Appalachia, Summer/Fall 2006If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.
—William Cronon, in
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature One snowy evening late in October, when I was working at Zealand Falls Hut in the White Mountain National Forest, our only guests were eight members of an extended family. Since it was chilly, one of the fathers was lobbying hard to bring in the heavy iron woodstove from the storage closet, where it was supposed to remain until the winter caretakers arrived a few days later. “We could split some wood and haul that stove in here no problem,” he told us, as he commissioned his teenage son to help out. “We’re from Vermont, so we know how to build a fire.”
He made offers to this effect several times throughout the evening, with emphasis on the fact that they were from Vermont and knew about such things. While at first I took it as good-natured hectoring, his persistence got on my nerves as the night wore on. Finally, after dinner, I asked them where they really came from, “because no one who’s accustomed to splitting wood for heat would be this eager to do that kind of work.”
After a sheepish pause, one of the women, who seemed to be the guy’s wife, confirmed my suspicions. “We’re actually Massholes,” she admitted, and my testiness dissolved amidst everyone’s laughter. They had been living in Vermont for only about a year.
As someone who grew up in Steep Falls, Maine, I was amused to find someone whose pretensions sought to approximate a rustic, rural hick rather than a sophisticated urban professional. But to other friends of mine who also have worked in the huts, the story is also funny because it unearths and explodes such pretensions, which are eerily common among guests in wild places.
Surrounded as they are by forests and mountains, it is easy to forget that the huts have some very urban characteristics. Their visitors and employees are predominantly from cities and suburbs, and the food that they serve is routed through urban ports and boards of exchange worldwide. Most of the places where people go to escape urban places, from exurban subdivisions with pastoral names to the uninhabited timberlands of northern Maine, similarly rely upon urban institutions.
I do not regret the huts’ close relationship to the cities, nor should anyone else. If not for civilization, the huts would not exist, and as much as I admire self-reliance, a complete devotion to the principle results in personal self-rule, lonely and brutal. As someone who has lived with satisfaction both in the backcountry of New Hampshire and in the middle of Houston, Texas, I wouldn’t mind if the huts are subordinate to the urban, so long as the relationships are clear, honest, and easily understood. However, even conservation-minded individuals run the risk of misunderstanding those relationships when they romanticize the North Country as a pristine wilderness or as an escape from the cities. As the region becomes more of a tourist attraction for transient consumers and less a productive geography of forestry and agriculture, the North Country runs the risk of losing its sense of interdependence with its natural resources, and becoming suburban in the usual sense of the word.
The full text of this story may be found in the Summer/Fall 2006 issue of Appalachia.
Christian McNeil, a former assistant hutmaster and winter caretaker at Zealand Falls Hut, last year worked as a community outreach specialist for two REI stores in the Houston area. He spent the winter and spring of 2006 as a caretaker at Carter Notch Hut. 
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