HONEOYE, NEW YORK — This time of the year the roadways of rural New York are littered with apples. You see them everywhere. Trees heavy with fruit line hillside orchards; a dozen unkempt trees stand in high grass beside a sagging farmhouse; a single gnarled tree in a hedgerow stands forgotten, its meager crop equally gnarly and forgotten, unnoticed except for the birds and worms.
Like honey straight from the hive, a warm tomato just picked from the garden or bread just out of the oven, the flavors of a fresh-picked apple explode in the mouth in ways that bear little resemblance to their grocery-story counterparts.
Apples aside, the landscape in this part of the country this time of year is an unending garden. There is no litter, and the wildflowers — goldenrod, aster, milkweed, blue chicory, evening primrose and thistle — to name a few — are abundant.
Even the invasives, which, thanks to a wet summer, are particularly conspicuous this year and beautiful. Streams and low areas all but disappear under the Japanese knotweed, which reminds one of privet with a showy white bloom, and phragmites, a large perennial grass that looks like sea oats, overflows from roadside ditches.
When I emailed a friend who has spent time in this area photographing the algae blooms plaguing lakes and waterways across the country, he wrote back telling of two apple trees he found near us in a wilderness area south of Honeoye Lake where last year he gathered 75 pounds of apples from which he made apple butter.
The story might have ended there had he not sent GPS coordinates for the two trees. Why, I’m not sure. Perhaps he thought I might want to wander out into the wilderness and try to find the trees. Why, yes, I might.
First, I was intrigued by the name Honeoye (pronounced like “honey” and “ahoy” without the “ah” sound), a hamlet of 500 about 33 miles south Rochester at the head of a lake of the same name, one of the 11 Finger Lakes.
According to Wikipedia, Honeoye comes from the Seneca word ha-ne-a-yah, which means lying finger or where the finger lies. As the story goes, a Native American living in the area had to cut off his finger after it was bitten there by a rattlesnake. Presumably, the finger was buried nearby, its GPS coordinates unknown.
Earlier this year, I gained some understanding of the Global Positioning System (GPS) when a young friend and I began Geocaching in Columbus. Geocaching (for more, see geocaching.com) is a kind of hide-and-seek activity where participants, using maps and mobile devices, look for trinkets hidden by other Geocachers, and, in the process, learn about their community.
So it was on a recent sunny afternoon, I was wading through a field of chest-high goldenrod toward a hedgerow in which the southernmost of the two apple trees was thought to exist. My patient wife watched from the road.
I had entered the coordinates Ben sent on the Google Maps app on my cell phone. Twelve thousand miles overhead, three or four GPS satellites tracked my position, which showed up as a blue dot on my iPhone. When the blue dot coincided with the red pin on my screen, I would, presumably, be standing under a tree laden with apples.
Difficult to believe, but I found both trees. Both were old, in obscure locations and absolutely barren. No apples were anywhere near to be found, not even on the ground below.
On the first tree, I found a strand of wild grapes. Though plentiful, they were small, tart and full of seeds. Their juice stained my fingers a rich, dark purple.
A friend, who, as it happens, teaches dendrology in Syracuse, offered several possible explanations for the lack of apples, a condition he’s observed on other fruit trees this year. They include unusual winter weather and unfavorable conditions for pollinators during the few days the tree flowers.
As for this seeker, he has no complaints. The search afforded us a lovely outing though, a beautiful countryside on a glorious afternoon. And, I made it home with all of my fingers, albeit some of them stained purple.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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