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- Journalist Isaac Fitzgerald’s new book, “American Rambler,” details his quest to walk Johnny Appleseed’s trail.
- The book reveals Johnny Appleseed’s trees were for hard cider, not the wholesome eating apples we know today.
- Fitzgerald’s journey concludes with reflections on his mother’s death in February 2024.
The Johnny Appleseed Trail of North Central Massachusetts — named for John Chapman, the folk hero who spread apple orchards across the American frontier in the early 1800s — is not actually a trail. It’s a stretch of highway, branded for tourism and designed for motorists.
Isaac Fitzgerald discovered this in March 2023. The journalist, then in his late 30s, 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 on his feet and a plan that was part literary quest, part family visit and part personal dare. He wanted to walk west from Chapman’s birthplace in Leominster through Massachusetts and eventually follow the ghost of John Chapman through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
Instead, he got a nice woman in a sweater at the visitors’ center offering him cider and suggesting he might want to rent a car.
So he bought a hot drink, stuffed some children’s books about Appleseed into his pack for his niece and nephews, found the hole in the chain-link fence behind the visitor center dumpsters, threw his gear through it, and started walking west through the abandoned tires.
That collapsed premise became “American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed” (Knopf, May 12th), a book that’s part pilgrimage, part elegy and part comedy of American self-mythology.
“Often in life there is no clean, walkable path,” Fitzgerald said in an exclusive interview with The Post. “Things are rarely clean cut and straightforward, not in this story, not in history, not really for America.”
The book is as much about Fitzgerald learning to live inside contradictions — myth and fact, comedy and brutality, solitude and fellowship, escape and return — as it is about Chapman, apples and Americana.
“As much as I’ve been a rambling, gambling man my whole life, this book wasn’t a call to keep adventuring forever,” the writer said. “It was actually about discovering the desire to come home, and the desire to actually want a home.”
Fitzgerald grew up poor in Boston, in and around Catholic Worker shelters, with a father who kept his boy’s feet moving through the White Mountains of New Hampshire by turning every bend in the trail into the cliffhanger of an elaborate, thoroughly inaccurate story involving green knights, Minutemen who could outrun their own bullets, and, eventually, the legend of Johnny Appleseed.
His mother, raised on a Massachusetts farm by “two strict puritanical realists,” Fitzgerald writes, pushed back against the fictions with encyclopedias and primary sources and a single reliable fact: John Chapman was born down the road from her family’s land.
“My father believed in getting at larger truths through fictions,” Fitzgerald said. “My mother was more interested in hard looks at reality. But life is both.”
The book’s handling of Chapman reflects that tension. The biggest surprise is the apples themselves. Chapman got his seeds from cideries, pulling them from the leftover pulp of alcohol production, which meant the trees he planted across the frontier were never intended for eating. They were booze trees.
The fruit they bore fed settlers’ appetites for hard cider and applejack. The wholesome lunchbox apple of American innocence came much later.
“That’s when I knew I’d found the perfect historical figure to try and chase down,” he said.
So, he attempted to find Chapman on foot through Massachusetts, through snowstorms and borrowed camping gear, a clam chowder resurrection at a fish restaurant outside Gardner, too much hard cider at a roadside bar, and a cold night in a bivouac tent pitched on what he believed was a field and turned out, in daylight, to be a marsh.
Then he went by Jeep through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.
The Hoosier State leg of the journey ends in Fort Wayne at the Glenbrook Square mall, where a ten-foot wooden statue of Chapman, carved from the trunk of a tree by sculptor Dean Butler in the 1970s, stands in a corner of an H&M next to a rack of discounted cargo pants and a display of cheap earrings. A nearby plaque offers the standard biographical summary.
Fitzgerald orders an Orange Julius, looks up at the figure, whose eyes are “almost closed to the world,” and asks the statue out loud what they’re both doing there.
Apparently, Fort Wayne loved the Chapman statue too much to tear it down and had no idea what to do with it, which is how a hand-carved religious wanderer winds up in a shopping mall.
“It ends up sitting next to racks of socks and cargo shorts,” Fitzgerald said. “I doubt John Chapman would have been excited about Scandinavian fast fashion, but American malls are increasingly monuments to the uncanny themselves.”
By winter, another ghost takes over entirely. In February 2024, just shy of a year after the walk that began the book, Fitzgerald’s mother died by suicide at the family barn where she’d grown up.
“There will be no monument for my mother,” Fitzgerald writes, “save the wall we put her ashes in, which was already there.”
She’d struggled with mental illness for most of his childhood. Fitzgerald had watched her, during one of the harder winters of his boyhood, dance through their farmhouse in a green swimsuit, tossing water on the cast-iron stove, shouting a promise that was also a prayer. The book ends on her simple words: “Spring will come.”
