Free Wandering Home by Bill McKibben Page A

really started exploring the Adirondacks, though, I knew I wanted it to be my home region,” he said. “There really was no place else.”
    By now we were almost completely across the lake, pulling into a small cove in the woods. Looking back at the Vermont shore, we could see dozens of those big second-home mansions, mile after mile of development. On the New York coast, however, the woods run almost unbroken down to the water’s edge; much of the land we were approaching south of Split Rock Point is state-owned, “forever wild” under Article 14 of the state’s constitution. The Adirondacks aren’t
all
wild—within the 6-million acre Adirondack Park, only 3 million acres are protected public land; the other 3 million are in private hands. Most of that is timberland, but there are also small towns scattered throughout, and ever more vacation homes. Still, that 6 million acres makes it roughly the same size as Vermont, only with 140,000 peopleinstead of 700,000. It makes Vermont—statistically America’s most rural state—seem densely populated. It is not, as I have said, pure wilderness, any more than Vermont is purely settled. But it tends toward wildness. And one of John’s missions is to make it wilder yet.
    We landed the rowboat and struck off through the woods, first on a path and then on a track and then just cross-lots through the puckerbrush. The afternoon was steamy, and within minutes a cloud of mosquitoes descended. By dint of topography, and because so much of the Adirondacks have never been tilled and drained, the region seems infinitely wetter than Vermont. No placid agricultural rivers like Otter Creek, but ten thousand little streams backed up into a million beaver pools. The cartographers claim three thousand lakes for the park, but it all depends on definition—if you’re a mosquito, the number of places to call home is many orders of magnitude higher. I slathered on some toxic DEET, John a bit of organic repellent, and we continued toward his house. And he continued to tell his story.
    “When we started
Wild Earth
, I was actually getting a salary. Not much, but I was saving every penny. And I knew I wanted to buy land. All those years of reporting and editing bad news—I wanted the satisfaction of seeing a place saved.” His father actually found the parcel, forty-five acres with a listing log cabin. “As soon as I saw it, I thought immediately: ‘This is the place.’ Hemlock Rock Wildlife Sanctuary, I started calling it. One of thefirst things I did was to climb a big white pine—to the west I could see Coon Mountain and nothing but forest. I looked on the map and, sure enough, that area was protected in part by the Nature Conservancy. And to the other side was Split Rock Wild Forest, 4,000 acres of state land. We were right in the middle.”
    Anywhere else in the east, it would have seemed wild indeed. But in fact the Champlain Valley is the least protected part of the Adirondacks; the few miles between the lake and the start of the high mountains were traditionally farmed, and the state acquired much less land there than in the more rugged uplands. “Conservationists have tended to see the Champlain Valley as a buffer,” Davis said. “But there’s important wildlife habitat here. People think of it as bucolic—from Willsboro to Port Henry it looks a lot like Vermont, and people love that, don’t want it to change. Environmentalists have generally assumed their job here is to maintain that bucolic landscape. Which is fine, but it’s not enough. You can’t completely consign the valleys to human dominance. That’s the western model—wilderness in the rocks and ice, people everywhere else.” So John quickly had a second job: trying to build a truly intact corridor connecting the lake with the High Peaks.
    John’s friend Tom Butler—who eventually succeeded him as editor at
Wild Earth
—met us a few miles on, and together we all climbed Coon Mountain, a rocky little knob