American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed by Isaac Fitzgerald
When was the last time you thought about Johnny Appleseed? I haven’t given him much thought since grade school myself. Then, I picked up a hardcover copy of Isaac Fitzgerald’s latest book, American Rambler, from a display at Valley Bookseller in Stillwater, Minnesota.
“I’ve been drinking a bit less and praying a lot more than I used to.” I read that first as I stood in the store listening to Michael Stipe croon about the end of the world. One sentence became a paragraph and then a page became two. I didn’t want to put it down, so I bought it.
Johnny Appleseed has occupied Fitzgerald’s mind since childhood, never fading into the recesses of memory. “Johnny Appleseed became a personal hero,” he writes. “A patron saint.” The home Fitzgerald grew up in wasn’t all that far from Appleseed’s — or, more accurately, Chapman’s. John Chapman. America’s Dionysus (so dubbed, I learned from Fitzgerald, by Michael Pollan).
In American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed, Fitzgerald, fast approaching 40, hikes, floats, and drives. Each time he sets out ill-equipped, he learns to return better equipped, if not fully prepared. He rhapsodizes about bar hopping and makes poor decisions as he wanders between Massachusetts and Indiana, following in Chapman’s footsteps. Determined, misguided, Fitzgerald is nonetheless rewarded with the self-discovery people have taken mad journeys for.
“Which is how I come to be rolling out of Youngstown, Ohio, like some sort of suburban Hunter S. Thompson” – albeit with a collection of drugs leaner than the famous doctor’s bag. In addition to Thompson, Jack Kerouac and Robert M. Pirsig receive mentions among others. For me, Fitzgerald is less addled than Thompson, not as dependent on the kindness of others as Kerouac, and more tethered to the everyday world than Pirsig. He isn’t climbing as high in the philosophical mountains as they did, which makes him a more reasonable travel companion.
Fitzgerald is vulnerable. He makes his mistakes, but balances them by noting real conundrums. Rents are high. Step counts are down. Migration is about the pursuit of resources or avoidance of danger, just as it’s always been. Violent as ever.
I closed the book knowing more than I did before. For example, hard cider preceded apple pie in being distinctly American. Apples from the trees Chapman planted “were mainly used to create alcoholic cider, and the hard liquor known as applejack, an apple brandy high in alcohol content.”
I’m already thinking about my next adventure, and, for the first time in decades, about John Chapman.
Purchase American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed.
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