Wandering Home (3 page)

Once the thrill of road maintenance subsides, however, it’s clear he can see the forest, too. We haven’t been walking five minutes when he drops his voice, motions me off the trail, and leads me to a little grove. “These are two of my favorite white oaks on earth,” he says, patting a pair of lovely straight trees. “I get goose bumps when I come over here, and I’m getting them now.”

VFF enrolls woodlot owners who agree to follow the program’s strict ecological standards—not just about sound road building, but leaving lots of dead trees as standing snags for wildlife, staying far away from streams, and a hundred other details. The guidelines fill a thick manual, but of course there’s a rub: building all those waterbars and broad-based dips takes longer than cutting an eroding track straight to the trees you want to harvest. It takes longer to be responsible, in logging as in every other thing on the Earth. And time is money, so in some sense bad logging is efficient.

Brynn’s basic task, then, is not just figuring out how many trees you need to leave standing for birds’ nests—it’s figuring out how to increase the return to landowners and loggers so that they can afford to be responsible. “We find bare-bones logging around here costs $150 per thousand board feet, and doing it the right way costs $220 to $260 per thousand board feet. So we had to come up with some way to pay for that difference.” VFF has played with many schemes to make up that gap; most of them come down, in the end, to eliminating some of the middlemen and to branding the wood as local and sustainable so that people will pay a slight premium. “Right now the Vermont timber industry is worth more than a billion dollars, but stumpage—the money paid to the guy who owns the woodlot—is only 3 percent of that. It’s exactly the same as growing potatoes for McDonald’s. You’re completely at the mercy of the mill.”

But localizing the timber supply is just half the battle. The other half is convincing consumers that what they want in their homes is the same thing that the forest wants to yield. A few years ago, for instance, Middlebury College decided to erect a vast new science building, Bicentennial Hall. The architects specified, as architects usually do, that the interior wood be “Grade 1”—by the standards of the Architectural Woodwork Institute, that means it should be uniform in color and grain, with few “flaws.” That kind of wood, though, comes only from
big trees with few knot-forming side branches, and removing those trees from the forest (“high-grading” is what the loggers call it) has left the forests of the Northeast filled with smaller and weaker trees. It’s as if we were some species of wolf that, instead of culling the sick and the feeble, only went for prey in its prime. The alternative is to decide, as Middlebury College did, that what you used to think of as flaws could be reimagined as
character
. “That tree has been standing there two hundred years, taking whatever nature can fling at it,” says Brynn. “That’s not a problem, that’s an asset.” If you walked through Bicentennial Hall, you’d immediately see what he was talking about, for the walls are filled with little streaks and swirls and flickers that please the eye like the dance of flames in a fireplace. Before long you’re beginning to think in other ways that used to be heresy—like, why does my floor have to be all one type of wood, a big expanse of unbroken oak? Why can’t it be like the forest that surrounds us, which is roughly equal parts birch and beech and maple? VFF supplied the timber for the home we built in Ripton a few years ago: local wood, local mill, local carpenters. It looks beautiful to the eye, and to the mind’s eye, too, because I can walk you to the forest it came from and show you that it’s still intact. Show you the broad-based dips.

If you can make the economics work, then there’s a chance the people who won the woodlot won’t sell it for subdivisions. Brynn and I reach the edge of the forest
and peer off into a new clearcut with a nice orange No Trespassing sign. “This was a beautiful forest. But the owner has cashed out, and he’s going to put in houses. And the people who buy them—well, they’ll be here a couple of years and then we’ll come up to do a new cut so this guy can net enough money to keep his forest intact, and those new owners will be outraged we’re cutting trees.”

“It’s never going to be a huge wildland here,” Brynn says as we come to the edge of this small forest. “It’s always going to be more of a patchwork quilt. But there are so many people who could develop a positive experience with their piece of the quilt. See this stump? A beautiful white pine, shot straight up, not a pimple on it. Then it got blister rust, right about the same time that the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum came looking for clear white pine for the mast of a replica pilot gig they were building. The schoolkids who were doing the work came out here, one cold day in December, to harvest it. They weren’t the luckiest kids—a lot of them wouldn’t look you in the eye. But by the time they’d finished building that boat, well, each of them was able to stand up and give a little talk to the three hundred people who came to see the launch. That’s the real harvest of this place.”

B
RISTOL MARKS THE
divide between forest and field—between cutting trees and growing corn—in this part of
Vermont. Upland, to the east, Addison County tends toward woods broken by occasional opening. West, as the valley levels out toward the lake, more and more of the land is open field, interspersed with woodlots. Brynn and I came out in one of those fields around noontime, a vast expanse of cow corn already higher than our heads. We set off down parallel rows, two feet apart but invisible to each other, and David began talking about how agriculture presents many of the same paradoxes as forestry in this area. There’s the same pressure to produce food and timber as cheap commodities, because most customers buy on price. But cheapness always carries a cost. In the forest, it’s clearcuts and eroding roads. It’s not so different for farmers.

This field, for instance, belongs to one of the county’s biggest dairies—they bought the land, ironically, after they made a bundle selling off a parcel near Burlington that became Vermont’s first big-box development. On the one hand, they are reasonably conscientious farmers, not spreading their ocean of liquid manure until there is enough spring growth to make sure it won’t flow straight into the river. On the other hand, says Brynn, “there used to be fifteen different houses filled with people farming this land. Now it’s all one big farm.” The cows are confined to a huge barn instead of walking in the fields, standing all day on pavement like city commuters waiting for the bus. The farmers are producing milk at commodity prices, hoping to stay big and efficient
enough to compete with the mega-dairies of California and Arizona and Wisconsin, hoping to defy the odds that have shut down 80 percent of Vermont’s dairy farmers in the last thirty years. For the hardworking family it might mean a necessary path to survival, but for the region it didn’t really replace the smaller-scale farming that had once thrived here. It was, perhaps, a kind of holding action—keeping the land in use, unsubdivided, till an economy emerged that could allow it to be more diversely farmed.

And so, when we finally reached the edge of this sea of corn, emerging on a dirt road, I bade David farewell and set off again to the west—interested to see, among other things, if there were signs of that new economy emerging anywhere. If the same kind of creative thinking he was bringing to forests had begun to bubble up on area farms. If the trend toward bigness was inevitable, or if other visions beckoned.

All morning, walking the back road from Bristol toward Middlebury, I was in open country. There were fields in corn, and meadows and pastures, and there were abandoned fields growing in. An awful lot of former farms had been divided up into house lots—until recently, Vermont law exempted parcels over ten acres from state septic laws, so the houses tended to be spaced about the same distance apart. Many had expanses of grass out front, and for some reason, probably because a thunderstorm was threatening for later in the day, it
seemed as if every single man above retirement age was out on his rider-mower. Some had clearly cut their lawns just a day or two before—their passage left no discernible wake, like the Russian babushkas forever brooming their spotless patch of sidewalk. But it was a sign of atavistic devotion nonetheless. Farming may have all but disappeared in this country (fewer than 2 percent of Americans list it as their occupation, making farmers scarcer than prisoners), but some desire to tend the soil persists.

And occasionally it erupts, despite all efforts at suppression. I reached Chris Granstrom’s farm about one in the afternoon, and slung my backpack down in his garden shed because the rain was clearly just minutes away now. Granstrom is, come to think of it, tall and skinny, with a broad smile. He arrived in the region twenty-five years ago to attend Middlebury College. “Between my junior and senior year I worked the summer for a dairy farmer a little ways west in Bridport,” he says. “As any good farmer should, he did his best to talk me out of staying with agriculture. But I loved the whole thing.” And he loved it still, though a little more sadly and wisely. “We’ve farmed U-pick strawberries here for twenty-one years,” he says. “Between that, and my wife teaching, and a little freelance writing, we’ve made it. On a Saturday in the spring we’ll get vast crowds. But you know, we’ve been growing them in the same soil. Rotating them, of course, but still, by the fourth rotation, they just
weren’t as vigorous. And I was learning about all this,” he says, with a sweep of his hand that took in a small pile of cuttings, his daughter Sara who was busy transplanting them, and a greenhouse beyond. “This” was his new project: wine grapes specially bred for the North, a concept he stumbled across at a website called
littlefatwino.com
.

O
NLY A YEAR
after planting, Granstrom now has row upon row of sturdy vines where his strawberries once grew. We’re walking them, clipping promising-looking twigs that his daughter—a few weeks from heading off to Middlebury College herself—is transplanting by the greenhouse. “This whole idea of taking cuttings and making them root is kind of magical to me,” says Granstrom. “It’s sort of astronomical the way it multiplies.” Indeed, his business plan relies on that magic—he plans to concentrate on selling nursery stock to others in the area who want to start vineyards of their own.

“Look, the wine will be really nice wine. But probably not world class. So it will be for local supply”—that is, for people who want the pleasure of tasting it not only on their tongues but in their minds as well, who will appreciate the story that comes with it, the same way I cherish the local wood in my house. “There’s a huge glut of wine right now in California, New Zealand—that’s why you can get Two Buck Chuck or whatever in the
supermarket,” he says. “But in places like the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, it’s worked out better—it’s for a local market.”

Right about then the thunder finally cracks and the downpour starts, so we retreat back into the shed. Granstrom opens a bottle of the wine he’s made from his initial harvest—crisp, like a Riesling, delicious—and he and Sara engage in what is clearly a long-running debate about what to call their winery.

“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.”