Outside my door lies a crate wild apples. It being mid-May, they are soft and sweet with only a hint of the crispness of last fall. When plucked from the tree, they were waxy and red with green spots in the north, this being the lee of the sun as they sat on the bough. A six-month stint underground and their cherry-red skins have darkened to burgundy. The greens are now yellow, and their once glossy coats are dusted with wild yeasts. In those dusts, the fingerprints of children.
There is a chemistry to life, to color. The turn of seasons marked by decaying molecules that drift and change in fragrance and memory.
Last autumn this harvest had the floral scent of apple blossoms, a cousin of the rose. From August to November, I had as many as ten varieties stuffed into canvas bags and boxes in cool areas of the house, so that walking from room to room was like sampling roses in a garden - early apples, church apples, street apples, crab apples. Today, as apple trees are once more blossoming in the mountains, I have only this one variety – the hardest and longest storing apples available. If you walk past my door today, you will detect the sweet and sour fragrance of cider or vinegar.
My daughter told me that I’m not allowed to pick apples without her. Occasionally, I disobey. In the fall, the kids and I climb under canopies of green leaves, some starting to turn yellow and gold, and pluck their fruits. It’s become a tradition, my daughter picking the best from the ground while I climb the upper branches to set them free. Sometimes, there’s nothing to do but shake the limbs and rain apples over the earth.
If she grows up and remembers her father sneaking happily into parking lots and churchyards to pick apples unwanted, I'll be happy. Decaying leaves and wet earth, tumbled with rosy thoughts and the peculiar joy of trespassing.
Author’s Note: This essay is a quilt, built of the fabric of several stories and essays written between 2015-2019. This weekend, the kids and I performed War & Peace at the theater, a task that took all my attention. A video of that performance will be available in a few weeks.
There are apples in my bedroom, in my cupboard, in the cold room, drying on racks, cooked into jars, stashed into root cellars. Almost none of these physical places are mine. They belong to countless friends and acquaintances. I’m not the owner of this store, just its proprietor. Like a squirrel, I take and shelter and move things around for maximum storage time coupled with minimal effort – sharing, eating, letting go, possessing little. Last fall I collected enough apples to eat them every day until May. Hundreds. Thousands. Many of them rot.
The apples don’t belong to me either. But it’s not exactly stealing – no more than the squirrels, at least. I don't pick apples people are eating or saving for themselves. And when I can, I ask. But if they're falling on the ground, neglected in fields and lots, I willingly cross fences and boundaries. Those are my apples. Till they’re not.
There are trees like this all over Taos, vacant and forgotten. My eyes are alert for them, filling my mental landscape with trees that give me food. Every time I go past - how do I say it? - we acknowledge each other. I don't make a big thing of it. Flirting is sort of a passive affair.
The analogy is fair, because apples are wombs. They’re the most voluptuous, sensual part of the plant - literally its sex organ. In spring they open up, a flower pollinated by bees and flies and moths. Can you imagine a creature with thousands of sexual organs on the tips of its fingers, covered in them twenty or thirty feet into the air? Multiple thousands of erotic little connections, buzzing with vibrating bees. Apples, their little children.
In the fall, with only a handful of visits to these trees, the kids and I can put up enough apples to last into a new season of blossoms. That’s eating three to five apples a day, sometimes more. Local organic apples cost about $3/lbs at the farmer’s market or local grocer. People buy them plenty, but often fail to notice the same fruit on trees in their own backyards, or, as the case may be, the parking lot behind the hardware store.
I can put up six large boxes, which weigh about fifty pounds apiece. That’s about three-hundred pounds, $900 by retail value, or 71,000 calories. And I do it while kids run and play under the trees, stuff themselves silly with apples, and help sort them into bins. That’s not just $900 worth of apples. It’s a few thousand dollars’ worth of joy.
A student of mine once told me, “I only like fresh apples.”
“I only like fresh you,” I laughed, then smiled.
In 1862, Thoreau published Wild Apples. I read it for the first time in a small library in the mountains. Far from the civilized world, yet just as plainly in the heart of it, the place was not unlike Walden Pond. I had always liked apples, but as the snow stacked up outside my library window, Thoreau reached through 150 years of time into…what’s that smell?
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple-tree is connected with that of man,” he writes. “The apple was early so important, and generally distributed, that its name, traced to its root in many languages, signifies fruit in general. Mhlon, in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.”
Thoreau traces the mythology of the apple across Europe, ultimately to the gates of Eden. The bible does not tell us what fruit grew upon the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but people have long depicted the scene with an apple. Today, most of us cannot picture a naked man or woman, or a snake, under any other tree.
Thoreau, however, stops short of tracing the apple to its actual roots. He writes that we may no longer be able to follow the apple’s path “to its wild original.” Michael Pollan, privy to another two-hundred years of footpaths and scholarship, had no such trouble. In Botany of Desire, he writes an account, fragrant and reminiscent of Thoreau’s, that follows the mythical and factual cultivation of the apple from its roots in the steppes of central Asia into the modern period.
Pollan’s account is more factual, but Thoreau’s essay is about wild apples, and only incidentally about the richness of cultivated varieties. This wildness, both internal and external, transcends something of Pollan’s history. That’s what struck me as I gripped the pages of his book in that cold, reclusive library. Thoreau manages to give us something more than a history of the organism. In it, he reveals something something eternal.
Thoreau describes wild apple trees with great relish. We might call them feral. Found at the edges of abandoned orchards and sometimes deep in the territory of untamed forests, these trees, he says, have travelled by the advancement of seed, not human cultivation. The roots of the plant tangle with native trees. Sexual reproduction, not common grafting, produces novelty rather than predictability. The result, he says, is a, “rank wild growth, with many green leaves on it…and…an impression of thorniness.”
The observation of such trees, in a variety of locations and seasons, brings to bear something about the plant and the human that we might miss in more cultivated settings. “Going up the side of a cliff,” he writes, “about the first of November, I saw a vigorous young apple-tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up amid the rocks and open woods there.”
Thoreau manages to visit hundreds of such trees, and he knows them as if by name. Well he should, since he’s watched many of them since they were seedlings. After the first two years of a wild apple’s life, he says, protected amongst the rocks and crags, the hardships begin. Just when the plant is ready to climb for the sun, a “browsing ox” cuts it down.
“Thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby, until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff, twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock… The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph.”
After twenty-odd years, the shrub becomes a tree.
Apple trees used to be in backyards across the nation, but as outlying towns and farms got incorporated into cities and subdivisions, most of the fruit trees were cut down. This is something Thoreau could not have predicted. No longer seen as food, their sloppy, half-rotten fruits created a nuisance for trimmed lawns and driveways. I cannot recall a single apple tree within ten miles of the house in which I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. A century earlier, there must have been hundreds.
In Taos, where people neglect them just the same, the trees are still here because there’s no reason to cut them down. There’s plenty of space. The abundance of fruit first struck me ten years ago, when one of my more adventurous friends started gleaning fruit in town. Sometimes he’d call and arrange a visit, but usually he’d just show up with a truck, a ladder and a few extra hands.
There were a few occasions when he got into a shouting match, but by and large he got in and out without so much as a word. And even the trouble was interesting. He got reprimanded for trespassing a couple times, even threatened with the police once, but no one ever accused him of stealing. No one, it seemed, wanted the apples. They just didn’t want strangers.
I’m not as bold. It took me a while to get over my initial timidity, but inspired by my friend, I began climbing into some of those churchyards, hanging out in parking lots, and scanning the overgrowth along acequias, the surface ditches that irrigate the land. Sometimes, I bring my daughter with me, and other kids. When I can, I ask (it helps to have a scraggle of kids in tow), but more often than not there’s a good tree not too close to anyone’s home, not too far from the road, with a huge plop of rotting fruit beneath it. On such occasions, I walk in boldly, like visiting an old friend. Thoreau calls them saunterer’s apples. “We have met with them,” he said, “and they are ours.”
In Taos, we’re talking about hundreds of such trees, and pears and plums too. Apricots. So, we don’t just stuff ourselves with any old fruit. We sample. I know the good trees, and I watch them all summer. I visit in winter, and share a word or two for the coming year. My favorite tree is outside the water district office in El Prado. The secretary inside is very friendly, and she says they’re fine with people picking apples so long as you don’t climb the trees. Liability, they say. So, I go after they close at five o’clock.
“There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and relish it. I hear that the fruit of a kind of plumtree in Provence is called Prunes sibarelles, because it is impossible to whistle after having eaten them, from their sourness.”
I once took a long walk in autumn with my daughter, then four. It was nearly Thanksgiving, and we chanced upon a thicket of blue-black plums, all shriveled and wrinkled on the branches like prunes. It being late in the year, the plums had had a chance to freeze and thaw on the branch a dozen times or more. Curiously, the birds had not eaten them. I tried one, then turned to my daughter with a broad smile. She already had a few apples in her hands. “These!” I said, opening my eyes wide and nodding my head. Soon, we had grabbed as many as our hands could hold, no more, and raced down to the river for one of the best Thanksgiving meals of my life.
Thoreau frequently sat along streams and on low branches in late fall and winter, tasting the ferment of unwanted apples. “But it is remarkable that the wild apple, which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house has frequently a harsh and crabbed taste…for there you miss the November air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with.”
There is a variety of crab apple in Taos, easy to recognize once you’ve eaten it. Taken whole, they are spicy and delicious. More than once, I’ve collected a bag of these bright red apples, only to find them unpalatable at home. They make an excellent sauce. Dried, they are exquisite with fresh bread and my neighbor’s goat cheese.
But there is something else to taste in these apples, and that is the excitement of taking them. Like the squirrels, like Thoreau, I relish a little bit of petty thievery. I’m not advocating anything criminal, but there is a moment and flavor in life that only exists when we transgress barriers and trespass into the moment. A field of golden grass. A centuries-old tree. The strange pleasure of uncertainty.
The cidery apples beside me aren’t mine. They don’t belong to Thoreau, Pollan, or anyone. They are, at root and in seed, themselves. I have trespassed on occasion, not by night or stealth, but often in plain view. “The owner,” Thoreau says, “knows nothing of it.”
oh, it's a missing 'of'.
What a wonderful piece of writing! i love your work, your words..... and i love 'harvesting' and 'gleaning'. I was going to tell you about"Botany of Desire' but you already know that brilliant book. i like the chapter on apples best of all! Especially the fact that someone stores and gifts wild apple seeds, and they will send you some with the request that you report what sort of apples it eventually grows. i also wanted to tell you that there is a typo in sentence one..... should be it be 'crab'. or 'crazy'... i just don't know what 'crate' means in this context. And i particularly appreciate and have 'harvested' the passsage from Thoreau about the struggle between apple shrub and browsing ox. such a great metaphor for life's journey! thank you so much. such a pleasure to read!