Home is where the heart is

Bill McKibben owns two houses, but only has one home. His home is vast and wild and largely the property of others. His home is a swath of land that stretches from the edge of Vermont and deep into the Adirondacks. It is scattered through the High Peeks and in the gilded waters of Lake Champlain... it meanders through Middlebury, bounces down rapids and lurks in Stony, Muddy, and Round ponds. If home is where the heart is, McKibben's heart is an eclectic one, a breathtaking scruff of land that is both mysterious and tenacious, with crevices that hide rich histories and an astounding capacity for love.

McKibben's vivid account of Wandering Home is an optimistic one, a tale of gentle woodsfolk and old communities. It seems that, to him, home is the wilderness, and the wilderness is (perhaps by definition) unowned. It is No Man's Land--uninhabited... by humans. McKibben loves the Adirondacks for what they are: America's largest "inhabited wilderness." And yet as much as he enjoys inhabiting these woods, the "inhabited" identifier gives him pause.

Bill McKibben has fallen so hard for these woods that he battles endlessly between an urge to share his passion, and a compulsion to protect his woods from others--not only from loggers and pollution, but also from wealthy city dwellers who couldn't possibly understand the true mystique of the Adirondacks. McKibben loathes the big houses sitting sentinel on lakes; the rumble of a jet ski from across the water and the sound of a plane touching down just a little too close to his cottage. He resents those large vacation settlements because they call dibs on the land, they keep it away from the public. They whittle the number of denizens down to a minority, not a majority. If only he could control those who access the land; if only he could brush away the swanky resorts and summer homes; erase those symbols of hyper individualism and leave nothing but pure, rustic wild, pocked only by communities brimming with hippies and environmental vigilantes.

McKibben wrote that "One of the reasons for wild places is so other people can fall in love with them--because surely there are others wired like me, for whom this landscape will be enough" (136). Most of us have felt that immense relief that overtakes us when we step into the wilderness. We become a part of something bigger, something more innate... "natural," maybe. And therefore, to delineate public and private property in such a place only mars its vast and welcoming appeal.

It is worth lamenting the takeover of wealthy vacationers, but maybe McKibben doesn't give his city neighbors enough credit. They feel it too, whatever "it" is. They feel the way McKibben's friend, Chris Shaw feels, when "'all of the features click, fall into place... when that happens all at once it's like seeing your own name by accident in print, or catching sight of your hand writing on a piece of paper where you didn't expect to see it. That's a very powerful feeling of identity'" (116).

Those city dwellers identify with the wilderness, too. They express their adoration in different ways--they build big mansions and stay in fancy hotels. They might only climb the High Peaks; ignorant to the beauty of those under 4,000 feet. And they might never see the sun sink below Lake Champlain, the world rimmed by rainbows in a perfect, fleeting moment. But they have their own memories and there is space for them in the Adirondacks, too.

The wilderness is wild because it does not discriminate for better, or for worse. The wilderness is home because we all identify with it, and it doesn't matter whether we own two houses, or five, or nothing at all.