American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed
by Issac Fitzgerald
Library Copy

I expected a travel book. Man gets in the car, drives around America, sees interesting places, tells me about them.

Instead, Fitzgerald kept pulling me into history, myths, dying towns, local bars, county fairs, abandoned cars, economic change, rural America, and Johnny Appleseed.

And somehow, I went right along with him.

One of my favorite parts was Johnny Appleseed, because I realized I knew the legend but not the real story.

In my head, Johnny Appleseed was this cheerful barefoot man wandering across the countryside, scattering apple seeds everywhere with a tin pot on his head.

The real man was John Chapman, and his story was much more interesting than the childhood version.

Chapman was not just randomly tossing apple seeds around. He planted nurseries and orchards along the expanding frontier, and those orchards had real economic value. The apples grown from seed were often not the sweet eating apples we think of today. Many were better suited for hard cider, which was widely consumed and had value as a product.

Suddenly Johnny Appleseed was not just this lovable eccentric roaming around doing good deeds.

His story connected to westward expansion, settlement, land, business, and the cider economy.

Even the famous tin hat appears to belong more to the legend than to established fact.

That was when I found myself thinking, Wait a minute. How much of the Johnny Appleseed story I learned as a child was actually true?

And down the rabbit hole I went.

That became one of the things I liked best about the book. Fitzgerald would take something familiar and turn it sideways. I would think I knew the story, and suddenly I was asking where history ended and mythology began.

I also found that I liked the ordinary scenes more than some of the larger explanations.

The county fair.

The local bar.

The empty fields.

The old cars sitting there like leftovers from another time.

Those images stayed with me because they showed the changes in America without needing a lecture. You could see places where factories had closed, jobs had disappeared, and people had moved away. Some towns seemed to be surviving on memory as much as anything else.

But the people were still there.

That mattered.

The book also changed the way I think about rural America.

When people say rural America, I think many of us immediately picture Wyoming, Montana, Idaho — ranches, mountains, wide-open land, somewhere “out West.”

But rural America is everywhere.

It is in upstate New York. It is in California once you get away from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the other large cities. It is in Pennsylvania, Ohio, the Carolinas, and almost every state in the country.

That seems obvious once you stop and think about it, but I had never really thought about how misleading our mental picture can be.

The rural-urban divide is not simply East versus West, or the coasts versus the middle of the country. Sometimes those two Americas exist inside the same state, only a few hours apart.

New York City and rural upstate New York are both New York, but they are very different experiences of the same state. California has some of the largest cities in the country, but it also has farming communities and isolated towns far removed from that urban life.

That helped me understand one of Fitzgerald’s larger points. We talk about “America” as if everybody is living in the same place and experiencing the same country.

They are not.

A person living in a town where the factory closed, jobs disappeared, and the young people moved away may experience America very differently from someone living in a growing metropolitan area.

That difference matters.

Still, Fitzgerald sometimes seemed determined to make sure I understood that small towns were struggling.

And then make sure again.

And again.

By the middle of the book, I was thinking:

Yes, I understand. The factory closed. Jobs disappeared. People left. I’m with you. Can we keep driving now?

😂

That was probably my biggest problem with the book.

I liked Fitzgerald much more when he showed me America than when he explained America to me.

Show me the old car in the field.

Take me to the county fair.

Sit me down in the bar.

Let me hear people talk.

I can figure out what some of it means.

And while we are discussing things I could have lived without, I definitely did not need quite so much information about his bodily functions.

There are some things a travel companion should simply keep to himself.

But underneath all of that, the part of the book that stayed with me most was Fitzgerald’s search for solitude.

He seemed to set out wanting to get away from people. Away from noise. Away from routine. Maybe even away from himself for a while.

Yet everywhere he went, he kept finding people.

People at county fairs.

People in bars.

People in small towns.

People telling stories.

People gathering, talking, laughing, and helping one another.

He went looking for solitude and kept running into humanity.

And then he came home.

That ending made the whole journey mean something different to me.

After all that traveling, all those miles, all those towns and conversations, he seemed to realize that community is where you hang your hat.

The thing he had been looking for was not necessarily somewhere out there waiting for him.

It had been there all along.

He just did not recognize it.

That reminded me of The Wizard of Oz.

Dorothy travels all the way to Oz believing she has to go somewhere else to find what she needs. She meets strange people, goes through all kinds of trouble, and eventually discovers that home was more important than she understood when she left it.

Fitzgerald’s journey felt a little like that to me.

He had to leave home to understand what home meant.

He had to search for solitude to understand the value of community.

He had to travel across America to realize that belonging is not always some perfect place waiting at the end of the road.

Sometimes it is the place you started from.

Sometimes it is the people you already know.

Sometimes you have to leave before you can finally see it.

I normally do not read travelogues, and there were definitely sections where my attention wandered. But then Fitzgerald would come across some forgotten town, strange piece of history, unexpected conversation, or something like Johnny Appleseed, and suddenly I was interested again.

That may be what I liked most about American Rambler.

It made me curious.

It made me ask questions.

It made me want to look things up.

It made me question the stories Americans tell about themselves, the way we picture rural America, and the difference between history and mythology.

And every once in a while it made me stop and think:

Wait a minute…is that actually true?

For me, that is when a book becomes fun.

And maybe Fitzgerald’s biggest discovery was the simplest one of all.

After traveling across America looking for something he could not quite name, he finally came home and found it.

There really is no place like home. 👠