Sherry Chandler

Last night on the telephone, my 89-year-old mother told me that some one has sprayed herbicide on her property. Because it follows the path of the powerlines, she thinks it was done by airplane to keep the right-of-way clear. But the herbicide killed trees and wild grape vines where, as my mother said, turkeys and all kinds of birds and small animals sheltered and fed. “They don’t care a thing about the wild things,” said my mother, “as long as it’s convenient for them.”

For my mother, who lives alone in the little farm house where I was born, the wild things are company, comfort, and entertainment. Though there may be other grapevines in this rather wild part of Owen County, that particular growth was a real loss to her.

On the other hand, the electricity and telephone are her lifelines, keeping the oxygen machine running and help within reach. I am old enough to remember when electricity came to our house. It was a day for celebration.

It’s a complex question. “They” are us. But I was appalled to think that some one could spray like that without any kind of by-you-leave.

I was also struck by how much my mother sounded like Bill McKibben in his latest book Wandering Home (Crown, 2005). I’ve been listening to this book on my commute (possibly some irony in that) and so I don’t have the comfort of a text for reference. Still, I remember that he argues, like Mom, that we should not always put our convenience above everything else. I know that he argues that we’ve become selfishly individualistic, putting our “right” to drive ATVs through wilderness above everybody else’s privilege of enjoying the beauty and the quiet.

Wandering Home is a wandering narrative built around a walk McKibben took around Lake Champlain, through the Adirondacks, from Vermont to New York. Along the way, he tours a number of preservation and sustainable-logging and -agriculture projects and other ways folk in those mountains are trying to survive, mostly trying to fit into the natural world, sometimes trying to mold it to their need for a second home, an agri-business type farm. And he talks about what he sees and about the complicated question of how man fits into the natural world.

McKibben argues that we should try to leave some room in our world for the wild and natural just for the good of our souls, just to recognize that there are some things more important than our convenience.

And maybe just so old women can watch wild turkeys eat wild grapes.