Gnarly Little Apples

I'm pretty sure, and I did not check, that in the bus stories I've told in this blog which there are many, I don't know how much I talked about the bus right on the bus each morning and off in the afternoon. Once we were deposited at the bus stop we still had possibly a half-mile walk until we got home. Not a huge distance as in the narratives my parents visited on me but a significant distance,

Our bustop was that the junction of Boise Avenue and Holcomb Rd. on the south side was housing and farm land. On the north side of Boise Avenue, by our busstop, there was a strip of undeveloped ground above the Ridenbaugh canal. Beneath that was pastures which is to be river bottom of the Boise River been flowed just north of that. I don't know when I found this little Appletree. Because of been the fourth grade around that time of my life. Think it may have been even another year passed that that I realized the little tree actually produced apples. Truth of the matter is that I rarely went on the side of the street. In fact it only time I have used the mounds of dirt was to hide me from the bus when I was trying to ditch school or the bus or both.

It must've been the fall that I found the tree or noticed it, really for the first time. I'll bet it was the fall of 1959 or 60. The little tree over the canal. It was a volunteer tree I'm sure somehow it had planted itself by sheer dumb luck. The tree cannot been very old. It was wild and gnarly sure how to fight for each drop of water the tree pulled out of the canal. The tree was feral if trees can be feral. The canal by which the tree lived was totally concrete. Concrete canals frighten me, the water flows so fast and there's no way out if you should fall in the canel.I really believe that only way that someone who survived such a misfortune would be if they were able to find something to hang onto. Maybe that's why I like this tree so much is because the trees hung so low to the canal I believe I can actually reach out and grab a branch if I needed to. And more importantly what I found was the tree had fruit! Sweet little apples. I would pick an apple in the morning before catching the bus and always pick one for the walk home in the afternoon. Tree was a survivor it had to be to grow where it was. The whole area now is been gentrified and I was quite surprised to find homes and even built on that stretch of ground immediately above the canal. I'm sure the tree never survived redevelopment which is a shame. While wild things can survive many challenges I doubt they can survive the challenge of man.