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Chapter
1
Desire: Sweetness
Plant: The Apple
(Malus
domestica)
If
you happened to find yourself on the banks of the Ohio River on a particular
afternoon in the spring of 1806—somewhere just to the north of Wheeling,
West Virginia, say—you would probably have noticed a strange makeshift
craft drifting lazily down the river. At the time, this particular stretch
of the Ohio, wide and brown and bounded on both sides by steep shoulders
of land thick with oaks and hickories, fairly boiled with river traffic,
as a ramshackle armada of keelboats and barges ferried settlers from the
comparative civilization of Pennsylvania to the wilderness of the Northwest
Territory.
The
peculiar craft you’d have caught sight of that afternoon consisted of
a pair of hollowed-out logs that had been lashed together to form a rough
catamaran, a sort of canoe plus sidecar. In one of the dugouts lounged
the figure of a skinny man of about thirty, who may or may not have been
wearing a burlap coffee sack for a shirt and a tin pot for a hat. According
to the man in Jefferson County who deemed the scene worth recording, the
fellow in the canoe appeared to be snoozing without a care in the world,
evidently trusting in the river to take him wherever it was he wanted
to go. The other hull, his sidecar, was riding low in the water under
the weight of a small mountain of seeds that had been carefully blanketed
with moss and mud to keep them from drying out in the sun.
The
fellow snoozing in the canoe was John Chapman, already well known to people
in Ohio by his nickname: Johnny Appleseed. He was on his way to Marietta,
where the Muskingum River pokes a big hole into the Ohio’s northern bank,
pointing straight into the heart of the Northwest Territory. Chapman’s
plan was to plant a tree nursery along one of that river’s as-yet-unsettled
tributaries, which drain the fertile, thickly forested hills of central
Ohio as far north as Mansfield. In all likelihood, Chapman was coming
from Allegheny County in western Pennsylvania, to which he returned each
year to collect apple seeds, separating them out from the fragrant mounds
of pomace that rose by the back door of every cider mill. A single bushel
of apple seeds would have been enough to plant more than three hundred
thousand trees; there’s no way of telling how many bushels of seed Chapman
had in tow that day, but it’s safe to say his catamaran was bearing several
whole orchards into the wilderness.
The
image of John Chapman and his heap of apple seeds riding together down
the Ohio has stayed with me since I first came across it a few years ago
in an out-of-print biography. The scene, for me, has the resonance of
myth—a myth about how plants and people learned to use each other, each
doing for the other things they could not do for themselves, in the bargain
changing each other and improving their common lot.
Henry
David Thoreau once wrote that “it is remarkable how closely the history
of the apple tree is connected with that of man,” and much of the American
chapter of that story can be teased out of Chapman’s story. It’s the story
of how pioneers like him helped domesticate the frontier by seeding it
with Old World plants. “Exotics,” we’re apt to call these species today
in disparagement, yet without them the American wilderness might never
have become a home. What did the apple get in return? A golden age: untold
new varieties and half a world of new habitat.
As
an emblem of the marriage between people and plants, the design of Chapman’s
peculiar craft strikes me as just right, implying as it does a relation
of parity and reciprocal exchange between its two passengers. More than
most of us do, Chapman seems to have had a knack for looking at the world
from the plants’ point of view—“pomocentrically,” you might say. He understood
he was working for the apples as much as they were working for him. Perhaps
that’s why he sometimes likened himself to a bumblebee, and why he would
rig up his boat the way he did. Instead of towing his shipment of seeds
behind him, Chapman lashed the two hulls together so they would travel
down the river side by side.
We
give ourselves altogether too much credit in our dealings with other species.
Even the power over nature that domestication supposedly represents is
overstated. It takes two to perform that particular dance, after all,
and plenty of plants and animals have elected to sit it out. Try as they
might, people have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, whose
highly nutritious acorns remain far too bitter for humans to eat. Evidently
the oak has such a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel—which obligingly
forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn or so (admittedly, the
estimate is Beatrix Potter’s)—that the tree has never needed to enter
into any kind of formal arrangement with us.
The
apple has been far more eager to do business with humans, and perhaps
nowhere more so than in America. Like generations of other immigrants
before and after, the apple has made itself at home here. In fact, the
apple did such a convincing job of this that most of us wrongly assume
the plant is a native. (Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who knew a thing or
two about natural history, called it “the American fruit.”) Yet there
is a sense—a biological, not just metaphorical sense—in which this is,
or has become, true, for the apple transformed itself when it came to
America. Bringing boatloads of seed onto the frontier, Johnny Appleseed
had a lot to do with that process, but so did the apple itself. No mere
passenger or dependent, the apple is the hero of its own story.
Excerpted
from The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Copyright 2001 by
Michael Pollan. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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