American Chestnut & Me
Neither of us yet extinct
In 2002, my wife and I bought a 1910 Victorian home in Phoenicia, NY. Our friends christened it “Big Blue.” At our housewarming party, Jody, the husband of the local postmaster, laid a hand reverently on the pocket door leading to the dining room. He caressed the woodgrain and gazed wide-eyed at the door jambs and window frames around him.
“American chestnut!” he said.
I’d noticed the wood was beautiful, but Jody’s enthusiasm seemed a little odd. No one – not the relator, nor the previous owners – had mentioned anything special about it.
Jody gazed at me for a long moment.
“You don’t know, do you?” he asked. It was more statement than question.
Thus began my education about one of the worst ecological disasters in American history, a cataclysm made even more remarkable by my total ignorance of it. Like almost everyone I knew – and know – I’d learned nothing of the blight that brought down the indigenous American chestnut, the majestic “redwood of the East,” in the first half of the 20th century. This calamity significantly altered the landscape of the Eastern U.S., including our Catskills. Between 1904 and 1950, about four billion American chestnuts fell, one quarter of the forest canopy. Hereabouts, they were replaced mostly by the maples and birches that look down on us now.
“Someone thought the fatter Chinese chestnuts were better,” Jody said. “So, they imported ‘em in the late 19th century, and brought the blight.”
My grandparents’ Atlanta backyard featured one of those imported chestnut trees – Castanea mollissima. A squat, bushy thing, not unlike an apple tree, its ancestors bred over centuries for orchards in China. I remember walking barefoot over the burrs that housed those fat chestnuts, getting trapped beneath the boughs, howling in pain.
Dear reader, any chestnut you have ever consumed was of that variety.
Jody said the straight grain, rot-resistant American chestnut – Castanea dentata – had been prized by builders for houses like mine, as well as for railroad ties and telephone poles. Now gone forever. Or so I thought.
I shook my head in sadness at humankind’s seeming inability to stop hurting the planet, and I moved on. I had a lot to do. The most productive time of my life was about to commence.
My wife and I would raise a child in those American chestnut-lined rooms. We would settle in as teachers and creators in various spheres; our son would fall in love with movies in Big Blue. After graduating from the local public school, he would head off to seek a film degree in 2016. The American chestnut-lined house became an empty nest.
Occasionally the saga of the American chestnut would come up in conversation with friends. One of the only ones who knew of the blight was my bandmate Dennis Yerry, a lifetime local. Dennis would tell how his father, a Native American born in 1907, regaled him with tales of the white, fragrant chestnut blossoms blooming on Shandaken mountainsides.
“They called it ‘winter in the spring’” Dennis said. “Because it looked like snow.”
Thoreau wrote a lot about chestnut trees in Walden, how they perfumed his Concord neighborhood, and how the nuts sustained him and the surrounding wildlife through the winter.
These sad stories seemed all there was to tell of the American chestnut, another victim of advancing technology.
Just prior to lockdown 2020, however, I would learn the American chestnut story is not over. That February, the Woodstock Times assigned me a story about SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s encouraging efforts to produce a blight-resistant American chestnut. Just as technology brought down this ancient life form – the tech of trade and travel – tech may very well bring it back.
Why are they even trying? In addition to introducing more diversity to our forests, which benefits all trees, a fully grown 300-foot American chestnut could remove Co2 from the atmosphere like nothing else, mitigating climate change.
Their efforts are not without criticism, however. Some fear GMO trees could do more harm than good, and some categorically oppose any kind of genomic tinkering. Playing God.
Nevertheless, as a fan of most science, I jumped at the chance to uncover and share something science-y that struck me as optimistic. Science and tech are so often the boogeymen: the perils of AI, nuclear power, surveillance; emissions from advanced tech leading much of the natural world to the brink of extinction. And yes, the poisons of GMO food, i.e. Frankenfood.
In my research I would learn the American chestnut is not exactly extinct. To this day, its ancient root systems thrive beneath our soil, repeatedly sending up saplings that grow as high as ten feet before the blight – it will never go away – takes them out, usually within a decade. After which the roots try again and again, undeterred, tireless.
At the SUNY lab in Syracuse, after 30 years of experimentation, scientists have successfully grafted a wheat gene onto an American chestnut genome, rendering it resistant to the blight fungus – Cryphonectria parasitica. They’ve successfully bred thousands, and they plan to begin reforestation of the East pending FDA and EPA approval. They’ve enlisted hundreds of volunteers to pledge to help when the time is right.
Touchingly, everyone involved in this restoration realizes they will not live to see the fruits of their labors. The American chestnut spends 100 years growing, 100 years living, and 100 years dying. Like masons of old laying the cathedral foundation, knowing they’ll be gone before their grown grandchildren attach the spire, these scientists and volunteers are faith incarnate. Unlike most plugged-in, urban, modern-day humans, they grapple with the concept of deep time. Anyone spending significant time among plants – gardeners, botanists, outdoorsy folk, biologists, et al – experiences time differently.
This was not yet me. It would take a global pandemic, and an intricate, unseen root system to get me to deep time.
My Woodstock Times article was published on March 3rd, 2020. A week later, lockdown commenced, and consumed everything. You may recall. Once again, it seemed, just as the Chinese chestnut pathogen had traveled here from afar, the novel coronavirus pathogen had also taken advantage of available vectors. We were once again victims of progress.
I had been scheduled to go on tour as bass player for The Mammals that spring – to Australia and California. Instead, I hunkered down in the backyard of my 1910 Victorian home, the safest place I knew.
After my intense disappointment faded a little, my eyesight changed. Spring ripened. Now that I was grounded, I saw with fresh eyes the flora I’d been living under and around for almost two decades. I noticed with horror that Asian bittersweet – yet another invasive – had infested almost everything. I spent three days disentangling it from a 150-year-old spruce. The more I weeded, the more the scales fell from my eyes. By helping the natural world, I mused, I was being granted keener eyesight.
While resting, and covered in dirt, I saw the bittersweet had enveloped one of our lilacs.
Upon uprooting this vine, I came across two saplings in the shade of the lilac, each about two feet high. Had I not been assigned that Woodstock Times article a month before, I would not have realized, with astonishment, that these were rare American chestnut saplings! Rising from roots deep in the soil in which my house had been built over a century ago. I used the tech of my smartphone to confirm this. American chestnut.
The whole time I’d been writing about it, diving deep into its lore, a living American chestnut root system had been moving glacially beneath my feet, in the world unseen.
Perhaps it’s all coincidental. While science has recently proven different tree species communicate via intricate, entwined root networks, there’s no evidence they send messages to humans in need. But in that moment, when much of my world, my plans, had been shattered by forces beyond my control, and I was deeply afraid, I really needed connection to something that measured time differently. I needed to appreciate deep time.
I dug gingerly around the saplings and held the American chestnut roots in my hand. Because of work I’d not requested, but which had filled my mind and spirit, I knew this tree’s story was not yet over. Perhaps the tree knew my story was not yet over, either. And it had figured out a way to tell me.
Great story from a great storyteller! ❤️🐧