How folk hero Johnny Appleseed ended up at an H&M in Indiana

The Johnny Appleseed Trail of North Central Massachusetts — named for John Chapman, the folk hero who spread apple orchards across the American frontier in the early 1800s — is not actually a trail.It’s a stretch of highway, branded for tourism and designed for motorists.Isaac Fitzgerald discovered this in March 2023.

The journalist, then in his late 30s, arrived at the Johnny Appleseed Visitors’ Center near the Lancaster-Leominster line with a backpack full of borrowed camping gear, his father’s hiking boots on his feet and a plan that was part literary quest, part family visit and part personal dare.He wanted to walk west from Chapman’s birthplace in Leominster through Massachusetts and eventually follow the ghost of John Chapman through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana.Instead, he got a nice woman in a sweater at the visitors’ center offering him cider and suggesting he might want to rent a car.So he bought a hot drink, stuffed some children’s books about Appleseed into his pack for his niece and nephews, found the hole in the chain-link fence behind the visitor center dumpsters, threw his gear through it, and started walking west through the abandoned tires.That collapsed premise became “American Rambler: Walking the Trail of Johnny Appleseed” (Knopf, May 12th), a book that’s part pilgrimage, part elegy and part comedy of American self-mythology. “Often in life there is no clean, walkable path,” Fitzgerald said in an exclusive interview with The Post.

“Things are rarely clean cut and straightforward, not in this story, not in history, not really for America.”The book is as much about Fitzgerald learning to live inside contradictions — myth and fact, comedy and brutality, solitude and fellowship, escape and return —  as it is about Chapman, apples and Americana.“As much as I’ve been a rambling, gambling man my whole life, this book wasn’t a call to keep adventuring forever,” the writer said.“It was actually abo...