Luke and the Lake

(continued from p. 109) welding and general repair, and makes maple syrup. Over the years, he has held a variety of regular jobs; one was at a tractor repair shop, another was as an auto mechanic. Once, he was hired to tear up 10 miles of train tracks in upstate New York. This is all a long way of saying that he’s not particular. He is also one of the smartest people I know.

There is evidence of Luke’s smartness in every nook and cranny of his home and shop, tokens of resourcefulness scattered about like shiny pebbles—the sawmill he built from scrap metal, for instance. Once, he led me into the basement and pointed to an automotive radiator in the corner. “What’s that look like?” he asked. “A radiator,” I replied. He nodded, beaming. “Yup. Out of a Hyundai. It heats the whole house.”

Then there’s the charcoal grill he built on a hinged arm and attached to the frame of the front door. The grill folds back against the house when not in use, and then when Luke and Terri have a hankering for cheeseburgers or T-bones in the winter months, it swings out for ready access from the cozy interior of the house. (Yes, the door has to be open, but let’s remember that car radiator in the basement, pumping out heat piped underground from the outdoor wood-burning furnace, also homemade.) And when a switch in the control panel of my excavator went bad, Luke swapped it with one from a scrapped DVD player. The equipment dealer had told me I’d need to replace the entire control panel for a cool $800; Luke charged me 20 bucks and said, “That should work fine, God willin’ the creek don’t rise,” smiling all the while. (He says, “God willin’ the creek don’t rise,” with great frequency.)

Although his father was handy enough, Luke credits his mother’s brother, Chet, for the genes and the inspiration behind much of his own ingenuity. “He was always making stuff like I do. I remember he took some British sports car and put it on an American frame,” Luke said. “He was one of those guys you’d look forward to coming around the farm. Everything stopped. Or in my world it did, anyway.” ccording to Luke Persons, the answer to Lake Champlain’s woes can be found in something you probably haven’t even heard of: biochar, a type of charcoal made from biomass. It’s produced by subjecting the biomass feedstock— in Luke’s case, wood chips—to high temperatures (generally 800 to 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit) in the absence of oxygen. The result is an extremely porous high-carbon material that retains large quantities of water and nutrients such as, yes, phosphorous.

It’s worth noting that all the projects Luke seems proudest of involve the comingling of major vehicle components, such as the Dodge ambulance he got for free and converted into a dump truck, or the industrial-size wood splitter he built from the axle of a Toyota truck, the frame rail of a Peterbilt tractor trailer, and the engine of a Ford lawn tractor. There’s even a hydraulically activated arm to load the unsplit rounds of wood.

When I think of Luke’s particular brand of intelligence, I think of the kinds of smarts that were once common in this country but which seem to have entered a steady and inexorable decline, as our lives have become increasingly dependent on technologies and economic forces beyond our control. It’s an intelligence rooted in the urgency of need, a relationship to a specific place, and the capacity to make do with the materials and resources at hand. It’s not the sort of intelligence that makes anyone rich (though it occurs to me that if the world were more fair, it would be), or wins any awards, or garners much, if any, recognition beyond the small community it serves. It is, in a word, unassuming.

Or at least that’s what I thought until Luke told me he had a plan to save Lake Champlain. Though not a “Great Lake” per se, to the millions of people who live within an easy drive of this 490-square-mile body of water, and to the hundreds of species of birds and waterfowl who populate its depths and shores, Champlain is no small potatoes. And whatever Luke’s plan might be, I figured it had to be vastly more complicated than anything he’d tackled before.

As it turns out, I wasn’t wrong.

Luke stumbled upon biochar a few years ago. “I was looking to make charcoal, and I discovered this whole thing,” he told me. At the time, Luke and his friend Roger Pion were considering what business venture they might embark upon; they’d been thinking wood pellets but soon determined there was too much competition. “We mulled the idea over, then got to talking about biochar,” Luke explained. “Right from the beginning, I told Rog, ‘This is how we’re gonna save Champlain.’”

Luke had seen the lake’s troubles firsthand. “I like fishing up there,” he said, “and I’ve been there when the algae’s so bad it just stinks.” Still, I suspected that his intentions were not strictly altruistic but rather rooted in his compulsion to fix things. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to save Lake Champlain. It was that, having seen a way in which it might be done, he simply couldn’t not try.

The origins of biochar can be traced to South America, where it’s believed to have played a role in traditional agricultural practices for more than 2,500 years, prized for the same nutrient-capturing qualities that have piqued Luke’s interest. Indeed, charcoal-rich soil known as terra preta covers an estimated 10 percent of the Amazon Basin. Deposits have also been found in Ecuador and Peru, as well as in the West African nations of Benin and Liberia.

As Luke sees it, there are many ways in which biochar could be implemented in defense of Lake Champlain. It could be distributed over the land, where it would bind runoff before excess nutrients enter the lake. It could be built into industrial-size filters to be installed at the outflows of agricultural waste systems. Or it could be distributed in shallow trenches to intercept the nutrients as they worked their way toward the shore. “You can’t just shut off the phosphorus,” Luke explained to me. “But you can capture it.” an Luke Persons really save Lake Champlain? I’d posed the question to James Ehlers, and his answer was not encouraging. “Look, I’m all for biochar. I’ve got no problem with it. It’s good stuff,” he said. “Hell, it wouldn’t matter to me if someone discovered that lollipops would save the lake.” We were standing on the dock in Malletts Bay when he said this, and I imagined a rainbow of brightly colored candies bobbing in the water. “But the truth is, biochar is only addressing the symptom. The real problem is that there’s too many freakin’ cows.” (Except he didn’t say “freakin’.”)

Producing biochar requires a highly specialized contraption known as a retort, which is, in effect, an overengineered wood stove. I first saw Luke’s retort in action on a mid-August morning as Luke and Roger gathered to make char and continue working out kinks in the system. I found them under the low roof of a three-sided, wood pallet–walled shed at the edge of Luke’s barnyard, which was populated by an impressive array of cast-off machinery and parts: An old tractor tire, still mounted to its rim, weeds flourishing in the hollow center. A long-abandoned rototiller. A snowmobile improbably perched atop a stack of wood pallets. A motorcycle with its front wheel removed. A pitchfork. There were chickens strutting about, and a duck drinking from a bucket of water. Luke was padding around in a pair of hiking moccasins, monitoring the retort and making adjustments as necessary.

Naturally, Luke built the retort almost entirely of material diverted from the waste stream. For instance, the chain that drives the wood chip conveyor was gleaned from an old hay elevator, and the blower runs off a fan sourced from an air-cooled Volkswagen engine. To aid in the pre-combustion drying of the wood chips, he welded together five 50-gallon drums that now ride in a homemade stand and rotate via a small electric motor (also salvaged). And the auger that feeds the furnace began its life as a trailer jack. “It’s all homemade,” he told me, and chuckled, not because it was funny (it was merely true) but simply from the sheer pleasure of having created something useful out of so many abandoned bits and pieces. Luke chortled again. “I can’t believe it works!” he exclaimed. I nodded my agreement, but I was pretty sure he’d known it would work all along.

I walked to the far end of the retort, where finished biochar dropped off a chute into a trash can. The char was warm but not hot, and I reached into the can and extracted a handful. It was light and crumbly-feeling. To be honest, it felt like not much of anything at all.

For further clarification, I turned to Michael Wironen. A graduate fellow at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, Wironen is studying the ecological economics of Champlain’s phosphorus problem. The challenge, he explained, is that even if every source of phosphorus imported into Champlain were halted today, the lake could still suffer for decades, thanks to the abundance of “legacy phosphorus” that’s accumulated in the soil. “There’s been a phosphorus surplus every year since 1925,” he said. “Remediation solutions like biochar are very important, but we still need to reduce phosphorus dramatically. Even if we bring things into balance, we might not see evidence in water quality for years to come.” In short, he was saying the same thing Ehlers told me: There’s too many freakin’ cows.

So, yes, there are too many cows, and maybe even a few too many people. And yes, it’s probably true that Luke Persons’s goal of saving Lake Champlain will remain beyond his reach. The hard truth is that biochar is no more likely to save Lake Champlain than windmills are to reverse the effects of climate change; the systems and structures creating the damage are too well established and powerful to be overcome by any one act of mitigation. There can be no singular remediation, no lone silver bullet. It will require a sustained effort on the part of all involved, and every bit of remediation counts. Every bit means the lake will be healthier than it would otherwise have been.

It’s not as if Luke and Roger are going to quit trying, anyway. Six months after I first saw the retort in action, I found them in Luke’s kitchen, alternately troubleshooting an industrial-scale wastewater biochar filter under construction, exclaiming over an old drill bit sharpener Luke discovered amid a pile of scrap, and browsing a recent edition of the Gun Trader’s Guide.

Since my visit in August, they’d attempted to attract $500,000 in seed money but failed, despite having won a regional entrepreneur pitching competition. Their intent was to build out the filter business (Green Mountain Biochar was the name), which they could then leverage into developing larger-scale systems intended for lake cleanup. Notwithstanding the lack of funds, they seemed undeterred, and they’d even hatched a new back-ofnapkin plan to drag algae from the lake’s surface, combine it with biochar, and burn the mixture in electricityproducing digesters. The biochar would act as a catalyst to improve the efficiency of the digesting process.

Roger left to pick up a piece of PVC pipe for the filter they were fussing over, and Luke and I walked down to his shop so he could install a couple of belts in the engine compartment of the former ambulance. Soon, the belts were installed, and Luke led me up a short hill to show me the old ambulance body so that I might better understand the scope of the conversion. Along the way, we passed an old refrigerator, a discarded oil tank, a dune buggy half buried in the snow, and a shed with a “piglets 4 sale” sign affixed to its side.

“See that?” asked Luke, after I marveled over the ambulance body. I followed his gaze to what looked to me like random lengths of steel best suited for the scrapyard, though by now I knew enough to understand that to Luke, this wasn’t scrap. Not even close. “That’s the frame from an ’86 Toyota truck.” He was grinning to beat the band. “Yup, that’s a project. God willin’ the creek don’t rise.”

Whether

Corn Season

(continued from p. 113) figure it out on my own. Later in the summer, he turned over his favorite job, picking peppers and eggplant, to me. They were my favorites, too: so shiny and beautiful. Like him, I loved the solitude of the task, walking barefoot between the rows in that sandy loam, filling my basket with what I pre tended were massive green and red and purple jewels.

That summer, right after my high school grad uation, a reporter and a photographer from magazine arrived to do a story about “America’s Oldest Family Farm.” My sister, Lucy, had been liv ing and teaching in Paris since her college gradua tion; Will was in Boston working for Campbell Soup. When the reporter asked my father what might happen to the farm in the future, he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It is kind of tough when you turn out one son and you have all your hopes on him and they don’t materialize.” Will liked to play golf, he said. Maybe he could turn the farm into a golf course. The reporter looked up from her notebook. “What about your daughter?” My father chuckled. “I’ve never heard of a woman farmer.”

But a week later, he let me start learning the tractor work. He showed me how to start the irrigation pump down at the pond. He started telling me stories about his father and grandfather and great-uncle and the improvements they had made to the farm. He invited me to accompany him to the monthly evening meetings of the New Hampshire Vegetable Growers Association. He was 50 years old that year, sure that his only son would never come home for good.

The article in Life magazine came out in the fall of 1971, at the start of my second year of college. The fullpage photographs and the words that accompanied them painted a picture of our farm as a place of exquisite beauty and deep-rooted history. Reading it in my dorm room, I wept.

Two weeks later, my brother quit his job and came home to work the farm. My father was, of course, over

Once in control, Will made huge changes. He took out a big bank loan and built a spacious climate-controlled year-round addition onto the old barn. The area that used to be the charming post-and-beam farm stand was now used for storage. He bought a tractortrailer and drove it to Boston two mornings a week to buy produce from the big wholesale market there. He put in walk-in coolers to keep it all fresh. Soon we were selling bananas and iceberg lettuce and Florida corn. There was a gift shop and garden center. My sister managed a deli department, where she sold imported cheeses and fine olive oil. My family stopped referring to Tuttle’s Red Barn as “the stand,” as we always had. Now everyone called it “the store.” on a farm would be to marry a farmer.

I hated the changes. “I don’t like it either, Beck,” my father said. “But it’s your brother’s farm now, and he gets to make the decisions.” He told me that he had accomplished his work, passing the farm to the only son of the 11th generation of Tuttles.

My sister came home from Europe that summer and pitched in, building a house nearby with her husband and working as hard as I did. Will was more interested in marketing than farming, and more interested in playing golf than anything else. I got married in 1978, but not to a farmer. Five years later, after my second child was born, I reluctantly gave up the work I had loved.

When my father turned 65 he officially deeded the farm to my brother, as was the family tradition. Will wasn’t the farmer in the family, but he was the son. Even though I knew it was coming, I took the news hard. “What if all three of us had been boys?” I asked my father tearfully. “You weren’t,” he replied.

My parents had both died by the time the recession hit and the big bank loan came due. There was no money to pay it. No money for seeds or fertilizer. No energy left to keep going. The year I turned 60, there was no corn planted on the farm for the first time in any living person’s memory.

Our brother’s voice broke when he gave my sister and me the news that he had to sell the farm.

I have a vegetable garden in Maine where I grow my own corn now. Like my mother, I keep a stick of butter just for corn in the refrigerator all summer, with bits of corn silk embedded from the previous night’s cob-rolling. My children and their children and their cousins will likely never be farmers. Their bare feet will never feel that rich Tuttle soil on a summer afternoon. But at least they’ll know what fresh corn tastes like.