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out even the dependable flow of dandelion honey) as he discovered how to propagate queens and nucleus colonies for sale to other beekeepers.
    Eventually it all worked. Selling queens, and 30,000 pounds of honey, now netted him 50k a year—that is, half again as much as my enthusiastic students had calculated for their baseline. “After living, and enjoying life, for so long with so little, this frankly seems like an enormous fortune to me,” he writes. His only sadness, he wrote, was a certain loneliness. He’d never married, and had no one to pass his carefully collected knowledge on to. “If there are young people any more interested in beekeeping as a way of life, I’d like to have a few of themcome here to learn the trade,” he wrote at the end of his essay. “I’d like them to get a better start and better grasp of the basics than I did,” and if even one or two took up such work as their life’s own, “I’d be able at least to approach my own definition of successful beekeeping.”
    Jean had read Kirk’s essay in our class, and he came to our final feast (more pies!). It wasn’t many months more before he was teaching her the trick of picking queens from a hive. (“I did fine until the end of the day,” she said. “When I started getting tired, I started getting stung.”) Soon Jean and Bennett and Kirk and Susannah and Missy and a jumble of other real farmers and would-be farmers and boyfriends and girlfriends were off to visit the organic guru Eliot Coleman at his Maine farm, investigating the possibility of using his novel winter greenhouses in the Champlain Valley. Meanwhile, a local master gardener, Jay Leshinsky, was spending most of his summer in the college garden, offering sage advice; and the dean of the county’s organic growers, Will Stevens, was dropping by regularly to look in. (He’d visited our class, too, bringing his account books, which demonstrated the unlikelihood of getting rich in this business, and a pile of his best vegetables, which declared the possibility of prospering nonetheless.) “No one knows better than I do how vulnerable real farming is today,” Kirk had written. “But when new farms are spawned, and become associated with the others, some real strength, resilience, and comfort starts to emerge. If we reach the point where communitiesare farming again, then the flywheel will start to turn on its own, and a movement will emerge that no government or corporation can stop.”
    Jean and Chris crawled inside the new garden shed to sleep, and I rolled out my tent and lay in it happily. All the wine had long since washed from my system, but I still felt unaccountably happy. To be around young people, who haven’t yet made all the compromises and concessions that life will urge them to make, and to see them finding older people who can help them go a different way, is to be reminded that the world really is constantly fresh, and that therefore despair for its prospects is not required.
    I PROPPED MY BACKPACK against the trellis of the outdoor patio at downtown Middlebury’s Otter Creek Bakery the next morning and gorged myself on sticky buns. Not organic, but sticky. Sated, I strode off to meet Netaka White, who’d agreed to keep me company on the day’s saunter.
    Netaka is very Vermont—lean, bearded (no ponytail, but it wouldn’t look out of place). He was walking slowly today because he was still recovering from a run he’d taken from Vermont to Washington to protest the war in Iraq. “When my wife and I first came to Vermont, we had a craft business,” he says. “We were very involved in weaving. And that led to hemp.” Ah, hemp.At the confluence of the environmental movement with, say, the drum circle/aromatherapy/crystal movement, hemp has been a hot topic for quite a few years. Did you know that the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp? That Thomas Jefferson grew hemp? That if only we grew hemp now we could save the forests, stop global