‘American Rambler’ Traces the Path, and Truth-Squads the Tale, of Johnny Appleseed

Isaac Fitzgerald is in a sorry state. He’s been drinking a lot and praying a lot. He’s about to turn 40, he’s not married, he’s had a bad break up, has no job and, worst of all, he’s back in the middle of dreary Massachusetts visiting his family. His — let’s say difficult — father, and his mother, who’s dealing with mental illness, still live in the old family farmhouse taking care of Fitzgerald’s centenarian grandmother. It’s a scene straight out of Ethan Frome, but after the sledding accident.

Fitzgerald knows he’s got to do something with his life and quick — or else. So what does he decide to do? Walk the entirety of the Johnny Appleseed Trail of North Central Massachusetts, naturally.

And so begins Fitzgerald’s new book, American Rambler. 

With a tent, a tarp, hiking boots, even a ride snagged from his dad, he finds himself at the Johnny Appleseed Visitors’ Center next to “‘The Big Apple of New England,’ a ten-foot-tall red apple that is ‘the largest apple sculpture of its kind in all of New England.'” Looking for the trailhead and wondering how many other big apple sculptures there could be, he soon discovers there is no trailhead because there is no trail. It’s all just a tourist trap. And now he’s stuck there along the side of Rt. 2 in Leominster, 25 miles from his parents’ home. It’s the perfect loserish beginning to a truly loserish plan.

Why Johnny Appleseed? The iconic barefoot American arborist and Swedenborgian proselytizer, whose real name was John Chapman, grew up just down the road from Fitzgerald’s “run-down family farm.” But the real inspiration to follow in Chapman’s footsteps wasn’t about the legendary stuff he’d learned as a child; rather, it was the walking. As he describes it: “In a way, prayer and walking have a bit in common. A repetition. A solitude. They’re both ways of getting out of one’s own head—or at least away from one’s more perilous thoughts, if only for a little while. (Drinking, come to think of it, has a similar effect.)” An escape route, in other words.

But Fitzgerald also meets plenty of authentic, quality folks at the end of his favorite bar — and it is those barroom conversations, like the apple seeds that John Chapman once disseminated, that bear rich American fruit in clear, crisp, red-white-blue-and-tattooed, truths and consequences. It is in these serendipitous encounters with the locals that Fitzgerald’s mission is both validated and fructified, as they provide many of the missing pieces of himself that he so desperately seeks. By embarking on what might seem to many like a silly, year-long pilgrimage in search of a Disney cartoon character, Fitzgerald, albeit often verbose and obscene, overcomes some (but not all) of his problems. And, in so doing, he manages to bestow upon his interlocutors a comforting and hopeful message.

American Rambler is a humorous narrative with moments of brilliance that can make you chuckle, or in some cases, spit out your beer. In the final analysis, it is a line reminiscent of Major Gen. Thomas Waverly’s dressing down speech to his troops in White Christmas that, perhaps, expresses it best: I am not satisfied with the conduct of the main character in this book. He’s sloppy. He’s unserious. He’s unruly. He’s undisciplined… And I’ve never read anything so wonderfully relevant in my whole life.

‘American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed’ by Isaac Fitzgerald is out now, via Knopf.

Richard Horan is a novelist and nonfiction author, best known for his nature and literary-themed work, including ‘Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers’ and ‘Harvest: An Adventure into the Heart of America’s Family Farms.’ He also wrote the novel ‘Goose Music.’

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