Wandering Home by Bill McKibben Read Free Book Online Page B

march of the big box stores, the decline in the number of farmers, the demographic tides of our population. But sometimes that history churns up its own countercurrents. If the future seems unlikely to answer enough yearnings, then people will look for exits.
    The last time that happened, of course, was the 1960s and early 1970s—which was also the last moment when there were as many dreams across this landscape. Like northern California, rural Vermont was one of the places that drew yearning counterculturalists. Don Mitchell, whose farm I was now wearily approaching, was perhaps the single perfect specimen. Born in Chicago in 1947, he’d made it to Swarthmore College by the time the sixties were in full swing. From there, with his girlfriend Cheryl, he’d hitchhiked around the country, including Big Sur, Carmel, San Francisco. At twenty-two, based on his experiences, he wrote his first novel, with theUr-title
Thumb Tripping.
It was an instant hit—“a pilgrimage to nowhere that slices neatly across the current scene,” the
New York Times
declared—and Mitchell was hired to write the screenplay. Directed by a twenty-three-year-old, it co-starred Michael Burns and Meg Foster as what
TV Guide
called “two happy-go-lucky flower children,” not to mention Bruce Dern as one of many creeps the pair encounter on their hitchhike through paradise. By the end, said one reviewer, “with the audience numb from the ghastly parade of subhumanity lurking out there, the two youngsters tire of each other and go their separate ways.”
    In real life, however, Don and Cheryl stayed together. With the money they made from the movie, they bought a Porsche and then they bought this farm in the central valley town of New Haven. It’s a spread of undulating meadow set against the rocky outcrops of a low mountain, one of the most thoroughly Vermont settings imaginable. They had their share of adjustment problems—one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard was his description of coming out one morning to find the cows licking the chrome off his sports car—but unlike so many of their peers, they stuck. Stuck to a place, stuck to each other, built a life. And slowly changed. When their children began to arrive, they took up farming with real seriousness: “Caring for livestock and making hay and managing a large garden became a wonderful project to bond our family together with a sense of shared purpose,” he says.He raised lambs, in part because the land was suited to them—at its height around the Civil War, Vermont, where grass grows easily, had been sheep pasture to the world. But the business had gone into terminal decline once competition from big Western ranches, and then Australia and New Zealand, caused the price to plummet. (At the moment you can’t clear enough selling wool to pay the shearer.) But Mitchell did find one market: Easter lambs for the ethnic market in the big city. It meant breeding his ewes with one eye on the Greek Orthodox liturgical calendar, so that he could time his slaughter for the right week. And it wasn’t exactly a living—he kept writing, especially essays about the country life for
Yankee
magazine and the
Boston Globe.
“When I think of all the inappropriate talents, the varieties of ignorance and wealth of misinformation,” he wrote in one collection of those pieces, “I am filled with laughter and amazement. Imagine people like me helping to create a new agricultural industry.” But he was indisputably a farmer. And there were, indisputably, 260 sheep in the pasture this night, softly baaing.
    During thirty years of caring for those flocks, Mitchell developed a certain allergy to romanticism. The week I wandered through, he was making final changes to the galleys of his first novel in two decades,
The Nature Notebooks
, which could almost be described as antienvironmentalist. It tells the story of a handsome and charismatic eco-warrior who arrives in Vermontfrom parts west, seduces three