The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (6 page)

As I thought about the scattering of settlers along these streams who would welcome Chapman into their homes, offering a meal and a bed to this strange man in rags, I was reminded of how the gods of classical mythology would sometimes appear at people’s doors dressed as beggars. Just to be on the safe side, the Greeks would shower hospitality on even the most dubious stranger, because you never knew when the ragged fellow on your doorstep might turn out to be Athena in disguise. It’s true that Johnny Appleseed’s fame usually preceded him, but you couldn’t blame a settler family for wondering if the man who’d appeared at their door didn’t have something otherworldly about him. There was the gleam in his eyes that everyone remarked on, and the news he brought of other worlds (the wild, the Indian, the heavenly); and, of course, there was the precious gift of those apples.

As we glided through the woods to the music of birds and the splish-swirl of our paddles stitching the black water, I tried to summon an image of Chapman. I fell back on one of the slides Bill had shown the night before at the historical society. This one was an etching that had accompanied an 1871 article about Chapman in
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,
and it depicted Chapman as a sinewy, barefoot figure with a goatish beard, wearing, again, something that looks very much like a toga or a dress. The effect was of a creature part man and part woman. Yet it was even more ambiguous than that, since the slight figure with the goat’s beard also seems to be melting into, or out of, the shadowy trees all around. What a strange image, I remember thinking, and now I thought I understood why: Chapman appeared in it as a faintly Christianized version of some pagan wood god. And that seemed just about right.

By the time I entertained this little epiphany, the sun had risen high enough behind the trees to flare wildly between the cottonwood leaves, almost like a strobe, momentarily turning the riverscape into a silhouette of itself. I saw Chapman now as clearly as I could hope to. Johnny Appleseed was no Christian saint—that left out too much of who he was, what he stood for in our mythology. Who he was, I realized, was the American Dionysus.

After the river trip my interest in Bill Jones’s John Chapman began to flicker. Which was too bad for me, because we still had a lot of ground to cover between here and Fort Wayne, where I planned to catch a flight home. I found myself tuning out a touching story about Chapman buying a new set of china for a family who’d lost all their possessions in a fire. It felt as though there were now two John Chapmans riding with us in the car, Bill’s Christian saint and my pagan god, and the front seat began to feel too small for the both of them. This made for an extremely long ride to Fort Wayne.

When at last I got home, I went looking for Appleseed again, this time in the library. I read everything I could find about Dionysus, about whom I knew only the usual high school basics. Teaching men how to ferment the juice of the grape, Dionysus had brought civilization the gift of wine. This was more or less the same gift Johnny Appleseed was bringing to the frontier: because American grapes weren’t sweet enough to be fermented successfully, the apple served as the American grape, cider the American wine. But as I delved deeper into the myth of Dionysus, I realized there was much more to his story, and the strangely changeable god who began to come into focus bore a remarkable resemblance to John Chapman. Or at least to “Johnny Appleseed,” who, I became convinced, is Dionysus’s American son.

Like Johnny Appleseed, Dionysus was a figure of the fluid margins, slipping back and forth between the realms of wildness and civilization, man and woman, man and god, beast and man. I found Dionysus depicted variously as a wild man with foliage sprouting from his head, a goat, a bull, a tree, and a woman. Friedrich Nietzsche paints Dionysus as a figure able to dissolve “all the rigid and hostile barriers” between nature and culture.

The Greeks regarded Dionysus as the antithesis of Apollo, god of clear boundaries, order, and light, of man’s firm control over nature. Dionysian revelry melts every Apollonian line, so that, as Nietzsche writes, “alienated, hostile, or subjugated nature . . . celebrates her reconciliation with her lost son, man.” By worshiping Dionysus and getting drunk on his wine, the Athenians temporarily returned to nature, to a time when, as the classicist Jane Harrison writes, “man is still to his own thinking brother of plants and animals.” The odd, ecstatic worship of Dionysus, which needed no temple, always took place outside the city, returning religion to the woods where it had begun.

I learned also that Dionysus was the god originally responsible for the marriage of people and plants that John Chapman’s double-hulled canoe had symbolized for me. In
The Golden Bough,
James Frazer says that, in addition to the grapevine, Dionysus was also the patron of cultivated trees and specifically credits him with the discovery of the apple. He was in fact the god of domestication itself, bringing “wisdom from the very breast of nature” (Nietzsche), teaching men not only to ferment wine but also to hitch their plow to the ox. Dionysus brought wild plants into the house of civilization, but by the same token his own untamed presence reminded people of the untamed nature on which that house always rests, somewhat unsteadily. The same, I realized, was true of Johnny Appleseed.

Nothing better captures the paradox of Dionysus’s double role, as a force for domestication
and
wildness, than his involvement with grapes and wine. Wine itself is a peculiarly liminal substance, poised on the edge of nature and culture as well as civility and abandon. It is truly an extraordinary thing, this artful transformation of raw nature—a fruit!—into a substance with the power to alter human perception. Yet wine is an achievement of civilization we’re apt to take for granted or condemn, perhaps especially as Americans, for whom alcohol has always presented a moral problem.

The Greeks, who were much better at holding contradictory ideas in their minds than we are, understood that intoxication could be divine or wretched, a ceremony of human communion or madness, depending on the care taken in handling its magic. “Wine is rudderless,” Plato warned. (He advised mixing it with water and serving it in tiny cups.) Dionysian revelry, which begins in ecstasy and often ends in blood, embodies this truth: the same wine that loosens the knots of inhibition and reveals nature’s most beneficent face can also dissolve the bonds of civilization and unleash ungovernable passions.

This is why, of all the gods, “Dionysus is, for humans, fiercest and most sweet,” according to Euripides. If Apollo is a god of concentrated light, Dionysus, worshiped at night, is a god of dispersed sweetness. Under his influence “the earth flows, flows beneath us, then milk flows, and wine flows, and nectar flows, like flame.” Under the spell of Dionysus and his wine, all nature answers to our desires.

As for the fierce part of the Dionysian drama, this Johnny Appleseed did not play. He was a far more gentle, less sexual being than Dionysus, though his gender does sometimes seem equally amorphous. (Come to think of it, Chapman
did
sponsor sex orgies—but only among apple trees.) The flight from civilization back to nature in America tends to be a solitary and ascetic pursuit, having more to do with wilderness than wildness. Johnny Appleseed was very much an
American
Dionysus—innocent and mild. In this he may have helped establish the benign, see-no-evil mood that characterizes the Dionysian strain in American culture, from transcendentalist Concord to the Summer of Love.

• • •

“We can hear him now,” a woman who had known Chapman reminisced in the 1871
Harper’s
article. “Just as we did that summer day, when we were busy quilting upstairs, and he lay near the door, his voice rising denunciatory and thrilling—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.”

Imagine how riveting such a figure must have appeared on the American frontier, this gentle wild man who arrived at your door as if straight from the bosom of nature (wreathed in morning glory leaves, no less). He came bearing ecstatic news from other worlds and, with his apple trees and cider, promising a measure of sweetness in this one. To a pioneer laboring under the brute facts of frontier life, confronting daily the indifferent face of nature, Johnny Appleseed’s words and seeds offered release from the long sentence of ordinariness, held out a hope of transcendence.

Under the spell of this otherworldly figure, the world outside one’s cabin window suddenly appeared very different, no longer quite so literal or firmly lashed to the here and now. Eyes blazing, Johnny Appleseed would show you how to see the divine in nature, his “strange eloquence” transforming the everyday landscape into a vivid theater of appearances. You could tell yourself this was good Christian doctrine, but truly it was mystical and ecstatic, dwelling more on the all-around sweetness of nature than the singular light of Christ above. And if his words didn’t by themselves make the earth flow and the milk and wine and nectar flow like flame, there were then the apple trees he planted, sacramental in their own way, and, perhaps most potent of all, the cider those trees would produce. For one of the wonders of alcohol is that it suffuses the world around us, this cold indifferent planet, with the warm glow of meaning. (Or at least spins that illusion.) This was the gift of sweetness he brought into the country.

• • •

Though Johnny Appleseed may have lacked Dionysus’s complementary fierceness, he did deliver in his person a thrilling, scary reminder of the nearness of savagery and the tenuousness of civilization’s grip. In both his person and his stories, he temporarily dissolved the stark opposition of wilderness and civilization that organized frontier life. I imagine that pioneers struggling to get by in the wilderness regarded Appleseed as a welcome contrast gainer. However straitened your frontier existence might be, you couldn’t gaze on John Chapman without counting your blessings: at least you had leather shoes and a warm hearth, a sociable table and a roof over your head. Your guest’s tales of subsisting one winter on butternuts alone, or sharing a bed of leaves with a wolf, would have warmed the draftiest cabin, deepened the savor of the most meager meal. Sometimes the cause of civilization is best served by a hard stare into the soul of its opposite. Some such principle may have underwritten Dionysian revelry in ancient Athens—and the impulse to invite someone like John Chapman into one’s home in nineteenth-century Ohio.

• • •

Like Dionysus, John Chapman was an agent of domestication. With every cider orchard he helped plant, the wilderness became that much more hospitable and homelike. (It just happened to be a home he didn’t care to live in himself.) But the apple was only one of the many Old World plants John Chapman brought with him into the country; there was the small pharmacopoeia of medicinal herbs, too, and quite a few weeds. I met people in Ohio who still curse Chapman for introducing stinking fennel, a troublesome weed he planted everywhere he went in the belief it could keep a house safe from malaria. (Even today, Ohioans call it “Johnnyweed.”) His plantings helped remake the New World landscape in a more familiar image, in the process contributing to an ecological transformation of America the magnitude of which we’ve just begun to appreciate.

Everyone knows that the settlement of the West depended on the rifle and the ax, yet the seed was no less instrumental in guaranteeing Europeans’ success in the New World. (The fact that John Chapman is remembered today along with frontier heroes such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett suggests that maybe we knew this before we completely understood it.) The Europeans brought with them to the frontier a kind of portable ecosystem that allowed them to re-create their accustomed way of life—the grasses their livestock needed to thrive, herbs to keep themselves healthy, Old World fruits and flowers to make life comfortable. This biological settlement of the West often went on beneath the notice of the settlers themselves, who brought along weed seeds in the cracks of their boot soles, grass seeds in the feed bags of their horses, and microbes in their blood and gut. (None of these introductions passed beneath the notice of the Native Americans, however.) John Chapman, by planting his millions of seeds, simply went about this work more methodically than most.

In the process of changing the land, Chapman also changed the apple—or rather, made it possible for the apple to change itself. If Americans like Chapman had planted only grafted trees—if Americans had eaten rather than drunk their apples—the apple would not have been able to remake itself and thereby adapt to its new home. It was the seeds, and the cider, that gave the apple the opportunity to discover by trial and error the precise combination of traits required to prosper in the New World. From Chapman’s vast planting of nameless cider apple seeds came some of the great American cultivars of the nineteenth century.

Looked at from this angle, planting seeds instead of clones was an extraordinary act of faith in the American land, a vote in favor of the new and unpredictable as against the familiar and European. In this Chapman was making the pioneers’ classic wager, betting on the fresh possibilities that might grow from seeds planted in the redemptive American ground. This happens to be nature’s wager too, hybridization being one of the ways nature brings newness into the world. John Chapman’s millions of seeds and thousands of miles changed the apple, and the apple changed America. No wonder Johnny Appleseed has shaken off the historians and biographers and climbed into our mythology.

• • •

As far as I know, John Chapman never set foot in Geneva, New York, but there is an orchard there where I caught my last and in some ways most vivid glimpse of him. Here on the banks of Lake Geneva, in excellent apple-growing country, a government outfit called the Plant Genetic Resources Unit maintains the world’s largest collection of apple trees. Some 2,500 different varieties have been gathered from all over the world and set out here in pairs, as if on a beached botanical ark. The card catalog of this fifty-acre tree archive runs the pomological gamut from Adam’s Pearmain, an antique English apple, to the German Zucalmagio. In between a browser will find almost every variety discovered in America since the Roxbury Russet distinguished itself in a cider orchard outside Boston in 1645.