The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (5 page)

Swedenborgian doctrine, which holds that everything here on Earth corresponds directly to something in the afterlife, might explain the strange and wonderful ways Chapman conducted himself in nature. The same landscape his countrymen treated as hostile, heathen, and therefore theirs to conquer, Chapman regarded as beneficent in every particular; in his eyes even the lowliest worm glowed with divine purpose. His kindness to animals was notorious, an outrage to frontier custom. It was said he’d sooner douse his campfire than singe the mosquitoes attracted to its flame. Chapman often used his profits to purchase lame horses to save them from slaughter, and once he freed a wolf he found snared in a trap, nursing the animal to health and then keeping it as a pet. When he discovered one evening that the hollowed-out log in which he intended to spend the night was already occupied by bear cubs, he let them be, making his bed in the snow instead. Chapman could sleep anywhere, it seems, though he was partial to hollowed-out logs or a hammock slung between two trees. One time he floated a hundred miles down the Allegheny on a block of ice, sleeping the whole way.

Curiously, a great many stories about Chapman have to do with his feet: how he’d go barefoot in any weather, the time he punished his foot for stepping on a worm (or in some versions a snake). He would entertain boys by pressing needles or hot coals into the soles of his feet, which had grown as horny and tough as an elephant’s. (Ripe for ridicule though he must have been, boys were so awed by his fortitude that they never made fun of him.) Listening to an itinerant preacher in Mansfield pound his tree-stump pulpit and ask, one too many times, “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians, is traveling to Heaven barefoot and clad in coarse raiments?” Chapman roused himself from the log he was reclining against and planted his bare ugly foot square in the middle of the preacher’s stump. “Here’s your primitive Christian!” The recurring barefoot theme underscores the sense people had that Chapman’s relationship to nature was special—and not quite human. The soles of our shoes interpose a protective barrier between us and the earth that Chapman had no use for; if shoes are part and parcel of a civilized life, Chapman had one foot planted in another realm, had at least that much in common with the animals. Whenever I hear or read about Chapman’s horny bare feet, I can’t help picturing him as some kind of satyr or centaur.

But in spite of his peculiar attire and personal habits, those who knew him said he was “never repulsive.” People were happy to have him as a guest in their homes, and parents would let him bounce their babies on his lap.

Shadowy stories about Chapman’s love life seem to have followed him across the frontier, but whenever I asked Bill Jones about this, he tightened up. In one account Chapman had come west after a girl had stood him up at the altar back in Massachusetts. To people who asked him why he had never married, he would say that God had promised him a “true wife in Heaven” if he would abstain from marriage on Earth. In the most curious of these stories, recounted by Price, Chapman made an arrangement with a frontier family to raise their ten-year-old daughter to be his bride. For several years Chapman paid regular visits to the girl and contributed to her upkeep, until one visit when he chanced to witness his young fiancée flirting with some boys her own age. Wounded and enraged, Chapman abruptly broke off the relationship. True or not, the stories hint at a sexual eccentricity of some kind. Or maybe his libido was submerged in some sort of polymorphous love of nature, as some biographers have theorized about Thoreau.

Gingerly, I tried at one point to raise the subject with Bill. My timing was perhaps not the best. We were in my rental car, driving up the wooded hillside near Mansfield where he hoped someday to build his Heritage Center and “Class A” Outdoor Theater—a destination for school groups and families on vacation, as he’d told me more than once. And here I was, asking whether he thought his hero might have had a . . . thing for young girls.

“I know exactly what story you’re referencing,” Jones said tightly. “The child bride. In my opinion it is completely implausible.”

Jones was silent for a time and then worked himself into a denunciation of “the sort of people who feel compelled to take our heroes down a peg.” And then, pulling tensely on the corners of his mouth, he confided his deepest, darkest fear about Chapman, a charge about his hero’s sexuality that, though baseless—though never in fact even
alleged
by anyone—nevertheless stood “to ruin everything we’re trying to do.” I’m sorry to say that the price of hearing this rumor was a promise not to tell.

Jones had his own G-rated theory of Chapman’s love life, something having to do with a Massachusetts girl who may have broken a promise to join him in Ohio. “That’s as much as I can tell you right now,” Bill said. He sounded as if he were talking to Bob Woodward in a parking garage. I pressed, gently. “Nope. Not a word until I can get this all nailed down and published.”

• • •

That night I went to hear Bill give a talk about Chapman at the Loudonville Historical Society, a stop on his one-man campaign to build support for his Heritage Center and Outdoor Theater. Fifty or so mostly retired folks in folding chairs sipped coffee and listened politely as Jones pressed his case: John Chapman is just the “exemplary figure” to help our children navigate a treacherous world, “yet no one is telling his story.” As he spoke, the slide projector showed an early engraving of Chapman made by a woman who had known him in Ohio. Scraggly and barefoot, he’s wearing a sackcloth cinched at the waist like a dress and a tin pot on his head; in one hand he’s holding out an apple sapling like a scepter. The man looks completely insane.

Bill’s talk took the rhetorical form of a sermon, with the line “No one is telling his story!” serving as its thumping refrain. He was determined to cut Chapman’s life to a Christian pattern, and the stories he told were the ones that made the case for beatification. Protoenvironmentalist. Philanthropist. Friend to children and animals and Indians. It was pap, little more, and I wasn’t the only person in the room to grow impatient, especially when Jones got around to the apples, which he praised, incredibly, as “an important source of vitamin C on the frontier.” Just then an old guy behind me poked an elbow in his neighbor’s ribs and whispered, “So does he ever get around to the applejack?”

He did not. Bill was doing lives of the frontier saints, and there was no place in it for alcohol (or mysticism or romance or psychological weirdness of any kind). The sole mention of cider was cider vinegar, “vital as a preservative.” (So
that’s
who John Chapman was, patron saint of pickling!) Afterward, as we were packing up Bill’s tripods and slides, I asked him about the omission. He smiled. “Come on, this is a family show.”

• • •

I believe I got a better glimpse of John Chapman the following morning, when Bill and I set out to canoe a stretch of the Mohican north of Loudonville. Bill wanted to show me a riverside nursery of Chapman’s, and I was curious to see the country from a perspective nearer to Chapman’s own—from the water, I mean, since it was by canoe or pirogue that he usually traveled. On the old maps Chapman carried, the rivers and streams appear as strong black lines against a whole lot of blank space. His America ordered itself around those veiny lines the way ours does around highways. On them you could travel from the spot where Bill and I were starting out all the way to Pittsburgh or to the Mississippi, depending on which way you turned at Marietta.

The sun was not yet up over the trees when we put into the river a few miles above Perrysville, me taking the seat up front since Bill was the more experienced canoer. The water, moving with surprising dispatch for the time of year, looked like a freshly blacktopped road, except where snags flustered its surface, causing it to sparkle. In places spooky mists rose from the surface, and the banks were so thickly lined with trees—giant cottonwoods leaning way out over the water, spectacularly contorted sycamores—that it wasn’t hard to pretend we were pushing through a wilderness. In fact, acres of newly cut corn lay just beyond the line of trees, and at one point I glimpsed a chugging factory through an opening in the leaves. We slipped by mergansers and mallards and saw a pileated woodpecker pile-driving the trunk of a dead tree on the bank. At one point a young wood duck allowed us to follow it for at least a hundred feet, probably trying to lead us away from a nest; judging the coast clear, the bird exploded noisily into flight.

After we’d been paddling along for an hour or so, Bill pointed to a broad table of open land off to our left. This was the site of Greentown, a sprawling Indian village Chapman often visited, at least before it was torched by settlers during the War of 1812. Just a few hundred yards farther on, at the spot where a tiny creek dribbled into the river, was the site of Chapman’s apple tree nursery. I lifted my paddle, and through the trees I could see a rough stubble of corn on a gently curving skin of black earth.

The nursery’s proximity to an Indian town might have troubled another man, but Chapman moved easily between the societies of settler and Native American, even when the two were at war. The Indians regarded Chapman as a brilliant woodsman and medicine man. In addition to the apples, which the Indians were eager for, Chapman brought with him the seeds of a dozen different medicinal plants, including mullein, motherwort, dandelion, wintergreen, pennyroyal, and mayweed, and he was expert in their use.

Chapman’s ability to freely cross borders that other people believed to be fixed and unbreachable—between the red world and the white, between wilderness and civilization, even between this world and the next—was one of the hallmarks of his character and probably the thing that most confounded people about the man, both then and now. It certainly confounded me. From a conventional distance, at least, Chapman’s whole life appears to have been a skein of warring terms and contradictions no ordinary mind could hope to sustain, much less resolve.

As Bill and I glided slowly down the Mohican, each of us alone with his thoughts, I tried to list some of these contradictions, hoping to discover some pattern. Chapman combined the flinty toughness of a Daniel Boone with the gentleness of a Hindu. He was a deeply pious man—sometimes insufferably so, I imagine (“Will you have some news right fresh from Heaven?”)—yet people said he could also enjoy a drink (a pinch of snuff, too) and tell a good joke, often at his own expense. I wondered how he squared the two vocations that occupied his days—that is, bringing to people leading stringent frontier lives two very different kinds of consolation: God’s word and hard drink.

The paradoxes piled up. An agent of civilization, working to domesticate the wilderness with his apple trees and herbs and religion, he was at the same time completely at home in the undomesticated wild, as well as in the company of Native Americans, to whom that civilization was toxic. A barefoot backwoodsman draped in sackcloth, Chapman could hold forth knowledgeably on Swedenborgian theology, perhaps the most intellectually demanding religious doctrine of the time.

Maybe that was the key. Maybe it was Swedenborg’s thought that gave Chapman’s mind just what it needed to dissolve all these paradoxes. In Swedenborg’s philosophy there is no rift between the natural world and the divine. Much like Emerson, who cited him as an influence, Swedenborg claimed that there were one-to-one “correspondences” between natural and spiritual facts, so that close attention and devotion to the former would advance one’s understanding of the latter. Thus an apple tree in bloom was part of the natural process of making fruit at the same time it was a “living sermon from God”; likewise, a crow wheeling overhead was a type of the black forces waiting to overtake men’s souls when they wandered off the Path. The river before you might be that Path, yet a wrong turn on it might land you in Newark, Ohio, a hard-drinking town notorious for gambling and prostitution that Chapman believed offered a literal preview of Hell. Everything before us was doubled; not this world or that, but both.

Fervently held, such beliefs must have lit up the whole landscape—the rivers and trees, the bears and wolves and crows, even the mosquitoes—with a divine glow. Every Path through the woods was capitalized, every deprivation a spiritual test. Minus the Christian symbolism, I imagine Chapman’s was a world much like that inhabited by the ancient Greeks, in which all nature and experience were suffused with divine significance: the storms, the dawns, the strangers at your door. One looked outward, to the land, for meaning, rather than inward or upward.

This was not how nature ordinarily appeared to Americans in Chapman’s time. To most of them, the forest was still a heathen chaos. Remember that by the time the New England transcendentalists began to find the divine in nature (“God’s second book,” they called it), their landscape had been securely under human control for more than a century; Walden Woods was far from a wilderness. For Chapman the natural world even at its wildest was never a falling away or a distraction from the spirit world; it was continuous with it. In some ways this doctrine chimes with the Native Americans’ cosmology, which could account for the kinship Chapman felt for Indians and they for him. Chapman’s mystical teachings veer about as close to pantheism and nature worship as Christianity has ventured. In Puritan New England he’d have been jailed as a heretic.

It may have been Chapman’s conviction that this world is a type or rough draft of the next that allowed him to overlook or dissolve the tensions the rest of us perceive between the realms of matter and spirit, as well as nature and civilization. For him these borders may simply not have been real. So many of the legends about Appleseed depict him as a kind of liminal figure, part man and part . . . well,
some
thing else. The something else, which was perhaps symbolized by the soles of his bare feet callused to a tough hide, is what permitted him to live with one of those feet planted in our world, the other in the wild. He was a kind of satyr without the sex—a Protestant satyr, you might say, moving through these woods as if they were his true home, making his bed in hollowed logs and his breakfast from a butternut tree, keeping the company of wolves.