Nine years of hiking in Vermont, and last week was the first time I ventured across Lake Champlain to sniff out the Adirondacks. Throughout the weekend my guide and friend Lance and I talked at length about the differences between the Green and Adirondack mountains, the cultures of Vermont and New York, the hoards of Quebecois climbers and hikers exploring the region, and the unfortunate and mysterious phenomenon of Vermonters sticking to their crowded trails in the Green Mountains.
On Sunday morning as I brewed my camp coffee, Lance handed me a book he’d started the night before. Wide-eyed and incredulous, he said, “You have to read this:”
“Champlain acts as the border between Vermont and New York, which is not like the border between, say, Connecticut and Massachusetts, or Kansas and Nebraska. This line is rarely crossed. Partly that’s because most places you need to take a ferry, but much more because the ferry connects two different states of mind. On one side you stand in “New England,” and you can still feel the ocean at your back, and maybe even Olde England beyond that. To a New Englander, Boston is the city– the radio mast a couple of peaks north from Mount Abe carries the Red Sox out across this valley on a summer eve. New England comes with as many icons as Holland– even here, 140 miles from saltwater, the lobster somehow still seems native. The towns tend towards neatness, gathering themselves around white churches– Congregational churches, governing themselves without the aid of bishops or the overly active intervention of the Holy Spirit. And town halls, with their March rite of town meeting– of good, crisp self-governance. It is a tidy place, New England.
Whereas, across the lake, the unruliness of the rest of America begins. Looking west from the top of Mount Abe, you look West. For a long time, New Englanders averted their eyes. Mount Marcy, New York, the region’s tallest peak, shows up clearly even from the valley towns of Addison County, which were settled in the 1600s. But not until 1834, with Lewis and Clark home for a generation from the Pacific, did a white man bother to go climb it, and he came from downstate New York. Even now, the hikers and climbers of Vermont are more likely to stick to their narrow and relatively crowded mountain trails than to venture to the Adirondacks (there you’re far more likely to meet adventurous Quebecois, who have crossed and honest-to-God border for their day’s outing). A few years ago, conservationists seeking public support to protect a broad swath of land from Maine to the Great Lakes, commissioned focus groups in Boston, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Testing different formulations, they found that participants didn’t want New England to be lumped in with anything New York or even “Northeastern.” New England was “serene, “bucolic.” “Everything is so elegant,” said one Boston woman. “It’s a very classic place to live.”
Indeed they are right to perceive a difference. Cross the lake and you leave behind the neat town green with the bandstand in favor of a more Appalachian look: Methodists and Baptists and Catholics. No one goes to a town meeting– political power and patronage tend to pass on dynastically. There’s poverty on both sides of the lake, but somehow it looks rawer on the Adirondack shore, the trailers more numerous and nearer to the main road. Boston is suddenly no closer than Detroit. Vermont, too, seems distant, all the way across the lake, a mythical land of Saab-driving, goat-cheese-eating Democrats. The Adirondacks are higher, colder, and wilder– people have lived there for fewer centuries in fewer numbers, and have never been able to make farming work for long. And so, over time, huge chunks have been left to rewild themselves, till in places it approaches the primeval.”
– Bill McKibben, Wandering Home
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