Apples to Apples

Dana and Dale were good friends. They had to be, because they were going apple-picking in Maine. It’s not a good idea to pick apples if you’re not friends with the other person or they’re not family. Don’t ask why. This is experience talking. 

Anyway, the two friends mentioned above are in the car, heading to one of the many orchards in the state, and they got to discussing all types of apples, in Maine. It would help readers to know a little about the size of the state, the Mainer mindset, and the condition of the roads, but that all probably goes beyond the purview of this particular story.

The first thing Dana and Dale did was to talk about all the varieties of apples that could be found locally locally. Both of them knew that the grocery stores had several kinds, but neither could name more than five varieties from the ones they’d seen in the produce section. Some of those were even imported, despite the abundance of apples in Maine, the most northeastern of the New England states. 

People who went to the orchards in this state usually didn’t confirm which types a specific grower had before going to pick them; they just assumed the fruit would be ripe and edible when the season rolled around. Some people knew the apple wealth there was immense; others hadn’t given it much thought.

Dana said:

“I bet there are nearly a dozen varieties in Maine, right?”

Dale replied:

“The Maine Pomological Society lists twenty-eight on its website. There are around sixty orchards listed, too. There are actually around a hundred varieties here, and each orchard grows from twenty to thirty varieties.”

Dana thought for just a moment that Dale was showing off a bit. Who even knew Maine had its own Pomological Society? In fact, how many people even knew pomological was a word?

“I like McIntosh best, but there are other good apples around here. Macoun, Northern Spy, Black Oxford, Duchess of Oldenburg, for example.” Dale observed. (Was this intended to impress Dana? Probably not.)

“You won’t find any of those in a store, but you’re right. We really have some good ones here in Maine. I also like the Brock, the Spencer, and the Wolf River varieties.” Dana was hoping to show off a little knowledge, too.

Dale dug a little deeper and came up with a few more delicious pomes, all with nice names: Alexander, American Beauty (the name sounds like a rose, admittedly), Aroostook Sunset, Belfast White. All of these came from heritage orchards, but that didn’t mean they’d be hard to locate, according to Dale.

Dana added to the heritage list: Blood, Charlamoff, Drap d’OR, Cranberry Island, Fameuse (also known as Snow). Dale added St. Lawrence and Striped Harvey, then Dana added Windham Russet and Yellow Transparent. Both of them knew they were way past the dozen or so Dana had spoken of, and that in fact they were barely getting started. A lot of the varieties bore the name of a place, often but not always in Maine. 

Neither knew what they’d find at the orchard they’d chosen. Maybe nobody knew what was in any given apple farm, except for the owners.

Then Dale showed off a little more and explained that a lot of apples were not for dessert or eating from the tree, but instead were for drying, making hard cider, things like that. Dana noted that the colonists had been big cider drinkers because they didn’t trust the water. (Likely story from those religious people.)

Dale came back with the observation that it wasn’t illegal in Maine to pick up seedlings in ditches, ‘seedlings’ in this case being the apples that had fallen from the trees. Dana hadn’t known this, so opted to say nothing. It wasn’t clear to Dana what one did with a seedling legally retrieved from a ditch in Maine. Eat it? Plant it?

The pair continued their conversation, and turned to telling apple stories as well as facts. Both were familiar with John Bunker, ‘the apple guy’, who could bite into a fruit and pretty much identify 100% of them. He was a state celebrity of sorts. He was still going strong in his sixties and could detect varieties accurately every time. People bragged to him about all their trees or took him fruit for identification. Nice job if you could get it: Bite! Baldwin! Right again!

Dale showed off a bit more, noting that each apple has seeds that, if planted, would not grow into a tree like the one on which it had grown. Reproducing the original tree could only be done by grafting from it onto another. All the new seeds would produce new varieties, created by the DNA of the mother tree and the DNA of the father tree. Dana was puzzled, wondering how there were only around five thousand varieties of apples in the world and not billions or trillions. Apples did not have family planning.

Then Dana remembered another fact, related to all the hard cider that used to be drunk in the colonies and afterward: people started to see the trees as evil, as promoting drunkenness, so they went after them with hatchets and axes. Dale had not known that. It wasn’t clear to either of them that the famous Johnny Appleseed, a devout man, was aware of what he was doing. (Johnny Appleseed is an American folk hero, a man who roamed the country planting apple seeds, according to the myth. He was based on John Chapman, who was slightly different.)

While they were in the car, the two friends began to recall myths about apples. One was that a treasure buried under an apple tree never rots but also can never be found. People bobbed for apples because fruit + water put them in contact with fairies. If you take a bite of an apple and put the piece under the pillow that night, you’ll dream of your true love. There were so many more beliefs that Dana and Dale changed the topic to the weather.

As everybody knows, the weather for apple-picking varies a lot. Autumn is fickle like that. It’s the season of transition. It’s October. One time you get drenched by a surprise shower. Another time, you overdress and are sweating all through the two or three hours of trying to fill your bags. A hailstorm could even start pelting you, then disappear.

.

Anther story about going apple-picking mentioned by Dale and Dana was about getting lost on the way to the orchard in the days before the GPS. It was just like trying to find Xmas tree farms. Maine before technology was a real labyrinth. Even now, some parts of the state had bad coverage and one could still get royally lost in the East Williwags. (That’s Mainer for out in the boondocks or in the sticks.)

Dana had memorized part of a Laurie Lee poem, (appropriately) titled “Apples,” and decided it was a good time to recite the first two stanzas:

Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:

juice-green of July rain,

the black polestar of flowers, the rind

mapped with its crimson stain.

The russet, crab and cottage red

burn to the sun’s hot brass,

then drop like sweat from every branch

and bubble in the grass.

The thought of apple bubbles in the unmowed grass was quite intriguing. Especially intriguing, after the way the poet had referred to the apples as worlds in the first line. Dana was unexpectedly silent after reciting the stanzas.

Dale - just as unexpectedly - continued reciting the poem until the end:

They lie as wanton as they fall,

and where they fall and break,

the stallion clamps his crunching jaws,

the starling stabs his beak.

In each plump gourd the cidery bite

of boys’ teeth tears the skin;

the waltzing wasp consumes his share,

the bent worm enters in.

Actually, Dale only recited the next two stanzas. Those had been disturbing, with verbs like break, crunch, clamp, stab, bite, tear…

There were five stanzas in all, so then both of them finished the poem. In this manner, what could have been a comeuppance on Dale’s part, or a sadness on both their parts, was complted in a duet that made them both smile. Maybe it was the effect of the juicy fruit:

I, with as easy hunger, take

entire my season’s dole;

welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour,

the hollow and the whole. 

Respite! The poem transformed the pome from victim (stanzas three and four) to source of contrast (stanza five), from aggression and death, to ease and welcome. Maybe the author wasn’t ranked up there with the greatest poets, but he sure had outdone himself with these verses.

After a poem like that, it didn’t seem that talking about picking too few or too many apples was all that interesting. Nor did the stories about running into old friends or enemies at orchards. Even anecdotes they both might have told about falling from a ladder, on top of the person below, or stumbling with heavy bags, apples rolling all over - those were boring as well. Neither had gotten into an apple fight, using the fruit like snowballs. That could rub the orchard owners the wrong way, and was a waste of good fruit. 

Then Dana confessed to not really being an apple fan, at least as far as baking was concerned. 

“I just like to eat one, holding it in my hand. Unless, of course, somebody else bakes and there is a lot of homemade whipped cream…” Dana observed. Dale agreed, surprisingly. 

Both Dale and Dana started mentioning recipes like apple crisp, apple butter, apple butternut soup, potage, cookies, dumplings, salad, sweet bread, and on and on. Nothing out of the ordinary, and most of them desserts, except for when cooked with meat. It was about then that they realized something: neither of them had ever had as much fun as everybody else seemed to, from photos on social media about apple-picking excursions. 

They looked at each other and gave it one last try. This time they went international.

Dale wondered about the origin of the apple, and Dana was pleased to know the answer: Kazakhstan, in Central Asia. Apparently that was mentioned in Pollan’s book, The Botany of Desire (and in other places, even). It was also in the film of the same name. Neither Dana nor Dale knew that cider became popular after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, nor that apples were already being grown in Jamestown in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Somewhere along the line, Thomas Jefferson was associated with the Fuji apple and the fruit may really keep the doctor away. At least the History Channel had given that information, but neither Dana nor Dale watched television much, so they weren’t informed.

Dale brought up the Basque cider, called sagardoa, with sagar being the word for apple and -doa… maybe fermented or juice? (Actually, sagardoa means ‘apple wine’, for those who might be interested.) Maybe the Celts introduced cider to the Iberian Peninsula, but in the eleventh century there are documents of its production in the Basque Country. Dale knew these things through some distant relatives, apparently. (Most people don’t know or care who the Basques are, which is sad. They’re missing a lot.)

Dale then did an internet search - they were getting closer to the orchard, but still had a few miles to go - and found a reference to Dan Bussey. Bussey wrote the seven-volume study, The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada. 

The two friends thought that was quite an accomplishment, but they didn’t plan on reading the entire work. Probably the local library had it and they could go there to look at the illustrations. Dana was especially interested in the visual aspects of apples, it seemed. Dale was more inclined to learn about how to cultivate them. They both hoped the author of the seven volumes would achieve his goal of documenting every last variety in the US.

Dana did find it interesting when Dale read aloud that Bussey had used works from the Pomological Watercolor Collection of the USDA. Botanical illustrations were always fascinating, from the earliest times up to now. (There’s that word, pomological, again.)

At that point, the two friends realized they’d arrived at the orchard. They also realized, even more suddenly, that they were not all that interested in picking apples. First of all, the sky looked threatening. Dark clouds were unraveling over to the west and moving eastward, toward the Atlantic. It was quite the display, as Maine sky often is, no matter what the season. However, this was autumn, October, and you played Russian roulette with the weather. Dana and Dale knew this and we have already pointed it out as well.

Dana looked at Dale and Dale looked at Dana. They had just pulled onto the rocky dirt road that led into the orchard. From the car they would go to the small shack a few yards away to announce their arrival and verify how to proceed. Different orchards have different rules and visitors - customers - were expected to obey them. The way people were charged for the apples might also vary, and some orchard owners insisted on supplying the bags so the amounts would all be the same.

The pair sat in the car for a few minutes, uncertain of what to do. It was like they both were thinking the same thing. Neither made the gesture of opening a door to get out, then finally they cautiously opened their doors, put one foot on the ground, and left the other leg resting on the car seat. They knew. Maybe it had been the poem after all. The poem, or the pome.

It didn’t matter. They had had enough pomes for the day. The feet that had been resting on the rocky path on each side of the car now slid back inside the vehicle. Seatbelts were clicked on at nearly the same time. The decision had remained unuttered, but it was mutual and it was clear

The car backed up carefully, then turned in the direction it had just come from, traveling at least an hour from home to orchard. As if it knew where to go without having need of a driver, the car headed to a craft beer brewery about half an hour back. Maine was full of breweries and the beers that were being produced now were beyond description. It was entertaining to see the new sites spring up, then try to keep track of the stunning cans and labels. On top of that, the names the brewers were coming up with were either hysterically funny puns or seductive sells. 

The place Dana and Dale pulled into was one of the best new brewing labels, and also one of the most creative. Currently they had a hibiscus tea IPA, a chile and lime lager, and an apple stout. They choose last one. Not for the apples, for the beer. Or maybe for both the apples and the beer.