energetic. “You can use it for home heating oil, you know—a fuel one hundred percent locally derived. Even the ferries crossing the lake could run on it!” On we strode, arms swinging.
    This is what Vermont is like right now—a lot of fascinating dreams, some of them fever dreams, about howthis place might be successfully inhabited. Wine grapes, sweat-equity community forests, college gardens with solar pumps, high-tech wood energy, diners serving local ham and eggs, community slaughterhouses. Ferries running on local biodiesel! Every one of them is an attempt to interfere with history, which at the moment looks as though it should go this way: dairy farms fail or consolidate; farmland turns into second homes or retirement homes or just home-homes, as Burlington sprawls south and north. Interfering with history is hard, because its momentum is so strong: the