Johnny Appleseed

It’s the last two weeks of our US summer road trip.  After Labor Day we’ll pull back into the driveway of whatever goes for a normal fall here at the Back Road Café. 

Since lazy America seems to travel only by car and superhighway, let’s close out the road trip by celebrating two great American long distance walkers.  Both are named John.  I’ll keep you in suspense til next week for who I’m thinking about besides Johnny Appleseed.

If Johnny Appleseed had lived 175 years later, he would have been a hippie or a Jesus freak.  As it is, he is an American icon of free spirit generosity, frontier expansion and the very uber-Americanness of apples. 

But how did he really intend those apples to be used?  Why did farmers welcome him so enthusiastically?

He seems mythic, but he was a real guy.  John Chapman was his name, lived 1774 to 1845, wandered the Midwest his whole life sowing apple seeds.  With no family or fixed address, he handed out free, to farmers and frontier pioneers of the Ohio River Valley, not only apple seedlings, but also news from the road, and his mystical Swedenborgian faith. 

He slept outside, was kind to animals and befriended the feared native folks.  Barefoot, he  dressed in a burlap sack, a tin pot for his hat.  Sort of a John the Baptist, St. Francis type, wild nature-loving weirdo.  A contemporary described his preaching:

"We can hear him read now, just as he did that summer day, when we were busy quilting upstairs, and he lay near the door, his voice rising denunciatory and thrillin—strong and loud as the roar of wind and waves, then soft and soothing as the balmy airs that quivered the morning-glory leaves about his gray beard. His was a strange eloquence at times, and he was undoubtedly a man of genius.”

During his lifetime popular magazines called him a living legend and he fast entered the American public imagination, appearing in novels, TV shows, songs, and even Apple video tutorials (get it – Apple?) and most insidiously, a 1948 Disney movie for kids.  My post war baby boom generation was just the first (it still shows on the Disney channel) for whom Johnny became a wimpy, slightly lost soul until an angel encourages him to go West with just his seeds and tin pot hat, to befriend animals, and to sing a lot of catchy tunes.  The most catchy was a cheerful and easy sung grace, “The Lord is good to me, and so I thank the Lord, for giving me the things I need, the sun and the rain and the apple seed, the Lord is good to me.”  I still sing that grace at camp and church.

Popular food journalist Michael Pollan recently challenged this American myth by debunking the happy seed sower.  No, he wrote in The Botany of Desire, Johnny Appleseed was an “American Dionysus” a carefree planter and probably consumer of intoxicants.  Johnny didn’t give away apple trees so settlers could make that most American dessert, apple pie, or even fulfill the vain promise that eating one a day would keep the doctor away. 

No, Pollan says, frontier families welcomed Johnny into the cabin because they wanted to get loaded.  Sugar was a rare and expensive commodity on the frontier.  Some eschewed it because of its source in the slave trade.  But apples  - now there was an easy source of sweetness, especially in the northern colonies and what came to be called the Northwest Territory, that is, Ohio.  And you need sugar for fermentation.  Cider is easy to make quickly from apples, and cider then becomes hard cider in just a few weeks. Johnny brings more apples, we’re all happier.  Johnny WAS a hippie freak, he was like the old dope peddler, he helped those hardworking frontier folks kick back.

Pollan’s ideas are entertaining, but he often writes just for effect and attention (most of us writers do).  I think he may be exaggerating both Johnny’s insidious intent and the extent of frontier alcoholism.  Most of Europe at that same time consumed low proof booze daily. 

But his revisionist history is a good reminder of how we Americans do love to mythologize and romanticize our folk heroes, from Pocohontas to Babe Ruth.  Johnny Appleseed sounds to me like a complicated and creative person, not a sappy Disney one-dimensional man.  (Don’t get me going on what Disney has done to so many folk heroes.  Our European readers may now chime in on the Disney crimes against Victor Hugo, A.A. Milne and P.L. Travers.)

But I still like Johnny Appleseed.  Why?  Because he walked.  And worked with nature, not over and above it. Because he had a spiritual life and message (not sure what, but his friend called it “strangely eloquent.”).  And that he was generous.  Today he’d be suspect, followed and attacked under “stand your ground” laws.  Or mocked by agribusiness for trying to keep the gene pool diverse.   Or dismissed as a PETA fanatic (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).  Or thrown in a drunk tank. 

Sounds like my kind of guy.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter