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delight: “There’s blue cohosh, and that’s maidenhair fern,” he says. “They indicate lime-rich soil. So does that plantain-leaved sedge. We counted thirty-one species of wildflower up here one day.” The slope was likely clearcut sixty or seventy years ago, but the rich soils have bred another stand of big trees. And now it won’t be clearcutagain, not ever; earlier that week, John and Rita had donated a conservation easement on the land to the Vermont Nature Conservancy, assuring it would never be developed—except for two small house lots, one for each son. “See those huge ice-wedged erratics over there? That’s where Rita and I want our ashes scattered.”
    Driving back to Bristol in his pickup with the old tubing piled in back, we pass example after example of just the kind of careful reinhabitation he’s been promoting. On the northeastern edge of town, for instance, a tidy farm occupies the one broad stretch of flat land. A group of Elder’s neighbors have been trying, thus far unsuccessfully, to buy the land because it would serve as a natural plug on further sprawl. To pay off the note, they’d need to lease some of the land for a community-supported agriculture farm, an ecologically sound woodlot, perhaps a fishery on the brook that flows through. On the ridge above the land, the same group of neighbors is trying something even more exciting: the Community Equity Project is helping buy a big piece of timberland, and then selling shares in the property, allowing residents without much cash to become joint owners and managers of the landscape. If they have no cash but own a backhoe, they can help maintain the skid roads and pull logs out—sweat equity will do. All of the logging will be done according to the strictest set of environmental criteria. So, no second homes sprout, local people find work and ownership, the forest flourishes.
    Back in town, we head for the Bristol landfill. A few other guys in pickups are unloading debris, and so is the town’s sole garbage truck, a flatbed pulled by a phlegmatic pair of Percheron draft horses. Their driver bid low for the town contract a few years ago, and ever since then he’s ranged the town’s compact streets, picking up trash bags and recycling bins. The team walks at a pace that lets him load easily—indeed, he can usually count on the assistance of one or another young girl eager for the chance to be near the massive team. We came home, washed up, and then headed out for the short walk to dinner at Bristol’s new Bobcat Café, built with money loaned by community residents. Many of the financiers were lined up at the bar, enjoying their 25 percent discount on the Bobcat’s home-brewed beer. Do you see what I mean? People are
trying
things here.
    And so to bed—it wasn’t precisely the same glow I’d felt in the sunset on Mount Abe, but it was a glow nonetheless.
    L IKE JOHN , I am primarily a writer. We are, that is, good with words, verbally dexterous, jugglers of symbols. And so we have a role to play helping to nudge our communities toward some more reasonable path, toward something that might not rely quite as deeply on the environmental ruination of cheap oil, on the human ruination of cheap labor. We can coax, we can alarm, we can point to possibilities.But let’s face it—the Western world is knee-deep in symbol-manipulators right now. We verbally facile folk form an enormous tribe—throw a rock in Vermont and you’ll hit a published author, who will let out some creative oath. What we need more of are people who actually know what they’re doing out in the physical world—who know so well that they can not just carry forward old tradition but work out new and better ways of doing things. And so the next morning I resumed my walk again, this time in the company of one of John’s neighbors, a man named David Brynn.
    Oddly enough, Brynn is tall and skinny, too, with a smile about as sunny as Elder’s. He grew up just across the