My father was a smoker, albeit a very self-conscious one, and frequently worried and fretted over the rest of our being affected by his second-hand smoke and the like. He went to great lengths to isolate himself before starting a cigarette; but he also smoked a pack a day, and so was hardly ever seen around the house for fear that we would smell his habit. When he was home he would sit in his rocking-chair by the fire, playing with an empty pack of Camels, and call for the rest of us to sit around him for some hot chocolate and a story. My father loved old western tall tales. He would tell us about the adventures of people like Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan, and each time stretching the stories of their feats just a little further. I had known then that it was all made-up, but as for how much of them he made up himself, I do not know. 

Paul Bunyan, according to my father, spent his entire life traveling around the American frontier planting apple trees. He would go from town to town, scattering apple seeds wherever he went. As the stories go, Mr. Bunyan’s seeds could take root wherever they landed, as soon as they landed – and any town he visited would end up with more than enough apples to last them through the next decade. However, no town at the time had any need for (or wanted, really) a decade’s supply of apples, and those without the time or energy to preserve the nine years, eleven months and two weeks’ surplus would try to sell the fruit, only to find that Mr. Bunyan had already passed through all the neighboring towns, and there was nobody to sell it to. 

However, Mr. Bunyan especially liked to frequent the towns on the frontier, and the settlers living in these towns ended up with so many apples that the fruits had come to make up the majority of their diets. Every morning, the average frontiersman would wake up to a breakfast of freshly picked apples. His luncheon would often consist of an apple stew or an apple sandwich with cheese and ham; and after a hard day of work, he could expect to come home to a great big oven-baked apple casserole, an apple pie for dessert and some apple cider to wash it all down with. Eventually, these settlers had become so tired of eating apples every day that they began to refuse Mr. Bunyan’s apple trees. As soon as he turned around, the townsfolk would dig up all the seeds he had just planted and discreetly return them to his bag, after which he would carry on to the next town and repeat the process. When Old Bunyan finally figured out what the townsfolk had been doing, he flew into a rage and emptied his entire stock right over the ground where he stood, and to this day this spot remains the location of the largest apple orchard in America. 

Johnny Appleseed, meanwhile, was a lumberjack by trade, and a perfectly ordinary man if not for his extraordinary size. Where normal children might be measured by feet and inches, Johnny Appleseed Sr. had to measure his son’s height in stories. As he grew, little Johnny Appleseed quickly became too large to fit into any house in the Midwest, and took his last step indoors at the age of seven, after which he lived the entire rest of his life outdoors. But it was no problem for Mr. Appleseed, for Mother Nature provided him with all he needed. He ate bison and deer whole and drank from the Great Lakes; when he was filthy, he leaped across the continent to wash himself at Niagara Falls; when he had an opportunity for leisure, he laid down and suntanned atop the Great Plains. Furthermore, his size made him the greatest lumberjack on the American frontier. Work that would take a crew of men to accomplish could easily be done by Johnny alone, and at thrice the speed. Johnny would uproot three or four trees at once with his fingers, and snap them into as many pieces as he wanted like twigs. He built thousands of log cabins for homesteaders, and refused to accept any form of payment, for anything they had to offer was far from enough to satisfy him, anyway. 

When the day came for Johnny Appleseed to come of age, his father decided it was time to make him a proper set of clothes, for it was exceptionally difficult to dress him nicely given his size, and for most of his life he had been wearing large drapes and tarps clumsily stitched together with rope. So to gather enough wool, Johnny Appleseed, Sr., sheared all his sheep, and in addition all his friends’ sheep, moreover all his acquaintances’ sheep, along with all the sheep his acquaintances’ friends owned. Johnny Appleseed Sr. was an exceptionally well-connected man, and from the fall of 1885 to the summer of 1886, all the sheep in the state of Texas, where Mr. Appleseed Sr. lived at the time, walked about naked. He then called every single tailor he knew for help stitching together a shirt and pants fit for – and that would fit – his son’s size. And when Johnny Appleseed finally came of age, the boy who had lived in public view since the age of seven had finally become a man who looked presentable enough for public viewership. 

I remember frequently asking my father if he wasn’t mistaken, and if Johnny Appleseed, rather than Paul Bunyan, was the one who went about planting apple seeds. In response my father would smile and shake his head, and say that this was the ironic humor of the American Cowboy.

My father came home one rainy afternoon sopping wet, his right hand still holding a soggy bent cigarette, and his left waving about as he cursed the weather. He had four children in total – and we were already gathered about his rocking-chair, eager to hear whatever tale he had to tell tonight. But Mother shooed us away, and told us that Father needed to undress and have his bath first, and we were to either clean the house or prepare our hot chocolate in the meantime. So the four of us scrambled to the kitchen, crowding around the stove to make hot chocolate; for we had agreed long ago that the state of the house was a lost cause, and there was no point in cleaning a perpetual mess. 

After a long bath he returned to the living room, only to be met with four expectant faces, each eagerly holding a cup of hot chocolate. My father didn’t like hot chocolate; I had put a glass of whisky on the table for him, for I had found that drinking always loosened his tongue and made his stories longer and less credible, and neither I nor my siblings wanted to hear a story which we could reasonably believe to be true. He took a long sip, but before sitting down, he pulled an apple out of his coat-pocket, sliced it with a pocket-knife, and offered it to the four of us on a plate as an addition to our hot chocolate. Then he sat down and began his speech as follows: 

“What’ll it be tonight? Do you want to hear more about Davy Crockett? John Henry and his long grudge against the steam engine? Or maybe I should tell you about Old Pecos Bill and his adventures with Slue-Foot Sue? No, tonight I have something even better to tell. I have a true story; a series of events which occurred just today, which were just as extraordinary as any story about our beloved folk heroes, at least to my knowledge. 

“As you all know, I left the house for a cigarette at around noon, and returned at around 5 o’clock this afternoon. Now – when I left the house, it was not raining yet, and there was no sign that it would rain. I headed for the alleyway around the block between the tailor and the body shop, which is my favorite place for a cigarette as there are few passers-by and the fumes from all the cars at the body shop can help mask the smoke. But just as I turned the corner, I was approached by a suspicious-looking man covered from head to toe in a top hat and a tall trench coat, who stopped me and accosted me rather unpleasantly. 

“He introduced himself as a Mr. McCulloughsby, and told me that in meeting him I had stumbled across great fortune, for in his youth he had been a tireless collector of ancient and mysterious treasures. In his old age, he had nobody he saw fit to receive his life’s work, least of all his children, for as large his collection might be, his children were even larger fools. He thought they would squander his wealth and use his treasures unwisely, and decided that as absurd his current method might be, it was still better to try looking for more suitable candidates in passers-by on the street.

“His criteria were as follows: candidates must give the impression (for there was no way to make sure on such short notice) that they were intelligent, of sound mind and acted in the spirit of goodwill. Now, he told me that as soon as he laid eyes on me, he had been convinced by my general bearing and demeanor that I fit his criteria, and wanted me to receive one of his many treasures. 

“From his trench coat he plucked a small, round, dark brown seed, and placed it in my open hands. He had found this seed in an old red bag deep in a forest in Utah, which he had thought was probably lost or thrown aside by some passing traveler or hiker. He had kept the seed out of curiosity, and through his connections and resources he had gathered as a treasure hunter, he finally was able to ascertain that this seed was, in fact, the last of Johnny Apple– I mean, Paul Bunyan’s stock. Though he had never tried planting it, he had been told that it was exceptionally competent and grew incredibly quickly, whether the planter wanted it to or not.

“And so he left me with this warning and walked away, perhaps to continue looking for another suitable recipient for his gifts. For a while I stood, unsure of what to do with what I had been given, and unsure of how careful I had to be of his warning. Eventually I decided that it was not worth the risk to plant it at all, for in an age where I can buy apples at my convenience, there was little need to go through the trouble of raising an apple tree. I threw the seed down a storm drain, thinking that this would effectively dispose of it. 

“However, I had still paid too little attention to the stranger’s warning, and without my knowledge the seed had managed to take root, even deep inside the storm drain. It had not rained recently, but there was apparently enough moisture in those underground pipes to nurture it, at least until it needed sunlight for continued growth, and in that case I had found some consolation in the fact that there was no way sunlight could penetrate that far underground. However, as per the stranger’s warning, there was nothing in the world that could stop this seed from growing – and it would get anything it needed to do so, even if it was stuck at the bottom of a storm drainage pipe and could not afford the privileges enjoyed by its kin aboveground. 

“And so right before my eyes – and I swear to you this is true – the sun somehow began shining brighter. The clouds parted and the sun’s rays grew in intensity, driving me into the shade below the overhanging roof of a nearby shop, though I could still feel the heat coming off of the asphalt and from the sidewalk, through the soles of my shoes. However, this was enough for the seed to sprout, as the sunlight had become bright enough to leak into the storm drain and reflect off of the pipes and metal joints until it reached the young plant. 

“But this had likely dried up all the moisture in the storm drain which the apple seed had been feeding on, and so what it needed now was no longer sunlight, but rain. The weather turned cold, and the sky dark; the clouds, recently parted, once again gathered; and a chill blew in from the North. From the sky fell a light sprinkle, which turned into a drizzle, which turned into rain, then a torrent of water from up above. Rainwater flooded the streets and forced me up onto the stairs of the shop which I had been standing at to hide from the sun. As the water level continued to rise, I watched ass nearby cars flooded, while children jumped into the water, laughing and playing as their parents scolded them and tried to get at them with floaties tied to the ends of fishing lines. 

“Meanwhile, the plant underground continued to grow; its roots spread further downward, while its branches stretched toward the surface through metal pipes. And at the end of it I could see a single branch poking out of the storm drain onto the street, and on that branch a single red apple, still dangling from its stem. Seeing it as the fruit of my labors – and a consolation for having got a sunburn and a cold, mind you – I twisted it off of its branch and started for home, no drier than a fish in water. 

“Now – what did I do with the apple, you ask? Why, I cut it up and fed it to you, of course! But do not worry; there’s sure to be more. I plan to return to the tree to-morrow – at the speed it’s growing, I reckon we’ll make a proper orchard out of that storm drain by the end of the week!"