When the Chestnut Falls Far

Bridget A. Lyons 

from Rooted and Growing

My father is obsessed with the American chestnut tree. This might not seem odd if he were a biologist, an arborist, or a forester. Or if he, over the course of his eighty-two-years, had ever taken any kind of interest in landscaping. But he’s a Wall Street guy. Besides money, his passions are fly-fishing, opera, and scotch. How the possible comeback of a species that disappeared from the American landscape before he was born fits into this assemblage of interests is a bit of an enigma. It does give me—a tree-hugging former wilderness guide—something to talk about with him, though. 

I ask him questions about chestnuts in a desperate attempt to understand the constellation of things he cares about. For many years, I assumed that I wasn’t one of those things. I assumed that, when all was said and done, our story would be one of gradual estrangement. But I wonder, now, if a tree struggling to come back from near extinction might offer us a new ending. 

The American chestnut story, until recently, has been a tragic one not unlike the plot lines in my father’s favorite operas. Prior to about 1904, the species blanketed the east coast of the United States. Its hard, fast-growing, and rot-resistant wood was just what a booming country needed to fuel its expansion. Countless houses, floors, pieces of furniture, and railroad ties were made from the strong, straight-grained timbers it produced. Its nuts were a significant source of nutrition for humans and wildlife as well as a pre-slaughter fattening agent for cows and pigs. Black-and-white photos of chestnut trees show entire families posed for portraits in front of their trunks with plenty of space left on either side of Mom and Dad to give the viewer a good look at the bark. Their giant boughs offered broad-leafed shade on streets from Maine to Mississippi. 

Then the blight came. 

All of the nearly four billion trees in the American chestnut’s historic range succumbed to a fungus that arrived in the New World from Asia. Cryphonectria parasitica’s spores spread rapidly on the wind, invading trees through wounds in their bark. Once inside the cambium, the fungus released acids that lowered the pH of the trees to lethal levels. While the blight has not killed off chestnut trees entirely, the continued presence of this tiny organism has made it impossible for them to grow any larger than shrubs in the geographic corridor where they once thrived. These shrubs have thriving root systems and can send up enough shoots and leaves to eke out an existence, but the majestic trees of legend exist only in history. 

For now, that is. The chestnut’s ending hasn’t been entirely written yet. 

The little I know of my father’s story isn’t tragic at all. In fact, his tale is a classic variation on the American rags-to-riches formula. He was born the third of six children to Irish Catholic parents in Queens, New York. His father was a traveling candy salesman who lived on the road, and his mother was a brilliant woman who, after graduating from college at age eighteen, found herself in charge of a full house. She used prescription medications to ease the pain of being pent up with six of them, and my father, the only boy of her brood, made himself scarce. After the family moved to Reading, Pennsylvania, no one noticed that he spent most of his time hunting squirrels on the fringes of the city. 

Somewhere along the line, he must have done some studying because he won himself a scholarship to a Catholic college in Philadelphia. After serving his Korean War time, he returned to New York City to get an MBA, courtesy of the Army’s GI Bill. Then, he made the money his parents never had. He’s run banks and hedge funds, sat on corporate boards, and appeared on television talking about savings and loan crises. His parents lived long enough to witness their wayward working-class kid from Queens transform into a responsible, upstanding scion. 

They didn’t live to see him have grandchildren, however. My brother and I are both middle-aged and child-free, so that part of the story is in the books. I suppose the dying branch of a lineage might appear tragic to some people, including my father. It doesn’t to me. I think there are other ways for family trees to grow, other ways to write the narrative of a good and meaningful life. It is on this point that I have always assumed my father and I differ. 

My father and I planted two trees together when I was young. One was a Japanese maple, the other a magnolia. I distinctly remember helping my father with the excavation. “You’ve seen the rock walls we have lining our yard,” he warned me. “They all came out of the ground when these foundations were dug. This not going to be easy.” A few fading photographs in an old family album serve to testify the fact that I did do some digging. They also remind me that these trees were, once upon a time, only a foot or two taller than the four-foot me. 

While I hit 5’8” in eighth grade and stayed there, these trees just kept growing throughout my childhood and beyond, with only sun, water, and soil to feed them. I think we humans, as relatively short-sighted creatures, underestimate how huge our tree companions can become. Clearly, my parents did, since they recently had to take the magnolia down when its branches started to scrape the sides of the house. 

When I see the Japanese maple now—when I visit my parents to make sure they’re still healthy enough to live on their own—I barely recognize it. I would have never thought I’d live long enough to see it tower over the house. Maybe my father did, though. Or maybe he planted it thinking about his grandchildren. 

I first learned about recent efforts to bring the American chestnut back from relative extinction from my father. He explained with astonishment that there’s a non-profit organization, the American Chestnut Foundation, dedicated entirely to this endeavor. I listened as he talked about blight-resistant hybrids and gene splicing. “And get this,” he added. “I’ve got a plan for this group to give me some that we can plant at the club.” 

“The club,” is a fishing and hunting property in the Pocono Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania that he and fourteen other “owner/ members”—all men, all wealthy—enjoy and steward. I have a hard time stomaching multiple aspects of the club, most of them having to do with its exclusivity, but I recognize the good it’s doing as well. Not only does the association preserve watershed land, deciduous forest, and stream quality, it gives my semi-retired father something to nurture. When I’ve visited the place, I’ve been reminded of the days when he went camping in the Catskills with my Girl Scout troop, before he and I both got too busy to spend time in the woods together. So, when club news dominates our calls, I don’t mind listening. Lately, the updates have had less to do with trout and deer and more to do with chestnuts. 

As he explained, and as I later read and reread online, genetic engineering at three different levels has created the possibility of restoring the American chestnut to eastern forests. At the most basic level of manipulation, the heritage trees have been crossed with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts as well as other root rot-resistant strains. The resulting tougher individuals have been planted in large swaths across the American chestnut’s original home range. In addition, geneticists from the State University of New York, using CRISPR (gene editing) technology, have implanted a blight-resistant wheat gene into the chestnut’s DNA, creating modified chestnuts with disease protection. Finally, work is being done to weaken the blight fungus itself. By introducing a virus into its genetic material, scientists hope to make the American chestnut’s mortal enemy less formidable. 

In addition to raising funds and organizing volunteers, the American Chestnut Foundation serves as a clearinghouse for much of this research. They also periodically give chestnut saplings to people like my father. “Well, they’re not exactly giving them to us,” he explained. “I have to pay about ten dollars per tree. And I have to prove to the organization that we can keep the deer from munching on them, which is going to require some costly fencing.” 

“What does the rest of the club think about this?” I asked. “Are they into it?” 

“Nah. They could care less, as long as the streams stay healthy and full of fish. But they’re not stopping me either.” 

I was impressed. This struck me as a worthwhile project, if a bit like expensive and time-consuming windmill-tilting. It actually sounded like something I would do. 

Sometimes, when I’m on the phone with my father, I wonder how other men his age spend their time. I suppose some play golf and eat meals with friends, others do woodworking projects in their garages or volunteer with local nonprofits, and still others learn new languages or travel. Then, I remember that a lot of them spend huge chunks of time playing with their grandchildren, or making things for their grandchildren, or planning to visit their grandchildren, or FaceTiming with their grandchildren. 

I’ve never wanted to have children. I announced this to my parents when I was young, and I’m sure they looked and me with knowing smiles and said that I would change my mind. As the significant birthdays passed—twenty, thirty, forty, and now fifty—it must have become apparent that I was sticking to my guns. To their credit, my parents have never made me feel guilty about this. Still, I once worked up the courage to ask my mother if she thought my choice bothered my father. “Oh, yes, definitely. He loves children, you know,” she said. “He really likes teaching the other men’s grandkids to fish at the club.” I shook my head, wondering what it would have been like to grow up in a family where conversations like this happened when they could have altered the storyline. Then my mother added, “He spent a lot of time with you when you were little. You remember, I’m sure. He likes people when they’re young and impressionable.” 

I often think about the interactions I had with my father when I was just about the same height as the trees we planted. We took our German shorthaired pointer down to the lake to run off-leash, we went to the hardware store, we raked leaves and took them to the town dump. We also spent a lot of time working on my softball skills. He had been a mediocre baseball player as a teen, and I think he hoped that I would do better. I must have been about eight or nine when my father brought home the two mitts that we oiled weekly to keep them supple and foster the development of the ideal softball-shaped pocket. From the start, I had a good throwing arm, so the two of us would stand at opposite ends of the front yard—one of us alongside of the Japanese maple tree, the other backed up against a giant oak—playing catch. “More followthrough,” he’d say. Or, “Hear that? That sound? That’s a solid throw, when you hear that smack in the mitt.” I knew that, and I’d swell with pride when he noticed. “Now, do that again,” he’d say. “Imagine you’ve got a runner to beat.” And I would. After a few years, I started pitching, and these sessions evolved into lessons on concentration and focus under pressure. All too often, my pitches would fling wildly into the air, knocking the buds off of the magnolia. I was, in short, inconsistent, and games were more stressful than fun. I quit before I had any chance to rewrite the family’s history with the great American pastime. 

About that same time, I felt like my father disappeared. He started to travel more frequently for work, and, when he was in town, he didn’t get home until after my brother and I had eaten dinner. That was part of it, but not all. I know a lot of fathers with busy schedules who manage to connect with their children. I was still doing what I was supposed to do—getting straight As, playing clarinet, singing in the school chorus, taking art classes—but I was also spending a lot of time watching MTV and debating whether Duran Duran or Culture Club was the better band. I wore mesh shirts like Madonna, and, though I wasn’t allowed to date, I took a great deal of interest in my friend’s romantic pursuits. I debriefed the day’s events every evening on the phone with the three or four girls who formed my eighth-grade inner circle. 

Maybe he didn’t like whom I was becoming. Or maybe he just didn’t like that I was becoming. I was a person forming likes and dislikes of my own. I didn’t need careful cultivation anymore, and I didn’t seem to be growing as straight and true as he wanted. 

When I was fourteen, my parents told me I wouldn’t be attending the public high school up the street from our house. It was then that I discovered how much of my plot had already been devised for me. I would go to private high school that would assure my acceptance into a prestigious college that would launch me into a career that climaxed with money and success. I’d thought I would spend my freshman year taping photos of the Go-Go’s on my locker and walking home after school with my girlfriends. Instead, I rode a bus in New York City commuter traffic to an institution where my classmates both took calculus and snorted coke by the age of sixteen. I still had braces and glasses and watched reruns on TV with my younger brother. A month into the school year, when I came home bawling and begging to rejoin my friends at the public high school, my father scowled at me. “What, and just be average? No.” 

Soon after, I stopped calling him “Dad” and started calling him “Father.” 

The American Chestnut Foundation, which was created in 1983, wasn’t always on board with the genetic manipulation of trees. At first, they wanted to stick with traditional cross-breeding, the kind that’s been a part of agriculture since the days of Gregor Mendel. By 1990, they’d warmed up to the experimental genetic work being done by a team of scientists at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. In 2013, this team unveiled an American chestnut variant, called Darling 58, that seemed to be resistant to the Cryphonectria fungus. Darling 58 still needs to be evaluated by the EPA and the FDA (because the nuts it produces will become food), so government approval of this chestnut strain will be a long and complex process. In the meantime, it’s launched the chestnut version of the increasingly common GMO debate. On the one side are the pro-modification people who argue that since our species’ movements brought the blight to American shores in the first place, our species should fix the problem. They argue that engineering pervades every other aspect of our world and that we might as well use it to restore a beautiful and useful tree to its rightful habitat. On the other side of the debate, opponents of Darling 58 claim that these genetically modified trees will cross with the few natives that remain and eliminate the heirloom strand from the gene pool. They also point to the fact that Monsanto has been waltzing around the GMO chestnut scene of late and allude to the dangerous precedents that might be set by the species’ adoption. If we promulgate this one superspecies, they ask, what’s to stop us from redesigning entire forests with “perfect” trees, all according to the latest fashion? 

“It’s ridiculous that anyone would contest the introduction of this tree,” my father said. “Nothing but good will come from this. Imagine: Chestnuts all up and down the east coast again. It would be an amazing sight. What could possibly go wrong?” 

I could think of a few things, but I kept my mouth shut. I’d stopped fighting him many years earlier, when I went to college and finally escaped our painful breakfast table debate forums. Whatever my brother or I said at 7 a.m. over our bowls of cereal—it could have been an opinion about a homework assignment, an observation about the weather, or an expression of of exhaustion—was met with a contradictory statement. Arguing was a sport for my father, one that he thought was essential to success in his field. Therefore, it was a critical part of our upbringing. “You’ve got to get your juices flowing in the morning,” he would say, as one of us raised our voice to rebut the remark he’d just made. “I’m training you. This is how you get ready for your day in the real world.” 

It got me an ulcer diagnosis during my freshman year in college. It also stopped me from sending any exploratory tendrils out into the “real” world. 

“So, I need you to make me a flier I can send to the other club members,” my father called to announce one day. “I’ve got to raise $30,000 to set up an enclosure.” The enclosure, he explained, would be a way to cordon off a chunk of the forest, ostensibly to see how the oaks did when Bambi and his parents weren’t chomping away relentlessly at every sapling in the area. And, it had an extra benefit: The American Chestnut Foundation people would sell him some of their blight-resistant hybrid chestnuts if he could get this thing built and ensure the young trees would be protected from deer. 

“So, there’s this stuff called ski fencing. Have you ever heard of it? It’s this plastic mesh....” I cut him off. By that point, I’d lived in an Idaho ski town for twelve years and had a season pass to the local resort for most of them. I was quite familiar with ski fencing. “Well, anyway, it’s ugly. Orange, with holes. But it’s perfect, really, because you can move it around.” I knew this too. “I’ve designed and priced an enclosure arrangement that involves ski fencing and concrete pilings. I think it can work. He went on to say that he envisioned barricading ten acres for seven years, then moving three of the four lengths of fencing to close off an adjacent ten acres for seven additional years, then repeating that pattern twice more. “So, we get twenty-eight years of data on how the forest does without deer, and we get to plant four crops of chestnut trees.” His voice got louder. “In twenty-eight years, the chestnuts will be huge! Not that I’ll live to see them, but someone will.” 

Of course, his optimism rests on the assumption that the chestnut tree’s story will continue as projected—that all of these trees will take root, that the new genetic technology will enable them to fight off the blight, that some new pest won’t disrupt their life cycle, that we humans haven’t introduced another villainous plot twist into the ecosystem. In my worldview, that’s too much uncertainty to maintain trust in my father’s expected outcome. But that doesn’t mean I’m not curious about how this all pans out. 

I made him a flyer. He sent it to his fellow club members. He did some heavy arm-twisting, and, I suspect, threw down a lot of the cash himself. Six months later, he called to tell me that he was on site with the club’s resident manager, watching him use a mini-cat to place the concrete pilings on the parcel my father had flagged earlier that month. “This is really cool,” he said. “And I have twelve chestnut trees to plant. Anyway, gotta go. We’re renting this machine by the hour.” 

Of course, he didn’t ask me what I was up to. But I didn’t really mind. 

If you take a seed from a chestnut tree, plant it, water it, and protect it from predators, you can typically expect it to produce a chestnut tree that looks and acts more or less like the one you scavenged the seed from. Parents-to-be are often curious about how their offspring will uniquely combine their own genetics. Many people assume that their kids will be ideal mash ups of both parents—in looks, habits, and interests. But it doesn’t always work that way. 

I suspect my father planned for me take over his company, although, like most complicated subjects in our family, this one was never discussed. He started bringing me into New York City with him, to his office, when I was about ten years old. My brother and I had fun playing with the intercoms, photocopier machines, and dot matrix printer paper, but I think my father was actually hoping to ease us into the Wall Street environment so that, when the time came, we’d slide right onto the path he’d prepared for us. He did everything right; he pushed the academics, gave me a taste for travel, sent me to the right schools. I got all of the sunlight and water I needed, and yet, I didn’t blossom into the tree I think he wanted. Maybe I inherited an aberrant gene that gave me countercultural leanings, a wandering nature, and a lack of interest in material possessions and money. I bet he would have used CRISPR technology to excise this gene at conception if he could have. 

Shortly after I graduated from a stuffy east coast college, I moved west and jumped from job to job for thirty years. Most of those jobs involved teaching in some regard—middle school children, yoga students, budding writers. Along the line, I spent thirteen years as a wilderness instructor, dragging suburban kids like the one I once was through Wyoming mountain ranges, Utah river canyons, and Patagonian fjords, hoping that the time they spent in the woods would foster an appreciation for the land and, of course, its trees. For a while there, I spent so much time camping for a living that I didn’t bother maintaining a home. I didn’t make enough money to be paying rent for a space I only occasionally slept in. Not only did I see places most people only glimpse in photographs; I developed relationships with them. I came to care as much about the land and its non-human inhabitants as I do about my own species. I now consider them to be my family. 

I don’t know what my father thinks of the story of my life. For years, I assumed that I was a source of disappointment, if not outright embarrassment. After all, he never asked how my students were, how my kayaking trip was, if I was dating anyone, or where I hoped to travel to that year. He just told me about the weather in New Jersey and offered a full report on how his investment funds were performing, since we couldn’t talk about the grandchildren he didn’t have or the empire I wasn’t building at work. And he routinely asked if I needed money. 

On a recent visit to New Jersey, I asked my father if we could go to the club to check out the chestnuts. He said yes and suggested that we spend the night there as well, since he also wanted to show me the trout habitat improvements the caretaker was working on. I packed my camera and journal and hopped into his hybrid SUV for two-and-a-half hours of nearly conversation-free car time. I asked a few questions about the fund, about his cataracts, about the book he was reading and the Jeopardy champion he was following. The answers didn’t offer openings for further exploration, so I mostly stared out at the deciduous forest flying by through the tinted windows. 

       After arriving at the club and driving out to the enclosure, though, he started talking. “Look at this. Look how different it is in here without the deer eating everything. Imagine what this forest would look like if they could be kept in check, if the red oaks could really get a foothold.” He undid the clasp and pulled the orange ski fence over to the side. I could see six rings of metal mesh encircling green stakes and headed towards the closest one. “That one’s doing well,” my father said, as I approached a three-foot sapling with a few little branches and a dozen leaves. “And that one,” he gestured to another tree, “is the go-getter of the bunch.” 

        We walked around the plot, inspecting each of the saplings one by one. I took pictures of all of them, in part to document their progress for him, and in part to look at later, to remind myself of what he saw in them—not just a handful of young living things, but a handful of young living things that he had invested significant effort into acquiring and nurturing. A handful of young living things that he clearly cared about and had high hopes for. I knew, also, that he saw in them the future of a species in peril. I saw that too. 

       I paused in front of a rather sickly-looking tree and asked if he knew what was going on with it. “I’m not sure. It’s in the same soil as the others, and we dug the holes to the same depth.” I bent over to look at its leaves. It had them; they were just smaller. “It’ll do what it’s going to do,” he said, as we turned to walk back to the enclosure entrance. 

I’m not as sure of my mutant status anymore. While I don’t think my father understands my choices, it’s possible that he sees some redeeming value in them, even though he wouldn’t have made the same ones— even though they resulted in a daughter who fell far from the tree. 

What I do know is that, whether he likes it or not, my choices have forced my father to find new ways for his influence to survive him. His parents lived well into their late eighties, so the family genetics suggest that he could have five to ten more years on the planet. Still, although we never talk about it, I know he is thinking about what a legacy looks like without grandchildren in the picture. He recently told me that he set up a non-profit arm for the club, one that allows him and other members to make tax deductible donations to their conservation efforts. These include research into the effect of deer on red oak saplings, attempts to restore the stream banks, projects that help to naturally control the invasive gypsy moth population, and, of course, the ongoing cultivation of young American chestnuts. 

I suspect some of the money he will end up donating to this nonprofit was originally sequestered in a college fund for the children I didn’t have—an account that would have made sure these young humans would have the opportunity to thrive. It turns out the funds will go to making sure some of our non-human family members thrive. I’m more than okay with that. 

If he cares about what I care about, then maybe, by associative property, he cares about me. 

A couple of months ago, I was mountain biking with a friend along the spine of the Santa Cruz Mountains, about an hour from my home. I rarely drive to go biking, but I’d wanted to explore the trails off of Skyline Boulevard, the north-south road that traverses the crest of the range. I knew there were vast hillsides of California live oaks up there, and that some of the trees had been planted by the Spanish in the 1700s. Seeing them would be well worth the trip. After planning a route that looked like it would maximize technical riding, Bay Area vistas, and oak spotting, we pedaled off to check out some new terrain. 

About an hour into our ride, we arrived at a dirt parking lot, complete with an attendant and a few makeshift wooden stands. “Excuse me,” I said, dismounting from my bike. “What’s going on here?” 

“We’re a chestnut farm,” the young woman replied. A chestnut farm in California? How had I not heard about this or seen it on the map? “We’re open every weekend in October for u-pick. It’s by reservation only. We fill up every weekend, pretty much.” 

In the process of firing dozens of questions at her, I learned that the farm’s chestnut trees, like the oldest of the live oaks, were planted by the Spanish. They’re European chestnuts, not American chestnuts, but the nuts for sale in big mesh bags looked the same to me. She told us we couldn’t enter the farm itself without a reservation, but we could skirt below it on a dirt road that had a good view up towards the trees. 

I couldn’t miss the chestnuts as we rode beneath the grove. They stood out amongst the twisty-trunked oaks with their straight, strong spines and big oval leaves. Their foliage was beginning to turn an autumnal yellow—something the majority of California wild tree species don’t do. The chestnuts looked different from everything else around them, but they didn’t exactly look out of place. 

As we came around a bend, I spotted one chestnut tree right next to the road. A wayward nut must have rolled out of the orchard decades ago and sprouted a sapling outside the orchard’s fences. I stopped and got off my bike. I’d only ever seen full-grown chestnut trees in photos, I realized, and I wanted to touch one—one that, like me, had been transplanted to California to begin a new branch of its lineage’s history. 

I admired the tree’s serrated leaves while I caught my breath. Then, I reached up to grab a branch and pull it towards my face for a closer look. When I let go, the bough bounced right back up. I smiled, clipped back into my pedals, and kept riding. 

UPDATE: In the fall of 2023, the American Chestnut Federation withdrew its support for the development and dissemination of the Darling 58 genetic variant. While the trees yielded promising results in labs and greenhouses, they did not perform as well as expected in the field. In addition, it came to light that an error occurred in early stages of the genetic manipulation process. The American Chestnut Federation acknowledged the public’s existing fear of this technology, and its discontinuation of Darling 58 research is in part driven by their desire not to “erode public trust” in further research of this kind. They continue to pursue other promising paths towards restoration of the American chestnut to its historic range. For more information, see their website, www.tacf.org. 

Image © Europeana

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Bridget A. Lyons is a writer, editor, teacher, and creative consultant. She's also an avid explorer of unfamiliar territories of every kind, from the geographic and interpersonal to the intellectual and emotional. 

bridgetalyons.com

From Entwined: Dispatches from the Intersection of Species by Bridget A. Lyons, Texas A & M Press, 2025. Used by permission of Texas A & M Press.