Trees II

There’s a lovely passage in “Paper Pills,” the second story in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio:

“The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and left her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg. In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy’s hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. One runs from tree to tree over the frosted ground picking the gnarled, twisted apples and filling his pockets with them. Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.”

I first read the story in high school, and the poetry and science of “twisted little apples” remain vivid. In the first autumn after reading it, I walked through an old orchard that was no longer harvested, half-wild and overgrown with weeds and saplings. The day was bright and cold, probably in mid-October, and the first frost had already come and gone. The apples, even in summer, were hard, wormy and irregularly shaped, like small green gourds. By mid-autumn they were spotted and some were brown and puckered into angry little faces. I bite into one and it was achingly sweet. I felt as though I had performed an experiment and confirmed Anderson’s metaphor.

In A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America, Donald Culross Peattie describes three varieties of wild apple – the wild sweet crab, the Iowa crab and the southern crab. The first I knew growing up in Ohio. The apples were small and inedible, though squirrels and yellow jackets savored them. Their name seems appropriate because the trees were often crabbed – twisted and dense with small branches. Two fields behind our house was a crab apple about 20 feet tall and 30 feet across, shaped like an inverted bowl. Generations of kids had turned it into a den or clubhouse. At noon on a summer day, the interior was almost as dark as a closet. In spring, the inelegant crab apple turned into a stack of pink and white flowers. In “The Apple Trees at Olema,” Robert Hass notes “the raw, white, backlit flaring/of the apple blossoms,” and Peattie dramatizes the crab apple’s seasonal renewal:

“Long after the orchard Apple trees have come into bloom, the Wild Sweet Crab still stands in its dense thickets on the edges of abandoned fields, along fence rows, behind the moving dunes of the Great Lakes, naked, leafless, dark, secretive, and spiny, as if it intended never to awake to the seduction of spring. Then, when the petals of the cultivated Apple are falling, this Crab at last puts forth its little new leaves, tinged red and very downy when they unfold from the bud, and at the same time the flowers open swiftly. So swiftly, indeed, that suddenly the dead-seeming thicket seems to burst into bloom upon the naked wood.”

In February 1860, Thoreau delivered a lecture titled “Wild Apples.” Shortly before his death in May 1862, he sent a revised version to the Atlantic Monthly, where it was published six months later. It’s one of Thoreau’s best essays, dense with learning, observation and humor. Here’s a passage that reminds me of Anderson’s but with greater botanical detail:

“In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the trees. I saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit than I remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with their weight, like a barberry bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new character. Even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect, spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles supporting the lower ones that they looked like pictures of banyan trees.”

And this, from the section titled “The `Frozen-Thawed’ Apple”:

“Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, -- for they are extremely sensitive to its rays, -- are found to be filled with a rich, sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, and your jaws are the cider-press.”

At the end of the essay, Thoreau foresees the extinction of the wild apple: “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!” This is the playful Thoreau, flourishing in the middle of what could have turned into an ecological rant. Thoreau “knocking off wild apples” reminds me of the pleasure Samuel Johnson took in rolling down hills in the country.