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were eating like Alice Waters. Walk a few paces and eat ahandful of cherry tomatoes; a few paces more and grab a pepper or a peapod, or pull a carrot. Two students from that local-food class were spending the night with me. Chris Howell—tall, skinny, goofy grin—had just finished overseeing construction of a garden shed, framing windows, building a rock patio. The final touch, a sod roof with grass cut from the surrounding knoll—seemed to be taking root. Jean Hamilton, quieter and with a bit of a Mona Lisa smile, had been harder to get to know, but as time had gone on, I’d come to admire her enormously. Partly, I confess, for the pies she’d produced for our class. They looked like pies from the covers of those magazines devoted to high-end country living, and they tasted even better than they looked. But her story interested me even more. The daughter of doctors and the graduate of a top prep school, she was clearly an academic overachiever, like virtually everyone else at Middlebury. But she somehow figured out, early on, that she wasn’t going to follow the obvious path. She’d spent one semester of her prep school years at the Mountain School, a working farm in the hills of eastern Vermont where I’d been often, a place where the curricular highlights included lambing, sugar run, spring planting. “That made regular school all the harder,” she said—and indeed I think she came to Middlebury more to satisfy her family than herself. More than anyone else, she’d designed the garden now blooming around us. We all three lay back against a sloping berm, drank cool water from an old wine jugJean had spiked with a branch of mint, and watched the sky above us—this was the summer when orange Mars came so close.
    Even in the dusk I could make out four or five white beehives a few yards away on the edge of the garden knoll. They were, as a curator would say, on loan from the collection of Kirk Webster, one of the most artistic small farmers of the Champlain Valley. He lived a few miles south of my route, so I wouldn’t actually get to visit his apiary on my trek. But I’d been thinking of him as I wound my pastoral way through the valley, and one of the lighter burdens in my pack was a photocopy of an article, “The Best Kept Secret,” that he’d written a few years before for
Small Farm Journal
. Part memoir, part practical guide, part moral meditation, it told of his long and slow maturation as a beekeeper. “It has been my great privilege, despite having very little to start with and many setbacks, to have started on the path of farming when I was a teenager, to give up doing all other work when I was thirty-seven, and to reach my mid-forties with the prospect of continuing for the remainder of my life,” he wrote. “Like a person carrying one tiny candle and trying to find his way in a vast underground cavern, I needed all my faculties to find the right course and put the pieces together into a harmonious whole.” Indeed, one of the continuing themes of his essay is the difficulty of learning to farm when the chain of transmission that operated since the start of agriculture has broken down—whenthere is no parent to teach you how, or to leave you a working farm. “This state is literally crawling with people bringing their money from elsewhere and investing it in some kind of a ‘back to the land’ venture. These are some of the nicest and most well-intentioned folk you will meet anywhere but…their main contribution has been the very patriotic one deemed essential to democracy by Jefferson and Madison—dispersing the fortunes accumulated by the previous generation so that succeeding generations can rise according to their own wits.” In general, he says, these neophytes pick the wrong locations and invest too much capital before they figure out a workable system. By contrast, his own story involved endless trial and error (what to do when tracheal mites plague your bees, or a late spring rains