The Ancestor of the Red Delicious was Actually Delicious

It is Decidedly Not Delicious

    The Red Delicious apple, with its deceptive bright red hue and distinctive shape has been a popular apple in America for 128 years. Most of us remember getting one on our lunch trays in elementary school. But let’s face it, delicious it is not.

    I love apples. I have a special place in my world for each one. Each of them, but one.

    As I child I was not terribly picky about which apples I ate. My other classmates were though. They would hand their apples off to me and I would eat them all on my walk home at the end of the day. But the truly mealy, gritty ones—you know what I mean—would never survive more than a bite before getting chucked into a bush for the animals.

    Unless it was February. And winter. And I would eat the better bits around the mealy bits just for a taste of the fruit.

    I don’t feel so bad for my great distaste for the red delicious. Even Tom Burford, author of Apples of North America, whose ancestors planted seeds in the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1713, and who grew up with over 100 species of apples in their family orchard refers to the popularity of the Red Delicious as a “ramming down the throats of American consumers this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.”

    Turns out, it wasn’t always disgusting.

 

Colonial Apples

    America had its own native apples, but the common varieties we know today are descendants of imports from Europe. Apples were important to colonial life. It was not only used for food, but hard cider, a safe beverage to imbibe, as the village water was usually unfit to drink.

    Apples were one of the earliest crops planted by colonists and each family would have a few trees of their own in their backyards. In the 1800s and the early 1900s, the popular apple was the Ben Davis, a reliable crop for growers. It was a pretty apple, and a crop with a reliable yield, but touted to be pretty bland.

 

What Jesse Hiatt Let Grow

    A Quaker farmer named Jesse Hiatt of Peru, Iowa found an unwanted apple tree growing within his orchard of Yellow Bellflower trees, in the 1870s. He tried to cut it back for several seasons but it came back up every year. History says that he decided something that tenacious deserved a chance and he let it grow.

    Ten years later the tree produced its first fruit, a red and yellow striped elongated globe. The flesh was said to be crisp, fruity and sweet, but it wasn’t pretty to look at. Hiatt named the perfumed apple the Hawkeye, after his home state. Amy Traverso, author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, says, “The [Hawkeye] was a chance seedling, and I like to imagine what a revelation it was to come across this apple tree that you hadn’t even planted. To taste the fruit for the first time and realize it was just incredible.”

 

The Next Big Apple

    The Ben Davis apple was the widely-seeded but bland apple in production at the time. In 1983 the Stark Brothers’ Nursery in Lousianna, Missouri, opened a contest to farmers, seeking a new strain of apple. Jesse Hiatt brought his Hawkeye apple to the contest. It was love at first bite and the Stark Brothers bought the production rights to the apple.

    The first thing they did was change the name.

 

The First Delicious

    It became the Stark Delicious.

    Rowan Jacobsen writes, in Apples of Uncommon Character, that “the fruit kept well and had an inoffensive, pleasantly aromatic taste. Most of all, it was very sweet. What it wasn’t, was solid red; instead, it had a light pink blush, reddish stripes, and a less pronounced strawberry shape, making it a pretty generic apple.”

    Over the next twenty years, the Nursery promoted the Stark Delicious in a manner that changed the business of apple production. The Brothers spent $750,000, sending salesmen to farms all over the country. They even sent it out as free gifts to their existing customers and exhibited it at the 1904 World’s Fair.

    The Stark Delicious became a hit and the Nursery was bombarded with requests for more trees from customers. As its population expanded, and it was propagated widely, it became less and less like the original Hiatt’s Hawkeye.

 

What’s in a Name?

    In 1914, when the Golden Delicious was discovered in West Virginia and bought up by the Nursery, the Stark Delicious apple became the Red Delicious. The Stark Brothers’ aggressive promotion of the breed meant that by 1922, the annual Delicious crop was valued at $12 million.

    A year later, one of the Delicious growers in New Jersey found one single branch on one of his trees that was producing a mutant variant of the apple. It had ripened earlier than the others and had turned a deep, solid crimson hue. One of the Stark Brothers’ sons travelled from Missouri and bought the branch, also known as a sport, off the tree for $6,000.

    “Traditionally, growers were paid based on the redness of the skin of their apples. Flavor was not evaluated,” Rowan Jacobsen wrote. “Red Delicious earned a premium over other apples, and the reddest Red Delicious earned the highest premium.” It wasn’t long before farmers all over clambered to get their hands on their own clone of the deep crimson variant.

 

Pros and Cons and Poor Taste

    Amy Traverson likens this as the problem. “It turns out that a lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” she explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor.”

    This new breed of Red Delicious came with a thicker skin that disguised the bruises that came during long shipping routes. The “coke-bottle bottom” of the fruit and the uniform shape made them perfect for storage and transport, prizing them for a long shelf life over taste. The deep red fruits continued to ripen after harvesting, so it could be picked prematurely and left to ripen in cold storage as it travelled.

    As soon as an apple is picked from the tree it begins to produce ethylene gas, which is what causes fruit to either ripen or rot. According to Simon Thibault, author of Pantry and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food, it enabled the Delicious apple to be stored for a length of time before being shipped.

 

Why So Popular?

    The Red Delicious was the most popular apple in production by the 1940s. But the skin was tougher than other apple skin, hiding an open-celled texture that consumers would consider mealy or gritty. It had a tough and bitter skin hiding mushy flesh. Have you ever wondered why that is?

    Thibault also says that if the Red Delicious is left on the tree long enough, something called watercore develops. “What that means is the starches and sugars get converted to sorbitol, or unfermentable sugar. They’re very sweet, but they don’t last long. If you let the Red Delicious do that, even the cardboard ones can become nonoffensive.” But then their shelf life for transport is severely shortened. As people left the farms and more people moved into the cities and shopped at grocery markets, and they were not getting their food from the farm stands, transportability became more important commercially.

    By the 1980s, seventy-five percent of the crops produced in Washington State were Red Delicious apples. They are responsible for two-thirds of the apples produced in America.

 

Who’s Buying Them?

    Now, the majority of Red Delicious apples are not bought by consumers. Instead they are sold to schools and health centers, hospitals and hotels; places where people don’t have a lot of choice in what they eat. For instance, the United States Department of Agriculture sends the fruit out through its food distribution programs, most of which comes from farmers’ surplus. The Red Delicious is usually one of the last crops standing, as far as American demand goes.

    Orchardists couldn’t just switch out their long-standing crops and the seemingly sudden shift in consumer demand took them by surprise. Tom Burford pointed out that people had been “eating with their eyes and not their mouths.” Now shoppers were not satisfied with poor flavor when there were other savory apples on the market like SweeTango, Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, and Snap Dragon.

 

The Decline

    Red Delicious apple growers lost almost $800 million between 1997 and 2000 because consumers weren’t buying them. In 2000 the government spent $138 million to bailout the apple farmers of Washington state. It was the largest bailout in the history of the apple industry.

    Production of the Red Delicious dropped forty percent over the next seventeen years. It is the parent of the Empire and the Fuji apple varieties, among others. It’s still one of the most commonly produced apples, by twenty million bushels, and in 2014, the Washington Apple Commission began focusing on exporting two-thirds or more of their Red Delicious crop to other countries. Most of our Red Delicious apples wind up in China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.

    (Did you know that China produces a full half of the world’s apples, about eight times as much as the United States. Seventy percent of the apples they grow are Fujis.)

 

A New Cream of the Crop

    For the first time in fifty years, the Red Delicious was dethroned by the juicy and mildly sweet Gala in 2018. The Red Delicious came second—due to the production demand, Granny Smith was third, Fuji fourth, and the Honeycrisp fifth… though if they were correct, by the typing of this article the Honeycrisp should have moved up the list.

    Yum.

    Lots of farmers are slowly replacing their Red Delicious trees with new popular varieties and no one is planting new ones. Somewhere out there, some farmers still grow the original heirloom variety Hawkeye. Which means there is a chance to taste the fruit that was the Red Delicious’ ancestor, and experience where its name originated.

    I sense a road trip in my future.

 

 

 

Sourced with information from:

A.C. Bright, author of Apples Galore!

Tom Burford, author of Apples of North America

Rowan Jacobsen, author of Apples of Uncommon Character

Erika Janik, author of “Apple: A Global History”

Simon Thibault, author of Pantry and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food

Amy Traverso, author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook

LeAnn Zotta, author 200 Years and Growing: The Story of Stark Bro’s Nurseries & Orchards Co

Be a Good Ancestor Now

I’ve been doing my own genealogy for years, and recently I have begun to help others search for their ancestors. I have literally seen the lines, uninterrupted, of parents and children, and parents and children, stretching out and down from the past into our waking present. I cannot see that without also being able to envision my parents’ names at the top of that tree, with the unknown generations who will stretch out past us. But what world are we leaving to those who will come after?

I can no longer think of the future without wondering which generation of my family’s children will run out of fresh water. Do I care? Should you care? After all, I won’t be here. Yes. Yes I should. Yes you should. Anything else is selfish and human selfishness is killing the planet.

Human selfishness is killing the planet. Which means it’s also killing us. We need to cultivate the mindfulness that the planet we walk on is part of us. Our blood, bone, and tissue evolved from the life that crept out of the oceans. We carry the earth within us. We are not separate from it.

The way Western culture lives is not sustainable. Most of the people I know work hard and get little in return for it. I know they often decide not to care, because they don’t think they can make a difference, and if no one else is sacrificing, why should they?

Big Corporation wants us to think that. They want us to feel like we can’t make change. That’s part of the problem. We all need to make hard choices or the places we love, that feed us, will keep disappearing.

Make choices like your decisions will decide the fate of the next seven generations of your descendants. Because they will. This week I am sharing some photos of my favorite places in nature, places I hope those who come after me will be able to experience for themselves. Included among the photos are quotes on sustainability

The supreme reality of our time is ...the vulnerability of our planet.

- John F. Kennedy

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?"

- Rachel Carson

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

- Henry David Thoreau

We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to.

- Terri Swearingen

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something.

- Carl Sagan

One planet, one experiment.

- Edward O. Wilson

There is a great need for the introduction of new values in our society, where bigger is not necessarily better, where slower can be faster, and where less can be more.

- Gaylord Nelson

Reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word 'success.'

- David Wann

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.

- Cree Indian Proverb

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

- Albert Einstein 

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

- Native American Proverb

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.  

- John Muir

I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.  

- Edward Everett Hale

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.  

- Archibald MacLeish

Again and again

Some people in the crowd wake up.

They have no ground in the crowd

And they emerge according to broader laws.

They carry strange customs with them,

And demand room for bold gestures.

The future speaks ruthlessly through them.  

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Quotes Contributed to:

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) was the 35^th President of the United States of America. Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was an American marine biologist. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. Terri Swearingen, a nurse from Ohio, was the 1997 Goldman Prize winner. Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, and author. Edward O. Wilson (b.1929) is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist, and author. Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005) was an American Democratic Senator and Governor from Wisconsin. David Wann is an author/speaker of sustainability. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was an American writer. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. John Muir (1838-1914) was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher. Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) was an American author, historian and Unitarian minister. Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was an Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist.

Malidoma Patrice Somé, Supernatural is Natural

“Earth is where we belong. She is our home. She gives us sustenance unconditionally and makes it possible for us to feel connected. Earth is where we go to and where we come from. The nourishment and support of the Earth Mother grants us the feeling of belonging that allows us to expand and grow because we feel strong.”

Western civilization superimposes us onto the natural world, as if we are above it, and it is below us. As if it is nothing more than a storage shed for resources at our disposal, and not a living, breathing world we are a part of. We see this viewpoint in the entitled way we dam rivers and when we clear-cut forest dwellers of their habitat, of their trees. We even blow holes in hills and mountainsides to make a way for ourselves and we call it progress.

Along the way, we stopped living with the earth and began to try to tame it to suit our needs and comforts. It is saddening. Yet there are people who walk with feet in both worlds, that of our constructed culture and that of the world we wandered far from as generations of nomads settled into cities. And these people are using their gifts to serve as guides, and awaken our perception to the larger truth.

“Human beings are most of the time unaware of the extent and intimacy of their connection with nature, especially the world of plants and animals. We act as if we are the proud and dominant other and thus can and should manifest our superiority in ways that are rather careless and devastating to nature. Indeed, trees live in harmony, and we create dissonance. Yet we want to live in a world where everyone and everything is harmoniously linked to everyone and everything.”

Malidoma Patrice Somé is one of these remarkable people, straddling both worlds and successfully acting as a mediator and translator between them. He was born to the Dagara people of Burkina Faso in West Africa. Malidoma was kidnapped from his village at the age of four by a Jesuit Missionary who had befriended his father. He was placed in a boarding school, on path to become a priest, to be used as a tool to convert the African people to the white man’s God.

When he was twenty he managed to run away and walked the entire distance back to his village, where he found himself home once more, and yet a stranger among strangers. He had been gone for fifteen years and could not even recall enough of the Dagara language to communicate with his mother and sister.

His Western world upbringing left him inadequately prepared for his return. He and his people did not understand each other. Well past the age of manhood in his village, Malidoma was required to undergo a month-long rite of passage before he could fully become a member of his community.

He had to first unlearn what he had learned.

His trials are compellingly written in his book Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. In its pages he describes one of his first breakthroughs, where he was bidden to sit and watch a tree. He was aware of his own head processing through wondering what the purpose was, of wondering what the correct thing to do was. There had to be more to it than staring at a tree, right? Then he became angry and felt like he was being made to go through a public humiliation, as he was sat in the center of the village. Passed that anger, he broke open and began to speak to the tree. It became a sort of confessional where he poured his feelings of frustration out and apologized to the tree.

What he experienced next was a transformation of the tree into what he calls the green lady- a green human form spirit who felt like love and home. He ran sobbing to the spirit and she held him in her arms. When he came out of the moment and was hugging the tree he immediately tried to blame the vision on the heat and lack of food- which is the Western way of thought- except that the elders of his tribe who were watching had seen the same green lady in the moment he did. How could he explain that?  

“My experience with the green lady raises an important issue, namely, the true identity of the elements of nature. What if they are not inanimate objects, as people in the West have been taught to believe, but rather living presences? How would we need to change if we granted to a tree the kind of life that we usually reserve for so-called intelligent beings? If you peek long enough into the natural world - the trees, the hills, the rivers, and all natural things - you start to realize that their spirit is much bigger than what can be seen, that the visible part of nature is only a small portion of what nature is.”

            What we would call the supernatural, his people call the natural world. They have no word for supernatural. The closest word they have is Yielbongura, “the thing that knowledge can’t eat.” Western thought may have decided that it is separate but that doesn’t make it a truth for the larger world.

In fact, that way of thinking will only serve to separate us more from that which we all want most- to rediscover the sensation of wholeness. Spirit is real. What is spiritual can be explained by science, but not explained away. After all, you can put blinders on a horse so that he cannot see the distractions around him, but the distractions around him are still occurring. He does not see, yet they happen.

That’s true of the fullness of the world around us. Either we are open to it or we are closed to it, but it does not stop existing if we do not believe in it. If we choose to, we can do work to open ourselves up to the spirit world, the larger world, the greater web around us. We can see and hear with more senses than we use. People who have had these experiences, as Malidoma had, often decide in the aftermath that they must have hallucinated. So much of the spirit world is ephemeral that it takes a certain amount of faith and openness to make the connection.

"You can acquire what is usually seen as magical. When in fact the more you dwell in this kind of world, the less you see it as magical because it is the familiar, it is the kind of thing that every human being is entitled to and it is the kind of thing that is at the core of human nature, the search, the intense search for the magical." 

            I can’t recommend Somé’s writings enough. He has two other books The Healing Wisdom of Africa, which chronicles his life after the awakening, and Ritual: Power, Healing and Community. The story of his life’s journey and the purpose his Ancestors gifted him with is laced and woven with a breathtaking, wondrous, and seemingly simplistic awareness of the larger world that stretches beyond our everyday perception. Malidoma’s words act as a gateway, a doorway that the reader can grasp, an opening they can step through.

“Indigenous people see the physical world as a reflection of a more complex, subtler, and more lasting yet invisible entity called energy. It is as if we are the shadows of a vibrant and endlessly resourceful intelligence dynamically involved in a process of continuous self-creation. Nothing happens here that did not begin in that unseen world. If something in the physical world is experiencing instability, it is because its energetic correspondent has been experiencing instability. The indigenous understanding is that the material and physical problems that a person encounters are important only because they are an energetic message sent to the visible world. ... Ritual is the principal tool used to approach that unseen world in a way that will rearrange the structure of the physical world and bring about material transformation.”

            [This article was originally published July 20, 2011.]

Looking Back: Unexplainable Things Have a Purpose

“If the wonder’s gone when the truth is known

there never really was any wonder.”

~ from the television show House

Unexplainable things have a purpose. It’s something I believe. It’s not the same thing as “everything happens for a reason.” I don’t believe that is true, as it insinuates that something somewhere is orchestrating the event. In the natural world, things just are and what matters is how we take them. I believe that sometimes the purpose of unexplainable things is just to exist and/or happen, in order to serve as a moment against which we respond and reveal how we react to things unknown. They can be teachable moments, reflecting our vulnerabilities and levels of openness. We cannot control what happens to us all the time. The only control we have is how we respond to it.

Some people think of death as the ultimate unexplainable thing. We try to make sense of it in order to find some solid ground to stand on when we face it but we also meet the stories of those who have come back from death with disbelief and skepticism. We want to know but we want to know and have difficulty accepting an outside voice as truth, assuring that we can never truly have an answer.

Unexplainable things happen but even calling them that is a misnomer. It’s not that they can’t be explained. It’s more that we lack the understanding or language to put the experience into words that make sense. Maybe because we try to put into words something our intuitive bodies just know. We have multiple senses and each of these have their own language and way of responding to and translating the world around us. We spend so much time trying to figure out if what happened to us could have happened to us, that we lose sight of the fact the experience happened at all. Some of these teachable moments are not as grandiose as death. They can be small events that evoke a larger change within us.

In the summer of ’97 on a Smoky Mountain peak, I wandered away from my house at dusk, away from the chaos of people, towards the small creek that ran along the property. I was having one of those nights of feeling like there was no place to be alone in a house twenty-one people lived in and I was looking for a little inner quiet. I must have sat on the bank of the creek, listening to the gurgling, rippling and singing of the water off the stones for an hour, unmoving, just being.

I almost didn’t notice the shadow that flew over me and by the time I reacted the creature was sitting on a low branch above the creek five feet in front of me. It was the first memory I have of seeing an owl in the wild. It was by the far the largest bird I have ever seen in nature. She appeared mostly white, with bits of grey tufted here and there. She wasn’t moving and her eyes took me in. They were large and round and the color of dandelions. She might have had horns, and in some recollections earlier on I was more sure- before my brain started telling me what could or couldn’t be possible.

I held my breath as the owl turned its head around. For the moment that we sat there, the smell of the air seemed to shift, filling with a muskier scent of moldy earth and grated wood bark. I exhaled and the owl spread its wings out and flew silently, not even a whisper, over my head. I fell backwards as it passed, watching it glide overhead, in fearful intimidation. I remember her wing span was almost as wide as I am tall.

In that moment, I felt like I had glimpsed an unaltered state of the natural world. It woke something in me and my eyes were open, seeing the wild in tandem with the modern. For years I studied every kind of owl looking for the scientific name of the one I saw. No picture ever fit the creature I saw.

One day I asked myself, if someone told me that the owl I saw was impossible in nature, would I disbelieve the experience? The answer was no. Even though I couldn’t find the correct scientific answer, my nose remembered its smell. My skin remembered the rush and blur of air as the owl swooped in. My eyes remember with artistic grandeur the unfurling of those wings. And my ears recall the kind of silence that accompanies the presence of a predator in nature. I chose to embrace the truth that my interaction with this magnificent creature woke a connection in me and served as the catalyst for the spiritual path I have taken. Knowing the facts and the science about that moment would not diminish the wonder and magic of the experience, and it shouldn’t.

[This article was originally published February 23, 2011]

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.

It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art

and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder,

no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-Albert Einstein

The Autumn Tree

As a child, I thought that the splash of autumn color was the final death cry of the tree, screaming against the end in red, orange, and yellow defiance. I believed every fall was a little death for each tree, except for the pines, the immortals of their world. I used to hug the trees, bare of their leaves, and whisper comfort to them, telling them it would be all right, that their leaves would come back in the spring.

There was a lot about death I couldn’t perceive then, but even in my misunderstanding, I created rituals designed to comfort the living.

It is in these last weeks before they die that the leaves are able reveal their true selves to men who might otherwise bow too humbly beneath their splendor. Could we stand against the awe and wonder if our world was painted so vibrantly around us every day?

As they die, as their chlorophyll drains, the true skin is revealed and the leaves fill our world with wonder. We honor them as they burst and burn and fall to the ground. We trample the bones of them beneath our feet, reveling in the crisp sound cutting through the air that signifies autumn. We make pyres of their dead, careening into piles, giggling as they crunch beneath our weight. Even in death, we can also find joy.

The pieces of them we crush and scatter underfoot nourish the ground beneath the trunk of their tree. Their bones are meant to be left to mulch and feed their mother, just as our dead are meant to be buried beneath the earth, exposed to the elements, to nourish the world around it. Nature shows us how to live within the pattern of the larger world, but we can’t perceive it from our square cities of cement and asphalt.

We don’t bury our dead unfettered. We bag up the leaves from our yards and take them away from their home. We do it because death isn’t pretty. Because we do not want to see the crisp carcasses decaying before our eyes, as if it taints the image of their beauty.

But all beauty fades. Should that make what remains less beautiful? Is it not beautiful that each tree sees multiple generations of humans come and go, just as we watch a generation of leaves bloom, grow, and die for each year that we are alive? Is there no beauty in death's place in our cycles of life? I stand in wonder, gazing at the mountains around me. I watch as red, yellow, orange, and russet fire meet their end.

Ancestors in the Woods

As the internet posts this blog, I will be far from electricity that could handle more than one hairdryer plugged into an outlet at a time. I will be in the mountains of Massachusetts, celebrating Rites of Spring with the EarthSpirit community for my eleventh year. I don’t have to be psychic to say that I am having a good time right now.

I will be tending the Ancestor Shrine for the gathering, down in a thicket of woods along the beach. The space is open as a natural spot where the living and the dead can commune together, alongside the living creatures of the physical place. It’s a way of using the magic of the natural world as a tool to peer into Spirit. We will hang the names of our ancestors in the trees, and ask them to watch over those we have lost in this last year. And we shall feel our feet on the earth and we shall have gratitude for the breath in our lungs. We are living because They Were.

While I am off teaching in the woods, I wanted to share my favorite poem with you. If you are someone who likes poetry and likes nature, and you haven’t checked this poet out already, I highly recommend Mary Oliver’s work. It’s hard to choose a favorite, really, but this one resonated most authentically with me. It’s how I feel when I spend time in nature.

Sleeping In the Forest

by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me, she

took me back so tenderly, arranging

her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds. I slept

as never before, a stone

on the riverbed, nothing

between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated

light as moths among the branches

of the perfect trees. All night

I heard the small kingdoms breathing

around me, the insects, and the birds

who do their work in the darkness. All night

I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling

with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

(Tune in next week for my 200^th blog post!)

Stewards of the Land

We are born to the earth, we live on the earth, and when we die we will return to it. Just as our planet rotates around the sun, so do we, in our infinite migrations, rotate around the planet. So why doesn’t the Earth sit more fixedly centered in our thoughts? In my life it’s not a choice. I have nieces and nephews. I have great nieces and nephews even. Knowing that they and their children will live on long after me makes living a life of being kind to the earth important to me.

Over the generations we’ve watched our changing landscape spread out, crawling across the open spaces and clearing away the forested ones. We’ve despaired against the loss of green and wild places as animals became endangered and extinct. And now, it is such a state of how we live that we can’t imagine it any other way. We think that we cannot be a force for change, that one action cannot be a catalyst for renewal. But our bones know that we are people of the earth and they know that is not true.

The earth is not just dirt and bedrock beneath us. It is alive. We were born from its matter and our bodies will decay into its dust when we die. The earth is our Mother, a real and tangible parent beneath us. And mostly, in our short lives, we take little notice of the way we affect change to her. When we run out of room for progress, we build our cities out, abandoning discarded industry to decompose. So we build out, carving more space from the wild, and then we complain when the coyotes, bear, and deer wander our city streets.

What we need to do is to protect the green spaces that are left, from those who would wish to develop them. We are too smart to think that more green spaces will be discovered after we have removed them all. So we have to stop now. We have to become true stewards of the land and watch over the plant and animal life that is left.

Many people are already acting as stewards of the earth. And their pursuit of earth-centered actions have had larger and wondrous effects. Like this video of what happened after wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. Click here to view the 4 minute video How Wolves Change Rivers.

I’m not talking about a total re-wilding of the earth, though I have to confess, I do love images of nature taking the earth back, like in the films I am Legend, Twelve Monkeys, and The Happening. To my delight, I have even met trees already engaged in the process (see the picture at the top of this post).

Be a steward of the land, no matter what that means to you. Where is the place you can make a change? How can you teach your children to have reverence for the world around them? Maybe you will pick up litter, or plant a garden. Maybe you will feed the birds or rehabilitate wild animals. Maybe you will protest environmental destruction from industry. Maybe you will protect the whales in the sea. Maybe you will be a teacher. Maybe you will plant trees.

Maybe you will sit quietly in the forest and its language. Maybe you will call the crow, sister. Maybe you will call the raccoon, brother. Maybe you will hear the earth singing back to you and maybe you will understand that we are all kin, and that our purpose is to walk softly with the natural world. 

The Magic of Petrified Wood

Petrified birch from the Blue Forest, Wyoming.

In my spiritual life, to better connect to the natural world around me, I use allies as focusing tools, like animals, plants, and stones. I love trees, and feel a strong affinity with them. They have taught me to slow down, to stand and be present in the moment, to breathe in seasons and touch stillness. For this same reason, one of my favorite stones to work with is petrified wood. I use a lot of fossils, the petrified remains of organics that lived millions of years ago. I call them earth bones. They are the ancestral stones I hold when I meditate backwards through my family lines.

Almost as magical as the rock itself, is the process it undergoes to become stone. The word petro is Greek for “rock/stone.” When something petrifies, it literally becomes stone in a process called permineralization, where organic material is replaced over time with minerals, mostly silicates. Many fossils form as compressions or impressions, but petrified wood uniquely forms as a three-dimensional representation of the original, preserving detail at the microscopic level. To feel the weight of the minerals in your hand and the coolness of the stone while your eyes perceive grainy bark… it is a wonder of the natural world.

Wood becomes preserved when it is buried under sediment, where a lack of oxygen stops aerobic decomposition. Then, water rich in minerals flows through the sediment, where they deposit in the plant cells. Permineralization begins when silica from the mineral-laden water permeates the wood. Next, this solution penetrates the pores of the cell walls. Then the cell walls, cellulose, begin to dissolve while, elsewhere in the trunk, the minerals begin to build up, preserving the wooden frame. The last to decay is the inner lignin of the tree. Afterwards, silica deposits itself in any spaces in between the cells, until it finally penetrates the cell lumina, the cavity within the walls of the plant cell. It might fill these voids with chalcedony, agate, quartz, calcite, pyrite, or opal. Finally, lithification occurs, which is the process where sediment compresses under pressure, into rock, as water loss continues to occur. The initial silica is amorphous, which is unstable. Over millions of years, due to more extensive polymerization and water loss, the silica transforms into a more stable crystalline structure, like opal or quartz.

Cellulose, hemicelluloses, and lignin account for 95% of the dry weight of live wood. After permineralization, 90% of the weight of the fossil is silica, showing that very little, if any, of the original material remains [according to Leo & Barghoorn (1976), Sigleo (1978), and Mustoe(2008)]. Permineralization is one of the most accurate modes of fossil preservation. Because different layers of the wood decay and fill in with silicates at differing rates, it preserves the individual parts of the tree, though accuracy varies between specimens. Some are “sugary,” where the cell detail is blurred. Others show the tree rings intact, and still more are comprised of such a fine grain of silica, that the histology of the original tree can be studied satisfactorily.

Believe it or not, that bark is pure stone!

Some specimens of petrified wood, when uncovered, are pure silicate/quartz white, though, over time the sun will darken it. Other minerals add to the beautiful colors of the petrified wood. Carbon colors the specimen black. Cobalt and chromium both add hues of green and blue. Manganese tinges the stone with pink and orange, while manganese oxides color it in yellow and black. Iron oxides color it with red, brown, and yellow.

Petrified wood is a common fossil, but the conditions needed to create it are specific. Temperatures over 212 degrees Fahrenheit will break the wood down before the process can occur and excessive pressures will deform the organic tissues. And not only does it need mineral-rich water but, chemically, wood breaks down when the water’s pH value is below 4.5 and above 7, so the window for a perfect environment is still precise.

They are treasure from the earth, gifts in their assurance as to the cyclical nature of life, and the knowledge that life will out in the end. I use them as touchstones. Their process of transformation traverses so many millions of years that I use them to connect to the past, as if I can take a shortcut and touch any point of time in their linear history. When you come across petrified wood, take a moment to touch it and connect into it. Touch the energy of the spirit of the tree it was once a part of and be reminded of the larger, universal web we are all a part of.

Facts and Folklore

·         Most of the petrified trees have been given the name Araucarioxylon arizonicum. 

·         Petrified wood is found on every continent except for Antarctica.

·         There are petrified trees more than 10 feet in diameter and 100 feet long at the Petrified Forest National Monument, Santa Cruz Province, Argentine Patagonia.

·         The stone of Alberta, Canada is petrified wood.

·         The Chinese government has cracked down on the collecting of this material.

·         The Museum of Natural History in Chemnitz, Germany has specimens that date back to their discovery in 1737.

·         The Puyango Petrified Forest in Ecuador has one of the largest collections in the world.

·         Egypt declared their petrified forests to be national protectorates.

·         The largest forest can be found in the Petrified Forest of Lesvos, on Lesbos, Greece, covering 93 miles. Upright trunks with roots intact can be found there. Some trunks measure up to 72 feet in length.

·         In the Great Sand Sea of Libya, pieces of petrified trunks and branches are littered over hundreds of square miles, along with Stone Age artifacts.

·         At low tide along the coast of Wales and England, submerged petrified forests become visible.

·         Seven species of tree have been identified through petrified wood.

·         Petrified wood is often used in lapidary work, cut into cabochons for jewelry and slabs for table tops and counters.

·         The oldest known species of petrified wood can be found near Gilboa, New York, dating to the Devonian period, over 358 million years old.

·         The stone in the National park in Arizona are of the Triassic Period, over 160 million years old.

·         Petrified wood is associated in metaphysical worlds with the astrological sign Leo and the Base Chakra.

·         Petrified wood and dinosaur bones are the best-known specimens of permineralized fossils.

·         Petrified wood is found in large numbers in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, Germany, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Greece, Indonesia, India, Israel, Libya, Namibia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and the United States.

·         In the United States, Petrified Forests and Parks can be found in abundance: the Gilboa Fossil Forest in New York; the Petrified Forest in Mississippi; the park in Lemmon, South Dakota; Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota; the Petrified Springs in Kenosha, Wisconsin; Yellowstone Petrified Forest and Gallatin Petrified Forest in Yellowstone, Wyoming; the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado; the Ginkgo Petrified Forest, Wanapum State Park in Washington; the forest in Calistoga, California; the National Park in Holbrook, Arizona; the Escalante Petrified Forest State Park in Utah.

Words from an Early Naturalist

Gene Stratton-Porter

In my post last week, I wrote about discovering a book that had belonged to my 2x Great-Grandma. It was meaningful to me because I am a booklover. I was more excited to discover that the author, Gene Stratton-Porter, had been born Geneva Grace Stratton, and was a woman. Then, researching the book and the author led to the discovery that she was an early and avid naturalist, writing her books of fiction, ripe with a wealth of knowledge of the doings of the natural world, so that she could support her books and articles of non-fiction.

This voice from the past was more than just a connection to one of my ancestors. I see the effects of cutting down forest to build more city as the deer and coy dog populations become more and more visible in my city. The sight of eagles and hawks within the limits is becoming so common as to not be a novelty anymore. Why is that? Because their homes are disappearing for the sake of our comforts. It was both heartening and heartbreaking to discover Gene Stratton-Porter’s own words on the loss of her beloved natural world, almost a hundred years ago.

I found a description of her from biographer Frederic Cooper: “Gene Stratton-Porter lives in a swamp, arrays herself in man’s clothes, and sallies forth in all weathers to study the secrets of nature. I believe she knows every bug, bird, and beast in the woods… She is primarily a naturalist, one of the foremost in America and has published a number of books on flora and fauna…”

Voices from the Ancestors

The Limberlost marsh in Indiana was a favored place of the author at one period of her life, reflected in several of her books, most popularly in A Girl of the Limberlost. She was devastated when the trees and natural habitats of her animal friends were cleared to make room for farmland. And she watched in despair as oil drilling destroyed the marshlands. She spoke out against it, even though her husband owned many oil rigs.

Gene Stratton-Porter wrote several essays on environmental issues in a book, Let Us Highly Resolve, printed posthumously, in 1927. She watched her beloved swamplands get cleared for farming and oil. In her article “Shall We Save Our Natural Beauty?” she says: “The deer and fur-bearing animals are practically gone from the country I knew… The birds have been depleted in numbers until it is quite impossible to raise fruit of any kind without a continuous fight against slugs and aphis… With the cutting of timber has come a change in climate; weeks of drought in the summer…and winters so stringently cold that the fruit trees are killed outright. The even temperature and the rains every three or four days which we knew in childhood are things of the past…it has become necessary for the sons of men who wasted the woods and the waters to put in overhead sprinkling systems… windmills and irrigation are becoming common…as a nation, [we] have already, in the most wanton and reckless waste the world has ever known, changed our climate conditions and wasted a good part of our splendid heritage. The question now facing us is whether we shall do all that lies in our power to save comfortable living conditions for ourselves and the spots of natural beauty that remain for our children… If this is to be done, a nation-wide movement must be begun immediately…there may not be coal and iron, at the rate we are using it, to supply future generations… Certainly to plant trees and preserve trees, to preserve water, and to do all in our power to save every natural resource, both from the standpoint of utility and beauty, is a work that every man and woman should give immediate and earnest attention.”

Gene wrote her articles in the hopes of sharing the “often-overlooked beauty and complexity of wildlife.” She regarded it more highly than the social affairs and proprieties she saw within her world. Of the loss of habitat in the Limberlost marsh, she notes the inevitable climate change: “They had forgotten that draining the water from all these acres of swamp land would dry and heat the air… and they had not figured out for themselves how much rainfall they would take from their crops… [A]s the forests fell, the creeks and springs dried up… the work of changing the climatic conditions of a world was underway… the fur-bearing animals and all kinds of game birds were being driven farther and farther…”

I hear her words, and I think of my love of the green wilds. A friend of mine says that when she was growing up, her family home was in one of the first suburbs at the edge of a wood, a wood that stretched for miles behind them. Thirty-five years later, there are no woods to be seen at all. Nothing but more suburbs and sprawling spaces of dried grasses. I am not a scientist. I don’t have facts and figures. I don’t feel the need to prove we are damaging the Earth. Her resources are finite. That is a surety. How many generations of voices need to ring out before we find the strength to make the changes necessary for the continued survival of all life on the planet? For we are all relations.