Near the end of Bill McKibben’s Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks, the author comes across “a truly giant white pine” (119) from which hangs this hand-lettered sign:

On this site in year 1845 this pine tree, a sapling of twelve years, was transplanted by me, at the age of twelve years. Seventy-five years I have watched and protected it. In my advancing years it has given me rest and comfort. Woodman spare that tree, touch not a single bough. In youth it sheltered me, and I’ll protect it now.
- PASCAL P. WARREN, JUNE 14, 1920 (119)

I cried when I read that, and I choke up now as I type it. The question is: why?

McKibben’s little book is just what its title says it is: a journal of the author’s walk from his home in the Green Mountains (on land that used to belong to Robert Frost) to his home maybe seventy-miles away in the Adirondacks (on land that used to belong to the poet Jeanne Robert Foster).

The journey takes him across the Champlain Valley and into the Adirondack woods. Looking out over the region from the peak of Mt. Abraham in the Greens, McKibben writes, “In my experience, the world contains no finer blend of soil and rock and water and forest than that found in this scene laid out before me—a few just as fine, perhaps, but none finer” (13).

What McKibben leaves out of that description—the people who populate the land—he does not leave out of his book. Almost every day of his sixteen-day journey is spent walking or talking to someone who, like McKibben, calls this region—“Adimont? The Verandacks?” (13)—home.

But a summary of the book will not explain my tears.

I picked up Wandering Home for two reasons. The first is because I am writing a novel about the same region that McKibben writes about, and he is as respected as they come when the topic is the nature of Vermont. The second is because the characters in my novel spend a significant amount of time walking through the woods of this region, and in lieu of doing it myself, I chose to read the words of someone else who did.

And that, I think, is why the words of Pascal Warren made me cry.

Living the life of a fiction writer means you spend a lot of time in the land of make-believe. While any writer worth her salt never strives for anything less than truth in her fiction [of course, “An artist's job is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention. If we stumble into Truth, we got lucky” (West Wing)], the plain truth of fiction writing is the disingenuousness of it.

There is, almost by definition, “a false impression of sincerity” in the words of fiction, if not in the writer’s motivation, then in her production, for no matter how hard a writer works on a given sentence, the desired impression is almost always one of effortlessness, and through this effortlessness, the impression of sincerity.

Living inside this disingenuousness makes one crave, with all of one’s soul, the genuine experience that is best provided by walking into wilderness.

And I think, in that sign of Mr. Warren, I found exactly the emotion I needed to have. There is, in those 62 words, more sincerity and poetry and plain emotive truth than in all of the 67,899 words of my current draft.

But I’m not crying because Mr. Warren did what I have yet to do. I’m crying because it’s possible for it to be done at all.

And I think, in the end, that’s what McKibben wants most from his book. He wants us to remember that in the face of everything that seems to be going wrong with humanity, there is still a place, “America’s Most Hopeful Landscape,” where “life, which in most places seems to me to be spinning apart, was somehow slowly gathering here, deepening, threatening to make sense” (38).

Thank you, Mr. McKibben. And thank you, Mr. Pascal P. Warren.