Apples and the Lure of the North

In those days, when I was still a city girl, I didn’t know apples other than red, green or yellow. I didn’t know that strawberries came first, that raspberries and apricots joined hands down the aisle and that apples finished the season and sus- tained our ancestors through the winter.

I knew nothing. But on that day in October 2000, I knew I didn’t want to hang out at the Grand Traverse Resort while my husband attended a conference there. The day beckoned me out, and I headed up the Leelanau Peninsula in pursuit of some crazy place I’d heard about that grew not merely red, green and yellow apples but 240 varieties, most of them antique heirlooms, in what I imagined would include fantastic hues. It called itself Kilcherman’s Christmas Cove Farm.

Duty demanded I write a column the next day, one of three I wrote each week for the Detroit Free Press. I lived in Ann Arbor, I worked in Detroit and the only orchards I knew were planted with buildings in concrete. No bees, but plenty of cars. No heady aromas but lots of exhaust stink and the stench of hot pavement.

As I drove up Michigan’s Little Peninsula I saw slivers of crazy light on the water that nuzzled the road for miles at a time. On the hill-sides trees surely planted before my grandparents were born glowed with autumn pride. I realized the blue of the sky and the blue of the bay and the palette of the land were colors I never noticed in the city, and I found myself wishing I owned a sweater in the colors they wore.

Not that this road was new to me. Fourteen years earlier, in 1986, we took a friend’s suggestion and spent a few days at a Northport B&B called the Plum Lane Inn. Proprietress Bea Bowen talked soil before anyone knew the word “organic.” She raised 120 chickens. Her best friend was Jack Daniel’s; she drank it from a flowered teacup. She was in her 80s when she opened her home to strangers like us. We came back two weekends later so I could chronicle for the Detroit Free Press “Bea’s Chicken-Killing Bee.” There, a score of her friends butchered and dressed her birds, which Bea had calmed at dawn with a plum mash she doctored with the final inch from miscellaneous liquor bottles.

As I drove north I wondered what became of Bea. Stopping at the Tamarack Gallery in Omena, I learned from owner David Viskochil that Bea had died a few years earlier, that her family had her home on the market. I failed to spot it from M-22 as I drove into Northport, but found the Kilchermans’ orchard easily, and walked into a huge and wondrous barn.

Its walls were lined floor to ceiling with thousands of old soda pop bottles, arranged alphabetically. On folding tables sat, in neat rows, scores of green cardboard boxes, cradling all variety of apples, and labeled in black Sharpie with names like Peck’s Pleasant and Cox’s Orange and Kandal Sinap. I couldn’t believe it: I was a well-edu- cated 46-year-old woman, well-traveled, well-read, and had never heard of Sheepnose or Pink Lady. I thought: “Where have all these apples been all my life? And why do so many of the people milling around in this barn seem to know exactly what they’re looking for?”

I asked Dave Allen, who looked as if he knew food well. In each of his big hands he held a green box labeled Wealthy. He told me his wife, Iva, had baked him an apple pie on his birthday for 20 years, and they were great, but had not quite the taste he remembered as a boy from the pies his grandma made. He asked around and someone told him the best pies are made with Wealthy apples and lo, the Allens found Wealthys at John and Phyllis Kilcherman’s apple farm, just a couple miles from their home.

Dave Allen’s birthday wasn’t for another month, he told me, “but if we don’t come early, we won’t get any.”

I met Phyllis Kilcherman who, I swear, was wearing an apron over her pants and bright-colored top. She looked like Mrs. Claus, Santa’s wife, with curly gray hair and a sweet smile and an eagerness to please that made me feel embraced. I met John Kilcherman, who collects the soda bottles when he’s not taking care of apples. He claims his collection of more than 10,000 is the largest in the world. He has a genuine aw-shucks way about him, and actually asked me questions! Curiosity is rare in the world, and I noted that about him, and it touched me.

When I left Kilchermans’ farms, I carried a few quarts of unfamiliar apples, a jug of cider and two notebooks full of material for my next column, in which I described the farm as one of the rare places in the world “where a grown boy can find the apples of his youth.”

I also carried an ache, a profound ache, for a place like this in my own life, a place where people produce real food from land they’ve owned for generations. A place people come to with enthusiasm, to buy food that brings back memories. A place where visitors know each other, and chat with each other even if they don’t, and laugh together. And hug each other. Phyllis and John both hugged me goodbye, and I hugged them back.

Six minutes and three miles south of their place, on my way back, I spotted a FOR SALE sign on M-22. I glanced above it and realized immediately that I was looking up at the old Plum Lane Inn, where years earlier Bea Bowen had called upon her loyal community of friends to help her butcher her chickens. Later that season, I felt sure she would have driven herself up to the Kilchermans’ for apples to serve stewed with those chickens.

All you need to know is that six months later, we bought the old Plum Lane Inn, to lodge in it family and friends and strangers, but for free. We have been its stewards for 15 years now. We see the Kilchermans every so often at Barb’s Bakery, where John asks me more questions, and I wonder aloud with him what will become of his orchard when he’s gone. He tells me which trees he’s lost. When they come to our home for dinner, Phyllis always brings an apple salad. We have told them many times that we credit them as the catalysts for our move to Northport.

Dave Allen also became a friend and, as a skilled wood-turner, crafted us bowls from the remains of our beloved silver maple. His wife made him Wealthy apple pies every fall until her death.

We too now make annual visits to the Kilchermans’ farm, to ogle the bottles and admire the apples, rare jewels, and pick up the varieties we love, mostly the hard, tangy russets, with streaks of brown on their skins. But we never fail to try a new apple or two. We don’t want to get in a rut, see. But I also want to pay tribute to the old, old apples, more than a century old, unknown to all but a few Americans.

I don’t make pies, but I make apple crisps all autumn. We store our apples in a couple pails in the garage, and as the winter shrivels them we turn them into applesauce, and are sustained.