“I can’t write as well as those guys, but I can walk a lot farther.”
Review: Wandering Home by Bill McKibben
When I first cracked open Bill McKibben’s book, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape, I thrilled with recognition. It opens on Vermont’s Long Trail, which McKibben describes as running “up and down like a giant’s EKG.” Having hiked the Long Trail in its entirety in 2016, I well-remember that sensation. Even though my map had a rough elevation profile running along the top, it was still all too easy to underestimate the unrelenting climbs and descents.
“I’d taken an easy fall romp with a daypack along this path the year before, and remembered dimly that a field of ferns marked the approach of camp—now, heavy-laden, I walked through just such a fern field ten times in the course of the afternoon, each time more certain that this must be the one,” McKibben recalled. “But no, and no, and no, and no. Not until dinnertime, with ten solid hours of walking behind me, did I arrive, sore-footed, calf-cramped, and more than a little uncertain about the weeks of walking that lay ahead, at a small lean-to 750 feet beneath the summit of Mount Abraham, Vermont’s third-highest peak.”
I think most backpackers will recognize that sensation of anticipation—expecting to come to a shelter sooner than one actually does, maybe even conjuring the mirage of a shelter out of distant trees or boulders. (Related: Thinking that the rustle of wind through the leaves is actually the sound of rushing water when your bottles are empty.)
I remember that lean-to, although I only stopped in for lunch. Like McKibben, I climbed Mount Abraham on a damp, gray day threatening rain. I wore my rain jacket to shield me from passing showers, although my skin prickled with sweat on the climb, and zipped it tight at the summit because the whipping wind was chilling, even on an August afternoon. Photos a fellow hiker took of me at the top show claw-like tendrils of cloud sweeping over the mountains to the East. Mount Washington was obscured—although even if it hadn’t been cloudy I’m terrible at recognizing peaks from afar.
Back to McKibben:
Tonight a scrim of rain clouds advanced towards me, a gauzy curtain of gray that only made the lake and mountains behind gleam the shinier. It was clearly about to rain, but the worst of it seemed set to pass just north and south; a slight gap in the line headed toward my perch on Mount Abe. Hearing no thunder, I stayed put, and sure enough, the cloud washed up over me. For a few moments, even as the world turned gray, I could still make out the reflecting mirror of [Lake Champlain]; finally it too vanished and all was gloom. But then, even more quickly than it had descended, the cloud swept through, and behind it the world was created fresh. No scrim now, just the fields, the lake, the peaks. When a double rainbow suddenly appeared, it was almost too much—a Disney overdose of glory. But then a rainbow pillar rose straight into the southern sky, and east of that a vaporous twin appeared, and then a kind of rainbow cloud to the north. Soon seven rainbows at once. Then the sun reached just the right angle so that the mist whipping up the face of the peak flashed into the clouds of color as it washed over me: a rose cloud, a cloud of green. And always behind it the same line of lake, the same jag of mountain. All at once it struck me, struck me hard, that this was one of those few scenes I would replay in my mind when I someday lay dying.
It is a true delight to experience the marvels of the mountains through a great writer like McKibben. But this book is not overly preoccupied with the trials of the trail. (As Bill Bryson has said, “A long walk, a really long walk, is an exceedingly repetitious experience. I can’t keep saying, ‘I walked all day, and I was really tired when I finished.’ Coming up with fresh material all the time is a real challenge.”)
Perhaps McKibben anticipated that challenge, or perhaps the walk itself was never what interested him, although he clearly likes hiking. He says in the afterword the book came about because editor Annik La Farge was working on a series about “writers taking walks,” and that the other contributors were “great novelists ambling around places like Provincetown and Rome.” To this invitation, McKibben responded, self-deprecatingly, “I can’t write as well as those guys, but I can walk a lot farther.”
And so McKibben began plotting a trek through a region he playfully calls Adimont or The Verandacks—from his house in Ripton, Vermont, on land once owned by Robert Frost, to his other house in the shadow of Crane Mountain in the Adirondack wilderness in New York—70 or so miles as the crow flies, but a couple hundred on foot. (McKibben is not terribly concerned with specific miles or distances, which is marvelous.)
McKibben planned his route around people as much as places, and is joined most days by one or two others, people who exemplify the spirit of hopefulness McKibben has identified in this region—or perhaps I should say spirits. There is the pastoral and bucolic softness of Vermont, and the coarse and independent wildness of the Adirondacks—two ways of interacting with the natural world, both alternatives (or at least, supplements) to over-extraction and excessive consumerism, and subsequent climate and environmental crisis.
First published in 2005, the book is in many ways a time capsule. One of McKibben’s interlocutors effusively rambles on about running cars on soybean or rapeseed oil, and dreamed of a local bio-refinery and a pump in Middlebury selling “Addison County-grown gas.” How could they have anticipated that the demand for biofuels would increase farming on marginal lands—damaging ecosystems, harming biodiversity, and polluting water—while pushing up the price of commodities and exacerbating food insecurity, and in some cases still generate more greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuels?
Of course this book doesn’t hold all the answers—how could it—but it is a window into other possibilities. And it’s a meditation on the relationship between humanity and nature, a celebration of wild and beautiful places, and a clarion call to protect them from development, pollution, and climate change.
It’s not exactly a trail journal, but it is a good reminder that trails are what you make of them, and arbitrary start and end points are not necessarily as compelling or significant as the paths we make for ourselves—and I say this as someone who really likes faithfully following every inch of long trails with specific start and end points.