On Easter Sunday
I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mom, casually scanning the morning’s
news headlines online, when I clicked on the New York Post website and saw one
of their top highlighted stories was a long profile of a British woman, now in
her 60s, who’s just released a book about how she was raised as a little girl by
a colony of Capuchin monkeys after
being abandoned deep inside a South American rainforest by kidnappers who
botched her abduction.
She survived on bananas,
Brazil nuts, guava and figs as she modeled the monkeys' eating habits and
high-pitched cries and “even learned to climb trees, though she slept in a
hollowed-out tree trunk at night.”The article informed that Marina Chapman, who has written a just-released book about her 1950s experience, was “playing in her family’s vegetable garden when a man grabbed her and smothered her face with a rag she would later assume was dipped in chloroform. Such kidnappings were common in the era of La Violencia, a precursor to the civil war that continues in Colombia to this day . . . She believes the kidnapping was interrupted somehow, which is how she awoke from her drugged state alone in the jungle . . . Over time, Chapman shed all evidence of her past self, discarding her clothes and human habits.”
She was quoted as having written in her
book, “I was growing a new, muscular body, strong in ways a child’s body
normally isn’t. I had harder heels and palms, and an appetite for strange
jungle foods. I was also beginning to move around like a monkey, and one of the
reasons, perhaps, that I wasn’t aware of how I was growing was that I almost always
walked on all fours now . . .”
*****
Intrigued by the woman’s tale, wondering if
it really, really was true and anxiously wanting to see a photograph of her (not
provided by the Post), I immediately typed “Marina Chapman” into Google and
started reading other posted articles about her.
One I
pulled up from the London Telegraph reported that “after 10 years in Bogotá,
Chapman moved in with the Eusse family to the United Kingdom, where she worked
as a nanny and a cook. The family, though Catholic, attended the Abundant Life
church, a Christian Renewal congregation in Yorkshire. There, she met her
future husband, John Chapman, a 28-year-old church organist and bacteriologist.
In 1979, they wed. Marina Chapman did not share her jungle life with her
husband until after they were married.”
It was at this point I stopped reading dead
in my tracks and my eyes just stared at the screen, thinking in amazement, “That’s
Johnny Appleseed’s name!!!!!”
Appleseed, a favorite character of mine in
my childhood, was really John Chapman and, as anyone who knows anything about
the Christian adventurer, he lived in the wilderness, had bear-like feet from
walking barefoot all the time, even in winter, climbed trees, slept in a hollow log and
befriended and acted like animals who he lived with and deeply cared about!!!
*****
To give you the whole scoop on why this all
has me so tickled, here’s an article I wrote a couple of years ago:
I was nine years old when my family
returned from being missionaries in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador, and after a
year of camping out inside my grandmother's house in Akron, Ohio (I actually
slept on the floor in a sleeping bag set up beside my grandmother's bed), we
moved an hour-and-a-half away to a tiny farming/resort village called
Loudonville.
Loudonville is popular statewide for
its canoe liveries and campgrounds on both the Mohican and Blackfork rivers.
It's also home to the Mohican State Forest and nearby Pleasant Hill Dam. Tons
of campers fill the area each summer.
My summer jobs in high school included
working at one of the liveries and at a custard ice cream stand in town. For
two summers while attending Ohio State, I worked at both a water slide and Putt
Putt golf course inside Wally Campgrounds (yes, just like in the Chevy Chase
movie "Vacation," but its name precedes the classic comedy by at
least two decades).
I spent all my free time during these
summers cross-country cycling through the gorgeous rolling farm hills or woods
that stretched for miles any direction you ventured outside Loudonville's city
limits.
I preferred the back roads (and
sometimes had to fight off unchained dogs with my attached bicycle pump), but
would also ride country highways to destinations like Millersburg (known for
its large Amish community), Mt. Vernon, Mansfield, Wooster, Butler and Mt.
Gilead.
Whenever I rode up Route 60 (the road
my family lived on) into Ashland, I'd pass a large fruit stand my mom always
bought her cooking apples from every fall. The outdoor/indoor market was named
for Johnny Appleseed, who was said to have spread the apple seeds and nurtured
the young trees that led to the property's apple orchards.
Because Johnny Appleseed was known to
have been all through the territory surrounding Loudonville, clearing trees and
brush to spread seeds and plant orchards, I'd think about him now and then on
my excursions—actually more often than I should admit!
I was fascinated by the guy's story. He
was a true free spirit, roaming the earth barefoot in a tattered, patched coat
with a Bible buttoned inside it, using his head to haul around the cast-iron
stewpot he cooked in.
He loved children, animals and nature
and befriended the Indians even as he helped settlers avoid them. Historical
records even verify that in the War of 1812, he traveled 30 miles to summon
American troops to Mansfield, Ohio, thus forestalling a raid by Native
Americans who were allied with the British.
Johnny's real last name was Chapman and
he was born in Leominster, Mass., in 1774. He left home at 23, heading westward
into the wilderness with a simple dream to plant apple trees. All he brought
with him was his stewpot, a hatchet, a flint and steel for making fire, a bag
of cornmeal and a sack of apple seeds.
"He gave away his clothes to
anyone who needed a coat or trousers or shoes," says the children's book I
have on him, "The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed," written by Margaret
Hodges. "Most of the time he wore no shoes. One man said that he saw
Johnny breaking the ice in a creek with a bare foot.
"All along his path he planted
apple seeds. If he was invited to spend the night in a cabin, he would not take
a bed, but slept on the floor. He would not eat until he was sure that the
children in the family were full. He loved honey but would never take it from a
bee tree until he saw that the bees had enough honey to keep themselves alive
during the winter. A strange man indeed!"
Johnny followed creeks and rivers
westward using borrowed canoes, then crossed the wild Alleghenys on foot. When
a record winter storm caught him unaware, he wrapped his feet with pieces of
cloth torn from his coat and wove tree branches into makeshift snowshoes.
"As time went by, Johnny walked so
long and so far that his feet grew almost as tough as an animal's paws,"
writes Hodges in her book. "In other ways, too, he came to be like an
animal. He could curl up to sleep under a bush or in the hollow of a
tree."
Of course, there were people who
thought Johnny was nuts, walking about in no shoes, a ragged coat and stewpot
hat, but the children always loved him and they were the ones to coin his
famous name of Appleseed. He would read stories from the Bible to them and even
would tear Bible prayer and devotional books apart, leaving sections in tree
boughs during the summertime for children to find.
By the spring of 1845, Johnny had come
as far west as Fort Wayne, Ind. and was staying with a family when news arrived
that cattle had broken into one of his new orchards 15 miles away.
"The weather was cold and wet, but
he set off at once and never stopped to rest on the long walk," writes
Hodges. "'Cloudy. Snow showers,' an Indiana farmer wrote in his diary that
day. The next day the weather report was, 'Snow showers all day.' When Johnny
got back to his friends' house, they put him to bed with a high fever. During
the March snows, Johnny Appleseed died, and his body returned to the earth that
he had loved. By early April, winter was past. The weather report read, 'In the
night thunder showers—then fair—first apple blossoms."
*****
When I wrote this article on Appleseed I
didn’t even know as much as I do today about how closely linked he was with the
Loudonville area. Wikipedia, for one, writes, However, Henry Howe reported that Appleseed had
been a frequent visitor to Perrysville,
Ohio. He was to propose to Miss Nancy Tannehill there—only to find that he
was a day late; she had accepted a prior proposal.
Perrysville was
the other half of the Loudonville-Perrysville School District that I graduated
high school from and I rode my bike through the little town and its outskirts,
only five miles from downtown Loudonville, all the time. I knew its back roads
by heart!
My sister lived
in Mansfield all of her adult life. Wikipedia says:
According to Harper's New Monthly Magazine,
towards the end of his career, he was present when an itinerant missionary
was exhorting an open-air congregation in Mansfield,
Ohio. The sermon was long and severe on the topic of extravagance, because
the pioneers were buying such indulgences as calico
and imported tea. “Where now is there a man who, like the primitive Christians,
is traveling to heaven barefooted and clad in coarse raiment?” the preacher
repeatedly asked until Johnny Appleseed, his endurance worn out, walked up to
the preacher, put his bare foot on the stump that had served as a podium, and
said, “Here's your primitive Christian!” The flummoxed sermonizer dismissed the
congregation.
Well, I know I’m not going to forget Marina
Chapman’s story, especially after writing this! I can’t wait to see the
documentary National Geographic’s going to make on her!
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