Bill McKibben Wanders the Adirondacks

Book chronicles author's boring trek home

Story by Carl DeNovio

Bill McKibben's 2005 memoir Wandering Home from Random House is described on the cover as "A long walk across America's most hopeful landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks." In essence, the book chronicles a three-week walk from McKibben's home in Vermont to his former home in upstate New York.

From the first pages, though, something doesn't feel quite right. To look at the map on the inner cover, it is clear that the author's journey begins in the town of Ripton, Vermont, and ends at Crane Mountain and Garnet Lake in New York. Why, then, does the book begin at Mt. Abraham, almost a 10th of the way into the trek already?

There are things that McKibben simply does not make clear to his reader, and these things are what ultimately hurt the book. First, there is absolutely no background given as to who he is, why he is making this walk, or what he plans to accomplish with it. He simply begins on top of "Mt. Abe," complaining that his legs hurt from a walk that apparently led him there but isn't referred to at all, and talking about how pretty his surroundings are.

Looking at the cover and reading the jacket of the book, one may be tempted to believe that this is a camping story. McKibben, a survivalist, is going on this perilous trek across the Champlain Valley and into New York's untamed Adirondacks. Living in the wild, fending for himself as he learns to adapt to his surroundings and live off the land. Not quite. Just as he finishes talking about Mt. Abe and the exhausting trip it took to reach it, referring back to his aching calves and burning shoulders, he arrives at the house of his good friends who take him out to a fancy restaurant and give him a warm bed for a night. Real impressive, Bill.

McKibben's "journey," if it can be called that, takes him to a series of towns and farms along Vermont's Valley and to the comfortable campus of Middlebury College, where he spends an unspecified amount of time just hanging around. You know that weird guy who hangs out at the college and nobody's really sure why he's there but nobody wants to say anything either? That's him. He never really makes clear what he's doing there or why he decides to stop, and that makes it all the more difficult to care about the stories he relays. This is his major flaw – the inability to make the people reading the book care about anything he says.

The book goes on like this, as McKibben deftly ignores some of the more interesting aspects of his travels, such as the days and weeks he spends living off of nature and surviving the cold nights outside with only his knapsack the clothes on his back. He instead focuses on the people that he has arranged meetings with along the way, the towns he stops in, and the stories that they tell him.

The problem, though, is that the stories they tell him are the same things over and over again – how this part of the country is the most beautiful, how great it is that there's been so much state park land set up, the generations of their families that have lived there and how life has remained basically unchanged for years. As great as that may be, I got the point after the first four people who told him this stuff; move on to other stuff.

In the latter half of the book, it quickly deteriorates from uninteresting to painful. Where once we were burdened by boring people and places, we now are plagued by an unrelenting barrage of how terrible the world has become and how we need to save our lands from big business and government development and basically everybody who isn't a liberal, left-wing preservationist. What begins as an under-developed journey story, becomes an under-developed character study of the people of the Champlain Valley and Adirondacks and eventually turns into an under-developed political campaign. I'm not sure which exactly of these things the book is meant to be, but either way it is under-developed.

The closing pages of the book offer no resolution, and no answers. The book's jacket poses the questions, "What constitutes the natural? How much human intervention can a place stand before it loses its essence? What does it mean to be truly wild?" By the conclusion of the book, I can honestly say I don't know. Nor do I know if McKibben himself has received his answers. He closes the book by having a campout in his back yard and quoting an Adirondack poet name Jeanne Robert Foster. The book leaves us with as little a sense of accomplishment as it began with. I am neither enlightened nor inspired by his writings, nor do I feel the need to visit any of the places he spoke of. Whatever his intention was in giving this book to the world, I have to believe that he failed.

McKibben describes himself as an environmentalist, and I believe him. Only an environmentalist can be this in love with a place and make it so boring to read about. I have to believe that the only people who could find interest in this book are fellow environmentalists, which, if you are, feel free to pick up the book and give it a try. If you are not, however, and are just looking for a fun read about a survivalist journey through the heart of the wild, or want to learn about the history and people of the Adirondacks, there are better options out there.

Have you ever walked anywhere for days or weeks on end?

Wandering Home by Bill McKibben

Random House Publishing, Crown Journeys Series

Copyright 2005