Bitter Feral Children: On Wild Apples and Becoming Native
The past and future of apples "sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream".
…the apple emulates man’s independence and enterprise. It is not simply carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and maintain themselves.
— Henry David Thoreau, Wild Apples
I.
I know only fragments of my ancestry. On one side a German and a French-Canadian blacksmith converged on the dusty Kansas plain where the horizon stretches like God’s clothesline. On the other an Italian fisherman from a speck of an island off Palermo washed up in New Orleans, and another from Senigallia married an Irish woman in New England in that once scandalous blending of poor Catholics.
Apples are like the American people themselves — mongrels and wanderers who have forgotten their lineage. Ruffians that spring unbidden from roadside gravel and railroad embankments, reinventing themselves with every generation. Their children leave the farm, get tattooed with russet, move to the city, take new names.
They’ve claimed the temperate zones of the globe as their birthright. It would be hard to imagine the limestone orchards of Normandy without them, or the rocky ridges of New England, or here in the Pacific Northwest, where a handful of apple trees flank many a fog-whipped old barn. But they were born in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan, where they still blanket hillsides in a quilt of varied shapes and colors, interweaving with wild apricots. The biggest city in Kazakhstan is Almaty, which means apple-rich. The Soviet name for it was Alma-ata, grandfather of apples.
Long ago they traveled down from those peaks, roving pilgrims who tracked the footprints of trade and empire. Their seeds were buried in the felt-lined robes of Bukharan Silk Road traders following mulberry-paper maps, stuffed in the satchels of legionaries bound for the damp garrisons of Roman Britain alongside salt pork and smoked cheese, stuck to the moldering saddlebag bibles of frostbitten Jesuits planting mission orchards in the American Northeast, and clutched in the salt-raw hands of Basque sailors introducing new cider varieties to Normandy.
In every outpost of the apple's diaspora, transformation followed arrival. They crossed freely with wild crabs in the damp woodlands of Europe, the ancient forests of China, and the untamed edges of American settlement. Each valley and weather pattern shaped new expressions of appleness, the fruit's essence a negotiation between inherited memory and the particular demands of its adopted soil.
II.
My son Sam is almost a year old now, and people say he looks like me, sometimes with the caveat that he’s cuter, sturdier, or that his ears are more proportional to the size of his head. But if our genes worked like apples, he might just as likely have come out looking like the Dalai Lama. People would talk.
Many fruit trees don’t grow true to type, but apples take it to the extreme. An apple seed is a ledger of chaos, and every core cradles a quintet of possible futures. Plant the seeds of the rose-tinted sweet-tart Pink Pearl and chances are you’ll get a white-fleshed spitter. The character of its parents are in there somewhere, but often it’s hard to tell.
This genetic volatility spells disaster or at least a giant pain in the ass for the breeder trying to unearth the next big dessert apple or thread the needle between sweetness and shelf stability and redness and crunch. Creating the industry’s latest darling, the Cosmic Crisp, took more than twenty years of development by Washington State University and more than $10 million to breed (followed by an additional $11 million in marketing).1
But some embrace these bitter feral children — namely, hogs and cidermakers. And Henry David Thoreau of course, who held forth at great length upon them and howled about the replacement of seedling trees with grafted orchards, the loss of their racy and wild American flavors, sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.
Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists of pomological gentlemen. Their “Favorites” and “Non-suches” and “Seek-no-farthers,” when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very tame and forgetable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest, and have no real tang nor smack to them.
— that lovable grumbler Thoreau
Old cidermakers knew that the best ciders come from a balance of four apple categories, each one bringing something the others can't. The sharps offer acid like a razor, like my personal favorite Ashmead’s Kernel or the Harrison — once thought extinct until a lone tree was discovered on a New Jersey farm a week before it was slated to meet the axe. Bittersweets like the English Dabinett or the French Reine de Pommes bring rough tannins that grab at your tongue like sandpaper or a rock. Usually unpleasant to eat, they give the drink its guts and spine. The bittersharps contain those rare birds like Kingston Black and Porter’s Perfection that can stand on their own in a barrel and have acid and tannin both. And last the sweets, better suited for eating but useful to bump up the sugar levels of the blend.
A man could exhaust himself hunting down these varieties and mixing them like a chemist. Or he could do what his great-grandfather did and gather up the small fruits that fell from unknown seedlings and rolled down a hill to stack themselves four feet deep against a rock wall2. Often this gathering of motley volunteers combines in a way impossible to recreate with cultivated varieties. Picture a Burgundian winemaker fermenting grapes he found in the ditch by the roadside. A French mob would gather and wheel out the rusty guillotine still sitting in someone’s garage. But in cider, it’s tradition.
III.
Wild seedlings were the norm in early America and provided this multitude of flavors free of charge. And cider wasn’t just a drink — it was currency, medicine, breakfast. Every farmstead had its orchard, as essential as a plow and horses. George Washington swapped barrels of it for votes. Grumpy John Adams started each day with a tankard (for health reasons), and claimed it made him as frisky as a lambkin among the clover. Ben Franklin recorded a Native American’s riff on Genesis: It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider.
The average 18th century New Englander tipped back thirty-five gallons of cider a year, and settlers applying for land grants were required to plant at least fifty apple and pear trees to claim title and prove they were there to stay. Even children drank ciderkin, made by rehydrating pomace after pressing to eke out the last of the sugars. It yielded a low alcohol brew that was safer to drink than water and got kids the right amount of buzzed.
No single figure did more to propagate America's apple chaos than John Chapman, that peculiar frontiersman known as Johnny Appleseed. Unlike the Disney version who trailed through the forest singing to animals (very Snow White of him), the real Chapman had a hard edge.3 He walked barefoot through Ohio River rattlesnake country, dressed in a coffee sack with holes cut for his head and arms, seared his wounds with a red-hot iron, and carried with him one indispensable cargo: seeds harvested from cider press leavings. He traveled ahead of westward expansion, selecting rich and secluded spots in river valleys to plant nurseries of seedling apple trees, then returned to sell them to settlers when they arrived. His trees would grow for years before the first wagon rolled into the valley. When they did arrive, the pioneering families would find, already waiting for them, the raw material for the only safe and reliable beverage they knew.
Chapman’s theology shaped his horticulture. A disciple of Emmanuel Swedenborg, he denounced grafting as a form of torture inflicted on trees. Only God could perfect an apple. His nurseries became cathedrals of chance, each tree a rebellion against the grafted orchards creeping east. It was a quintessentially American approach — democratic, expansive, unpredictable — and it directly fueled America's cider culture. Each farm wound up with its own unique blend of apples, creating ciders that expressed the particularity of place. You couldn't travel ten miles without encountering flavors that existed nowhere else on earth.
IV.
Nevertheless, our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock.
— our guy Thoreau
Thoreau thought the era of the wild apple would soon be past, those days when vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out.4 Yet despite his grim prediction and the destruction of many wild things, two hundred years later the gravel-edge seedling still drips with small, spotted fruit that drivers race past without noticing. The drooping lean-to at the farm’s edge is still bordered by knotted veterans, bark twisted and hollow but churning out bitter-bright gifts each fall.
Apples, of course, are immigrants. We brought them here. Men like Chapman took advantage of their genetic disobedience to fuel a cider-soaked frontier, and they thrived not despite their anarchy, but because of it. Clearly they belong here. But can they truly be called native? Can people of ancestry that at some point threads back across the Atlantic become native? I say yes. Apples have sure done a better job of it than we have though.5
For man I think it is a question of generations, of time spent not just in a place, but being continuously re-made by it. My own ancestry and that of many Americans is a history of departures, each generation setting roots only to have their children pull them up. My grandmother was born in Louisiana, my mother in Bermuda, myself in San Diego, my son in Oregon. We need to stay put, damn it!
Being made and re-made by a place means surrendering to its particular mercies. In the Andes you eat a hundred varieties of potatoes because they grow well in the thin air. In the Arctic you eat whale fat because that’s what the ocean gives you. Your shelter rises from the material lying around — adobe baked from desert creek-bottom clay, timber hewn from the Cascade forests, Nebraska sod cut like dark bread. Your stories and myths revolve around the quirks of the landscape.
By those metrics, almost no modern human is native anywhere. But the seeds of nativeness are still lying around. Fragments of those myths exist in the local folklore around beloved apple varieties and their wild cousins, seedlings planted by raccoon or shoeless burlap-clad mystic roaming the frontier. Though it will take generations and the stripping away of modern conveniences, the first step towards becoming native here might be to take a cue from feral apples. To stray into the woods, as that unkempt prophet of the half-wild said (perchance), and to run wild and maintain ourselves.
The Cosmic Crisp apple, bred from Honeycrisp × Enterprise, underwent breeding at Washington State University from 1997 - 2019. WSU gets $1 per tree sold in royalties and a fairly crazy 4.75% fee on 40-pound boxes exceeding $20.
Thoreau describes this particular situation in Wild Apples. The owner then cut the tree down to make sure no one could make them into cider.
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England. You may still wander through old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider. Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted fruit, no native apple-trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, wrhen those vast straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see nobody planting trees to-day in such out-of-the-way places, along the lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,—and the end of it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a barrel.
Don't yell at me, I'm aware that Native Americans were here first and are still around. They certainly have first claim to native status, and we should learn from them. But everyone was native to somewhere once and I don't have a whole lot of hope for the natural world if we decide that because of identity politics non-natives have no chance of ever becoming native.
Poetic history, love it.