Russell Wangersky: Finding something in nothing

Opinion by Russell Wangersky • Yesterday 

A small but sweet apple from Gusset's Cove, N.L.© Provided by Leader Post

It seems like a long, long time ago. But when I was moving to Saskatchewan, a reader in Newfoundland and Labrador wrote to me and told me that he’d enjoyed my columns and editorials out east — “Even,” he said, “the ones you write about nothing.”

I could have taken offence, I suppose, but I didn’t. I knew exactly the type of columns he was talking about. They aren’t about politics, don’t point fingers, don’t take sides.

They’re about the tremulous thread of a shareable human feeling — about, perhaps, the curving way streams work through marsh, or the constant shiver of poplar leaves in the wind.

I haven’t written many of those columns here. I’ve been taking a measure of this place, a measure of all the differences and the odd similarities between a province next to, and thoroughly defined by, the Atlantic Ocean, and a province mapped by the prairie.

I’ve done them mostly when I’ve been struck by abandoned homesteads or the unique folds of land you find here, running downhill along creek banks to the big steady rivers. When I see something that could, or should, or might, run straight through us all, if only for a thin moment or two.

So, this is a column about apples. Or, about nothing.

Years ago, visiting Cape Breton, N.S., I was struck by the way every tossed roadside apple core seemed to take root and produce some viable form of apple tree — go at the right time in the fall, and Cape Breton’s ditches are dotted with fruiting trees, red apples and others close to burgundy, bright yellows and the khaki-brown of the fruit that trends towards russets.

It opened my eyes. Literally.

Because you can spend a lifetime looking at things without seeing them. Then, you can reach a critical tipping point and you suddenly can’t help but see them. Back in Newfoundland, I started to see apples and their trees. The particular colour and shine of apple leaves — the singular shape of the trees.

Those few short weeks — sometimes only a week — of blossoms. Suddenly, there were apple trees everywhere. Like there are apple trees here as well — tilting untrimmed out of backyards, along the river banks, in old farmyards.

Apples are a mix of their particular genetic parentage. And that means every named apple you eat is the result of something unique. Eat a Royal Gala or a Cosmic Crisp, a Granny Smith or a Cox’s orange pippin, and you are eating the fruit of one particular founding tree, a scion from that original parent that has been grafted onto hardy root stock.

Wild apples are different. They are an accident of parentage and bees, of pollen and timing and wind and near-neighbours, and they are all different. And perhaps, in nature’s infinite combination, better.

For the past few years, I’ve taken to trying apples from fall trees wherever I can find them. Bright red, small, sweet apples from an abandoned tree in an abandoned yard in a former community called Gusset’s Cove.

Fat, round globes, shot through with red and green tearaway stripes, on a stunted little tree in a creek-carved valley above Macrorie on the number 45 highway, apples on a tree so small and hobbled it looked like producing any fruit required the tree’s maximum, and maybe unsustainable, effort.

I think about their colour and their taste and their possible different uses: “Pie apple?” “Eating apple?” “Storing apple?”

I don’t write anything down. I remember the best of them, what they were like, how much I liked them. And I think that, out there somewhere, there’s a perfect combination, a perfect apple, the fruit that is the total definition of appleness. And maybe there isn’t.

Maybe a column about me tasting apples is about nothing. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s about what we reach for when the world around us seems tattered and frayed and unlikely to, against all odds, be anything less than horrible.

Maybe, in a small way, it’s about hope.

I’m looking for an apple.

Russell Wangersky is the editor in chief of the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. He can be reached at rwangersky@postmedia.com.