Cider

Meditations on the "Late Unpleasantness"

How the subject of apples arose, is uncertain and it occurred days after the fact.

Maybe it had, and just maybe I had always been anticipating what some subconscious preoccupation had always known, and predicted.

For the moment, I was confronted with the happy coincidence that I might indeed be called upon professionally, to render that fruit into hard cider, much as I had often imagined, for the purpose of argument, or as a ready intellectual quip to toss in at the end of winemaking arguments on Colonial Virginia.

In fact, there were lonely evenings years ago when I would lie back on the bed of my sparsely furnished studio apartment on Rahmengasse (Frame Alley) in Heidelberg, leafing through outdated numbers of Old Farmers Almanac.

During that sabbatical, I had deeply missed my native country, our wonderful old home in Alabama and all things Yankee in the broad sense, while I was living in a city that I only learned years later, had been beloved of that classic late nineteenth century raconteur, Mark Twain.

His little known Bümmel durch Europa had appeared in its American edition as A Tramp Abroad. On consideration, I suspect Twain meant tramp as a synonym for a loosely planned walk, not as rendered into German as bums or hobos.

It had been 1878, and Twain was at the height of his literary powers two years after the triumphal publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, although unable to settle on which of six books he had had in mind, he ought next to write.

To settle his indecision, he gathered up his little family, household and domestics, and sailed for Germany for an extended walking vacation.

The result only came to fruition years after he had published his better known works (1876-83). In it, one discovers the origin and names of characters that have come to be known by generations of adolescent American school children. Tramp was published in 1880, long after his 1878 actual raft trip down the Neckar River to Heidelberg in Baden-Wüttemburg, had been immortalized in the guise of the fictional raft trip of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on the American Mississippi River.

My two years in Heidelberg which rejuvenated a stalled academic cancer research career, might have been more informative had I known.

The point being, I was certain on reading the Alamanc article from an earlier back issue, on the resurgence of heritage American apples on American farms, that I would buy a farm soon as I was able, and take up planting apples.

After all, what could be more American than apple pie, a baked good along with pear cobbler from a tree in our front yard in Birmingham, that evoked the aromas of hearth and home.

Before bed while I had read about 1878 Heidelberg in Twain, I occasionally took up random chapters from Henry Adam’s The Education of Henry Adams, especially the chapter entitled “President Grant (1869)”.

I have often addressed my critics of plot and storyline, that I had always been more interested in setting and mood to which I was exquisitely sensitive. Style has likewise captured my attention more than memorable characterizations or twists of plot.

Now I think about it, character precedes plot or storyline. When time permits, it seems likely that I will use some of my character sketches from life, of the many interesting folks who seem to populate my recent travels, and see where they take imagination, once their inclinations and tendencies are settled.

A few things come to mind, mostly to do with literary style.

None of the events of Tramp are imaginary: however, Twain captures the flavor of meeting fellow Americans abroad in ways that just do not occur in country, and exposes the worst of the American nature.

Likewise, Education is crafted as a third-person autobiography written with a cynical self-awareness that borders on caricature. Adams was both a would-be thirty-year old unpaid journalist, a millionaire and a political operative. The modern reader finds an exact analogue in Adams’ views of the U. S. Grant administration, in this second year of Trump.

It is all there: the charges of graft and official misbehavior and fiscal misconduct. The jockeying of senior Senators trying to out-manuver the seemingly simple-minded President Grant. The sense that Colonial moralism and virtues have suddenly been abandoned in DC, and replaced by a new crass and cynical materialism. The impact of the machinations of billionaire Jay Gould and Jim Fisk and the Erie Affair.

Makes a wonderful and timely companion reader, to the daily political news of that spring.

Adams has a distinct style born of political intimacy with the power centers in Lafayette Square, and a social entre gained from having served as an ambassadorial secretary in London early in his career, as well as his family connection to two former Presidents.

Unlike the brillance of Twain’s perfect ear for conversation and verancular, one is hard pressed to find a single conversation presented inside quotation marks, in Adams.

At the risk of accusations for immodesty, Twain’s style is wholly disconnected by plot line or subject, and runs episodic and saltatory, and he succeeds nevertheless in entertainment.

This provides solace to some of us crippled with a wandering focus and not the talent to connect the lapses for those reading outside our own imagination.

Of course, apples led to Heidelberg and Twain, and Twain led to Trump and Adams.

Going back to apples and Virginia history, I had been recently hired to manage vineyard and orchard farm for a latter-day descendant of the Virginia “King” Carter family, a name that seemed to tie together Church, plantation, family, upbringing and immediate future as a winemaker.

There had been the casual comment dropped during my visit to Hume last week, of an interest in making hard cider. Indeed, the same skills employed in the craft of growing wine grapes and making wine, were likewise in play in the much smaller but historically older Virginia cidery.

As told, my apple interests stemmed to Heidelberg, but let us examine it more closely.

Along these same lanes and byways of Loudoun and Fauquier Counties, had ridden a farmboy, and orphan and federal trooper from Essex County, on the New York shores of Lake Champlain, who had come within a hair’s breadth of being mortally gunned down by Mosby’s small artillery piece on May 30, 1863 near Warrenton, Virginia.

A month or two back, my cousin who lives in an historic townhouse behind the capitol in DC, sent an image of that farm boy in his Union uniform.

I was more attached to her mother, my father’s only sister, than to any other relative for years and years, and we spent many happy hours reading mutual correspondence or chatting family over tea at her upscale Chevy Chase apartment. The daughter is no substitute for the mother in any sense, emotional or intellectual, to my regret.

Elmer, the farm boy, sports a ridiculously luxuriant dark moustache and thick hair above dark eyebrows, making him look a little like a short stature sibling of the Sgt Pepper Beatles.

Her remark sent by email amused me.

“Elmer looks like my mother in drag.”

Sure enough: if Weezie were to sport a ridiculously luxuriant fake moustache and a bad dark brown, almost black, wig, they might be indistinguishable from Sgt. Pepper siblings, both.

Elmer interested me because he had been adopted in the 1840s by the wealthy Hammond family who held extensive business properties in Vermont and Upstate New York. Naturally, when Charles Hammond, the family patriarch, had bought a hundred and eight magnificent Vermont Black Hawk Morgan horses with which to equip his son’s cavalry company in lieu of the pathetic federally issued livestock, John Hammond, a mining engineer in his thirties, would enlist his adoptive brother Elmer as part of the troop.

Both survived four rigorous years in Northern Virginia, and frequent clashes with John Singleton Mosby. Hammond was wounded and quit his commission in 1864 and was brevetted as a general after the war, to return home to his apple orchards in Essex County overlooking Lake Champlain.

Despite his youth, and Mosby’s artillery grapeshot that had killed his horse and penetrated 22 year- old Elmer’s boot and thigh, and sent him back to recuperate just before Gettysburg where many of his friends and cousins were slain or captured near little Round Top, Elmer became commanding officer, Company H, 5th New York Volunteer Cavalry, by Appomattox.

Elmer, on return to Upstate New York in 1865, married Charles Hammond’s cousin , and inherited the Hammond General Store in Crown Point, as well as an apple farm on the heights overlooking Lake Champlain.

On my trips to work a winery and vineyard in Fauquier County, I passed a state historical marker, unable to read it as it receded in the rear-view the first time. Something had caught my eye, and I paused to read the roadside marker on my second trip down to Hume.

It was nearest Delaplane, Virginia. At that point, Delaplane was known as Piedmont Station.

The marker where the rail tracks crossed Route 17 also bore a marker: I had read it on a prior trip to a winery called RdV.

History had been made at that small crossing that bore a single house up on the curve of the hillside, and across the track a siding and warehouse that could not have much changed since 1861.

The early days of the War had raged in the Shenandoah Valley. For the first time is world history, on July 20, 1861, former VMI mathematics professor and lately Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson, had boarded his army of 11,000 men on cargo railroad cars as a means of transit to battle. They had boarded right here for a battle to erupt at not far from the railhead at Manassas Junction.

That action Manassas Junction, resulted in Jackson’s sobriquet “Stonewall”, and had been conferred by a Confederate officer named Col. Thomas Munford who would later go on to marry not one, but two Tayloe cousins after one died prematurely, and assume management of the Tayloe plantations in Marengo County, Alabama after the War.

It was through one of the Hammond family and Penfield cousins, that a distantly related Boston woman married an unknown former school teacher and subsequently a writer from New York who wrote a long seafaring tale about a captain’s murderous obsession with an albino whale.

The marker up the road from Delaplane declared itself to mark the spot where 2Lt. James “Big Yankee” Ames had been shot to death on October 9, 1864. “Big Yankee” has distinguished himself as having deserted Elmer’s 5th New York (Union Federal ) Cavalry on February 20, 1862 as a Sergeant, to defect to Mosby as an officer.

It often intrigued me what outrage might lead a New Yorker to abandon his comrades, for service with the enemy. At any rate, it was by then clear I would have plenty of time to ponder this and other local historical mysteries, and where the unmarked grave of “Big Yankee” Ames might be found, when I took over management of the farm that overlooked, and was immediately adjacent to, Union General Philip Sheridan’s cavalry headquarters at historic Belle Grove Plantation.

It was thrilling and an inspiration, whether he looked like my favorite Aunt Weezie in drag or not, to know my grandfather’s father had viewed precisely these same scenes so many years back…

Postscript: A civilian Southern diary of daily events written at nearby Paris, Virginia is Amanda “Tee” Edmond’s Society of Rebels (1857-1867).