The
Yellow Transparent Orchard
1935
T he
apple trees in this darkened valley are dark themselves, towering up high
above our schoolboy heads. Yellow Transparent these apple trees are, Yellow
Transparents planted 40 years ago by our grandfather. Granddad planted
these 40 acres of Yellow Transparent trees back in the 1890s, and now these
trees are giants, their canopies joining high off the ground, shutting
out the sky. Not a weed grows in Granddad's orchard, not a weed survives
the hoe-gang that follows the weekly discing. Every week, Ol' Cat pulls
a 16-foot disc-harrow through the orchard, and the hoe-gang follows; a
weed in the orchard is an insult to my Granddad.
Today
cousin Bob and I are on the payroll. Cousin Bob and I are cutting suckers,
cutting suckers in the Transparent block, cutting the suckers with long
wooden-handled loppers. Suckers come up where the disc has cut into a root,
and Granddad hates them worse than he hates weeds. Bob and I use regular orchard
loppers to cut down the suckers, cut each sucker deep below the soil-line;
shove the lopper points down into the dirt and cut deep. Cutting suckers
is a good job for 10-year-old boys; we don't have so far to go to get down
on our knees. The
rows of Yellow Transparent trees seem endless, each one like the last,
with only an occasional lonesome toadfrog to entertain us, and once a garter
snake. I've brought my old dog Jack, of course, but out here he sleeps
too much to be any count.
There's
an old old well down in the holler. An old old bricked up spring. The water
is always brown and always has a funny flavor. Bob won't taste it even;
says probably some ol' Indian had drowned in it a hundert years ago. I
won't try that spring water again, even though I don't really think there
had even been a brick in this valley a hundert years ago. Bob gets pretty
fanciful sometimes.
These
big Yellow Transparent trees are hard to climb. All the bottom limbs seem
to come out together, and they're so big and so grown together that we
can't even get started in a lot of 'em, can't even get up into the first
crotch. When we do get up into a tree, though, there usually aren't many
limbs for climbing on up, and I never learned to shinny up the trunk. But
once in a while, a tree will be set up just right and we climb clear to the
very top. It always feels great to get up into the very top of a Yellow
Transparent tree, 25 feet up in the air, off the ground. Up in the top
you can look all around and see tree-tops going on forever, forty acres
of Yellow Transparent apple trees.
Bob
and I took two weeks to do it, but we finished cutting suckers in the old
Yellow Transparent orchard. We finished the job, and Granddad handed us
six silver dollars apiece. Six silver dollars was what a fullgrown man
got paid for a week of work, so me and Bob felt pretty high and mighty
about our six silver dollars apiece. I gave my six silver dollars
to my Daddy, and next Saturday he's going to help me get a new pair of
shoes.
1938
I have
been working with the thinning crew for two weeks now, ever since school
let out. I've been working alongside Oscar McGhee, Oscar on a long straight
ladder and me using a 12-ft stepladder. We're thinning Yellow Transparent,
Oscar and me and 20 other guys, and cousin Bob is going to start come Monday.
(The
Yellow Transparent is a tiny yellow apple, minuscle compared to the huge
Mutsu and Fortune and Spigold apples of today. But even back then, Yellow
Transparents were little apples. We usually packed Yellow Transparent 2-inch
and up, with not much up -- 2-inch diameter, that is -- not much of an
apple. Sometimes, if the market was hot, we'd even pack inch and 7/8. I
used to wonder what people did with an apple that little.)
To give
even a 2-inch packout, the crop had to be thinned. Yellow Transparent has
the most annoying habit of "biennial bearing" -- a huge crop of little
apples one year and no bloom at all the next. In that "on" year, Granddad
tried to thin the crop enough to let the remaining apples make decent size,
and that's what we're doing today.
Hand-thinning
apples is a slow and tedious business in our "pedestrian" orchards of today.
But 70 years ago, our old Yellow Transparent apple trees carried most of
their crop high -- 18, 20, 25 feet up off the ground. Handling a long ladder
in the orchard was the first test of manhood in our apple-growing community
in the Ozark foothills of Southern Illinois. Manhandling a 25-foot ladder
in an apple tree was a man-sized job, and almost every schoolboy in Dix
looked forward to the time he'd be growed up enough to be put on a 25-foot
ladder in the apple orchard.
Dad
started me out on this tall stepladder, and maybe next week he'll put me
onto a long pointed straight ladder. Not likely one like Oscar's 25-footer,
but then I'm not 6-foot-2 like Oscar either. I think I could handle a 16-footer
all right, though, or maybe even an 18; I've tried a 16-footer enough to
make me feel pretty good about actually working off it in the orchard.
Yesterday
a fella from Sikeston (that's down in the Missouri bootheel) was working
off a ladder like mine, and he climbed up it after lunch and just kept
climbing where there wasn't any more ladder. Of course he fell off, but
he wasn't hurt a bit. Oscar said the fella was too drunk to get hurt, that
he had brought a bottle and was working on it over lunch. Granddad sent
him home.
Me and
Gene McGhee almost got fired at noon today. We had got to throwing apples
at each other, just for fun, and didn't think that would particularly bother
anybody. But Grover Brenton -- he's the crew boss -- came over and said
that was hard against one of Granddad's rules and if we did any more he'd
have to let us go. We decided we didn't need to throw any more apples.Tonight
I'm going to practice with an 18-footer that Dad has at home where he was
cleaning the gutters last week. I'm going to practice with Dad's 18-footer
and maybe I'll get to use one in the orchard soon.
1939
B ob
and I were 14 and had just gotten our driver's licenses. This was the "off-year"
for our Yellow Transparents -- occasionally there would be a cluster of
fruit, great big apples, but not enough crop to be commercial. Bob and
I asked Granddad if maybe we could go out and pick some of these beautiful
big apples and drive into Mt. Vernon and peddle 'em door to door. We'd
never before tried peddling, but we figured anyone who saw these big Transparents
would buy a half peck at least. So we picked apples, climbed ladders high
to glean just 3 or 4 big golden apples, picked ten bushels of the finest
Yellow Transparent apples ever seen. Drove into Mt. Vernon, proud to be
trusted with Granddad's 1929 Ford pickup truck; took turns driving those
8 miles; Bob would drive a mile, I'd drive a mile. Got into town by nine
o'clock, started knocking on doors. "First apples, ma'am! Yellow Transparents
-- didja ever see such nice ones? Just a quarter for the basket!" Began
to get discouraged after a dozen noes. One lady gave us cookies but no
one would buy. Moved to a different part of town. By one o'clock we still
had all the Yellow Transparents we'd started out with except the two we'd
eaten.
We
went home and never went peddling again.
1945
Dad
got home from the Pacific in September, in time to take off his Navy blues and
jump into the Rome Beauty harvest. I was a couple of months later coming
in from the war in Europe. The orchards were a shambles, of course, after
four years of neglect. Granddad had done his best, but the men of Jefferson
County were in Germany and Italy and the Phillipines, they were simply
vanished into the war, and of course Granddad just couldn't get help. Now
we were coming home, home from the wars. Now we could put our lives back together, put our
land, our orchards back together again, and go on toward our tomorrows.
The
Schoolhouse Orchard was still in pretty good shape -- fairly young trees
not far past their prime. The Home Place was mixed -- the old striped Romes
would never be moneymakers again, no matter how much effort we put into
reclaiming the trees -- the market no longer wanted striped Rome Beauty.
And up at the White Orchard, on the land Grandmother had inherited from
her family's homesteaded farm, here was the block of Yellow Transparents,
those 40 acres I'd worked in so often as a boy. Granddad hadn't touched
'em since 1941, and there was no chance of salvaging these trees. Really
a jungle now, with half the limbs dead from shading. Really a jungle, not
seeming so tall as once it had, but with rather a sinister aura to it that
at first had jolted me into near-panicked caution, into fear of ambush
waiting.
The
Jonathan we saved -- Dad and I each took a crew into the Jonathan, marking
limbs to be sawed off: "Cut here", "take this one out", "just above the
crotch", we told our sawyers. We slashed through the Jonathan, the Winesaps,
the Duchess, the Grimes Golden -- the ground was layered with massive prunings,
but the trees were once again ready to translate sunshine into apples.
But
our Yellow Transparents? Time for our Yellow Transparents to go -- no market,
no production. But how do we get rid of an orchard of huge old trees? Trunks
of these trees were 6, 7, 8 feet around, and chain saws were unheard of
in Jefferson county, Illinois in 1945.
Granddad
decided that if the First Folks, the pioneers, had cleared the land with
saw and axe, then we should be able to cut down a few apple trees with
a good crosscut saw and some brand new axes. So our pruning crew, Butch
and Uncle Burl and Little Pearl and Montie, our pruning crew headed for
the Yellow Transparent orchard with two newly sharpened crosscut saws.
By noontime there were six big trees laid on the ground -- 6 big trees
cut down out of 1500 Yellow Transparent trees. It didn't take Dad long
to figure that it would take these four men a good six months to cut down
our Yellow Transparents -- six months of pruning not done, a season's pruning
gone by the board to get rid of the old Yellow Transparents.
Dad sketched out a solution on a grocery sack, sat by the kitchen stove
and sketched out a machine to cut down our Yellow Transparents, and then
started bringing his sketch to life in the shop. Dad's tree-cutter wasn't
too much for looks, and OSHA would have had a hissy today, but Dad's tree-cutter
worked. He rigged a horsedrawn wooden mudboat, pivot in the center, model
A Ford engine, 12-foot wooden beam, 20-inch circular saw blade, flat belt
drive. Dad took his new rig into the Yellow Transparent block, pulled up
by the first tree, started that model A engine, pivotted the whirling circle
saw into the tree trunk. In half a minute he had cut almost through that
massive trunk, and then the tree collapsed just enough to pinch the blade,
the belt flew off, and operations came to a halt. 
But
Dad was elated, of course -- his concept worked -- just details to work
out. Next day he was reorganized-- Ol' Yellow Cat with a 30-ft chain
to keep pressure off the blade. Ol' Dan and Ol' Rex to drag away the carcass.
By nightfall, there were 90 Yellow Transparent trees piled in a great windrow.
In a month the Yellow Transparent orchard was firewood.
1952
I've
made it home from Korea, and Cindy and I have found this old farm near
Alto Pass, high on the Ozark escarpment above the great valley, looking
off 25 miles south to the confluence of the Missippi and the Ohio. Right
in the middle of the Elberta orchard stand a dozen old Yellow Transparent
trees. We know they will never be moneymakers, but they'll be good climbing
trees for our kids. I remembered how Bob and I had climbed high in the
Yellow Transparents when we were boys so long ago, how we had climbed high and looked
out over the treetops; now these Trnsparent trees were only 50 yards from our little
red house.
Later
on, we often took our lunch there in the Yellow Transparents, and in the
springtimes their cascades of flowers were like great bouquets in our backyard.
We ate a lot of those Yellow Transparent apples -- never sold a one, but
fresh Yellow Transparents in June made a great treat just after strawberry
season. Those gaunt old trees reminded me of the Yellow Transparent orchard
back at Dix, reminded me of those long-gone days when I was a freckle-faced,
tow-headed boy.
1956
I'd
visited Dave Perrine at Centralia two summers ago, and Dave had walked
me through his block of Perrine Giant Transparents. Dave had discovered
a tetraploid sport of Yellow Transparent, a strain that produced an apple
just like the regular Yellow Transparent except four times as big.
Dave
gave me scionwood and I grafted up a hundred trees or so, and now this
spring Cindy and Jamie and John and I are planting them down below the
packing shed, down where Jamie and John had found and cleaned out the spring.
We're planting the little Perrine Giant Transparent trees and with them
planting a few of our hopes for our farm here in the Ozark foothills. Here
in this springtime we're planting hopes and dreams and apple trees, we're
planting hopes and dreams and apple trees here on our land, and Dave Perrine's
Giant Transparents are part of our total dream.
1967
Ten
years ago we had to leave our farm, had to leave our home in the hills
and go back north to Mt. Vernon and a higher teacher's salary that would
let us nibble away at the debts left from our hailstorm of 1956. Ten years
now that we've been almost migrants, Mt. Vernon and then summer school
in Kentucky and at Urbana, and then more graduate school in Wisconsin.
Then here to Southern to finish my doctorate and to teach, to teach of
molecule and matter, to teach of bonding and ions. Down at Alto Pass, our
old Yellow Transparent trees were dying of neglect, and our new Perrine
Transparents and our other young orchards were being invaded by sassafras
and persimmon and whitetail deer. Nature claims her own in the Ozark hills,
uses sassafras and persimmon and whitetail deer to take back the land when
our hand falls from the plow.
Now
at last we've loosed our grip on the farm, we've sold our land in the Ozark foothills,
the old hailstorm debts paid off; we've sold our precious land, and
we're going to New York to begin anew. We're going to New York to an alien
world, to a land of strangers whose only link to us is the apple tree.
To New York, to Cornell and the Finger Lakes, and to apple trees. We're going to New
York to begin anew.
1987
U ntil
today, I couldn't come back to our farm in the hills at Alto Pass. But
we're here today, Cindy and I, and Jamie and John and Pete and Steve and
Sarah. We've come back to walk again the land, the land that for a little
spell of time was ours to hold and touch and love. We're back again this
day to remember the land and to touch and polish our memories of this land.
We find the spot where once we brought our lunch, down under the old Yellow
Transparent trees so near the house, we find the spot where the boys would
climb the trees and look out over the great valley to the south. The trees
are gone, of course, just gaunt grey limbs awreck on the ground. One aged
stump still green. The packing house has crumbled too, its roof caved in,
one side collapsed, and the ancient Farmall tractor, the old 10-20, still
sits beside the pond, all red rust and dust by now.
Down
by the spring the sumac stands tall, sassafras trees are undergrown with
blackberry bushes. The tulip poplar seedlings that we planted the spring
Peter was born are forest now, great straight pyramids reaching for the
sky. Two whitetails flash, a pair of bucks flush out of cover, startled
to find strange people invading their domain. One lone Perrine Transparent
spreads its arms, covered now with the white of spring. One Transparent
tree alive still on our land.
One
lone Yellow Transparent tree, no longer ours, the farm no longer ours,
but we've walked the land again, we've touched again the soil, we've freshed
our memories, the memories of this land, the trees that once were here,
the life we lived here on these hills. These memories are ours and through
these memories the land is our land still, in our hearts this land is our
land still.
Dr.
James N. Cummins,
Emeritus
Professor of Pomology
