The Best American Essays 2013 (27 page)

Like many orange trees planted on public property, the Third Street trees produce oranges that are incredibly bitter. They offer only visual sustenance—glossy nests of leaves cradle orange orbs. When they fruit, they be come more of a nuisance than anything else, dropping inedible oranges that rot in the street and taunt hungry students and passersby who fetishize fruit globes.

I have a problem with inedible things—particularly soaps and bath products, though the sour oranges qualify—that smell or look like something edible. If sufficiently hungry, I will disregard sense and eat them, or try to, and spit out a mouthful of soapy chemical mess or too-sour fruit. I am no smarter with age. Biking down that street, I’ve been tempted. Too often, desire is a more powerful force than restraint.

At the request of a pair of conventionally rather attractive Alabama sorority girls, the Scottish indie rock band Belle and Sebastian once covered “Sweet Home Alabama” at a concert I attended in Atlanta. It was a glorious, if ill-fated, collision, the sort you look for in a cover situation. After all, Belle and Sebastian was a famously shy and media-elusive band in its youth, so the prospect of them inviting requests for covers was a funny surprise. I was shocked that the guitarist knew the riff at all, though the band didn’t know all the lyrics. Said sorority girls were pulled up onstage to sing.

University of Alabama alums know that the proper way to sing the song is with a “Roll, Tide, Roll” inserted like a virus in the chorus. As a northerner in the South, you understand quickly that this song is important to southerners, particularly Alabamans, partly for its famous fuck-off to the Canadian Neil Young, “Southern man don’t need him around.”

By the time I heard it covered in Atlanta, the song had lost whatever meaning it might have once had for me as a result of sheer oversaturation. But I listened hard to all the mix CDs. Doing so, I found that I don’t really
listen
very often to songs anymore. Perhaps it’s a product of the MP3 age, in which we trade off fidelity for convenience, the immersive and social experience of the album for the portability, downloadability, and immediacy of the digital single, but whether we love songs, hate songs, or disregard them, more typically when we press Play, we press Play on our memory of the song or what it represents, how it makes us feel, who we were when we first heard it or made it part of our lives. We don’t listen to the song
itself
. (Well, we’re never listening to anything itself, without consideration of context, genre, history, personal experience, and so on, but that road leads to a neurotic infinity.) Instead, I found that when I actually listened to it, “Sweet Home Alabama” is actually a pretty catchy song. This raises uncomfortable questions about what my taste in music actually means, but I can’t think about that too hard, too often, if I want to maintain any sense of what self means.

This last year tornadoes destroyed much of Tuscaloosa, including both of the places I lived in when I was in grad school there: an apartment complex named, in an attempt to ape the patrician South, Charleston Square, and a house situated about five miles distant on a street called Cedar Crest, though there were no cedars anywhere in sight. I remember seeing the damage on television, trying to reconcile the images in the media with my memory of the place.
What corner is that?
I asked myself—only to realize, holy shit, that was the street on which I lived: and it was entirely wiped out in a mile-wide stripe, just erased, like magnetic tape. You could tell it was Cedar Crest by the railroad tracks, the decimated Krispy Kreme, and the few remaining individual trees, which are numerous and often very old.

Tuscaloosa has long been called the “Druid City,” for the preponderance of water oaks lining its many leafy streets, and my memory of entering the South for the first time was largely one of being engulfed in trees, in near-total forestation, surprisingly similar to my home in Michigan, with echoes of
Deliverance
and red dirt everywhere.

A couple months before the tornado, an Alabama football fan was arrested for poisoning a stand of 130-year-old oak trees 160 miles away in Auburn, Alabama, commonly called Toomer’s Corner. These oaks are among the oldest of Auburn’s trees. There are 8,236 on the campus. According to tradition, fans would festoon the oaks with toilet paper after important football victories.

Alabama and Auburn have a longstanding and especially bitter rivalry, but the poisoning of the trees by sixty-two-year-old former state trooper Harvey A. Updyke Jr. is certainly a new low. Evidently he had problems with mental illness, though you could argue that the degree of obsession that hardcore Alabama fans often exhibit borders on crazy. Rarely do you get a sense of restraint overriding desire when it comes to Alabama football.

Updyke used a powerful herbicide called Spike 80DF—“80 percent tebuthiuron (the active ingredient) and 20 percent inert ingredients,” according to a
Huffington Post
news article on the subject, farmed certainly from some other website in the way of modern aggregated media. The same article suggests the herbicide “kills from the roots up.” As a result, it might take years for the stand of oaks to die as they shed, regrow, and reshed their leaves like past lives, past iterations of selves suggested by mix-tape track lists and embarrassing letters written to girls we yearned for. It’s not yet fully certain whether they will live or die, but the prognosis for the trees is not good.

The prognosis for my old neighborhood is worse: it’s since been bulldozed, the rubble and uprooted parts of trees removed, along with the few remaining halves of houses and the graves of the many stray cats my wife and I fed and tried to save. You can only do so much. The roots of my memories there are now erased entirely, along with the house next door to ours that (we were informed by an obsessive football fan who came to our house to take photographs) once housed football star Joe Namath.

According to the July 7, 1936, issue of the
Toledo News
, comedian Hugh Herbert was the first inventor of a particular mix tape of a tree, the “fruit-salad tree”: “[He] is developing a horticultural marvel to be known as a fruit-salad tree, or Herbert’s Folly. On a grapefruit tree his [
sic
] has grafted oranges, avocados, peaches, apples, plums, and walnuts.” Two months later, the
Christian Science Monitor
ran an article about McKee Jungle Gardens, almost two hours southeast of Orlando, in Vero Beach, Florida (now McKee Botanical Garden), which had a fruit-salad tree of its own (“the Mexican salad fruit tree . . . pineapple, strawberries, and bananas combined”).

These Frankentrees are made by grafting parts of different trees onto one trunk in order to maximize the variety of fruit grown on the one tree, and also for novelty or entertainment. Contrary to the
Toledo News
, these fruit-salad trees, also called fruit-cocktail trees, probably predate 1936, since the technique of grafting branches tree on tree has been around since antiquity, and someone surely had the idea before 1936. Circa 300
BCE
, for instance, amateur botanist Theophrastus writes, in
De Causis Plantarum
, that “it is also reasonable that trees so grafted should bear finer fruit.” He goes on to explain the technique of grafting in detail. Much of his discourse in “Propagation in Another Tree: Grafting” could more or less be copied-and-pasted directly into any contemporary manual on the subject, since the techniques have not changed much. It’s hard to believe that as an experimental botanist, he or his contemporaries wouldn’t have mixed multiple fruits on one tree.

By this time pretty much all of our domesticated trees, particularly citrus, are hybrids, only reliably reproducible via grafting. All fruit trees are Frankentrees. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the fruit-salad tree would later be developed by the University of California at Riverside, and more recently commercially popularized by the Fruit Salad Tree Company out of Emmasville, Australia, which distributes four fruit-salad tree varieties (Stone Fruit, Citrus Fruit, Multi-Apples, and Multi-Nashis—Japanese pears) that are ready to plant, tend, and fruit.

A mysterious and unmarked tape arrives . . . straight out of a noir novel.

Was it a message? Was it from a stalker? A crazy Alabama football fan? A former lover? A family member?

I asked the most likely suspects. Then I asked everyone I knew.

No one claimed responsibility.

The actual magnetic tape was not broken, though its casing was. I headed to Radio Shack to procure some new microcassettes in hopes of nerdily dismantling the broken casing and rethreading the old tape through an unbroken case. None of them turned out to be openable without some mystic wizard moves.

A couple months went by. I thought about other things, worked on other things, as I do. Watched the trees out my window lose their leaves and wind down, spectral, for winter. I thought more about it. The hacker in me said I had to fix the tape myself. The reasonable person just said,
Eh, forget it
. But I couldn’t just forget it. Eventually I sent it out to a specialty audio restoration company that fixed the tape, burned it to a CD, and mailed it back.

It sat in its package on my desk.
Should I listen to it?
I wondered. What if the mystery disappointed me, and it was just some heavy breathing? (Actually I’d take heavy breathing. It could connote anything.)

When I think of mystery, I think of the Paulding Light, the most famous unexplained phenomenon of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. At one point,
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!
offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could definitively explain the light. It was even featured on an episode of Robert Stack’s redundantly named television show
Unsolved Mysteries
and a more recent Syfy network show.

The Paulding Light is in the Ottawa National Forest, south of Bruce Crossing, about an hour and a half from the town where I grew up and in which my parents live. Driving south, it’s off an old mining road on the right of U.S. 45, a couple miles before you get to Watersmeet. You drive in at night and park where the other cars are, among millions of towering pines. Most nights there will be a dozen or more people sitting on the hoods of their cars, often with binoculars or telescopes, looking north at a series of lights that emerge, slowly move down a hill, and disappear. The locals have stories of these balls of light getting within a hundred feet of the viewers, floating, moving, changing colors, spinning, and splitting up. The official U.S. Forest Service sign (adorned helpfully, surely unofficially, with an illustration of Casper the Friendly Ghost) reads as follows:

This is the location from which the famous Paulding Light can be observed. Legend explains its presence as a railroad brakeman’s ghost, destined to remain forever at the sight [
sic
] of his untimely death. He continually waves his signal lantern as a warning to all who come to visit. To observe the phenomenon, park along this forest road facing North. The light will appear each evening in the distance along the power line right-of-way. Remember, other people will be visiting this location. Please do not litter.

In a place adorned with a long history of suffering (the miners, mostly, and the families of miners, many of whom died in the mines or in related accidents, or in the Italian Mining Hall disaster of 1909, and the Ojibwa before them, who suffered in ways all too familiar to students of American history), the Paulding Light is a cryptic and appealing experience with a speculative and storied past. Though there have been several scientific explanations offered for the light, including some sort of power phenomenon involving the electrical lines, swamp gas, headlights on a highway, and so on. Though several other television shows and paranormal investigators and experts have been deployed to investigate the light, most have concluded that the phenomenon remains unexplained. In 2010 a group of Michigan Tech University optics students claimed (with a good claim to fact) that they had proved that the light was a result of headlights in the distance. I have my doubts. It’s not just that I love the mystery of it, but that after having experienced the light myself on several occasions, the optics explanation doesn’t fully track. Or perhaps I just resist its attempt at closure. The roots of a mystery like this run deep.

Was it worth $40 to get the broken microcassette fixed? It turns out the answer is yes, if only to know. It is always worth $40 to know. That’s what makes me a crap poker player. I want to see everyone’s cards, to see the flop, the turn, the river, to see how it turns out. And in poker you have to pay to find out. And I almost always pay to find out. Now you know.

So. I popped it in and gave it a listen. It appeared to be a recording from the judge’s microphone in a murder trial set in Upper Michigan. There is no real identifying information beyond the names of the attorneys (Mr. Biegler and Mr. Dancer; there is also apparently a Mr. McCarthy who is mentioned) and the fact that the original judge on the case, a Judge Maitland, was taken ill, and the new judge was from Lower Michigan. There are references to this being a sensational trial. Here is an excerpt from my transcription:

I come here on assignment from Lower Michigan to sit in place of your own Judge Maitland, who is recovering from illness. Now I have no desire to upset the folkways or traditions of this community during murder trials or whatever they may be. I had not realized that there were so many among you who were such zealous students of homicide. In any case I must remind you that this is a court of law and not a football game or a prize fight.

Beyond this there are the judge’s exhortations to the attorneys and the gallery to quiet down, to act more civilly; a couple rulings on objections and witness testimony; and a congratulations to the prosecutor on a particularly spectacular prosecution: “This is the first time in my legal career that I have seen a dead man successfully prosecuted for rape.” The actual prosecution, the actual witness testimony, the actual objections—in short, any voice aside from the judge’s—is not in evidence. There are only short silences during the spaces where other people apparently responded, indicating that this is an edited version with the long silences and other voices removed. I didn’t know what to make of it. It felt like there was a decent chance that this was a recording from the courtroom of the murder trial on which I based some of my first book. Strange.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it
, I thought,
making everything about myself
.