Barefoot immigrant Appleseed

In fifth grade, I learned about Johnny Appleseed. There was something quite alluring about this legend of the man who traipsed about the West planting apple seeds and growing trees. The ideas of sleeping under the stars, rowing down and up rivers, and eating supper with frontiersman were intrigued me as much as the thought of taking a bite out of the forbidden fruit fallen from some wild, magical tree. It was fifth grade, and I loved the idea of the Johnny Appleseed because I was quite a stranger to all that ruggedness. Add to that the mystery of the child bride and I was completely hooked -- because he seemed so flawed.

I've long since lost that elementary infatuation. Or rather, I've grown to understand that my infatuation was not because of Appleseed's myths/legends, but because I lived the carefree lifestyle of a fifth grader who had the luxury of time, energy, and freedom to daydream too much for her own good.

Who knew that reading Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire would re-introduce me to Johnny Appleseed. Pollan recalls to mind, once again, that John Chapman really was extraordinary. This time, however, I appreciate his life out-of-the-ordinary not because of this figure carved in myth and made of legends but because of, you guessed it, his border crossing.

Pollan describes Chapman's life with perfect simplicity and captures its complexity in different ways. I would not have thought of describing Chapman's life as "a skein of warring terms and contradictions", but what Appleseed accomplished deserves our true, unadulterated appreciation. If Pollan's research can be trusted, if the stories and markers that we've encountered through histories can be believed, we know that "Chapman's ability to freely cross borders that other people believed to be fixed and unbreachable" (Pollan, 33) was what unnerved us, intrigued us, challenged us, and which basically helped blaze our way through the western wilds.

In The Botany of Desire, only a chapter of which mentions Chapman, Pollan reminds me that Chapman is a man set apart because he dared to cross borders that during his time few dared to cross, and even now we often forget what kinds of borders he crossed. If it weren't for Pollan, I would have forgotten that Chapman was border-crossing "between the red world and the white, between wilderness and civilization, even between this world and the next" (b/c of his Swedenborgian philosophy?).

This is what I want to know: How would he respond to the border crossings that are happening now? He risked a great deal to bring us much more than an apple, but if we had to sum it up, he brought us a fruit tree, and sweetness, and from there, the west-world. If he were here today, I wonder what borders he would risk, and what would he risk it for? Or would there be any borders for him at all?