Released
by Chelsea Green Publishing, Andy Moore’s book Pawpaw became available
on Amazon in late August 2015. I had preordered it, so it arrived in my mailbox
right around August 22, the day Amazon says it was released. I got through most
of it before August ended, and I finished reading the volume’s appendices
before the close of the first week of September. So here in February, I’m
writing this review of Pawpaw: In Search of America’s Forgotten Fruit
about six months after finishing the book. The review will have two
installments.
In
the first installment, I’ll discuss Pawpaw impressionistically. I’m not
going to quote from it. I’m not even going to re-open it to remind myself of
what it says. Rather, this first installment will be about Pawpaw as I
remember it six months after the fact. So this first part of the review is
designed to give readers an impression of what someone might take away from the
book in the longer term: questions it raises and perspectives it changes with
the extraordinary abundance of information it presents. (In the second
installment, I’m going to re-open the book, look over and quote from passages I
marked, and comment more directly on the specifics.) Here we go on the
impressionist side of things…
A
little while after I started reading Pawpaw, my sister stopped by. Since
Moore’s book was one that I had been excited about for quite a while, I showed
her the book immediately. Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t as excited as I was. But I
was caught off guard by the fact that she didn’t see that there was a
self-evident need for a book exactly like this, outlining the pawpaw’s natural
and cultural history, and its place in our present world. She wondered, “Wow I
can’t believe someone was able to write an entire book about the pawpaw!”
Meanwhile, I was wondering why it had taken humankind so long to write a book
like this about the pawpaw. And I wondered why there weren’t more books about
the pawpaw. How to explain the difference between our reactions?
I
found some hints in Moore’s book. Throughout, Moore discusses not only a
species of fruit but a species of person. The fruit: the pawpaw of course. The
person: the kind who eats the pawpaw and then lets the pawpaw not only into the
stomach but also, somehow, into the soul; and once inside, the essence of the
pawpaw doesn’t just reside there but actually reshapes the soul. (There are
varieties of people within this species of course. Some feel like the pawpaw’s
existence is as stunning as learning that unicorns or griffins actually exist;
for some, the pawpaw fervor prompts them to put their life savings on the line
to plant a fruit orchard to grow fruit for which there is only limited demand;
some people let the pawpaw’s soul-shaping quality do for them what religion
might do for others; some people might drive hundreds or thousands of miles to
a pawpaw festival; some might do a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to travel throughout the pawpaw’s home range, talking with other people who had
their souls infiltrated and reshaped by the pawpaw.)
The
pawpaw doesn’t do this for all people, obviously. (Take my sister and over 323 million Americans as a case in point). But there’s a contingent of people who
learn of the pawpaw and then become…what would you call them? Moore uses
several terms throughout his book to describe this species of person. I don’t
think he said it directly, but I got the impression he never felt like he had
landed on a term that was precisely right. I think he uses the terms pawpaw fans, pawpaw fanatics, and a few others, in an always-shifting
vocabulary. But the term that sticks most in my mind is pawpaw booster.
As I was reading, I liked that one best. For precision, I’ve just looked up the word booster, and I find definition
a: “an enthusiastic supporter.” For some, that doesn’t seem quite adequate
for the level of soul we’re talking about. Scrolling down to more eccentric
definitions for booster, I find definition e: “the first stage of
a multistage rocket providing thrust for the launching and the initial part of
the flight.” The fire and smoke and thrust and danger and innovation and
spectacular human yearning for some type of communion with the sublime
universe—for some people, that might be more like it. Then again, it’s good
that there’s some ambiguity in Moore’s term: if you’re reading this review,
chances are you’re a pawpaw booster, and you yourself can look into your
own soul to determine if you’re the former or the latter type of booster. No
need to tell others which type—just your affirmation that you are indeed a
booster is enough. (No offense to apples, oranges, or bananas, but they don’t
tend to infiltrate the soul like the pawpaw.)
Another
thing that I’ve mulled over since reading Pawpaw has been the question
of the fruit’s evident increase in popularity over the past few years. As Moore
says, pawpaw festivals are springing up all over the place. (It happened after
Moore published his book, but I’ll add that this list of festivals includes,
for as humble as it was, the First Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival.) As Moore says,
the pawpaw became “hip” during the time it took him to write his book. On one
hand, as a pawpaw booster myself, this is good news. I’m glad that pawpaw boosters who have
dedicated their lives and savings to growing pawpaw orchards can find ways to
make that pay, whether it’s by selling pawpaws to upscale restaurants in NYC
(where foodies may enjoy one-off tastes of the largest “Native American” fruit)
or to microbreweries (whose patrons may be more dedicated to varieties of beer
than they are to the soulful fruit that inspires their brew). And I’m glad
there are more pawpaw festivals, even if easy access to festivals may no longer
require or promote the sense of pilgrimage that the original festival, the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, required of my wife and our friend Katy when they drove from
Virginia to Ohio in September 2007.
But
as you hear me saying I’m glad about these things, you also hear me half-way
feeling some regret about the potential loss of a certain human relation to the
pawpaw—as the pawpaw becomes more mainstreamed like an apple, orange, or
banana, it may run the risk of losing boosters in the old, high way: the way of
the multi-stage rocket and spectacular human yearning. But that’s a regret I
don’t really feel. That kind of regret would be too much a cross between some
type of biblical prophet crying in the wilderness and a clichéd
sixteen-year-old in the 1990s gnashing teeth over the perception that a
formerly underground band (let’s just say Pearl Jam) had “sold out” after their
first album. (Incidentally, I was talking with a group of 18- to 22-year-olds a
few months ago, and they didn’t know what “sold out” meant. They thought it
meant that a band’s merchandise was no longer available because it had all been
sold.) So then the twinge of regret…what is it? It’s not so much even regret as
it is a recognition, inspired by Moore’s book, of the perpetually changing human
relation to the pawpaw. And there’s some wonder in thinking about what might
come next.
Finally,
Moore’s book got me thinking about how and when to invest time and space in
growing pawpaw cultivars. He’s got a great section (an appendix) that describes,
in alphabetical order, many popular and more obscure pawpaw cultivars. The
entries give some history and taste and texture information on the cultivars,
often drawing on quotes from people he’s talked with. Some are prize cultivars
of early years, like the Wells. But with the advances in quality for pawpaw
cultivars, those earlier cultivars are falling out of cultivation. For
instance, the year after I bought the Wells from One Green World, the nursery
stopped carrying it. When I realized that One Green World had found such limited demand for it that it needed to be discontinued, I involuntarily regretted that I had
planted it, since when you buy a gadget (even for your yard) you don’t want to
buy it right before it’s obsolete. After I realized it was discontinued, I
thought about pulling up my Wells cultivar and getting a newer model, but that
would cost me a year’s growth, and a pawpaw isn't an Apple, something to get rid of after two years. So I kept it. And then Pawpaw also talks
about the newest and sleekest models: the Peterson Pawpaws and the KSU-Atwood.
Now those are some nice pawpaws, I thought as I read. But then I
realized that, as Moore reports, newer cultivars should be coming online in the
next few years, and I asked: why buy the KSU-Atwood or Peterson’s Shenandoah
when I might wait a few years and buy the next new cultivar out of Kentucky
State University or, better, maybe if it’s ever released, a grafting from the
tree that Moore reports has been consistently winning the biggest pawpaw prize
at the festival in Ohio?
Was
I overthinking all of this? Probably so—I’ve just got a humble front yard
orchard of four (soon to be six) pawpaw trees. And all this thinking about
cultivars (for as intriguing as it’s been) has distanced me a bit from my
hardscrabble pawpaw roots, back when we just wanted pawpaws—any pawpaws—so bad
that we would trespass to get wild ones, or brave the battering-ram hoofs and scimitar
horns of a bull during Hurricane Jeanne in September 2004.
So
these are some of the issues Andrew Moore’s book has raised for me in the six
months since I read it. I want to finish up this installment with an
endorsement, something to reflect the way the book has stuck with me during the
past six months, like (as Moore so vividly describes at a certain point) the
scent of a single ripe pawpaw that can hang strong in the air and fill an
entire home:
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