When writer Bill McKibben hiked from Vermont's Green Mountains to New York's Adirondacks, the Middlebury scholar-in-residence spent a summer evening communing with students at the College's Organic Garden. Here, an excerpt from his book, Wandering Home.
By Bill McKibben
Illustrations by Rodica Prato
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. 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.
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.
Though I rarely teach, there are students who find their way to my door. Middlebury attracts a steady flow of kids for whom the bucolic setting provides more than a backdrop, and they start to wonder how they might fit into a place like this. Most of these regular students are gone till the fall, of course, 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 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 phrase books 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 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 neighbor's 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 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 food for consumers willing to pay more for a dinner free of pesticides. That premium was enough to make it possible to survive without 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 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, than 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 Old Farms 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 Finger Lakes. It's why our local food co-op started posting pictures of the farmers above the 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 new agronomy, and taking field trips to Vermont innovations like the Farmer's Diner, a Barre eatery where almost all the ingredients in the hamburgers and milkshakes 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. 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 and figure out how much they thought they'd need to earn in 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 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 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 summer 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, the 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 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 had 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 old 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 out. 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 a 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.
From the book: Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacksby Bill McKibben. Copyright © 2005 by Bill McKibben. Published by Crown Journeys, a member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.