The sun and the rain and the appleseed

Here’s a late-summer song, if you’d like one

Two generations ago, our neighbor told us, our whole block was an orchard. Just one orchard. The land was subdivided but the trees live on in the landscaping. Three apple trees grow along our western fence line. Two of them are so overshadowed by a skyscraper of a Douglas fir that they’ve never given us more than blossoms.

The third does not have a single branch that can be reached from the ground. Someone, I know, pruned this tree at some point in its life—someone, in the distant past, cared which direction the main branches were pointing. But in the intervening decades the pruned branches have grown back together, so close that in places they have grown into each other. Two thick metal bands are wrapped around one of the longer limbs, the remnants of chain links hanging down. Maybe a swing hung there at one point? Maybe someone tried to train those branches downward? I don’t know. But if the apple tree was ever chained it broke free. There are knotholes in the trunk so deep and old that invasive ivy and Armenian blackberry have taken root in them. At some point this season I will have to go up on an orchard ladder and weed my tree.

The apples start growing about twenty feet up. The bulk of them collect in the crown, twice as high. In mid-August they start plummeting earthward and by late August many of them are the size of two fists put together, their skins striped deep red over cracked yellow. They hit the ground with a smack and send the hens bumbling across the yard, shouting Get out of the way!

Some of them fall directly onto the fence and are cleft neatly in twain. Some stick on the wire like enemy heads on pikes over the battlements. Many roll under the overgrown forsythia and compost over the winter. But some—maybe one in thirty—land in the soft earth of the garden and bruise without splitting. These I take inside and wash.

I scoop up the bruised, smashed fruit with a pitchfork once a week: From this tree, from the apple tree across the yard that is not nearly so big but on a similar trajectory, from the two pear trees in the chicken run that remembered their purpose when we cut the giant cedar down and doubled the daylight hours, from the plum tree that is, thank God, still mostly in arm’s reach. I have a 90-gallon yard waste bin that the city collects every two weeks. When the bin is full the apples sit in piles on the grass, fermenting. I think I must be some kind of fertility goddess to a civilization of wasps and maggots.

I picked probably forty pounds of pears this year, gave away half to friends and family and neighbors, ate pear crumble a la mode and balsamic-drizzled pears and pear muffins and pear soup, cut pears into my cereal and my yogurt, ate pears for breakfast and lunch and brunch, and still threw away ten pounds or more. The chickens all have black faces from gorging themselves on fallen pears and then coating their sticky feathers in dust. We are only now winning the war against the fruit flies in the house, two weeks after I gave up and binned what it had become apparent we couldn’t eat.

“You should get a cider press,” people have suggested to me. “You should try canning them. You should rent a dehydrator and see if you can keep some that way.”

Maybe I should. It feels sinful to leave that much food on the ground—not because kids are starving in Africa but because the fruit is just so damn good. Every pear I didn’t get to is the best pear I’ve ever eaten. Every apple I didn’t rescue is a gift from God I’ve wasted. This is not fruit FOMO, this is cold, hard fact. I know what the pears I didn’t eat taste like because I have eaten probably fifteen of them. I wish I’d eaten thirty. I wish I’d eaten fifty.

I only get the homesteader hankering in late summer, when the mornings start to get cold and I’m afraid I’ll forget what hot afternoons taste like. I want to feel like I’m skilled at preserving good things, that I can handle some abundance.  

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On my walk to work there’s a European chestnut tree so old it has a plaque congratulating it. Its preservation has taken priority over things like replacing the broken asphalt over its roots, or the smashed sidewalk around its trunk. The sidewalk in particular looks like it’s been devoured, Old Man Willow-style, by the expanding trunk. Soon the road around it will be carpeted in spiny green husks for thirty feet in every direction.

Chestnut trees are very punk rock around here. Every October the local anarchist anti-property types hold a Chestnut Festival in a parking lot downtown. They hand out flyers about chestnut cultivation, sell chestnut seedlings and chestnut cookbooks, and give away bowls of chestnut bread and chestnut soup while ska-punk bands with names like The Window-Smashing Job Creators sing songs about Communism. They want us all to be eating chestnuts. They want chestnuts to sustain us in the apocalypse.

I have a zine they produced explaining that for centuries Castanea dentata, the American chestnut, was a major caloric staple for Indigenous people and European settlers in the eastern United States. Every October, it says, chestnuts littered the ground knee-high in forests in New York, Ohio, Kentucky, north Georgia. The entire population of America at the time, and the combined animal population of every forest, couldn’t eat them all. Then, in the early 1900s, a blight almost wiped out the species.

Chestnut blight’s Patient Zero has been traced to a plant collector and diplomat named Thomas Hogg, who sold a Japanese chestnut, probably the first ever introduced to America, to a gardener in 1876. Japanese chestnuts are the most blight-resistant of the chestnut family, so it was hardy enough to carry the disease across an ocean and live to spread it after replanting.

Thomas Hogg was renowned in the Victorian horticulturalist community for his generosity and integrity. He was a gentleman and a scientist. He didn’t try to profit off his rare Japanese cultivars, but distributed them at low cost to others who would propagate them. He also introduced the first-ever Japanese maples to America. In most sources, however, chestnut blight is all he is remembered for.

It’s an ongoing pandemic—most new chestnut saplings still die from blight. Attempts to cultivate blight-resistant American chestnuts have not yet taken wide hold. The older trees that survive in the eastern United States are anomalies, possessing some inborn resistance (or dumb luck) that most trees don’t have.

There’s a Wikipedia page about the American chestnut that includes a list of notable remaining chestnut trees. That, apparently, is the state of things, that the remaining chestnuts don’t even have their own separate list, just a header on the main page. Out east, a single tree is worth remarking on – the Wikipedia list includes “a lone but perfect American Chestnut tree” growing on a college campus in Iowa.  

I didn’t know what an American chestnut tree looked like before I learned that close to ninety-nine percent of them were dead. Articles about them often note that they were a staple food for the American passenger pigeon—a way of linking an extinction we’ve already gotten our heads around to one most of us don’t know about. We can’t imagine the eastern deciduous forests our great-great-grandparents walked around in, because we don’t know what a stand of chestnut trees thousands strong looks like. In 2021 the largest remaining stand of trees in the United States, covering some 60 acres, succumbed to blight and was harvested for timber.

Last week I drove to the courthouse for a hearing. On my way I noticed a row of chestnut trees on the road along the lake, distinctive with their clusters of spiny green balls. The other day, coming off a Zoom webinar in which only one person spoke, without pause, for the entire two hours, I abandoned the office like a man running out of a cave and walked around the lake to go and count them.

There are fourteen. All but one are heavy with fruit. These are probably European chestnuts, like the old one on my walk to work—not American chestnuts but the closest relative, somewhat more blight-resistant and an equally generous producer of food. There’s a good chance the big tree is their parent.

I plan to come back in the weeks to come and see how the chestnuts are getting on. There’s a whole community of foragers who show up “day and night” (per the plaque) to gather up what the big one drops, but maybe this little grove, set back from the main thoroughfare, gets less traffic. If I can gather a couple pounds of them I’ll be set for the whole season. This fall I intend to make chestnut bread and chestnut soup. I’ll eat chestnuts cooked in the pan with brussels sprouts in butter and maple syrup. I’ll roast them with apples and squash. I’ll rip my fingernails to pieces getting them out of the husk and it will be so unimaginably worth it.

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I’ve learned, now that I have my eyes peeled for chestnuts, that there are at least two American chestnut trees in this town. They grow on the grounds of a funeral home between a Walmart and a Costco. Per the local newspaper they’re 177 years old, almost twice as old as the European chestnut I see every day, and each six and a half feet in diameter. The local government has voted to give them prizes and a special “champion” designation.

I plan to make a pilgrimage this weekend, if I can. I hate to say it, but it feels a little bit like a matter of time.

I’ve had the thought, in grandiose moments when my lawn is mown and the yard is not ankle-deep in apple mush: What if I planted an American chestnut? What if we ripped out the stump where the cedar came down and helped bring back the tree America lost?

But it feels like tempting fate, planting more trees. The ones we have live on because they live further away from the blight than the wind can carry it. Every new tree, young and vulnerable, is a weak link. If one tree in this town gets it, every single chestnut will follow, and then we will have some small inkling of how Thomas Hogg might have felt had he lived to see the chestnut population of New York start to fail. 

You plant a fruit tree in the hope that in fifty years, somebody who may or may not be you will have more than they know what to do with. I am a willing gatherer and a grudging waster of late-summer abundance, but somebody else will have to plant the chestnuts. Last year I wouldn’t have known what to look for; this year, I’ll be ready to stuff my pockets as soon as they fall.