The American Chestnut

A Shared Longing

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A family stands around an American Chestnut tree (image source)

What is it like to be alive when a species you love goes extinct?

Each of us has lived through multiple extinctions, without realizing it, as animals die out or plant populations dwindle away.
We don’t always, or even often, realize it because these beings typically are not in our field of awareness.

When we are aware of species loss (or at least so I've found in the US), we assume they’re ‘over there’ somewhere, wherever 'there is, perhaps in a rainforest on another continent.

Something separate from our physical space and existence.

But extinction events occur in everyone’s backyard: Alabama, for example, is one of the most richly biodiverse places in the country.

How many species in Alabama have been lost or nearly so, perhaps without our ever knowing it?

And if you do know it, do you get a chance to say goodbye?

I often wonder what it was like to be in the last generation of people who knew acres of American chestnut, towering over the landscape. To know what they tasted like, or what the bark felt like beneath their palm.

Maybe they noticed the particular way the roots and limbs touched or shied away from neighboring trees, the weight of the leaves on the branches, the feeling of being in a forest you and I will never have a chance to stand in.

What is it like to have this experience at the beginning of your life but not the end?
What is it like to hold the memory of a tree that future generations won’t have?

For those new post-chestnut generations, how does time shape the memory of the species that once were?

Shimmering and fading at the edges, like a mirage in the desert, eventually fading away into story. Like looking in an antique mirror and imagining all the faces reflected there before, but that won't be reflected again.

Like looking in a mirror and imagining, though, that imagination comes with a longing, a desire: What would it be like to see those lost faces?

What would it be like to touch a lost tree?

Maybe, we hope, maybe the mirror can turn back to mirage, and perhaps even back into the material. Perhaps the story can become one we are participants in.

Perhaps we'll have the chance to touch the bark of the American chestnut, different this time, as a story reshaped and retold always is, but similar.

Perhaps, in the telling, even in the telling of a story not yet true, we can speak it into being.

Eco-grief is a particular flavor of sadness, one that asks us to plant one foot in loss and another in hope.

That hope makes the twinge of grief more profound in some ways, but it also gives the grief a topography: eco-grief undulates with the peaks and valleys of joy and sadness as we move through the world, both natural and human-made.

It is that hope, and that grief, and intertwine their tendrils through the story of the American chestnut.

Meeting the American chestnut

Though we're in the heat of summer now, soon the blistering heat will give way to the chill of autumn (or the 'slightly chilly but still hot' air of autumn in the South, a portend of less sticky, sweaty times to come).

And when it does, chestnuts will appear. But these are not the chestnuts indigenous to this place, stewarded for millennia by the people indigenous to this place. Both displaced, razed and removed by external forces cutting a path through their homes with sickle and disease.

Humans were at the root of all of it, even though the American chestnuts were cut down by diseases born in the bodies of other trees: first by ink disease then by blight, to be replaced by the very trees that cut them down.

For many, many centuries, many forests of the Eastern United States were Chestnut forests. A tree with many gifts to give, the American Chestnut was deeply rooted in local Indigenous traditions, used for food and timber, among other things. Here in the Southern Appalachians and stretching westward to the Midwest, these giant trees stood sentinel over the landscape, towering over 100 feet tall and well over 10 feet wide, numbering in the billions, according to the USDA.

For those who love trees, the story of the American Chestnut is one that evokes an eco-grief both personal and collective.

My friends and I often have conversations about trees, especially living in Atlanta, especially now, and those conversations are a mixture of loss, longing, and hope.

Ones that remind me of the American Chestnut, a story that still carries raw grief.

As Kimberly Coburn says in An Old Hunger, "I have a small collection of things gone long before my time that, nonetheless, acutely sadden me – among them: the Library of Alexandria, the Tasmanian tiger, and the American chestnut." In this part of the country, their thick, straight wood framed homes and was used to form many of the items within those homes.

As Coburn says, the people here were probably rocked in a chestnut cradle and buried in a chestnut casket, and fed by chestnuts in the years between. It was a tree that shaped and surpassed our lives.

Written about eloquently in The Overstory and elsewhere, we know that chestnut blight, brought over with Chinese Chestnuts imported for ornamental landscaping, spread quickly across the country, ballooning out from its original nexus point, reshaping landscapes once covered in these towering giants, and reshaping entire ecosystems of flora and fauna (as well as human diets) that relied on them.

Considered the greatest, or at least one of the greatest, ecological disasters in recorded history, we went from about 4 billion chestnut trees to less than 100. The loss was not overnight, but in the lifespan of giant trees, it probably felt that way.

A shared longing

Over a century after the blight burned from the Bronx all the way across the eastern half of the U.S., Kimberly Coburn and I are staring at some saplings.

"They're small", we say.

"But we have to start somewhere", we say.

American Chestnuts today are functionally extinct. However, new research is being done to breed blight-resistant hybrid American Chestnuts, crossed with just enough Chinese Chestnut to survive and maybe, some day, thrive.

This tiny stand of trees, tucked out of sight and probably (perhaps thankfully) overlooked by most passers by, is part of that work. A test patch of tiny hybrids, planted out in the world to see how they fare. And within them, a glimmer of hope, of possibility.

Coburn wrote about chestnut foraging in 2020, in the height of the pandemic, at a time when many of us turned to nature when so many other sources of hope had failed us.

Gathering chestnuts was a way to connect with friends, but as with all foraging also a chance to slow down. The old, but not tired, expression of finding nature to find oneself.

As we looked at the test grove, we saw a much larger Chinese chestnut nearby, towering with arms spread wide, dominating the landscape.

We gathered its sharp, spiny pods as carefully as we could with bare hands, reflecting on the almost David and Goliath-esque scene that played out before us: The giant tree looming nearby, looking down towards the little cluster of trees below. The giant tree perhaps carrying the blight that could cut these baby trees off at the knees, though unlike Goliath, powerless to deploy or retract its weapons at will.

And the small trees, in turn, hopefully strengthened with just enough hybridization to resist the onslaught.

Later on, roasting the nuts at home, I reflected on tasting the changing landscape, how similar (but dissimilar) this moment was to my ancestors before me: The flavors of a lost past, but also ones of a possible reimagined future.

It's interesting to me that eating chestnuts here, from a chestnut not from here, has always spoken to me of place in a superficial way, as though my body remembers (and it probably does) the old chestnuts, the old trees. As if it's waiting for the taste and feel of those trees again, perhaps just different enough to resonate against my bones at a different, deeper frequency, like a tuning fork bringing a choir to the same note.

Near the test site, eating the fruits of the trees that displaced these, the longing returns but with a glimmer of hope that, in time, maybe a new version of this tree might come back.

Will these baby trees, in time, produce their own chestnuts, their own offspring? And will those chestnuts taste more of place to me, will they remind my bones of home?

The chances feel precarious, but they are nonexistent so if we do nothing.

P.S. In a future essay, I want to gather thoughts from folks about why the American Chestnut story resonates so deeply with us.

Personal experiences/family memories/musings, all welcome.

If you're interested in sharing your thoughts on the American Chestnut as a part of that issue (or you just have some thoughts to share right now!), please let me know in the comments or shoot me a message.

News:

• I'm still accepting new folks into Writing Playground, my 4 week virtual writing workshop that's half playful, generative writing and half skill-building, happening each Saturday in October.
  You can sign up here!
  If you want to join but need to do a payment plan to make that accessible, please don't hesitate to reach out!
  

• A big news: I’m a finalist for the IACP Cookbook awards! This is my fourth nomination for Our Fermented Lives, and I’m so overwhelmed by the response I’ve gotten to a book so close to my heart. Thank you, thank you (and keep an eye out next month for the award winners, perhaps I’ll be among them!)
  

• I've been playing around with my Burlap & Barrel spice blend on my recent travels to McCarthy, Alaska, where Rose McAdoo and I, along with Mega, Josh, and the rest of the culinary team at the Salmon & Bear, shared an amazing forage and ferment dinner with guests, with Rose's glacier-themed dessert.
  I also gave a talk on fermentation history and learned a ton about baking inspired by the natural world from Rose's talk. I absolutely love doing events like these!
  

• Speaking of events, I'm booking out fall/winter speaking events and events into 2024. If you'd like me to do a talk at your organization, please get in touch.

  
  I'm especially eager to do more virtual author Q&As for book clubs, so if Our Fermented Lives is a part of your club's reading list (or you're considering it), please contact me. I love talking with readers and answering questions!
  

Read:

I enjoyed Ross Clarke's thoughts on notes in cookbook margins, and intuitive cooking, part of my continued dive into how other food writers describe knowing when you've added 'just enough,' or what notes are important to scribble down for later.
Added bonus to this piece is a recipe for Welsh teisen lap (moist cake), which reminds me a tiny bit of the barmbrack I make each Samhain (and which, at some point, I should probably write down my recipe for).

Last year, this piece on Italian food, nativism, and the fact that Italian food itself is a mishmash of ingredients and cuisines (John Last, "There's No Such Thing as Italian Food") sparked conversation in some of my circles.
I'm not an Italian food expert, but it reads to me as a good synthesis of the global history of Italian cuisine and a reminder that the cuisines we consider "authentic" or unchanged in some way (a whole different conversation!) have roots beyond that country's modern borders, whether in techniques, or ingredients, or both.  

On my 'to listen' list is A Journey Across the Steppes, which has been recommended to me a few times, and which documents a 1,000 mile journey on a Soviet-style train in search of the Aral Sea.

Make: Chocolate orange lotion bars

When I was a kid, we got Terry's chocolate oranges each Christmas. Broken into with a smack on the counter and eaten in segments, those chocolates felt like the height of candy luxury. I still love the flavor of chocolate and orange (who doesn't), but I also love the smell just about as much.

Fast forward a few decades, and I found myself in a travel dilemma. If you've traveled with me before, you know I try my damnedest not to check luggage when possible, which means I'm at the mercy of the TSA regulations for my shampoo and lotion and the like.

I use shampoo and conditioner bars when I travel now (I like B.O.B. best), but body lotion still had me stumped. Sure, I could buy lotion bars, but why do that when they're so easy to make and I can smell like actual candy?

I've made many solid lotion bars over the years, but I liked the texture of the bars from this recipe from My Tiny Laguna Kitchen.

The original recipe uses a whole host of great-smelling essential oils, but you can use the same principle that you use for salves or for lotion bars, basically melting together fats and wax to make a new product (remember: More wax and less oil means a harder, more dense final product, more on all that is coming up in a later issue!)

To adapt this recipe to make chocolate orange lotion bars, here's what I did:

Swapped out the shea butter, instead using Mountain Rose Herbs' roasted cocoa butter. It smells great, and is a great investment for your crafty pantry (and, we'll be using it later too, when I share my salve and lotion primer).

And, instead of using multiple essential oils, I use A LOT of either orange or tangerine oil (again, Mountain Rose Herbs has good ones, as does your local Coop or natural foods store).
For all of the oils she lists, replace them with orange. Yes, it seems like a lot, but the smell isn't as intense once your bar sets.

And combined with the roasted cocoa butter, you will actually smell like a chocolate orange, but without all the weird perfumey add-ins found in most body products.

Chocolate orange lotion bars

5 oz beeswax, grated

5 oz almond oil or sunflower oil

5 oz roasted cocoa butter

~60 drops orange or tangerine essential oil

-In a double boiler, melt together your wax and oils until liquid

-Stir in your essential oil

-Pour into silicone molds or into a silicone loaf pan and allow to cool and set.

-Once cooled, cut into individual bars with a sharp knife (after taking out of pan!)

-Wrap your bars in butcher paper secured with twine.