Free Wandering Home by Bill McKibben Page B

smack in the middle of the proposed corridor. Theview from the top showed plenty of little squares of hay meadow, but it also showed the obvious forest connection they were trying to enlarge and protect. “You get up here and you ask yourself: ‘If I’m a bear, how do I get from the lake to the mountains,’” Tom said. “From up here, too, you can see what a dramatic place this is. The elevational gradient is astounding—the lowest place on the continent is the bottom of Lake Champlain, which is 300 feet below sea level just off Split Rock. From there it’s just a few miles to the top of Giant Mountain, which is 4,600 feet.”
    “We have this opportunity at Split Rock partly because of geological accident,” adds John. “There’s a band of bedrock underlying the High Peaks that extends through to the lake right here. It’s much more rugged, cliffier, ledgier than the rest of the valley, and so it was less farmed. At one time or another, any given point was probably cleared for sheep pasture, but usually they gave up. Because of that challenging geology, we have this possibility for a corridor.”
    B ECAUSE OF THAT challenging geology, and because of another accident, too. After a few years, John left
Wild Earth
to take a job with the Foundation for Deep Ecology, promoting “wildlands philanthropy.” Which is to say, rich people buying tracts of land in order to conserve them. (The prototype, and John’s mentor, is DougTompkins, who purchased a huge slice of Chile and has recently bitten off a chunk of Argentina.) At a conference he helped organize on the subject in Boston, John met Jamie Phillips, a Manhattan fashion photographer whose stepfather had made a small fortune, set up a foundation, and then died. “Jamie ran the show at the Eddy Foundation, and he could have gone in any number of directions. But he told me he wanted to be able to walk a piece of land he had saved.” Within a few weeks John had him up in a small airplane flying over the proposed Split Rock Wildway; within a few weeks after that he’d bought his first parcel, 535 acres on the Boquet mountains. “And after that he really had land-buying in his blood,” says John. So far the foundation has acquired about 2,000 acres of the 10,000 they someday hope to protect.
    Phillips relocated to a small house in the middle of the property, its walls lined not with his photos but with maps full of pins marking possible land sales. I pulled off my pack in his yard, happy for the rest. Overjoyed, in fact, when he proposed a
drive
around the area so he could show off some of their acquisitions. “Until five years ago, I knew the Adirondacks was a place where they made chairs, but that’s all I knew about it,” Jamie said, as we climbed into his hybrid-electric Toyota Prius. We drove down Lake Shore Road toward the small town of Essex, passing Webb-Royce swamp. “That has longbeen a birders’ mecca; there was a big heron rookery. But then the beavers were trapped out and the water levels plummeted. By protecting the parcel, we’re hoping the beavers may recolonize.” As he said it, we passed a porcupine dead in the road—a good reminder that wildlife corridors are not an abstraction, that animals are constantly on the move following their own imperatives.
    A little farther on, though, we came to something quite different—a beautiful little spread, Black Kettle Farm. “This may be the oldest farm in Essex County,” says Jamie. “Now, initially John wanted
everything
to grow back to forest, but there was just too much community spirit here. So it will be a wild farm.” The farm property ran from a heavily logged high ridge—which will be left alone to recover its wildness—down to the Boquet River. “Down along the fields we’re letting the swales between the meadows go wild. Over on the left is where we grew wheat last year—we sold it all to the mill in town, and to Yannick’s bakery in Crown Point. Everything he makes, he makes