Wandering Home (5 page)

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.

Even in the dusk I could make out four or five white beehives a few yards away on the edge of the garden knoll. They were, as a curator would say, on loan from the collection of Kirk Webster, one of the most artistic small farmers of the Champlain Valley. He lived a few miles south of my route, so I wouldn’t actually get to visit his apiary on my trek. But I’d been thinking of him as I wound my pastoral way through the valley, and one of the lighter burdens in my pack was a photocopy of an article, “The Best Kept Secret,” that he’d written a few years before for
Small Farm Journal
. Part memoir, part practical guide, part moral meditation, it told of his long and slow maturation as a beekeeper. “It has been my great privilege, despite having very little to start with and many setbacks, to have started on the path of farming when I was a teenager, to give up doing all other work when I was thirty-seven, and to reach my mid-forties with the prospect of continuing for the remainder of my life,” he wrote. “Like a person carrying one tiny candle and trying to find his way in a vast underground cavern, I needed all my faculties to find the right course and put the pieces together into a harmonious whole.” Indeed, one of the continuing themes of his essay is the difficulty of learning to farm when the chain of transmission that operated since the start of agriculture has broken down—when
there is no parent to teach you how, or to leave you a working farm. “This state is literally crawling with people bringing their money from elsewhere and investing it in some kind of a ‘back to the land’ venture. These are some of the nicest and most well-intentioned folk you will meet anywhere but…their main contribution has been the very patriotic one deemed essential to democracy by Jefferson and Madison—dispersing the fortunes accumulated by the previous generation so that succeeding generations can rise according to their own wits.” In general, he says, these neophytes pick the wrong locations and invest too much capital before they figure out a workable system. By contrast, his own story involved endless trial and error (what to do when tracheal mites plague your bees, or a late spring rains out even the dependable flow of dandelion honey) as he discovered how to propagate queens and nucleus colonies for sale to other beekeepers.

Eventually it all worked. Selling queens, and 30,000 pounds of honey, now netted him 50k a year—that is, half again as much as my enthusiastic students had calculated for their baseline. “After living, and enjoying life, for so long with so little, this frankly seems like an enormous fortune to me,” he writes. His only sadness, he wrote, was a certain loneliness. He’d never married, and had no one to pass his carefully collected knowledge on to. “If there are young people any more interested in beekeeping as a way of life, I’d like to have a few of them
come here to learn the trade,” he wrote at the end of his essay. “I’d like them to get a better start and better grasp of the basics than I did,” and if even one or two took up such work as their life’s own, “I’d be able at least to approach my own definition of successful beekeeping.”

Jean had read Kirk’s essay in our class, and he came to our final feast (more pies!). It wasn’t many months more before he was teaching her the trick of picking queens from a hive. (“I did fine until the end of the day,” she said. “When I started getting tired, I started getting stung.”) Soon Jean and Bennett and Kirk and Susannah and Missy and a jumble of other real farmers and would-be farmers and boyfriends and girlfriends were off to visit the organic guru Eliot Coleman at his Maine farm, investigating the possibility of using his novel winter greenhouses in the Champlain Valley. Meanwhile, a local master gardener, Jay Leshinsky, was spending most of his summer in the college garden, offering sage advice; and the dean of the county’s organic growers, Will Stevens, was dropping by regularly to look in. (He’d visited our class, too, bringing his account books, which demonstrated the unlikelihood of getting rich in this business, and a pile of his best vegetables, which declared the possibility of prospering nonetheless.) “No one knows better than I do how vulnerable real farming is today,” Kirk had written. “But when new farms are spawned, and become associated with the others, some real strength, resilience, and comfort starts to emerge. If we reach the point where communities
are farming again, then the flywheel will start to turn on its own, and a movement will emerge that no government or corporation can stop.”

Jean and Chris crawled inside the new garden shed to sleep, and I rolled out my tent and lay in it happily. All the wine had long since washed from my system, but I still felt unaccountably happy. To be around young people, who haven’t yet made all the compromises and concessions that life will urge them to make, and to see them finding older people who can help them go a different way, is to be reminded that the world really is constantly fresh, and that therefore despair for its prospects is not required.

I
PROPPED MY BACKPACK
against the trellis of the outdoor patio at downtown Middlebury’s Otter Creek Bakery the next morning and gorged myself on sticky buns. Not organic, but sticky. Sated, I strode off to meet Netaka White, who’d agreed to keep me company on the day’s saunter.

Netaka is very Vermont—lean, bearded (no ponytail, but it wouldn’t look out of place). He was walking slowly today because he was still recovering from a run he’d taken from Vermont to Washington to protest the war in Iraq. “When my wife and I first came to Vermont, we had a craft business,” he says. “We were very involved in weaving. And that led to hemp.” Ah, hemp.
At the confluence of the environmental movement with, say, the drum circle/aromatherapy/crystal movement, hemp has been a hot topic for quite a few years. Did you know that the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp? That Thomas Jefferson grew hemp? That if only we grew hemp now we could save the forests, stop global warming, and have chakra-realigning Tantric orgasms? If not, you might want to visit some of the several million hemp sites on the Web. The week I was writing this chapter, an e-mail arrived from someone who had read one of my books. “You missed the boat on hemp, Bill, in
The End of Nature.
We could have already independicized our nation from OPEC! We could have reversed the Greenhouse Effect, saved the rain forests, fed the Third World…. Everything that soy does, hemp does better.” Anyway, Netaka had once been a kingpin of hemp. He’d started by weaving the fibers into cloth and sewing the cloth into backpacks and bags. Soon he had a little business going: Artisan Gear. Then the Japanese discovered hemp clothes—discovered them in usual Japanese style, which is to say everybody all at once. Suddenly Netaka had a multimillion-dollar company. Then, just as suddenly, the Japanese moved on to something else—snowboarding clothes, maybe, or fast-food uniforms. Anyway, the company more or less imploded, and Netaka was left with the small retail store he’d started with his wife, Claire, in downtown Middlebury, a place called Greenfields Mercantile. “We made the decision to open it
almost overnight—the site became vacant because the previous tenant, a lingerie store, turned out to be doubling as a child-porn download site. They were busted, they tossed their stuff out on the street, and since it was a prime Main Street location, we moved in.”

Greenfields Mercantile had specialized, of course, in hemp. When it first opened, thirty manufacturers supplied a wide range of hemp clothing, hemp accessories, even hemp vinaigrette. But the supply steadily shrank—federal agents cracked down on one manufacturer after another. “The feds have taken the position that all cannabis is bad cannabis. The stuff we use is incredibly low in THC. The industry has standards to make sure that hemp oil is THC-free, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all politics.” Anyway, Middlebury couldn’t really support an eco-fashion store, so they branched out, adding a coffeehouse and café.

Still, old dreams die hard. As we wandered toward the northern border of town, past the covered bridge, past open meadows and woodlots, Netaka said, “There’s no reason we shouldn’t be walking by fields of hemp right here. The University of Vermont did a study, it showed that Addison County was the very best place for this stuff in the whole state, all the right soil types. Heck, there’s still feral hemp growing in Addison County from before the legislative ban in the 1930s.” A few paces farther and he said with a resigned sigh, “Do you know they’re building houses with hemp in Canada? It’s fantastic insulation—high
R-value, very breathable, completely sustainable.” There’s something sweet and noble and for the moment utterly quixotic about this particular quest, so Netaka continues to branch out. He’s taken out some of the shelves of slow-moving hemp shampoos—more and more his store is specializing in free-trade coffee and in soups made from local ingredients. Before we’d gone more than a few lots farther down the road, in fact, he’d pulled himself out of the dumps, his entrepreneurial gene had reasserted itself, and he was imagining a sign in the window keeping track of what percentage of that day’s food came from Addison County. “There’s a bakery in Crown Point—all they use is organic Champlain Valley wheat and they’re doing great,” he said. “I bet we could do that. Local really could be the new organic!”

Two things interrupted our reverie before it could really take off. One was a hawk, perched out at the end of a big pine branch by the side of the road; it screeched several times, and then began to fly in looping dips, back and forth over us, time and again. The second was a driveway that led to the University of Vermont’s Morgan Horse Farm. Now, we’d each driven past this big barn dozens of times, and we knew that it drew tourists from around the Northeast, but of course neither of us had ever gone, any more than New Yorkers visit the Statue of Liberty. When you’re on vacation you have time to take in sights, but when you’re at home you drive by them on the way to somewhere else, somewhere you’re supposed
to get. On foot, though, there’s no reason not to stop. So we paid our five dollars, shucked our packs, and joined the tour guide, who was just beginning her spiel.

Justin Morgan, it turned out, was a local music teacher who lived in Vermont in the years following the Revolution. Someone in Massachusetts owed him a debt, and though he’d been counting on cash, Morgan was forced to take his payment in the form of a small bay colt. He started walking him home, hoping someone would buy him along the way, but the horse was smaller than the draft animals settlers were using to clear New England’s fields. As it happened, Morgan was lucky: his horse turned out to be something of a miracle, able to outrace and outpull every other horse in the neighborhood. “And he was a great breeding stallion,” the guide said. “We understand now that he was a genetic mutant with dominant genes, something that hasn’t happened before or since. He always bred true. By the time he died at the age of thirty-two, he’d sired enough foals to establish a breed. The Morgan horse has a beautiful crested neck, and a compact body frame with a sense of refinement. They’ve been used for everything from cavalry horses to family horses.” (Frost has a gorgeous poem, “The Runaway,” about a Morgan colt leery of his first snowfall.) Still, the breed was about to die out in the late nineteenth century when Addison County’s great benefactor, Joseph Battell, built this beautiful farm to save it from extinction. Now owned by the university, it houses sixty to eighty horses,
and breeds twenty new foals a year. Apprentices bustled everywhere—young women, who compete for the chance to put in fifty- and sixty-hour weeks, were training horses on a lunge line, currying horses, leading horses to the “breeding phantom,” which functions as a kind of equine inflatable love doll for efficient semen collection. Demand is high for the steeds, who are truly handsome in their muscled sleekness—raffle tickets for a chance at one of this year’s foals were going fast.

All of which was enough to get us talking again as we walked away. Here was a story about some agricultural innovation that appeared pretty much from nowhere and, with the right nurturance,
took.
Hemp hasn’t taken yet—and won’t, until we come to grips with our drug hysteria. But hey, there are other possibilities. “I’m helping coordinate a local group that’s looking into biodiesel,” Netaka said. “You can run a car on soybean oil, on rapeseed. Or you can use one hundred percent vegetable oil, or create blends with petroleum, stretching the supply and lowering emissions. We’d like to have a local bio-refinery—and a pump right in Middlebury, with Addison County–grown gas.” I felt him growing more alive, energetic. “You can use it for home heating oil, you know—a fuel one hundred percent locally derived. Even the ferries crossing the lake could run on it!” On we strode, arms swinging.