Before there was Johnny Appleseed there was Martin Luther, and he banged his thumb while hanging his 95 theses and thought about the end of the world. If he knew the end of the world was coming, Martin Luther said, he would plant apple trees. After this proclamation Luther retired into his brown robe and watched as King Henry VIII hybridized the church and saw how Gregor Mendel would hybridize the plants, and Luther’s theses fell into the ashes out of which grew the Puritans. They stepped into their long dresses and buckled belts, thought of the brightness of the flowers and the size of the vegetables that would soon grow around them, and left immediately. After building a boat made of oak trees and soot they doffed their tall hats and pressed the thumbprint of their ship into the sea, hoping to gently bump into a land across the ocean where the soil would be pure and dark and free of roots.
Plants do not grow on boats, and fruit trees were not standing on the shore when the Puritans tumbled into America. Instead there was the City on the Hill, already capitalized and waiting for them, and there they stopped and planted their feet firmly in the dirt and began to build. They had drowned the will-o-the-wisp and the persecution of Galileo in the ocean on the way, wanting to start over from the very beginning, and they had forgotten smallpox and the burning of the Catholics and all of the way back to the Seven Hills of Rome. When they could no longer trace the flotsam of their language back to its beginnings, they broke into thousands of seeds and grew up thinking that mendacious, lying, was the same as mend, repair, and two hundred years later when a young boy named George chopped down a cherry tree with an axe he lied about it, thinking that that was the way to fix things. Somewhere Martin Luther laughed and wondered if they would ever change.
