Wandering Home Read online

  All this environmentalist knows is that today he’s not thinking about it. Today he’s going for a ride. I’ve arranged with friends who run a rafting company to pluck me off the rocks at Blue Ledges and float me the rest of the way down to North River. Boots off! Barefoot! The family party I join has already come through the three miles of rapids on the Indian, where rafts put in, and they’ve managed the first big drops along the Hudson—they look determined, a tad shell-shocked. The guide steering our raft is named Critter—at least that’s his river name, and probably his winter name, too, when he works at the nearby downhill ski resort. He’s good—not just at steering, which gets fairly routine, but at the patter that keeps people laughing, not too nervy. We shoot through the long wave train downstream from Blue Ledges, and past Kettle, and Gunsight In and Gunsight Out, and Harris Rift, which has a big hole known to all as the Soupstrainer. Things flatten out eventually, and there’s time to jump over the side and swim, or lie back against the big rubber pontoons and watch the mountains slide by on either side.

  I’ve seen this gorge at every season save the dead of winter—one time, pushing for a late-fall trip, we had to hack through several inches of shore ice upstream even to put boats in the water. It’s most spectacular in the spring with the water roaring, and most gorgeous in the fall when the hardwoods that wall the sides have turned color. But midsummer it feels just right, the water warm enough and low enough that the rapids are a pleasure instead of a mild peril, the day stretching so lazily out in front of you that there’s no hurry (save to keep up with the bubble—if you drop off its back you end up pushing your raft over shallow spots). We drift down to the last sizable rapid, Bus Stop, and then paddle back hard to see if we can “surf” in its never-ending break. And we can! Laughing, soaked, stuck inside the power of the river for a minute or two before we finally pop out and start drifting down again. When the first sign of civilization appears—an old, abandoned railroad bridge that once carried trains headed for an iron mine near the heart of the High Peaks—it’s, as always, a bit sad. Tom Sawyer done for another day. Soon we reach the takeout spot, where the river joins the two-lane blacktop of Route 28. We hoist our raft up the bank and onto its trailer, and then we strip off life jackets and helmets and change into dry clothes and drink Coca-Cola and feel more or less perfect in the late afternoon sun.

  BY NOW I’M close enough to home—two leisurely days’ walk, twenty minutes’ drive—that I know half the people in cars driving by. (Adirondackers aren’t particularly into Subarus, and there’s not enough money for SUVs to dominate. It’s pickup country, and most of them actually have something in the bed—a chain saw, a load of firewood—that you wouldn’t want to pile in the backseat.) Everyone stops to ask if I want a lift, and so I have to explain my mission over and over, and most of them think it sounds pretty ambitious, since, after all, Vermont is, like, a whole other place. But I’m feeling fine: I’ve had a day of free mileage, floating instead of walking.

  The raft dropped me off right at the confluence of Thirteenth Lake Brook with the Hudson, and I follow it uphill for several miles, right past the entrance to the garnet mine. People have been mining garnet here for more than a century, and though this is the only pit left open, it remains the area’s prime employer. The garnet isn’t gem-quality; instead, it’s turned into sandpaper, or into a fine powder used for grinding TV screens. As mining operations go, it’s environmentally benign; far from being toxic, the tailings are used by the county to make pavement, and so at night your headlights often catch a red sparkle from the road. Eventually the brook reaches Thirteenth Lake. Despite its drab name, Thirteenth Lake is a gem—long and narrow, with tall Peaked Mountain climbing above it to the west. The eastern shore houses several dozen expensive vacation homes and the Garnet Hill cross-country ski lodge—but they were all built so cleverly that you can’t see them from the water. As subdivisions go, it’s as nifty as the mine.

  The houses line only half the lake, though—the southern half is part of the Forest Preserve, a vast 100,000-plus-acre chunk called the Siamese Ponds Wilderness. Though it’s only a tiny fraction of the public land in the Adirondacks, it’s nearly as large as all the protected wilderness in Vermont combined. We’re in my town of Johnsburg now—one of the biggest townships in the state, though with one of the smallest populations, a town with forty peaks over 2,500 feet, only two of them with trails. And only a couple of trails connect the various lakes and ponds that dot the Siamese. For the most part you’re on your own (in fact, if you come from the east, you have to figure out a way to cross the Sacandaga River, which forms a tough boundary for fifteen or twenty miles. There aren’t any bridges, just a couple of cable crossings where you can climb a tree, hang from a strap attached to a carabiner, and try to zip across a wire).

  The main trail across the top part of the Siamese wilderness starts at an orange gate, planted there to keep snowmobiles, ATVs, even mountain bikes out. These barricades aren’t universally popular—I’ve come across such gates elsewhere in town after they’ve been dismantled by four-wheeler enthusiasts with acetylene torches. They call them elitist, demand the right to use every inch of the forest, too. The debate usually turns on questions of fact: Do ATV tires turn trails into muddy wallows? But for me the answer is much more basic, having to do with what it means to be civil, a good neighbor, a part of a community. There might be a hundred of us out on this trail today (there aren’t, but there could be), and we would barely disrupt one another’s experience. Just as Thirteenth Lake can easily absorb a hundred canoes and each of them hardly notices the others. But put one Jet Ski turning doughnuts on the lake, or one four-wheeler careening along the trail, and everyone else’s blood pressure starts to rise.

  I have an economist friend, Charlie Komanoff, who wrote a long paper proving this point by demonstrating how, say, housing values declined along noisy shores. But in fact it hardly needs proving—only in relatively recent times have people decided that “because I want to” is sufficient reason for annoying others. Only in a culture of hyperindividualism would it occur to you to do what you wanted without reference to anyone else—an Iroquois would have been unlikely to decide that standing in the middle of camp singing at all hours was a good idea, and if he’d made the mistake, the rest of his tribe would have put him straight. But stand on shore someday and listen to the selfish grating whine, hour after hour, of an inboard Jet Ski engine—that’s the sound of a culture spinning out of control.

  And of course it takes more-tangible forms than noise, too. It wouldn’t have occurred to that same Indian to fish all the fish out of a stream—he operated in a world of sharp taboo that made such a thought impossible. But we don’t. I was hiking today with John Passacantando, an old friend who’d come to Thirteenth Lake for his summer vacation. John runs Greenpeace USA, which means he spends his time trying, somehow, to shame those who are most egregiously hogging the world’s resources, the multinational equivalents of a jerk on a four-wheeler. He sends boats out to block factory fishing fleets strip-mining the ocean with vast nets, and hires climbers to hang banners from the smokestacks of the worst polluters. As we walked, he told me about their latest exploit: his team dressed up in three-piece suits and infiltrated the Exxon Mobil annual meeting, jumping up to shout their anger at the way the company has stonewalled any efforts to even begin addressing global climate change. John and I were arrested together once, along with a couple of dozen other people, in the Capitol Rotunda—our crime was holding up a sign that said STOP GLOBAL WARMING: STOP CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS FROM GLOBAL WARMERS. We were lucky: the judge thanked us for our “necessary” activism, fined us ten dollars, and said he hoped he’d see us again. We got to walk away feeling righteous.

  But that righteousness only goes so far. Because—unlike Jet Skis—we all benefit from the systematic abuse of the planet. Cheap food and cheap energy and cheap wood let us eat big meals, build big houses, drive big cars. In some sense, our entire species, or at least the affluent portion
s of it, are circling the planet on Jet Skis, careening our four-wheelers through every acre of every continent. In our carelessness we now threaten to raise the very temperature of the planet five degrees. Vroom is us.

  I’m as implicated in that as most people. or almost—I’ve made modest efforts to rein myself in. We decided on one child; we drive a little hybrid car; we built a house of model efficiency, powered largely by the sun. All that has meant, in certain ways, a lower “standard of living,” though by comparison with most human beings I’m still a wild drain on the planet. At best I’ve gone from vroom to a dull roar. But here’s the point: what I’ve done, in my daily life and my political work and my writing, I’ve done because of these woods, these very woods we’re walking through. They captured my imagination and taught me, in my twenties, that the suburban life I’d grown up in was not as engaging as life out here. I fell in love with these hemlocks, these steep slopes, these patches of rock, these streams lit by leaf-filtered sun. And having fallen in love, the usual braided combination of selfishness and selflessness led me to try to do what I could to protect them. Where I lived, the woods had already been preserved from simple destruction—the Adirondacks are the most legally well-protected landscape on Earth. But even the New York State constitution can’t stop acid rain, can’t stop rising temperatures, can’t stop all the other assaults that drift across the park borders. So that’s where I’ve spent my life, working (with little obvious effect) on global problems like climate change. Were I a better person, I’d tell you that the deepest motivation has been worry for the people of low-lying Asian nations, or fear that we’re triggering new waves of malaria, or some one of the thousand other more clearly moral concerns. But mostly it’s because of these yellow birches, the bear who left that berry-filled pile of scat, those particular loons laughing on this particular lake.

  For me, then, one of the reasons for wild places is so other people can fall in love with them—because surely there are others wired like me, for whom this landscape will be enough. Enough to reorient their compass in a new direction, too. Most of the time now we live under a kind of spell, a lulling enchantment sung by the sirens of our consumer society, telling us what will make us happy. That enchantment is a half-truth at best—you don’t need to look very hard at our culture to see that deep happiness is not its hallmark. But breaking that spell requires something striking. For some, it requires seeing how poor people really live, or understanding the depth of our ecological trouble. Or, maybe better, it requires seeing other possibilities, the kind of possibilities I’ve been describing on this trip. A world where neighbors provide more for each other, growing food and bottling wine and making music, a world where we could take our pleasure more in the woods than in the mall. A world where hyperindividualism begins to fade in the face of working human and natural communities.

  That may sound airy and unlikely. Still, for me it has been so, and not just for me. Some years ago, determined to actually collect a few of those oral histories that I never seem to get in time, I sat down with one of my favorite neighbors, Donald Armstrong. He was born in 1918 and, with the exception of his years in the service, never lived anywhere but Johnsburg. I met him first at church, the backwoods Methodist church that serves our tiny town—he and his wife Velda sat in the same pew, six back on the right, week in and week out. (One day, after we’d been taking down the storm windows in the sanctuary, we crawled up into the steeple of the church, and found a place where he’d carved their initials sometime in the late 1920s; they’d been going together since grade school.) When the church celebrated its 150th anniversary, we put together a booklet listing everyone who’d ever belonged, and forty-eight of them were named Armstrong. His father had been a garnet miner—he would drive a team of horses across the then-open fields of the area, and when he found a likely patch of rock he would make a fire, set up a little boiler, and use it to run a steam-powered jackhammer so he could prospect for the ruby ore. When I asked Don what they did for fun in his youth, he talked about baseball and about swimming, but he also said, “In those days, well, they got out to work before daylight. They done chores sometimes with a lantern. They had to work pretty hard. But after the supper meal was over with, my mother would get the dishes caught up and then we’d all move into the front room and my father would tell old stories. Instead of being like we are today with a TV, he’d tell us all the experiences he used to have as a boy.” That was it. A limited life, no question.

  Don worked in the woods, and he worked building the big mine at Tahawus. When I asked him to recall the single favorite memory of his life, he started talking about this trail I was walking with John today, the trail that branches by the Siamese Ponds. “It’s seven miles back in there, you know, so you don’t get a lot of riffraff, or a lot of city tourists. Anyway, I was drafted into World War II, and I got the notice I had to report on June 3, 1942. So Velda and I went in to Siamese Ponds. Bert and Celia Nevins, they was in there and had a tent set up. He’d gone ahead and cut ice the winter before, and put it on sawdust, so he could keep your fish cold. We went in and stayed twelve days, cost us a dollar a day. And Celia cooked the best meals. Bert would come out and holler, ‘Dinnnnnnnner,’ it would echo up and down the lake. She had hot biscuits and potatoes and gravy and trout and tea and coffee. Back insofar and everything, that was about the best meal you ever had.

  “I used to tie my own flies. I’d get the feathers out of our chickens’ tails, and I used to dip them in gasoline and paraffin wax. That gasoline dissolved the paraffin so it went into a liquid. The gas would evaporate when you’d snap your fly, and then when it went out it would just lay there. Up would come a fish, and you’d shake the pole to make it rattle. Velda was fishing with worms, getting lots of nice panfish. But then she said, ‘I’ll try the flies.’ Well, I hated to let her take the pole, I was having so much fun. But I said okay. I was wearing a railroad cap, and she was whishing that fly back and forth, backcasting you know, and she caught that cap and sent it the whole length of that line. And the next time she cast back and she hooked a fish behind her and didn’t know it, and she just twitched that trout right out and sent it the whole length of the line too, kerplunk.” A memory, one supposes, that helped sustain him through the European campaign that followed.

  To my mind, Donald Armstrong has lived a nearly perfect life—good to his neighbors and loved in return, good to his wife and cherished in return, in a place that meant something to him and where he meant something. Doubtless he made less money than he could have almost anywhere else, but doubtless it didn’t bother him, since he had a little house with a little pond out back where he would feed the fish, and a huge garden that entertained and fed him in equal measure. And always always the woods and the mountains and the lakes. He told me about climbing Crane Mountain, our most massive local peak, in his youth: “We were full of beans and buckshot. We’d take that mountain at first speed. And then we’d climb the fire tower up on top, and we’d just look off. All those High Peaks in the distance. It was just amazing to us young people to see off, because we’d never been anywhere out of Johnsburg.”

  That’s an almost incomprehensible idea now, to climb a mountain for a view of the larger world. We see it on TV every hour, or through the Net, or by car and airplane and a thousand other ways. Our worlds are inconceivably bigger—even this sixteen-day journey of mine covers what we think of as a tiny territory, one crossed in a car in a couple of hours. But that doesn’t mean that the world I sort of know, or at least apprehend, is more complete or important than the much smaller world he has known. You can have a sufficiency of knowing, just as you can have a sufficiency of stuff.

  Or more than a sufficiency. John Passacantando and I have been walking and talking for hours now, but the longer our trek stretches, the quieter we grow. We’re along the east branch of the Sacandaga now, rock-hopping, watching the water play. The abundance of it all! And the endless novelty—I have hiked these trails in the late fall, when with the leaves d
own you can read the swell of the ridges with an anatomist’s precision. I’ve skied them dozens of times in the winter—sometimes in heavy glop, sometimes on icy crust, each trip utterly its own. And I’ve come through here in the muddy spring, skunk cabbage pushing up through the last drifts, river at full throttle. I know people here who are passionate birders or fishermen; I know a woman obsessed with moss and lichen. Trappers and hunters (meaning, if they are any good, people who have taught themselves to think as animals think). Photographers, peak baggers, mushroom nuts. There’s a guy who loves to find wild beehives—he tracks the bees in his garden deep back into the woods. Sugar-makers, and paddlers. One local wired the swamp around his home with dozens of microphones so he could record all the sounds of the wetlands. I know another guy who located dozens of apple trees, once growing in farm yards and now, generations later, surviving deep in the woods—he’d prune them, and go back in late summer for his harvest. Only one or two of these neighbors are affluent by the standards of contemporary American consumer society, but every one of them is affluent. I think people who don’t know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone’s interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven’t been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I’ve never seen in the fall (I’ve seen them in the summer—but that’s a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.