The phrase “an animal a thousand miles miles long,” attributed
to Aristotle, refers to a sprawling body that cannot be seen in its
entirety from a single angle, a thing too vast and complicated to
be knowable as a whole. For Leath Tonino, the animal a thousand
miles long is the landscape of his native Vermont. Tonino grew up
along the shores of Lake Champlain, situated between Vermont’s
Green Mountains and New York’s Adirondacks. His career as a
nature and travel writer has taken him across the country, but he
always turns his eye back on his home state. “All along,” he
writes, “I’ve been exploring various parts of the animal,
trying to make a prose map of its body—not to understand it in a
conclusive or definitive way but rather to celebrate it, to hint at
its possibilities.” This fragmented yet deep search is the
overarching theme of the twenty essays in The Animal One Thousand
Miles Long. Tonino posits that geography, natural history, human
experience, and local traditions, seasons, and especially atypical
outings—on skis, bicycles, sleds, and boogie boards—can open us
to a place and, simultaneously, open a place to us. He looks
closely at what he calls "huge-small" Vermont, but his underlying
mission is to demonstrate our collective need to better understand
the meaning of place, especially the ones we call home and think we
know best. From Laredo to Jackson Hole, San Francisco to
Burlington, his sensibility is applicable to us all. In his
signature piece, “Seven Lengths of Vermont,” he traverses the
length of the state in seven different ways—a twenty-day hike,
500 miles on bicycle, a thirty-six-ride hitchhiking tour, 260 miles
in a canoe, ten days swimming Lake Champlain, a three-week ski
trek, and a two-hour “vast and fast” flyover. He plots each
route with blue ink on maps strung across his office. “Each inky
thread was an animal a thousand miles long,” he writes.
“Vermont appeared before me as a menagerie.” What Bill Bryson's
A Walk in the Woods did for the Appalachian Trail and Peter Mayle's
A Year in Provence did for the South of France, Tonino's affinity
for the land he calls home gives a new perspective on the Green
Mountain State. His infectious love of the outdoors, the ground of
everyday life, should inspire us to explore the places just outside
our own front door.
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