a more profound change in just a century or so, at least not in a contrary direction to the
normal course of progress.
If you were going to be a farmer, you could hardly choose a worse place than New
England. (Well, the middle of Lake Erie maybe, but you know what I mean.) The soil is
rocky, the terrain steep, and the weather so bad that people take actual pride in it. A year
in Vermont, according to an old saw, is "nine months of winter followed by three months
of very poor sledding."
But until the middle of the nineteenth century, farmers survived in New England
because they had proximity to the coastal cities like Boston and Portland and because, I
suppose, they didn't know any better. Then two things happened: the invention of the
McCormick reaper (which was ideally suited to the big, rolling farms of the Midwest but no
good at all for the cramped, stony fields of New England) and the development of the
railroads, which allowed the Midwestern farmers to get their produce to the East in a
timely fashion. The New England farmers couldn't compete, and so they became
Midwestern farmers, too. By 1860, nearly half of Vermont-born people--200,000 out of
450,000--were living elsewhere.
In 1840, during the presidential election campaign, Daniel Webster gave an address to
20,000 people on Stratton Mountain in Vermont. Had he tried the same thing twenty
years later (which admittedly would have been a good trick, as he had died in the
meantime) he would have been lucky to get an audience of fifty. Today Stratton Mountain
is pretty much all forest, though if you look carefully you can still see old cellar holes and
the straggly remnants of apple orchards clinging glumly to life in the shady understory
beneath younger, more assertive birches, maples, and hickories. Everywhere throughout
New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest,
most settled-looking woods--a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in
America.
And so I walked up Stratton Mountain on an overcast, mercifully cool June day. It was
four steep miles to the summit at just under 4,000 feet. For a little over a hundred miles
through Vermont the AT coexists with the Long Trail, which threads its way up and over
the biggest and most famous peaks of the Green Mountains all the way to Canada. The
Long Trail is actually older than the AT--it was opened in 1921, the year the AT was
proposed--and I'm told that there are Long Trail devotees even yet who look down on the
AT as a rather vulgar and overambitious upstart. In any case, Stratton Mountain is usually
cited as the spiritual birthplace of both trails, for it was here that James P. Taylor and
Benton MacKaye claimed to have received the inspiration that led to the creation of their
wilderness ways--Taylor in 1909, MacKaye sometime afterwards.
Stratton was a perfectly fine mountain, with good views across to several other well-
known peaks--Equinox, Ascutney, Snow, and Monadnock--but I couldn't say that it was a
summit that would have inspired me to grab a hatchet and start clearing a route to
Georgia or Quebec. Perhaps it was just the dull, heavy skies and bleak light, which gave
everything a flat, washed-out feel. Eight or nine other people were scattered around the
summit, including one youngish, rather pudgy man on his own in a very new and
expensive-looking windcheater. He had some kind of handheld electronic device with
which he was taking mysterious readings of the sky or landscape.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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