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Authors: Bill McKibben
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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 slopinglawn, 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 andmuscled 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,
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 slopinglawn, 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 andmuscled 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,
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