Daily Archives: November 28, 2024

Discover heritage apple detective David Benscoter’s new book, Lost Apples

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Great holiday gatherings are about friends, family, and food, and the occasional navigation around taboo topics. Cranberry from a can, maybe, but jellied or whole berry? Sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes, right? The subject of pie — apple, pumpkin, pecan, all three, none at all — can reignite riffs that recur every November, yet unlike some publications, we’re not afraid to endorse a superior candidate: apples.

This pomological powerhouse has fed Americans for hundreds of years, even through the bleakest times. Baked, boiled or eaten raw, apples provide huge health benefits from lowering cholesterol to reducing inflammation. And while cider induces a smile, vinegar enables long-term food preservation.

Apples are also key to understanding regional history, from its succession of homesteaders to the evolution of its apple-centric economy, according to so-called apple detective David Benscoter. Since retiring from federal law enforcement, Benscoter (whom the Inlander profiled in 2018 and 2023) has spent the past decade tromping through 100-year-old orchards and poring over old records to discover nearly 30 local apple varieties previously thought “lost.”

It wasn’t long before Benscoter had enough for a book, yet he needed backup.

“I would do a lot of work on the laptop, but it was all police-type reports,” says Benscoter, formerly with the FBI and the IRS criminal division. “I did not have any type of a flair for writing.”

But Linda Hackbarth, whose past historical books included Trail to Gold: The Pend Oreille Route, did. The two share a mutual involvement with the Whitman County Historical Society, which hosts Benscoter’s nonprofit, Lost Apple Project.

“When I see someone so excited about something, I go, ‘Oh, well, he’s really into this,'” says Hackbarth, a retired Washington State University assistant professor of physical education whose 34-year teaching career concluded at Pullman School District.

Hackbarth joined Benscoter to co-author the recently published Lost Apples: The Search for Rare and Heritage Apples in the Pacific Northwest.

Lost Apples is encyclopedic, with four appendices comprising a quarter of the book’s 288 pages. The largest section highlights regional cultivars, all 1,623 of them, from Abe Lincoln to Zuzoff, including their aliases and in which document their existence has been verified.

The book hardly reads like an encyclopedia, however, and is packed with concise, yet compelling historical vignettes. A fast, fun read, available at Auntie’s Bookstore in Spokane or Sandpoint-based Keokee Books.

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Authors David Benscoter and Linda Hackbarth

Benscoter thinks Lost Apples will appeal to both younger people interested in homesteading or preserving lost varieties, as well as older folks who remember vintage cultivars.

A good percentage of people attending the talks he’s given over the years are senior citizens whose eyes light up when he talks about old apples, Benscoter says. “I can just see them being transported back to their mom’s kitchen.”

Unfortunately, advancing age is also a downside in the hunt for lost apples, says Benscoter, noting the decline in heritage trees, some of them dating back 150 years to the earliest white settlements. Another concern is a dearth of apple identification experts, many of whom are in their 80s.

“DNA testing is wonderful,” explains Benscoter, “but if an apple is truly ‘lost,’ there’s no DNA out there that we can compare it to.”

Instead, he and other lost apple hunters rely on a handful of experts nationwide to correctly identify some 50 characteristics of a single cultivar.

“There’s, you know, no one really coming up behind them,” he says.

The most significant imperilment to lost apples, however, is climate, specifically drought, Benscoter says. Although homesteaders mostly knew to plant in ravines and other areas where water was more plentiful, two terribly dry years in a row could wipe out hundreds of thousands of trees, he says.

On the upside, there’s a groundswell of interest in lost apples from researchers, like those at WSU, as well as historical societies, other lost apple hunters, orchardists and community members.

“Because if we don’t get people, if we don’t get articles like this come out,” Benscoter says, “people won’t contact us and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got a tree out back.'”

Benscoter’s enthusiasm for apples is more than skin deep. In addition to growing around 30 trees, each with eight to 10 cultivars grafted on them, he loves to eat apples.

“It is hard to beat a Honeycrisp right off the tree,” says Benscoter, whose modest orchard includes so-called lost apples like Shackleford.

And when it comes to cooked apples, there’s no contest.

“My wife makes a killer apple pie.” ♦

‘An inward demand to utter things’: How Prasanta Chakravarty wrote his new book of poetry

Prasanta Chakravarty.

Prasanta Chakravarty has published two collections of poetry in a 12-month period – Nectar Pours Like Fine Mist and The Aravali Quatrains. The former is a collaborative work with Rajarshi Dasgupta, whose photographs are integral to the work. Chakravarty teaches English Literature at the University of Delhi and edits the web-magazine Humanities Underground. He spoke to Scroll about his books and the impulses behind them.Two books of poetry this year. Would you like to tell us about the themes and motifs that run through the collections?Frankly speaking, I do not believe that poems can be reduced to theme-bearing texts. It is very difficult to write about or explain utterances or ditties anyway. But the traces that unite the two miscellanies are perhaps an insistence on the miracles that the whole of creation bequeaths upon us at every radiant instant. And yet we realize the significance of letting go: welcoming change with grace and celebrating the lovingly familiar in joy and sorrow. Now that I look back, the common thread that runs through the lines collected in Nectar Pours Like Fine Mist is perhaps to do with our place and predicament under inevitable circumstances – a realisation that as thrown beings we can uncork and celebrate the life-force only by splicing open time. How does one appreciate the sublimely beautiful things around us when time seems to be pressured, careening down the cliff?“Pulsation in the vein/Ten thousand years/ of velocity/in a globule”This new set of poems is a kind of concentrated, felt digression to me, a detour to reach nowhere farther than the most familiar – where the marvellous hides. Is there any higher deliverance than various crossings in living itself? At every bend a surprise. In the momentary glimpse we rise and our souls turn minstrel-like. We start singing; walk directionless. “My rucksack is obtuse/and tourism a trespass/Can you rearrange/ my legs?/I’ll walk.”In the vastness and intricacy of creation, we form bonds. We pledge and assure each other. Such assurances are magical; and yet the contours of those moments evolve into something entirely new eventually. Duration changes gear. Most of all, our untold, heaping selves collide within the ribcage at every bend. We are and are not. All relations are beautiful and yet insistently vulnerable and contingent. Fragile and tremulous. Is it not that our surroundings are the imprints of time – like my holding of the chalk as it grates the blackboard, or feeling the traceries of the anklet on my beloved’s foot? And yet, change blurs and smudges time, bringing forth a quality that is in perpetual tension with our habits and interests. It gradually dawns upon one that time and changing matter are the real actors: playing their part, appearing from nowhere and disappearing in wonder. And are the concerns in The Aravali Quatrains, published earlier this year, different?The Aravali Quatrains, published in January, is the other side of the same quest, as I see it. There are 52 quatrains in the quiver. Each a kind of paper boat swimming in the flood. Their bobbings and pulses serve as heart-beats that measure their own duration. One may call each quatrain a spell of enthusiasm. Or, to put it more pointedly: each quatrain serves to mark the taut relationship between enthusiasm and a gathering tension perhaps?All disgrace has untied meYour abandoning has cleansed meWhose dearest ones to the abyss gone?Come, together, we shall make some salt.The sense of common bankruptcy and destitution that can come from some felt and deeper attachment needs no attestation from any affiliation, party, ideology or method. Through the bushes and the briar we make our way. But those paths are also paved intricately with the filigreed work of yearning. Once all doubt is gone, this longing shimmers bright. It lurks just beneath the surface: we crave for touch, the roost, the hearth. My lectures I have prepared wellPupils come and waitI slur an digress, halt and mumbleAching for the nestDoting quivers within a scintilla of the essential glance – of burning fingertips that touch, a morsel of rice offered by my loved one. Sentimental length of time is like a spray of flowers, a corsage drenched in adoring and treasuring intensity. And that is the reason why all illusions are beautiful, all fiction throbbingly real. Each such slice of sentimental time is a reversible journey from craving to being bereft and a renewed return to essential dwelling. Between the firmament and the ground, we hover. Poetry hovers too. Shall human creatures carry this sense of homesickness at home forever? Is there a force that makes and breaks all tenderness and devotion? In and through the sheer force of attachment, our bodies are broken into pieces, butchered and gathered in little mineshafts of loving fiction. There is no respite.You burn and sieve all husk and grainCalligraphic glazeIn Iron grates you peel my skinThe naked rock within.What are the processes behind your poetry? Are there inspirations and influences? How do you organise your poems?When I look back to the initial moments that gave birth to the first few lines of the two collections, I see an increasing hesitation in articulation. I am not being able to say things with emphasis or even communicate with others – in my songs and poetry. There is too much noise around, far too many assertions. Relentless cycles of glee and anxiety bury us. There is a marked difference in these compilations with the poems in my earlier collections. Indeed, there has been an inward demand to utter things which lie outside of the pail of arguments, loquacity. One realises that an imaginative work cannot be a sermon in disguise. I remember WB Yeat’s inspired words: “We make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrels with ourselves, poetry.” Giving attention to our inner selves and to our interlocutors and materials that lie strewn all around us could take us away from the bric-a-brac and arrangement of language – sometimes called poesy – to the surging chaos which we call living. For instance, each cluster of the gulmohar/krishnachura flower contains an infinite variety of particular reds, though we usually do not distinguish between them. The variations seem uniform. But if attended closely, we shall find that the obvious colour of any discrete flower is actually infinitely abstract. Observing, and then assimilating, abstraction in pulsating matter requires a kind of attentive distraction. Fragmentary utterances emerge sometimes. They arrive. We feel rhythms that light us up as we attend closely to the chaos. I can comprehend all these, but am I being able to express these in my words? Am I being smug or too distracted in my own assertions? Anyway, in closely packed utterances there is a danger, I know. The minimal form in poetry can easily turn into little nuggets of wisdom. The obverse is also true: the form may simply turn into imagist brushstrokes or modes of marking fictive disruption where meaning is not an essential component. Neither of these approaches interests me, but I have often been drawn to the compact poetic utterances of Abbas Kiarostami, Mukund Lath, AE Houseman and Sisir Kumar Das – each of their styles, and approaches to the short lyric, are different of course. Instead of wisdom, I think the idea of the partial whole is closer to my sensibility. Photographs are integral to Nectar Pours Like Fine Mist. This collective work with Rajarshi Dasgupta, where each of us did our own thing – writing poetry, taking photographs – could not have come about without years of being close friends, sharing obsessive concerns and passions, and serious disagreements about art and thinking. Beyond their figurative mode, there is a sense where the photographer has always found his friend’s poetry charged with nocturnal colours and raining with mysterious gestures. I may have found my friend’s photographs curling into deeply solitary and other spaces of everyday and secret vacations. Where they meet (I feel) is in restrained and silent intervals, in conversations that break up and disperse their identities, and in collaborations where they become more vulnerable.Excerpted with permission from Nectar Pours Like Fine Mist, Prasanta Chakravarty, photographs by Rajarshi Dasgupta, Red River.

How to spark a love for books in kids: 4 steps for parents

Raising a child who enjoys reading is one of the greatest gifts one can offer as a parent. Reading not only helps kids develop their language skills but also expands their imagination, sharpens their focus, and fosters emotional intelligence. But turning a child into a book lover requires some intentional effort. Here are 4 effective strategies to cultivate the habit of reading in your child.Create a cosy reading nook at homeChildren are drawn to spaces that feel magical and inviting. Dedicate a small corner of the home as a reading nook. Fill it with soft cushions, blankets, fairy lights, and shelves packed with colourful books suited to their age. Let this space become their hideaway where they can escape into stories.Rotate the books regularly to keep the collection fresh and try to build the habit of the child to even just sit in the corner for at least 30 minutes. It might lead to a spark of energy to read.Make reading an interactive adventureReading doesn’t at all have to be a quiet, solitary activity. Bring stories to life by acting out characters, using funny voices, or asking the child to predict what might happen next in the plot. Parents can even set up mini scavenger hunts related to story elements or create a craft inspired by the book you just read together.Be a reading role modelChildren mimic what they see, so let them catch you enjoying a good book. Dedicate some family time where everyone reads their own material—whether it’s novels, magazines, or even recipes. Seeing their parents and siblings immersed in reading creates a culture of books in the household.Share your excitement about what you’re reading. “I can’t wait to see how this story ends!”Let them choose their own booksGive your child the freedom to pick books that interest them, even if they seem unconventional. Whether it’s comics, graphic novels, or books on dinosaurs or fairy tales, respecting their preferences empowers them and makes reading feel like a personal choice rather than a chore.Take regular trips to libraries or bookstores and allow your child to explore.