Wandering Home Read online

  “Lincoln Peak,” he says—a peak in the Mount Abe range, clearly visible through the trees.

  The New Haven gurgles nearby, now almost flatwater after its tumbling descent from the height of the ridge. “Breadloaf Mountain Winery,” I suggest—for the source of the headwaters of the river, and also for its “glass of wine and thou” overtones.

  “I just don’t know,” said Granstrom with a laugh. “My whole life used to involve dealing with words, and now it involves dealing with heavy objects.” He looked out through the open doors, where his vines gleamed in the lightening rain. “I have a much more complicated relationship with nature since I became a farmer. Things that seem benign or beautiful when they don’t threaten you directly become something else. Like thunderstorms. Or deer. I was out on the tractor the other day and this mother and fawn wandered in—I ended up chasing them around and around the rows in the tractor. Or take the weeds under the grapevines. I talked to a guy not long ago who was going to control the weeds organically—well, they got out of control and now he’s using a chainsaw to take out pigweed. So I use Roundup, maybe once a year, in a backpack sprayer. Monsanto is a big, evil, nasty company, but that Roundup starts to degrade as soon as it hits the soil. And what are the alternatives? Well, you could use a mechanical cultivator, but it tears up the vine roots and the soil structure, and it’s spewing diesel fuel as it goes. You could do flame weeding, and maybe I will—but that’s just driving down the rows with a propane tank. Or I could hire a bunch of migrant workers with hoes. Which is the right answer?”

  Just like the woodlot owners trying to figure out how much environmental conscience they can afford, Vermont farmers have to figure out how to stay afloat in an economy where food is treated as a commodity. For many, “organic” agriculture was the salvation—a label that could induce consumers to pay enough more for their dinner that small, local farms stayed viable. Behind the label was a story, just like Lincoln Peak wine will be a story, and VFF wood. “Organic” was “value added” in an almost psychological way, as shoppers looked for some kind of real connection that the shiny rows of supermarket apples, the yellow rafts of “chicken parts,” couldn’t offer. Organic carried those fuzzy feelings—but now the organic story is being quickly rewritten, as huge growers start to dominate the market. And so, as we shall see, the search is on for the next story that might allow small farmers the margin they need.

  Whatever else it turns out to be, that story won’t be a fairy tale. “I’ve watched many intelligent people arrive and try to farm—they’re well capitalized and all—and most of them go down in flames,” said Granstrom. “And the reason, I finally decided, is that they expect things to go right. You can’t think like that. You have to expect things to go wrong. Like, I used to sell apple trees. And when people would come to get them, I’d say, ‘You have to watch out for this disease and this scab’ and so forth. And they would look at me like ‘I’m a virtuous person, my tree’s not gonna get that.’ But they would, of course. I used to think that way, too—the rain was a blessing on my efforts. But what if it doesn’t rain? You’re cursed? You can’t think like that. You have to replace that kind of thinking with sheer competence.”

  THE RAIN ENDED, and from Granstrom’s farm I crossed Route 7, the two-lane road that is western Vermont’s main thoroughfare. (Until last year, all traffic stopped twenty miles south of here every morning and afternoon when a farmer led his herd from the pasture to the milking parlor. The state, with its usual unswerving commitment to speed and efficiency, finally paid to build him a barn on the pasture side, and so one last small reminder of what life once was like disappeared). A little farther west I hit Otter Creek, just above the spot where the New Haven flows in. Despite its diminutive name, Otter Creek is Vermont’s longest river; it flows mostly north, rising in the hills around Rutland and eventually pouring into Lake Champlain near Vergennes. Along much of its route it winds through farmers’ fields, but this is diverse country—I met Otter Creek just at the top of a rocky whitewater gorge. But instead of exploring that canyon I turned south, walking upstream, through a large forest park that runs right into the county seat of Middlebury.

  The thunderstorm had done little to cut the late-afternoon heat, and steam was rising off every puddle. But along the riverbank, giant hemlocks provided their own deep shade, and a spring-loaded carpet of red needles. Peering out through the branches, I watched dragonflies float above the lazy river, and listened to the rising tremolo pulse of insect song, and felt my belly full of wine. Leave Provence to the Provençals, and Tuscany to the Tuscans—the world was altogether sweet enough right here. Why, Provence could kiss my sweaty derriere, I thought, with the slightly sodden pleasure of someone just a trifle drunk. Drunk on that fine Riesling, but even more on the close, humid, singing torpor of an afternoon in the hemlock woods on the edge of Otter Creek. And even more on the sense that life, which in most places seems to me to be spinning apart, was somehow slowly gathering here, deepening, threatening to make sense.

  AFTER A COUPLE of miles, the path I was following emerged into Middlebury, shire town and gravitational center of Addison County. It’s not a perfect New England village—a sprawling suburban subdivision of cul-de-sacs and split-level ranches bounds the town to the east, and the town fathers carelessly let a short string of McDonald’s and Marriott franchises bloom south of town along the highway. But Middlebury still boasts an actual manufacturing district. At the spot where I emerged from the woods, I could see the Cabot Cooperative cheddar plant, the Otter Creek not-so-microbrewery, and half a dozen similar enterprises. And with its downtown, Middlebury hits the New England trifecta: bandstand on the green, towering white Congregational church, and at the far end a college-on-a-hill. In between, past the bank and the bookstore, you cross a bridge over a plunging waterfall on Otter Creek. There’s no other bridge for twenty miles to the south, and only a small covered one nearby to the north, so if you’re going east to west in this part of the world you pretty much pass through downtown Middlebury. As a result, there’s none of that left-out-to-dry-by-the-highway look which afflicts so much of rural America. The college and tourist trade has driven rents high enough that too many of the stores specialize in “gifts,” which is to say things that by definition no one actually needs. Still, a Ben Franklin remains, full of venerable merchandise and heavily patronized by my daughter and others of the ten-year-old set who enjoy its penny candy, still priced at a penny. Also a movie theater and a library and an overgrown shoe store that sells underwear and dungarees. Also a fancy restaurant for anniversaries and a smoky bar and a very fine bakery and really what else do you need?

  I stood on the bridge in the center of town, watching kids kayaking in the white water beneath the falls, and listening to the passing babel. Most of the year, Middlebury College is a top-tier liberal arts school, as good as any in New England (though just a trifle worried whether Williams and Amherst think of it as often as it thinks of them). In the summer, however, Middlebury gives itself over to a long-running and equally illustrious language school, an operation that has trained generations of diplomats and CIA agents and Peace Corps volunteers by immersing them in the tongue of their choice. These students sign a solemn oath not to utter a syllable of English the whole summer, and as a result much business in town turns into a pantomime of sign language and frustrated pidgin. In a foreign country, you speak the language poorly and the shopkeeper speaks it well; here, you speak the language poorly (at least at first) and the merchant doesn’t even know which of the dozen possible tongues you’re butchering. The students take it with dire seriousness—one of the ER doctors at the local hospital swears that they have a letter on file from the dean, which they can show to students authorizing them to break their vow and describe their symptoms in the mother tongue.

  I wandered on through town, stopping at the small grocery for provisions for the next few days, then at my college office to check my mail. I am a “scholar in residence” at Middlebury, a grand-
sounding post that—typical of any job I might attract—carries no actual salary. But it does offer a fine garret, with a view of the Adirondacks, and a speedy computer connection. Better yet, it offers colleagues—Middlebury has built perhaps the finest undergraduate environmental studies department in the nation, and so there’s a steady supply of like-minded economists, political scientists, biologists, physicists, theologians, and writers to talk with and learn from. And though I rarely teach, there are students who find their way to my door. Middlebury has its share of handsome and self-satisfied preppies on their way to the important task of investment banking, but it also attracts a steady flow of kids for whom the bucolic setting provides more than backdrop. They start to wonder, à la Chris Granstrom, how they might fit into a place like this. Most of these regular students are gone till the fall, of course, replaced by the worried throng trying to recall how you say “What’s on draft?” in Arabic. But a couple of my very favorite students are hanging around for the summer, and I’ll get to spend this night with them in perhaps the single most beautiful spot on this calendar-gorgeous campus.

  THE MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE Organic Garden lies on a knoll in the middle of a cornfield about a quarter-mile west of the campus. A year ago it was just a bump in that expanse of cow corn. But now—well, to call it a garden is not enough. It’s a good half-acre of vegetables, as well-tended and orderly a farmlet as any you’d ever want to see. A new harvest of spinach has just been dispatched to the dining hall for tonight’s supper of babel, and doubtless students are even now searching their phrasebooks to find out what they call spinach in Moscow or Madrid. Meanwhile we are sitting around the fire pit, watching our dinner of chard and corn and potatoes steam.

  This place was the work of students, right from the start. Like most liberal arts colleges, Middlebury traditionally hasn’t shown much interest in agriculture. Any other kind of culture, sure: you can major in film or dance or literature, and rightly so. But colleges developed at least in part to help people escape from the farm, and that old prejudice dies hard. There isn’t even a regular course about farming at this college, though it lies in one of New England’s most fertile valleys.

  A few years ago, though, when Jean Hamilton and Bennett Konesni were freshmen, they ran into each other in the hallway outside an organic agriculture workshop elsewhere in the state. They agreed, on the spot, that Middlebury needed a student garden. And then, oddly enough, they actually made it happen. (In my days as a wild-eyed student, it was generally accepted that talk was more important than action, but times have changed.) With an ever-growing band of fellow students, they commandeered the college GIS lab, using the computers to overlay maps of soil type with maps of college-owned land; eventually they found the knoll in the cornfield, one of the few nearby outcroppings of rich loam in the valley floor, which is mostly clay best suited for cow corn. They sat down with the guys from dining services, and worked out spreadsheets of what they could sell to the college; then they visited local farmers to make sure they weren’t planting crops that would undercut their neighbors’ livelihoods. They persuaded the student government to supply cash sufficient for a well and a solar pump; the latter’s black photovoltaic panel now rises like a rectilinear sunflower in the middle of the patch. They found seed companies to donate seed, and beekeepers to loan them hives, and before too long the day came to lay down a winter cover crop of rye. And on that afternoon, once the homecoming game was finished, the college president and the chair of the board of trustees both appeared, and spent a happy hour bent over, pulling rocks from the soil. At which point it was very clear it was going to be a success.

  A few months after that cover crop went down, and a few months before the first vegetables would be planted, I taught a short course during the college’s January term on “Local Food Production.” Not because I knew much about it—I have a green mind but a black thumb—but because I was beginning to think that “local” was about to replace “organic” as the key idea in the battle to save small-scale American farming.

  For a generation, a certain number of farmers scattered across the country have managed to hang on by growing organic food for consumers willing to pay more for a dinner free of pesticides. That premium was enough to make it possible to survive without the efficiencies of scale that came from vast agribusiness plantations; in Addison County, an organic dairy farmer can get twice as much per hundredweight. Just like David Brynn’s family foresters, these family farmers had figured out a way to keep their squash and tomatoes from becoming mere commodities; instead of chemical residue, they came with a residue of story, enough story to justify a living wage. A few years ago, though, the organic movement grew large enough that agribusiness began to pay attention. They started converting a few of their vast fields in the Central Valley or Mexico into “organic farms”—enormous institutions that in every other respect operated like classic corporate giants. It’s true that those particular acres were spared the rain of herbicides, but the food grown there still has to be trucked and flown around the world—by some measures, the average leaf of organic produce travels even farther than the 1,500 miles that a bite of conventional food must journey between farm and lip. And once companies like Del Monte started becoming some of the world’s biggest organic producers, the premium for a local guy with a couple of acres of really nice organic tomatoes started to shrink. He had no niche left. For two decades, “organic” had meant more than just “pesticide-free”; it also meant “some local guy grew this with his own hands.” Now that meaning was evaporating.

  But there was a possibility for another story, this one harder to co-opt. If “local” could become the new buzzword, then perhaps it would provide sizzle enough to justify a premium price again, that ten cents more a pound meaning the difference between a farmer making it, and a farm becoming Olde Farm Acres at $49,900 a building lot. That’s what Chris Granstrom had been talking about when he noted that Finger Lakes wine was still selling in the Finger Lakes. It’s why our local food co-op started posting pictures of the farmers above stacks of their cabbages. And Del Monte simply can’t do it—their economies of scale would disappear if customers in Rochester and Eugene and Tampa began demanding food from Rochester and Eugene and Tampa. That’s what we studied in our class, anyway—reading Wendell Berry and the other prophets of a new agronomy, and taking field trips to Vermont innovations like The Farmers Diner, a Barre eatery where almost all the ingredients in the hamburgers and milk shakes and french fries are raised within fifty miles of the kitchen door. “Think Locally, Act Neighborly” is their slogan, and so far it seems to be working.

  As is usually the case, the best thing about the course was the students, who turned out to be remarkably reflective. I knew from listening to them introduce themselves on day one that six or seven of my twenty-five charges thought they wanted to be small farmers someday. But I wondered if they had actually figured out what that meant—most of these kids were from the same backgrounds of privilege and semi-privilege as the rest of the Middlebury student body. They had the same handsome ease and offhand self-confidence.1 They were, in other words, made to order for the economy now emerging in our world, and every last one of them could grow up, if they wanted, to make a bundle of money. So one day I asked them to try to figure out how much they thought they’d need to earn a year in order to have the kind of life they wanted. They spent the night figuring, and talked about their results the next day—some said they needed to emulate the suburban lifestyle of their parents in order to feel secure, but for the rest their answers converged in the neighborhood of $30,000. Which perhaps reflected a certain sweet naïveté—twenty-year-olds don’t value insurance quite as highly as do the rest of us—but also a certain deep understanding that I admired. Instead of working to afford certain pleasures, many maintained, they would find their pleasure in their work. Which is a good strategy if you’re planning to be a small-scale local farmer.

  High on that list of pleasures was food. When I was in college,
food and grease were more or less synonymous—a cheese-steak sub was my idea of just fine. I told these students that two of them were to be responsible each day for cooking the rest of us lunch, from whatever local produce they could scrounge in midwinter. Our classroom opened onto a kitchen, and all through the discussion smells would flavor the air. Before long, truly astounding dishes were emerging: leeks gratinée, smoked squash soup, gorgeous frittata. (One fellow took things to their logical extreme, scavenging the January countryside for cattail flour and high-bush cranberries the birds had missed. It tasted…local.) A kind of emerging sensual appreciation for this place kept us all in thrall—what would come next? It wasn’t like we were in Napa—this was Vermont in January. And yet we ate well, just as people ate well in Vermont for hundreds of years before anyone thought of flying in iceberg lettuce.

  And now, out at the garden in midsummer, we were eating like Alice Waters. Walk a few paces and eat a handful of cherry tomatoes; a few paces more and grab a pepper or a peapod, or pull a carrot. Two students from that local-food class were spending the night with me. Chris Howell—tall, skinny, goofy grin—had just finished overseeing construction of a garden shed, framing windows, building a rock patio. The final touch, a sod roof with grass cut from the surrounding knoll—seemed to be taking root. Jean Hamilton, quieter and with a bit of a Mona Lisa smile, had been harder to get to know, but as time had gone on, I’d come to admire her enormously. Partly, I confess, for the pies she’d produced for our class. They looked like pies from the covers of those magazines devoted to high-end country living, and they tasted even better than they looked. But her story interested me even more. The daughter of doctors and the graduate of a top prep school, she was clearly an academic overachiever, like virtually everyone else at Middlebury. But she somehow figured out, early on, that she wasn’t going to follow the obvious path. She’d spent one semester of her prep school years at the Mountain School, a working farm in the hills of eastern Vermont where I’d been often, a place where the curricular highlights included lambing, sugar run, spring planting. “That made regular school all the harder,” she said—and indeed I think she came to Middlebury more to satisfy her family than herself. More than anyone else, she’d designed the garden now blooming around us. We all three lay back against a sloping berm, drank cool water from an old wine jug Jean had spiked with a branch of mint, and watched the sky above us—this was the summer when orange Mars came so close.