Wandering Home Read Free

descends through a tight draw between the Bristol Cliffs wilderness and the towering bluff wall that locals call Deer Leap; since there’s only room for the road and the river, I thread my way along the shoulder in the heat, counting Subarus. (Subarus are to Vermont what bicycles were once to Beijing, so nearly ubiquitous that it’s impossible to recognize your neighbor by his vehicle. The supermarket parking lot might as well be a Subaru dealership.) As the state road turns toward town, it passes an enormous boulder, what a geologist would call an erratic, left here by the departing glaciers. On it someone long ago carved the Lord’s Prayer—apparently because the teamsters tended to use less-than-Christian language as they maneuvered their loads around this tight curve. It’s a pleasure to be walking by instead of driving, slow enough to savor the rhythm of the familiar words.
    And a greater pleasure to be taking my pack off on the broad side porch of John and Rita Elder’s maple-shaded Bristol home, to sit down on their porch swing and unlace my boots. I stretch for a few moments before I knock, close my eyes and savor the sense of, as Isaac Newton would say, a body coming to rest. This was not my home, of course, but I knew the Elders would makeme feel like it was—anyway, arriving on foot gives one a slight proprietary sense. It’s not like arriving in the car for a dinner party. On foot you arrive late or early, without excuse, and settle into whatever conversation is under way. It took you a while to get there, so you’re obviously going to stay awhile. It feels like
visiting
in an older sense of the word, and you bring with you the news of the road, not the news you heard on
All Things Considered
.
    I’d planned the first part of my route around this house, for John and Rita are among my favorite people, and John is the great writer of these few mountains, this small valley. Not that he’s from here—like Robert Frost, he’s from California. He grew up to be a literature professor, and moved in the there’s-a-job-open fashion of academics to Middlebury College in the early 1970s, never intending to stay. “We always figured we’d eventually go back to the West,” he says. But like many of us he found himself falling under the spell of the new breed of nature writers whose great teaching was
place
: Barry Lopez, Ed Abbey, Wendell Berry. (His particular guru was the poet Gary Snyder.) Just as important, John was falling under the spell of the Green Mountains. Before long he was teaching one of the college’s most popular courses—“Visions of Nature.” His seminars and symposiums originally met in classrooms—but increasingly on mountaintops and by the shores of ponds, and in the spreading fields of the college’s Bread Loaf campus, Frost’s old summer haunt.
    Elder—tall, skinny, goofy warm smile, constant twinkle—nonetheless lives up to his name. He has an innate and generous sobriety, an earnestness a little out of place even in the not-very-cynical world of Middlebury College. You want to be thinking your least selfish thoughts in his company, which is what we mean, I guess, when we say that someone “brings out the best in you.” And more and more he was trying to bring out the best in the land around him. After years of describing these slopes and pastures, he’s begun to work the land as well.
    Which is why in the morning I left my pack on his porch and headed off for a morning of labor in his sugarbush, a hundred acres of prime maple woods in nearby Starksboro. With his sons Matthew and Caleb, he’s built a stout sugarhouse near the bottom of the land, and now he’s ready to put in a bigger boiling pan, allowing him to expand his operation from 175 to 500 taps. Today we’re hauling out the old plastic tubing that drains the spiles and carries the sap down to the evaporator. It’s companionable work, especially since John interrupts it every few minutes to show off some particular