The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (4 page)

Desire, then, is built into the very nature and purpose of fruit, and so, quite often, is a kind of taboo. The vegetable kingdom’s lack of glamour by comparison (whoever heard of a forbidden vegetable?) can be laid to the fact that a vegetable’s reproductive strategy doesn’t turn on turning animals on.

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The blandishments of sugar are what got the apple out of the Kazakh forests, across Europe, to the shores of North America, and eventually into John Chapman’s canoe. But the appeal of apples to humans (and perhaps especially to American humans) probably owes to their figurative as well as literal sweetness. The earliest settlers lighting out from places like Marietta wanted apple trees nearby because they were one of the comforts of home. Since the time of the New England Puritans, apples have symbolized, and contributed to, a settled and productive landscape. In the eyes of a European, fruit trees were part and parcel of a sweet landscape, along with clean water, tillable land, and black soil. To call land “sweet” was a way of saying it answered our desires.

The fact that the apple was generally believed to be the fateful tree in the Garden of Eden might also have commended it to a religious people who believed America promised a second Eden. In fact, the Bible never names “the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden,” and that part of the world is generally too hot for apples, but at least since the Middle Ages northern Europeans have assumed that the forbidden fruit was an apple. (Some scholars think it was a pomegranate.) This mistake strikes me as yet another example of the apple’s gift for insinuating itself into every sort of human environment, even, apparently, a biblical one. Like a botanical Zelig, the apple has wormed its way into our image of Eden through the brushwork of Dürer and Cranach and countless others. After their pictures, re-creating a promised land anywhere in the New World without an apple tree would have been unthinkable.

Especially to a Protestant. There was an old tradition in northern Europe linking the grape, which flourished all through Latin Christendom, with the corruptions of the Catholic Church, while casting the apple as the wholesome fruit of Protestantism. Wine figured in the Eucharist; also, the Old Testament warned against the temptations of the grape. But the Bible didn’t have a bad word to say about the apple or even the strong drink that could be made from it. Even the most God-fearing Puritan could persuade himself that cider had been given a theological free pass.

“The desire of the Puritan, distant from help and struggling for bare existence, to add the Pippin to his slender list of comforts, and the sour ‘syder’ to cheer his heart and liver, must be considered a fortunate circumstance,” a speaker told a meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1885. “Perhaps he inclined to cider . . . because it was nowhere spoken against in the scriptures.” Whether this was really the reason or a rationale concocted after the fact, Americans were indeed strongly inclined to cider, an inclination that accounts for the high esteem in which the apple was held in the colonies and on the frontier. In fact, there was hardly anything else to drink.

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Alcohol is, of course, the other great beneficence of sugar: it is made by encouraging certain yeasts to dine on the sugars manufactured in plants. (Fermentation converts the glucose in plants into ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide.) The sweetest fruit makes the strongest drink, and in the north, where grapes didn’t do well, that was usually the apple. Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider. (“Hard” cider is a twentieth-century term, redundant before then since virtually all cider was hard until modern refrigeration allowed people to keep sweet cider sweet.)

Corn liquor, or “white lightning,” preceded cider on the frontier by a few years, but after the apple trees began to bear fruit, cider—being safer, tastier, and much easier to make—became the alcoholic drink of choice. Just about the only reason to plant an orchard of the sort of seedling apples John Chapman had for sale would have been its intoxicating harvest of drink, available to anyone with a press and a barrel. Allowed to ferment for a few weeks, pressed apple juice yields a mildly alcoholic beverage with about half the strength of wine. For something stronger, the cider can then be distilled into brandy or simply frozen; the intensely alcoholic liquid that refuses to ice is called applejack. Hard cider frozen to thirty degrees below zero yields an applejack of 66 proof.

Virtually every homestead in America had an orchard from which literally thousands of gallons of cider were made every year. In rural areas cider took the place not only of wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water. Indeed, in many places cider was consumed more freely than water, even by children, since it was arguably the healthier—because more sanitary—beverage. Cider became so indispensable to rural life that even those who railed against the evil of alcohol made an exception for cider, and the early prohibitionists succeeded mainly in switching drinkers over from grain to apple spirits. Eventually they would attack cider directly and launch their campaign to chop down apple trees, but up until the end of the nineteenth century cider continued to enjoy the theological exemption the Puritans had contrived for it.

It wasn’t until this century that the apple acquired its reputation for wholesomeness—“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” was a marketing slogan dreamed up by growers concerned that temperance would cut into sales. In 1900 the horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey wrote that “the eating of the apple (rather than the drinking of it) has come to be paramount,” but for the two centuries before that, whenever an American extolled the virtues of the apple, whether it was John Winthrop or Thomas Jefferson, Henry Ward Beecher or John Chapman, their contemporaries would probably have smiled knowingly, hearing in their words a distinct Dionysian echo that we are apt to miss. When Emerson, for instance, wrote that “man would be more solitary, less friended, less supported, if the land yielded only the useful maize and potato, [and] withheld this ornamental and social fruit,” his readers understood it was the support and sociability of alcohol he had in mind.

Americans’ “inclination toward cider” is the only way to explain John Chapman’s success—how the man could have made a living selling spitters to Ohio settlers when there were already grafted trees bearing edible fruit for sale in Marietta.

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Mount Vernon, Ohio, is a classic early-nineteenth-century town, a modest grid of streets laid out around a central square of green a short walk from the meeting place of two streams. In the library on the square is a map of the town made in 1805, the year it was platted. If you look down in the bottom left-hand corner, where Owl Creek curves in to disturb the tidy grid, you can see lots 145 and 147, both of which were bought by John Chapman in 1809 for the sum of fifty dollars. Follow the creek to the far right-hand edge of the map, and you’ll see a neat rank of apple trees, representing what is thought to be one of Chapman’s nurseries.

I’d come to Mount Vernon, following the Muskingum and its tributaries north from Marietta, to meet Ohio’s leading authority on Johnny Appleseed. William Ellery Jones is a fifty-one-year-old fund-raising consultant and amateur historian with a dream: to establish a Johnny Appleseed Heritage Center and Outdoor Theater on a hillside outside Mansfield. When I had phoned him the month before at his home in Cincinnati, he generously offered to give me a guided tour of “Johnny Appleseed country.” Jones hinted that he had made some important discoveries—the locations of various Chapman sites and relics—and he indicated that, if I played my cards right, I might get to see a few of them. This seemed a little too good to be true—finding a Virgil in Appleseed country with one phone call. Three days spent driving around Ohio in the company of this gentle monomaniac confirmed that assessment.

The Heritage Center and Outdoor Theater should have been my tip-off. Within moments of our handshake, I could see that Bill Jones was deeply invested in precisely the version of Chapman’s life I’d come west to escape: Saint Appleseed. “Chapman is a hero for our time,” he told me in dead earnest when I asked what had attracted him to Chapman’s story. “His philanthropy, his selflessness, his Christian faith. John Chapman was also America’s first environmentalist. I ask you, could you
invent
a better role model for our children?” I decided to wait a bit before bringing up the child bride or the applejack.

Jones is a tall, courtly man with pale blue eyes and fine, parchmentlike skin. He gives the impression of being a tightly stretched drum of a man, devoid of irony and, by his own lights, somewhat out of place in time. He’s dismayed by present-day America—the popular culture, the violence, the “lack of moral compass.” Ohio’s frontier past is vividly present to him, and old-timey expressions like “Cripes!,” “Gee whillikers!,” and “Darn tootin’ ” come often and unself-consciously to his lips.

One of the first things I noticed about Bill were his delicate white hands and the multiple pairs of leather gloves he carried in his briefcase. Though it was only October, Bill would don the gloves while pumping gas or even indoors, when handed a hot mug of coffee. After we got to know each other a bit, he mentioned that he was certain Chapman had been an obsessive-compulsive, and that people used to make fun of Chapman’s delicate hands. “If you didn’t have fingers like thumbs back then, folks were liable to say you were effeminate.”

Jones had put together an ambitious itinerary between Mount Vernon and Fort Wayne, beginning with a brisk morning walk to plots 145 and 147. Chapman’s two landholdings in Mount Vernon stand across the street from each other, on the banks of Owl Creek. Jones said he was applying to the state to have historical markers erected on the site, now the parking lot of a tire dealership. Owl Creek looked far too shallow and sluggish to serve as the busy thoroughfare Jones described, but he pointed out that reservoirs and dams had long ago tamed most of the local streams and rivers. Chapman’s Mount Vernon property was, I would discover, typical of his holdings: the land hugged a stream, ensuring water for his seedlings early on and sales traffic later, and they were located on the edge of a new settlement. That particular tropism, pulling Chapman from the center of things out to the margins, proved to be a constant with the man and his life’s project.

Over the next few days Bill showed me all over Appleseed country and did an impressive job of bringing that quasi-historical place to life. We traipsed through a dozen of Chapman’s former nurseries, pulled over at the drop of a historical marker (Jones deplored the recent switch from brass to aluminum), and stood on a handful of undistinguished street corners that Bill alone knew were “crucial Appleseed sites.” On the banks of the Auglaize River we found the site of the famous sycamore stump Chapman had once lived in (now the front lawn of a ranch house), and in a rundown section of Mansfield, we visited the site of his kid sister Persis Broom’s house, now a drive-through liquor store called the Galloping Goose. In Defiance we climbed to the top of a water-treatment plant to obtain an unobstructed view of one Appleseed nursery, and near Loudonville we paddled a canoe for two hours to catch a glimpse of another. On a farm outside Savannah, we took pictures of each other standing next to an ancient, half-dead apple tree that may or may not have been planted by Chapman.

All the while Jones spooned tales of Johnny Appleseed, a rich soup of legend sprinkled with chunks of historical and biographical fact. Most of what’s known about Chapman comes from accounts left by the many settlers who welcomed him into their cabins, offering the famous appleman/evangelist a meal and a place to sleep. In exchange, his hosts were happy to have Chapman’s news (of Indians and Heaven, of his own fantastic exploits) and apple trees (he’d usually plant a couple as a token of his thanks). There was, too, the sheer entertainment value of a guest who was, literally, a legend in his own time.

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Chapman lived everywhere and nowhere. He was constantly on the move, traveling in autumn to Allegheny County to gather seeds, scouting nursery sites and planting in the spring, repairing fences at old nurseries in summer, and, wherever he planted, signing up local agents to keep an eye on and sell his trees, since he was seldom in one place long enough to do that work himself. Even into his sixties, after moving his base of operations to Indiana, Chapman made an annual pilgrimage to central Ohio to look after his nurseries there. His absentee management meant he was frequently gypped, and his land claims were often jumped, though whenever this happened Chapman’s main concern seems to have been for the welfare of his trees. In spite of these setbacks, he managed to accumulate enough cash to build up his real estate holdings and give money away to people in need, frequently strangers. As Bill pointed out, the size of his estate—which included some twenty-two parcels of land—is hard to square with the notion that he was feebleminded or feckless.

Even so, he was undoubtedly “one of the oddest characters in our history,” as a nineteenth-century historian in Mount Vernon put it. From the reminiscences of the settlers he visited along the route of his annual migration have sprung tall tales of his endurance, generosity, gentleness, heroism, and, it must be said, his unreconstructed strangeness. Jones knows all these tales by heart, and though he is agnostic on the veracity of the tallest ones, he was happy to pass them on—most of them, anyway.

Not surprisingly, Bill dwelled on stories of Chapman’s heroism, and together we retraced a portion of the famous “barefoot run” of 1812. During the war with England, Indians allied with the British occasionally rampaged, and late one September night Chapman sprinted thirty miles through the forest from Mansfield to Mount Vernon to warn the settlers of their approach. “Behold, the tribes of the heathens are round about your doors,” he’s supposed to have cried, “and a devouring flame followeth after them.”

As the high-flown diction suggests, Chapman figured himself the hero of a latter-day biblical narrative, a man anointed “to blow the trumpet in the wilderness.” This he would blow in every cabin he visited, asking his hosts after supper if they would hear “some news right fresh from Heaven” before producing the Swedenborgian tracts he kept tucked into his waistband. Black eyes blazing, he’d then launch into a sermon fired with a mystic’s zeal. Chapman saw himself as a bumblebee on the frontier, bringer of both the seeds and the word of God—of both sweetness, that is, and light.