Pick Your Own Fruitful Endeavors

IN THE BEGINNING there was only one rule – don’t eat the apples. But, of course, we did, and now there are all manner of rules about killing, coveting, lying, swearing, praying, fornicating, and so forth.

And still, nothing tastes better than stolen fruit. I copped a half a backpack full of apples biking home today, picked them from a tree that doesn’t belong to me. It is a scrappy uncultivated tree that seems to grow out of solid rock along a main street in town. I won’t tell you where. I don’t want you poaching my stash.

This tree has certainly been abused. It cowers like a stray dog, avoiding attention most of the year until it suddenly fills with fruit. Some years the pickings are lean, but every few years the apples explode. They are small and green and scarred and mangled, like nothing you could buy in a store. But they are free, and as tasty, or better, than their rich and polished cousins. And stealing them is still a joy of biblical proportion. The pie they landed in would tempt the devil.

There must have been an orchard here once, long before the asphalt came and the dynamite leveled the hill, back when the water flowed where Nature intended. Portsmouth itself was an orchard once. The first settlers planted fruit on the first granted acres here in 1630. For years the city was little more than a single plantation with one large house along the river and a house full of disgruntled servants from England. They spent their days planting the original orchard, now Strawbery Banke Museum, and searching for gold mines and raising grapes for wine.

I’ve never found the mythical strawberries for which the city was named. But I know about the pear tree across from the Abbott Store. I’ve made jam from the rose hips growing along South Mill Pond and Peirce Island. Portsmouth is no Garden of Eden, but there are the remnants of cultivation all around.

And I am a practiced sinner. I learned as a boy in my own back yard in a little town called Grafton. We had our own fat apple tree then, a cherry tree and a vegetable garden. I learned young how to swing from the tallest branches of one tree to grab the topmost fruit from another with daredevil skill. Moving to New Hampshire, where we had no fruit trees of our own, I learned to seek out targets by their spring blossoms, then strike in fall. On the long walk home from junior high, I would dissolve into a neighbor’s field and settle among the branches with a book. A cluster of vines and leaves in my favorite tree formed a perfect bower for hiding, reading and eating. Tart and oily Concord grapes hung among the tart green apples in a robbers paradise.

Portsmouth has its own stolen fruit traditions. Charles Brewster recalled an ancient bergamont pear tree on Vaughan Street in the early 1800s. It had served, he says, the tables of the Meserve, Sheafe, Mason, Webster, Upham, Long, Thorn and other neighborhood families for a century. And what boy did not climb into that yard to pilfer the prized pears?

But not only boys will be boys. Ruth Given of California recently sent me an unpublished manuscript by her ancestor Charlotte Haven. Charlotte was born in Portsmouth in 1819 and dictated her memoirs the year of her death in 1899. Precocious and lively, young Charlotte was more comfortable in the company of her relatives on the Shaefe side of the family. Her own father, the son of Rev. Samuel Haven, was kindly, but cold and stern. As child Charlotte recalls:

"My favorite seat was in an apple tree, where I used to carry my books and study. I was fond of green apples too, but father had forbidden me to pick them, so I used to bend down the branches and gnaw them, leaving the cores dangling on the trees."

Charlotte could play Eve to my Adam any day. Though separated by centuries, we share the original sin. We have reached out and taken the forbidden fruit, and we carry no regret for the tumbledown world that follows in our wake.

Copyright © 2007 by J. Dennis Robinson. All right reserved.