The three-year-old in the Jennings household has a bedtime ritual. After taking a bath and reading books with Mommy or Daddy, he settles into a large, comfortable chair in his room with one of his parents for story time. The lights go down, and the young boy gets to request two to three stories (depending on “how tired” Mommy or Daddy’s voice is). He has a handful in his archive, but since last spring, there has been a pattern, depending on the season. It started one night in early May.

“Will you please tell me a story about lacrosse?”

I quickly learned that he wanted a specific story, as in—he wanted a retelling of his attendance at that day’s game. It goes something like this (I’ll give you the extremely abridged version): Once upon a time, John, Daddy, and Mommy went to a lacrosse game. When they got to the stadium, John and Daddy went down on the field with their lacrosse sticks, and while Mommy cheered from the stands, John scored a goal (!) and the assistant coach on the field gave him a high five (!). Then the goalies came on the field, and John ran over and gave them high fives (!) and they all said, “Hey John!” Then John and Daddy went back up in the stands to have a snack, but then John heard bagpipes (!). “The team is coming!” John said.

(At this point, the three-year-old usually interrupts the story to make sure that the storyteller knows that the team doesn’t step onto the field until the drums start.)

And on it goes. Since the birth of the lacrosse story, stories about basketball and football and baseball and soccer have all been added to the rotation, as have stories about the radio station and the picnic and the trip to the “humongous” science building.

What is critical to each story—aside from John’s participation in each, of course—is the presence of Middlebury students in the narrative. They are everywhere, often willing (I think) and enthusiastic participants. There’s Basketball Ben, Basketball Aaron, and Basketball Matt; Ruby and Adrienne; Bisi; Jamie from the pool. They give him swimming lessons. They come over to his house and shoot baskets and then take him for ice cream. They volunteer at his preschool. They teach him how to say hello in Japanese. They offer those spirited high fives at games. They even teach him about tarantulas.

The thing is, as much as John’s mother and I think that our son is the greatest, the most irresistible, wise beyond his years, etc., we also recognize that Middlebury students are devoted to hundreds of Johns and Elizabeths and Lukes in Addison County; our kid benefits from this generosity, but he’s far from alone.

We hear so much about the exploits of Middlebury students—eye-popping success in the classroom, unwavering dedication in the laboratory and on the stage and athletic fields, and stunning achievements in realms previously undiscovered. (We also hear them tromping up and down some of our residential streets at 2 A.M. on the weekends, but in light of all that I’m writing about here, I’m more than willing to let that slide.) In a small town, though, where a community and an institution are intertwined, it’s the oft unpublicized acts—perhaps small and fleeting to the student, yet magnificent and life-changing to the child (and his parents)—that have the greatest impact of all.

To the keen observer, Middlebury’s campus landscape looks a bit different this fall. In a move driven by both ecology and economics, the College is mowing about 20 fewer acres of its 75 acres of lawn, a move that will save an estimated 1,000 hours of labor and nearly 700 gallons of fuel annually. Yet while the prospect of dollars saved and carbon emissions cut are popular line items during this time of budget and carbon reductions, Middlebury horticulturalist Tim Parsons says that the initiative has as much to do with ecological soundness as anything else.

On his blog, The Middlebury Landscape , Parsons writes: “While at Middlebury we pride ourselves in having beautiful grounds, ecologically [the campus] is a desert. Large shade trees and lawn give next to no habitat for pollinators, migrating songbirds, insects, amphibians, even what I call the ‘rotters,’ the worms, fungi, and other organisms responsible for breaking down dead plant matter. Having areas of campus grow up in meadow, albeit non native plants, increases diversity, and provides refuge and habitat above and beyond a green expanse of lawn.”

Parsons describes the following scene: “Picture stepping out of Bicentennial Hall, turning south and heading towards Pearsons. Immediately in front of Bi Hall is lawn, with some Adirondack chairs, a pollinator garden around a large pear tree, and [the] Smog [sculpture]. As you walk south, though, the lawn stops, and on either side of the sidewalk are large grass and wildflowers, with a break on your right, a  mown area around a pair of yellowwood trees, creating a little park, and another break at the top of the ridge, creating an overlook park with a magnificent view over Battell Beach looking east towards the Green Mountains. So now, we are highlighting one of the most spectacular trees on campus, and emphasizing a view that may have been so ubiquitous in the past that it was ignored.”

Parsons acknowledges that these “no-mow” meadows are populated with non-native species that were previously existing in the lawn and that the College’s master plan calls for many of these meadows to be populated with native meadow plants. Because of the expense—which would require removing what is there and planting plugs of native meadow plants—such an extensive undertaking probably won’t take place for a while. Still, with the current meadow initiative already underway, native plants can be emphasized in these areas, and nature, well, can take its course.

As I write this column, the first month of the new academic year is drawing to an end. Despite the well-publicized financial challenges so many colleges and universities will face this coming year, there is remarkable energy on campus and so many good things happening.

During the month, I enjoyed 10 lunches with students: 5 in Proctor, 3 in Ross, and 2 at the president’s house. The lunches at Proctor and Ross are unplanned in that I simply show up, get my food, and roam the dining hall until I make eye contact with a group that looks at least mildly interested in having me join their conversation…or at least doesn’t look away and hope I move to the next table.

The lunches at 3 South Street are something my wife Jessica and I enjoy immensely.  We invite a group of students who share a common experience at Middlebury and then engage them over lunch, trying to learn more about what they do, what have been the best things about their education, and what the College should try to change or improve. We have learned much from these lunches, and appreciated the students’ candor and deep appreciation for their Middlebury education.

I want to focus on one of the South Street lunches we hosted early this semester, as it represents an important, but often overlooked, aspect of a liberal arts education: the importance for students to explore their interests and passions on their own terms and their own clock, outside the formalities of the academic program. The lunch was with those who make up the student board of the Old Stone Mill (OSM), the home base for the College’s donor-supported project on creativity and innovation (the PCI).

The PCI was started because, over the past five years, students have voiced concerns about their inability to find space to pursue creative endeavors outside their course work. I have heard this from a number of students during my office hours and at several lunches in the dining halls, where students have sought me out to engage this particular issue. As part of their commentary, they also reported feeling stifled in their attempt to break through the College’s formidable bureaucracy when seeking to secure space that goes often unused, but somehow is unavailable to them. They have come to believe that, intended or not, the College is unsupportive of their desire to learn outside the academic program.

I am sure you are asking yourself: how can space be an issue when the College added almost one million square feet to its infrastructure since 1990 (an increase of 68 percent in overall square footage)?  Much of that space—the center for the arts, the new science center, the new library, and the renovated Starr Library, which now houses the Axinn Center—was added to meet the needs of an academic program whose physical facilities lagged behind many peer institutions, and had aspirations to become the best among liberal arts colleges. The results have been striking: our academic program has flourished as a result of the new facilities.

But while the remainder of the increase in the campus footprint was to meet the demands of the new Commons residential system and our excellent athletics program, none of the new space, students point out today, was created “just to let individual students, or groups of students, pursue creative endeavors spontaneously.” And the impact is now being felt. Academic departments and other College offices tend to oversee spaces in ways that make it either very difficult to schedule their use, or the bureaucracy involved in reserving space has become so time-consuming for students that many simply give up and forego carrying out their hoped-for activities, since many of those activities come as impulses and can’t easily be planned months, weeks, or even days in advance.

Until this year, there was no space on campus in which students could do ceramics work, painting, or photography, or secure space with any regularity for the purposes of writing and performing a play, choreographing a dance performance, or practicing and performing music, unless the student was a studio art major, a theater major, a dance major, or music major. Official student organizations have an easier time of securing space, but it is still a bureaucratic process, and many students take issue with being forced to become “institutionalized,” given all that is required by the Student Government Association and College policies, which many students see as unnecessary “red tape.” They ask why they can’t gain access to space in a more spontaneous way.

Part of the reason that some facilities have become harder for students to use is due to the success of the very programs we were trying to improve. Several of our academic programs in the arts have become so vibrant that, even with the increase in spaces and renovation of others, the number of students who are majoring in those programs requires the full use of those spaces. Another reason is that the new and often sophisticated facilities require a kind of monitoring that the older, less specialized spaces did not.

When I first arrived at Middlebury in 1984, buildings were rarely locked. It was routine to come into Warner Science (where my first office was located) to find that students had been there during the night and into the early morning, leaving behind props from rehearsal sessions, videos they had just finished editing in the basement of Sunderland, or even mats that helped classrooms serve as temporary rehearsal space for dance groups. Today, many of our academic buildings are locked, and a formidable bureaucracy has grown up around the management of those spaces. As a result of the changes, we are failing to deliver on a major tenet of a liberal arts education.

In discussing this issue with some faculty, I was struck by what alumnus Peter Hamlin ’73, now the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Music, said about his time as a student (from 1969-73). Peter recalled how there were few, if any, barriers to the use of spaces across campus. The infrastructure was much smaller, and less modern, but it was also available to students after hours, and, according to Peter, provided the outlet to experimentation in creative endeavors that he now sees being more difficult for current students to secure.

But what students now see as the difficult quest for space appears to have become part of a culture whose underlying premises must be challenged. When the College acquired the Old Stone Mill, the historic, four-story building located along the Otter Creek in town, it was obvious the College now had the place students had been looking for. It provided different-sized work areas in which a wide array of activities and projects could go on simultaneously.

It was the place students might finally be able to do ceramics…or photography…or any other creative endeavor that happened to be of interest to students outside their academic program.

The reactions to the OSM were both predictable and surprising. Students were at once interested in the space and 35 of them became tenants during the first semester that the building was available for their use. But several faculty colleagues expressed disappointment that the College would allocate such space outside the purview of the academic program. “Surely the OSM should be overseen by one or more academic departments,” colleagues told me. Other colleagues expressed disdain over what they saw as the College “encouraging” students to do what they called “bad art”—meaning art that did not benefit from first learning the fundamentals of what we teach in the academic program: drawing, painting, sculpting, (musical) composition, and creative writing.

What seemed to be missing from these initial faculty reactions is the crucial point that providing these kinds of independent creative pursuits redounds to the classroom—any and all classrooms—and should be celebrated and supported by our faculty. Students might not wish to major in art or music or theater or creative writing; however, by engaging in these pursuits as a physics, psychology, economics, or any major for that matter, students develop as individuals in ways that no doubt make them more interesting, more engaged, and more complete students.

Students shouldn’t have to major in any particular academic area to be given the opportunity to pursue a passion related to that major, even if they are beginners in the activity. In fact, as a faculty member in the performing arts who supports our students’ work at the OSM recently observed: unfettered student engagement with “big ideas” will lead those students to take formal in-class instruction much more seriously.

In times of financial challenge, when we are forced to revisit what among all we do is “core“ and “less core,” we must remind ourselves that the support of intellectual and creative pursuits beyond the academic program is something an exceptional liberal arts education must offer its students. Ensuring the opportunity and space to explore and pursue one’s passions, individually defined with self-imposed rigor and discipline, is essential if our students are to get the most out of their Middlebury education, and live a rich and rewarding life.

I befriended Peter Kohn late in his career and life. The Middlebury College Alumni Lacrosse team contracted with me to document Peter’s contributions to their program in the summer of 2002, and I was assigned to rendezvous with him at the Vail Lacrosse Shootout.

I was told he was a special person and that I’d recognize him immediately. I arrived at the field, and I remember seeing an elderly man trudging across the sideline—a bottle of water in one hand, a towel in the other.

I never imagined how close a friendship I’d share with this gentleman, how I’d come to believe so strongly in the meaning of his life and work. Patiently, carefully, I observed Peter with my camera, gathering footage for the documentary feature Keeper of the Kohn, released in 2005.

Peter is a true sports legend. On statistics alone, he was one of the game’s most accomplished figures, having worked the sidelines for six U.S. teams and roughly 25 college all-star games. Working with a host of Middlebury teams over the last 25 years, he possessed a championship ring for every finger. Another legend, former Hopkins coach Bob Scott, called Peter the most impressive person he’s seen in his 60-plus years in lacrosse.

But he never scored a goal. He rarely even set foot on the lacrosse field, except to shag balls in warm-ups or pose for photos after games. That he was a team manager might, for some, suggest that we include an asterisk by his name when we refer to him as an icon. But anyone who knew him and witnessed his contributions will disagree.

Born in Baltimore in 1931, Myron Gutman “Peter” Kohn was the grandson of businessman Bernard Kohn, the founder of the Hochschild-Kohn department store. Peter and his brother had what we now, more humanely, refer to as “developmental disabilities.”

There was no consensus then or now about what might have constituted his specific challenges. Some say autism; other suggestions range from Asperger’s syndrome to hereditary disease. An early diagnosis was schizophrenia, but this was years before doctors distinguished among the spectrum of cognitive and neurological disorders.

The recommendation for families at that time was often to place their children in institutions, a fate that Peter narrowly avoided. Attempts to define him or rationalize his idiosyncrasies were not only insufficient, but also irrelevant.

They minimized his abilities—those gifts that many recognized in him, from which so many people benefited. What mattered to Peter was only that he have the opportunity to overcome his challenges, the same as anybody else.

Like all of us, Peter hoped he would be recognized for his work, and in 2005 he was, receiving the sport’s highest honor: induction into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame. But what he wanted more than anything was acceptance, and this is where the story gets complicated.

Peter was revered by those who knew him best, but for many who didn’t—as well as those who, in general, are made uncomfortable by people with quirks and special needs—the truth is that he was often misunderstood.

When I consider the impact he had on those who loved him most, I’m reminded of an interview I conducted with my friend Jim Grube, who was responsible for bringing Peter to Middlebury in 1980.

“You could be cynical and say Middlebury created a slot for someone like Pete, that we’re just a group of kind people who made a space for Pete,” Jim said. “Maybe there’s some truth to that, but the reality is that because Pete cares so much, there’s a real value in what he does.”

Peter’s lifework wasn’t easy to categorize: he was at once a water boy and a wise man. What makes his story so remarkable is that he never felt a tension between those two roles. He pursued his life’s work, the mundane and the mystical, with enthusiasm and vigor until his final day, August 5, 2009, when he passed away after suffering a heart attack on a fishing trip near his Cape May, New Jersey, home.

Now that he has departed the physical world, we are entrusted with the responsibility of preserving his legacy, contextualizing his life through our storytelling.

The choice, as always, is the same. Some may view his role within the lacrosse world with a skeptic’s eye. But I think most agree that we are better for having known Peter, whether we met him in waking life or in the world of moving images.

There are no statistics to describe what someone like Peter helped us find in our hearts—something hard to describe, but all at once beautiful, essential, and eternal.

—DG

“Animated” doesn’t begin to describe Katy Smith Abbott when she’s talking about her work. If there’s suspense to be had discussing paintings from the 15th century, she’s able to mine it. When she’s deep into a project, she’ll tell you, hunting down obscure paintings and sorting through unexamined curatorial files, an unexpected discovery is cause enough to scream—quite literally so. She screamed upon finding two paintings, hidden behind a door, on the top floor of the Bargello, in Siena, and she screamed on a Friday in September, upon stepping into Johnson Hall in the Middlebury College Museum of Art, where The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy was set to go up.

As Smith Abbott walked around the exhibition space, she gestured to blank expanses of wall and discussed the paintings as if the works already hung there; in fact, they were just beginning to arrive, in sarcophagus-like crates. An empty gallery is enough to set her spinning rapidly in circles, like a theatre director walking through a partially constructed set before opening night. Indeed, Smith Abbott seemed barely able to contain her anticipation.

Smith Abbott has a doctorate in art history from Indiana University and a perfect isosceles triangle for a nose. Youth is still very much on her side. Despite her 17 years of teaching experience, she still exudes the buoyant energy and unbridled curiosity of a first-year professor. Consider the focus and excitement displayed by a three-year-old when telling you about a favorite dinosaur. Now add an eight-cup pot of coffee.

Smith Abbott’s preferred form of discourse is the soliloquy. She often has to write down what she wants to say, for fear of getting lost in a narrative tangent. To hear her describe the Herculean effort involved in the four-year process of developing an art exhibition is like embarking on a trip through a rather erudite fun house—equally disorienting and thrilling.

This particular journey begins with a painting in London, in 2005. Around Thanksgiving of that year, Smith Abbott’s phone rang. On the line was Richard Saunders, director of the Middlebury Museum of Art. Saunders told her that the College was considering bidding on an early Renaissance painting that was up for auction. Middlebury had been looking to acquire a painting from the period for some time—“Until that point, the College owned nothing from the early Renaissance,” says Smith Abbott, who specializes in the Renaissance—and the offering at Sotheby’s was a perfect fit.

Saunders sketched Smith Abbott a biography of the artist: Lippo d’Andrea, a Florentine, working from the late-1300s into the mid-1400s. Smith Abbott didn’t recognize the name—“Because there are [so many] Renaissance artists, unless they’re the really big ones, you’re not going to have heard of them,” she explains—but both the artist and the work, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari, captured her attention. Conservation work would be minimal, and, most striking of all, the wood-panel painting still hung in its original frame. For an object that’s approaching its 600th birthday—well, consider the condition of your kitchen cutting board in 2609.

Saunders told Smith Abbott that a small, liberal arts college museum was unlikely to win a bidding war against international collectors. Still, Saunders received permission from the College to proceed, using the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Fund and the Walter Cerf Art Fund, and on December 9 the Museum placed the winning bid; everyone involved was a little surprised, except perhaps Smith Abbott.

It was then that she heard a bit of disconcerting information. A distinguished scholar attached to both the Yale University Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art had studied Virgin and Child Enthroned, and he disagreed with its attribution to Lippo d’Andrea. Laurence Kanter, the curator of early European art at Yale and of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Met, thought the piece was by a different painter entirely. “Waiting for it to be delivered,” says Smith Abbott, “I realized that we had acquired a series of puzzles. Chief among them was that of authorship.” That’s a delicate way of saying that, as far as she or anyone knew, her Lippo might not be a Lippo at all.

It’s the third-to-last stage of May’s Giro d’Italia, one of the three Grand Tours on the professional cycling calendar. The other two are the Vuelta a Espana and the Tour de France. Like the major championships in golf or tennis grand slams, these three-week stage races are the year’s most important events.

Each day of the Giro, Armstrong has had a teammate or friend from another team join him in recording a video blog, where he has asked questions, critiqued the race organizers, and generally goofed around. It’s part of a new, more relaxed persona the Texan is cultivating in his first season back on the bike after a three-and-a-half-year retirement.

Today, he’s talking with King, who signed his first pro contract in the fall of 2005, his last semester at Middlebury. After three years riding on the U.S. pro circuit, the 26-year-old Brentwood, New Hampshire, native made the leap to Europe last fall, inking a two-season deal with Cervélo TestTeam, a Swiss-based squad that competes across the globe, from Paris to Qatar. This Giro is King’s first Grand Tour, a benchmark race for most budding cyclists. It’s during these long, grueling affairs that young riders find out if they will sink or swim at the sport’s highest level.

Just three days away from the finish in Rome, he’s staying afloat. The invite from Armstrong only cements that—it’s akin to sitting on Johnny Carson’s couch after a great stand-up set, except that Armstrong needs some work on his opening monologue.

“I was looking at the starting list and was like, who’s this American dude?” Armstrong says, opening the video segment. “And then I went up to him and joked, where’s New Hampshire? I’m from Texas, the center of it all—New Hampshire is like Greenland.”

But their five-minute chat isn’t all one-liners. “This has been a hard race and to come to this [one] and finish, especially when it’s been really undulating and really aggressive,” Armstrong tells King at one point, “a lot of people would have been home a long time ago.”

That’s high praise from the veteran. Welcome to Europe, kid.

It’s a soaking wet morning in Seattle. Coaxed outward by the rain, the ’shrooms will tomorrow be popping from the forest duff and sprouting sideways from decaying tree trunks. Langdon Cook ’89 will be out there, trekking nimbly down forest trails, surveying the secret caches of matsutake and morels that dot his mental map. But today he’s in the city, huddled with me outside the entranceway of the crowded brunch spot where we’ve just eaten cheesy egg scrambles and buttermilk biscuits the size of our hands. Between us I am cradling, like a bird’s nest, a paper towel that holds a pile of wild fungi: eight golden chanterelles and a pudgy white porcino sliced in half lengthwise.

Cook has brought me these mushrooms, a sample from his most recent haul, as a gift. As raindrops pelt our jeans, he gives me careful instructions on how to cook them into a pasta sauce flavored with sage and dry vermouth. “Now, I don’t know how you feel about cream sauces,” he begins, an impish smile gathering at the corner of his mouth. He casts his light-blue eyes on a pinhead-sized wormhole in the porcino. Holding up the bolete, his close-cut fingernails edged with woodsy debris, he shows me how to cut out the hole. The mushroom’s meat is white and otherwise without blemish. I feel very good about cream sauces, I assure him.

In the prologue to his new book, Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager (Skipstone, 2009), Langdon Cook writes: “In four years of college in rural Vermont, I’d cracked open the great books of literature but never cracked an egg.” After Middlebury, he learned to feed himself, but it wasn’t until his year as an MFA student at the University of Washington that he was properly introduced to foraging. Hiking along the Pacific Coast with his future wife, Martha Silano—a bird-watching poet whose outdoorsiness attracted him from the outset—Cook was astonished to see her grow excited over a cluster of Frisbee-like mushrooms sprouting out of a hemlock tree. They cooked the fungi that night in a stir-fry, and Cook was hooked. He soon became a voracious gatherer of the Pacific Northwest’s wild edibles, scratching the sand for clams at low tide, memorizing the choicest spots along mountain slopes for plucking huckleberries from their bushes, cultivating—to his neighbors’ dismay—a wild dandelion patch in his front yard. A longtime fisherman, he learned to free dive for Dungeness crabs in the frigid waters of Puget Sound and jostle for squid-jigging spots along its waterfront on cold winter nights, pulling up Pacific squid with a boisterous crew of first-generation immigrants as they schooled him on the proper techniques.

It wasn’t always such a wild life. Cook grew up along the crowded I-95 corridor in Connecticut. In high school he shipped off to Philips Exeter Academy, where, he says, “I didn’t thrive.” Middlebury proved a better match: his love of literature sizzled under the tutelage of Jay Parini, and he found friends of the lifelong variety, some of whom appear as characters in Fat of the Land. (“Can’t we just buy some crab at the market like normal people?” one Midd alum asks memorably in an essay called “Crab Feed” after escaping from a too-small wetsuit that Cook wants him to rent for a free dive.) Then came grad school and, in 1997, a job as a books editor at fledgling startup Amazon.com. It was fun, at first. Cook’s colleagues in editorial were literary types—veterans of publishing houses and newsrooms—and an egalitarian spirit ruled. Cook recalls company-wide e-mails where employees openly debated policies with CEO Jeff Bezos. “That didn’t last,” he says. When Amazon went public, things changed. Friends were fired without warning, priorities shifted towards the bottom line. It wasn’t fun any more.

In 2004, he quit. He and Martha packed up their three-year-old son and left Seattle to become caretakers of an off-the-grid homestead in Oregon’s Rogue River Canyon. Propane powered their refrigerator and small stove, and the nearest neighbors lived 10 miles down the river. To no one’s surprise, Cook loved it. In Fat of the Land, he describes days spent chopping wood, fly-fishing steelhead in the Rogue, and crouching around the grounds picking mushrooms that he’d identify with a guidebook at night until it was too dark to see. He hoped to stay through the winter, but when Martha became pregnant with their second child, the risk outweighed the adventure. They went back on the grid.

“When we came back to Seattle, I went into a pretty deep funk,” Cook recalls. Whenever he could, he’d escape to the woods for mushrooms, wild greens, and berries. He nourished his yen for self-sufficiency by catching and cooking wild salmon for the family’s supper, drying porcini for the winter, stuffing zip-lock bags with huge stashes of protein-rich stinging nettles for soups. At first he cooked the same recipes he’d prepared on the homestead’s propane stove: grilled fish, wokked veggies, simple pastas. Then the culinary bug bit. Chanterelle stir-fry became beef bourguignon with porcini and chanterelles. He cooked Pacific squid in their own ink. Experimenting with recipes in the kitchen, converting his wild haul into haute cuisine, Langdon Cook discovered a sort of a peace with city life. Jars of thimbleberry jam and pickled seabeans lined kitchen shelves that once housed brightly packaged store-bought items. The Cook-Silvano household was eating well.

Meanwhile, he wrote. He worked for a year as the Web editor of an environmental Web site. He pitched—and sold—stories to magazines, local and national, and shopped around a book proposal about living off the grid. “Publishers told me: ‘Everyone wants to live off the grid,’” says Cook. “‘Give me something new.’” To gauge interest in wild edibles, he started a blog called Fat of the Land, where he posted recipes and tips. The world’s foragers came out of the woodwork. The interest was there. A Seattle press accepted his proposal and Cook started writing. “When you’re writing well,” says Cook, “you just want to go out and have a party. When you’re not, you want to curl up and die.” To Cook’s delight, he kept the party going for a full year, and in early September, Fat of the Land was released.

On the evening after our breakfast interview, the rain pelting the windows in the galley kitchen of my apartment, I toss diced squares of shallot into a pan of melting butter, the first step to creating Langdon Cook’s Creamy Mushroom Pasta. I chop up the chanterelles and my now wormhole-free porcino and add them to the mix. Within seconds a sweet woodsy smell wafts upward from the stovetop, filling my apartment with an aroma as appetizing as any I can remember. Suddenly, I’m ravenous. I add heavy cream and sage and give the mixture a stir. And then I stand there, staring at it, impatiently anticipating the moment when I’ll spear the browning porcini meat with my fork, when I’ll taste that first earthy bite of a wild thing.

Jessica Voelker ’00 is an editor at Seattle Metropolitan magazine.

Langdon Cook’s Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager is available in bookstores nationwide.

“Taste is connected to history,” writes Deirdre Heekin ’89 in “Bitter Alchemy,” the third essay in her collection Libation: A Bitter Alchemy (Chelsea Green, 2009). “The history of the table, which is, after all, a narrative history, an oral history. The tongue experiences; the mouth tells a story.” Libation is Heekin’s own history of taste, chronicling the sensory experiences that have shaped her liquid-centric life. Her enviable globe-trotting (offset by a homebody’s sense of terroir; she’s determined to grow wine on her farm in Barnard, Vermont) is forever guided by the deeply textured pleasures of the palate and the connections between taste and memory. A restaurant owner and sommelier, spirits crafter, and Italophile, Heekin is also a seeker of stories: Her essays are vessels through which she shares the insights and people she experiences in pursuit of her passions.

Food and drink writers are prone to Proustian moments, when a taste experience evokes a memory, just as Marcel Proust’s madeleine cake does in Remembrance of Things Past. Heekin’s occurs in “Ode to Campari,” her love song to the Italian apéritif. “I’ve only just realized,” she writes, “that a Campari and soda, or Campari and orange, or a negroni, that powerful elixir made of equal parts Campari, gin, and sweet vermouth . . . have become a kind of personal Madeleine.”

Like other culinary-minded works, Libation also includes recipes: for rosolio, a spirit Heekin makes with petals plucked from her rose garden, and pan di spagna, a cake flavored with alkermes, a crimson liqueur colored with ladybug wings. But while other culinary memoirists shy away from the technical and the esoteric, Heekin relishes them, telling us how the microscopic flavor elements in alcohol are called esters and that Thomas Jefferson used the varietal V. vulpine to produce homemade wine. Libation is, like that bitter delicacy Campari, an acquired taste, rewarding slow and thoughtful intake and a genuine interest in what you might call “liquid culture,” the alchemy and history surrounding beverages.

Vermonters know Deirdre Heekin as half of the couple behind Pane e Salute, the Woodstock osteria where husband Caleb Barber ’88 cooks up rustic Italian recipes while Heekin helps diners navigate a wine list of the rare Italian varietals that are her life’s obsession. But then, Deirdre Heekin has a lot of obsessions. There is Italy, her “adopted home,” and New Orleans, the city of her birth, which is “her personal Carthage.” When she finally returns there, another obsession is born: She scours the Big Easy for the perfect Sazerac, a cocktail that originated in a French Quarter apothecary. “How did I study literature and film in college, and end up owning a restaurant?” Heekin wonders. “How did I spend so many years studying French and find myself living in Italy? How did I become a writer and also become a serious student of wine?”

What bridges these interests, it becomes clear, is the author’s fascination with the ways in which taste connects people and events over time: A Campari imbibed at an Italian café is recalled while sipping a second on a porch in Vermont—the taste links the locations and experiences, forming a chain that connects the events that make up a lifetime.

Or rather, lifetimes. Of a long-ago vacation that Heekin’s mother and father took before she was born, one they would relive through a nightly belt of Irish whiskey, Heekin writes: “It was here in Skull, with its scent of salt on the air, and the whistle of wind about the houses, that my parents fell in love with Ireland. The taste of the whiskey defined it ever after.” It is at such moments that Heekin—despite her many other interests and vocations—reveals herself to be a storyteller to the core.

Bond of Brothers

Sibling relationships outlast most other bonds, and are sometimes the most complicated. Childhood tensions and rivalries often go unresolved, or even grow, as kids become adults. In Water Dogs (Random House, 2009), the confident debut novel from Lewis Robinson ’93, the simmering struggle between two brothers in their late twenties heats up during a moody Maine winter.

Bennie and his older brother Littlefield still live in their childhood home on Meadow Island, on Maine’s midcoast. The nickname “The Manse” became the family’s inside joke because the house was relatively modest by island standards. But when the boys were teens, their father (Coach) died suddenly of a heart attack, and their mother and sister moved away.

In the decade since, the house has sunk into disrepair. “The porch seemed one or two strong storms away from crumbling into the ocean, and the old copper pipes were failing, rotting the ceilings and the walls, [and] calling the place ‘the Manse’ seemed sad.” The disintegration of the home’s infrastructure is a metaphor, of course, for how the family has fallen apart.

Only one activity draws Bennie and Littlefield together: playing paintball every Saturday, even during the winter. Bennie enjoys the camaraderie; Littlefield likes the guns. The game reminds them of biathlon, the sport of target shooting and cross-country skiing, which they trained for together as kids, under Coach.

The novel’s action focuses on what happens when one day of paintball goes horribly wrong. After a few beers, six men engage in a rematch at dusk, as a snowstorm comes in. Bennie falls off a quarry cliff and nearly dies, and one member of the other team, Ray, goes missing. In the accident’s wake, Littlefield’s behavior grows increasingly bizarre. The mercurial older brother barricades himself in the basement and then disappears for days. He was the last one to see Ray alive, chasing him when he vanished. Why is Littlefield avoiding the questions of his family and the police?

When the authorities can’t find Ray, and suspicion intensifies against Littlefield, Bennie and his girlfriend Helen decide to go “Nancy Drew” and do their own investigation. Unraveling the mystery means picking at the delicate threads that interconnect their rural Maine lives. Littlefield used to date Ray’s girlfriend; the main cop on the case bears a long-standing grudge against Littlefield’s father; Helen works for Bennie’s high school classmate, Julian, another paintball teammate. Will solving the puzzle sever fragile ties or strengthen them?

Robinson—who currently lives in Portland and teaches at the University of Southern Maine—uses clear, unadorned prose to conjure the setting. “The beach was gray with a few brilliant squares of orange where the sunlight filtered through the spruce forest, and the sand looked as smooth as an eggshell.” Crisp details of scents and sounds help make the stark landscape and volatile weather important elements in the storytelling. A river smells of dead herring; the steel chime of a bell buoy echoes across the water.

Nagging plot problems, however, detract somewhat from the tale. The central one is Bennie’s job euthanizing pets at the animal shelter, which is described in excessively graphic detail. (Sensitive animal lovers beware.) It seems contrived to serve a far-fetched plot twist.

Nonetheless, deftly drawn relationships propel Water Dogs: quirky lovers Helen and Bennie; trusting friends Bennie and Julian. Most compelling is the fraternal “push and pull” between Bennie and Littlefield. “They didn’t understand each other, and being born of the same parents only made things worse.” They vacillate between hate and “secret faith.” And they struggle to balance proximity and distance—both geographic and emotional—so that their strained bond of brotherhood remains unbroken.

—Elisabeth Crean

Recently Published

• Straussophobia (Lexington Books, 2009) by Peter Minowitz ’76
• Sicilian Enigma (Outskirts Press, 2009) by Judy Neese Woods ’60
• Standing in Two Places: A New Landscape of Motherhood (Aberdeen Bay, 2009) by Ashley Kincheloe Dyson ’93
• Renewable Energy Project Development Under the Clean Development Mechanism (Earthscan, 2009) by Elizabeth Lokey ’00
• Making Sense of 21st Century Health Insurance Plans by Jonathan Pierpont Warner ’82

A few years ago, I bought an apartment in New York. The city had been my home base for a while. Since serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand in the early 1990s, I’ve shuttled between Asia and the U.S. in my work as an activist for community organizations in developing countries. But as a single woman approaching her 40th birthday, I was feeling a pull to give my home base a more permanent structure.

After eight months of scouring real-estate ads, meeting brokers, and visiting open houses, I found a listing in the New York Times that interested me: a garden co-op in a Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, townhouse. The place certainly had its quirks. The railroad flat seemed to have four rooms, but no real bedroom in its 720 square feet. The front of the apartment was open for the first 20 feet, and then confronted a bizarre half-wall with a large window-shaped cutout and no connecting walls. The kitchen featured exposed brick, subway tile, and mismatched appliances. Beyond was a tiny bathroom with a miniature sink barely hanging on to the wall and an original claw-foot bathtub. The final 6-by-7-foot room was a mess: rotting plywood flooring; a small, plastic-laminate window with a broken sash; and a dropped ceiling that had started to drop even further at the edges. Still, the flat had some lovely features, including 100-year-old pumpkin-pine floors and a garden that had a lot of potential.

I was smitten.

Immediately upon closing, I enlisted my family to help in renovations. My brother, David, is a licensed architect and my mother, a practiced home renovator. I’d serve as the general contractor. I wanted to build a new bathroom in the current bedroom alcove, which would necessitate new plumbing. My mom suggested turning the current kitchen into a proper bedroom, and she recommended transforming the current bath into a laundry, a priceless decision. Mom was irked that there were no closets, so she proposed that we divide a walk-in pantry into three separate closets: a hall closet, a large bedroom closet, and an open linen closet in the new bathroom.

As general contractor, I wanted to find distinct craftspeople for each job and do a lot of the work myself—to save costs, to learn new skills, and to inject creativity into my home. I also knew that I would enjoy it. After work and on weekends, I demolished. I wore weathered Carhartts, drank beer, and listened to a classic rock station. I made a mess and cleaned it up again.

I bought a handheld sanding machine for ceiling beams, an eight-foot ladder, and a drill gun. I used a crowbar toun- cover brick in the bathroom, going through Sheet rock, wood lath, and cement layers.

I finally called in a general contractor for the electrical work, plumbing, Sheetrocking, tile work, masonry, and scraping 100 years’ worth of paint from the flat’s window trim, doors, and doorframes. Meanwhile, I focused on details. Relying on my subscription to This Old House, I learned how to boil the paint off of original black porcelain doorknobs and mortise locks.

I visited an architectural salvage shop in Manhattan and bought old glass knobs for my doors. I also found antique coat hooks for a coat rack I constructed for my foyer, using a scrap from the yellow pine wood as the baseboard. For finishing touches, I gravitated to my traveler side. On one of my trips to Cambodia, I hauled back French-style concrete tiles for the new laundry floor and wine-colored silk material to make living room curtains.

After more than two years of dust, sweat, and tears, my house was a home. I would do it again in a minute. Just don’t tell my family that I’ve begun browsing the real-estate section for my next project.