Free Wandering Home by Bill McKibben

descended, most of them more hippie than redneck. “They weren’t all that much concerned with wilderness,” Davis recalled as he rowed, steady and powerful, across the lake. “The last straw may have come at one of the annual rendezvous, when one of the newcomers stood up and demanded that Earth First! getinvolved in rent control.” Two, the FBI arrived. In our post-9/11 world, it seems hard to believe that the Feds left the group alone as long as they did: they were, after all, advocating a dozen creative varieties of sabotage. But it wasn’t until fairly late in the game that they swooped down, arresting Foreman and charging him with instigating a scheme to tear down a bunch of power lines in the Arizona desert. In truth, the charge was nonsense—the trial, when it finally happened, featured a government informer so drug-addled that the prosecutors had to argue that LSD didn’t interfere with his ability to be a cogent witness. But that was much later.
    “I’d been traveling when the arrests happened, and friends and colleagues back in Tucson said not to come back,” remembers Davis. “So I spent most of that summer traveling in the East. Not on the run, but keeping a low profile.” Within a few months it was clear that things would not return to normal. And so the movement began to split apart. The hippie wing kept some of the old spirit alive, still publishing the
Journal
, still marking the pagan holidays. But Foreman, Davis, and a good many others were a little tired of the bravado, and no longer convinced direct action would deliver much except police harassment. They split off to start a new, very different, journal, this one called
Wild Earth.
Now a decade old, it’s become the intellectual center of a new movement for wilderness, working with some of the country’s leading conservation biologists to draw detailed mapsand plans for the eventual rewilding of big chunks of the planet. But at the beginning, the most interesting question was where it would be located.
    In the United States, heads have always turned west when we’ve thought about nature. Our vocabulary and grammar of wilderness came most of all from John Muir’s summer in the Sierra; our picture of the wild came through the lens of Ansel Adams, traveling the mountains and deserts of California and Nevada. Yellowstone, Yosemite, Alaska, the Rockies—those are the icons. And for Earth First!, too, it had always been the vast Western wildlands—the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana, the Siskiyous of Oregon, all home to wolves or grizzlies or rattlesnakes, giant firs, ancient bristlecone pines, the charismatic flora and fauna of wild America.
    But John Davis had grown up in New Hampshire. “I’d been in Tucson five years. I was starting to really miss fresh water,” he says. “I have the Eastern forest in my bones. I can be away for a little while, but then I start to pine for it.” Not only that, he had a point to make: “that wilderness was not just a Western thing.” And so he turned eastward, and in so doing turned, almost inevitably, to the Adirondacks, the biggest and wildest patch of land this side of the Mississippi. “I knew about the Adirondacks because I’d read an article in
National Wildlife
magazine,” he says. “My grandmother gave me
Ranger Rick
, and then, when I was a little older,
National Wildlife.
Anyway, I wasin sixth grade and I read about the Adirondacks and I was amazed by it. Very taken by it. I knew I wanted to go there someday.” His first trip, however, was less than idyllic. It was shortly after he’d left Tucson, and he was with a friend. “It was hot, muggy. We stopped somewhere to camp, and it was completely miserable. Tom managed to get a solo tent up amid the blackflies. I stayed in the cab of the truck. With the windows closed, it was too hot. If I opened them the bugs were impossible. I finally got up at 4:00 a.m. to go for a very fast walk.”
    “Once I