- Journalist Isaac Fitzgerald’s new book, “American Rambler,” describes his desire to walk in the footsteps of Johnny Appleseed.
- The book reveals that Johnny Appleseed’s trees were for hard cider, not the edible apples we know today.
- Fitzgerald’s journey ends with a reflection on his mother’s death in February 2024.
The Johnny Appleseed Trail of North Central Massachusetts — named after John Chapman, the native warrior who spread apple orchards across the American frontier in the early 1800s — is not actually a trail. It is a highway, marked for tourism and designed for motorists.
Isaac Fitzgerald found this out in March 2023. The reporter, then about 30 years old, arrived at the Johnny Appleseed Visitors’ Center near the Lancaster-Leominster line with a backpack full of borrowed camping gear, his father’s hiking boots and a plan that was part book search, part family outing and part personal. He wanted to go west from Chapman’s birthplace in Leominster through Massachusetts and finally follow John Chapman’s ghost through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
Instead, he found a beautiful woman in a sweater at the visitor center offering him cider and suggesting he might want to rent a car.
So he bought a hot drink, stuffed children’s books about Appleseed into his nephew’s pocket, found a hole in the chain-link fence behind the tourist dump, threw his gear through it, and started walking west using abandoned tires.
That broken foundation became “The American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed” (Knopf, May 12th), a book that is part pilgrimage, part elegy and part comedy of American self-mythology.
“Most of the time in life there is no clean, smooth path,” Fitzgerald said in an exclusive interview with The Post. “Things are rarely washed and straight, not in this story, not in history, not really in America.”
The book is about Fitzgerald’s study of living within conflict – fiction and reality, humor and brutality, solitude and companionship, escape and return – as it talks about Chapman, apples and Americana.
“Although I was a gambling man, gambling all my life, this book was not a call to keep trying forever,” said the author. “It was really about finding the desire to come home, and the desire to find a home.”
Fitzgerald grew up poor in Boston, and around the Catholic Worker, with a father who kept his boy’s feet moving in the White Mountains of New Hampshire by turning every turn of the road into a rock of an elaborate, completely inaccurate story involving green knights, Minutemen who can outrun their own bullets, and Johnny the legend, and Johnny the legese.
His mother, raised on a Massachusetts farm by “two strict puritanical facts,” writes Fitzgerald, debunked the fables with encyclopedias and primary sources and one reliable fact: John Chapman was born down the road in his country.
“My father believed in finding great truths through fiction,” Fitzgerald said. My mother was very fond of looking at the truth. But life is both.
The book’s treatment of Chapman reflects that tension. The biggest surprise is the apples themselves. Chapman got his seeds from cideries, extracting them from the pulp left over from alcohol production, meaning the trees he planted across the border were not intended for food. It was an oak tree.
The fruit they grew fed the settlers with hard cider and applejack. The perfect lunchbox apple of American innocence came much later.
“That’s when I realized that I found the perfect person to try to chase,” he said.
So, he tried to find Chapman on foot through Massachusetts, through snow storms and borrowed camp gear, a clam chowder resurrection at a fish restaurant outside Gardner, very hard cider at a roadside bar, and a cold night in a bivouac tent he was thrown in what he believed was a field and it turned out, during the day, to be a swamp.
He then traveled in a Jeep through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
The Hoosier-state leg of the tour ends in Fort Wayne at the Glenbrook Square mall, where a ten-foot wooden statue of Chapman, carved from a tree trunk by sculptor Dean Butler in the 1970s, stands in the corner of H&M next to a rack of discount pants and a display of cheap earrings. A nearby plaque gives a general summary of the man’s history.
Fitzgerald orders Orange Julius to look up at the statue, whose eyes are “almost closed to the world,” and asks the statue aloud what the two of them are doing there.
Apparently, Fort Wayne loved this statue of Chapman too much to tear it down and didn’t know what to do with it, which is how the hand-carved religious spinner winds up in the mall.
“It ends up sitting next to the socks and shorts racks,” says Fitzgerald. “I doubt John Chapman would have been happy with Scandinavian fast fashion, but American supermarkets are increasingly a monument to the eccentric.”
In winter, another ghost takes over completely. In February 2024, a year after the journey that began the book, Fitzgerald’s mother committed suicide in the family barn where she had grown up.
“There can be no monument to my mother,” wrote Fitzgerald, “except the wall where we put her ashes, which is already there.”
He struggled with mental illness for most of his childhood. Fitzgerald had watched her, one harsh winter of his youth, dancing around their farmhouse in a green bathing suit, throwing water on the iron stove, shouting a promise that was also a prayer. The book ends with his simple words: “Spring will come.”
