For the most part, the few encounters between Ben and Dennis were brief and routine: Dennis was dying of cancer and Ben was his hospice nurse.

“You have to go through their medical history. You talk about every single part of their body systems and what they have issues with,” said Ben McMurray. “So I always try to add some extra questions that aren't on the list to just make someone feel like I'm not just a robot sitting there.”

Nothing crazy — just small talk like, “What did you do for a living?”

Ben learned Dennis had spent his career studying the American chestnut. He’d been a researcher. That was pretty much the extent of their interaction. Dennis passed away not long after.

But Ben found himself circling back to Dennis and the chestnut again and again in the coming years. And, eventually, this grew into a fascination, which grew into a mission: he would try to help save the American chestnut.

Credits:
Host: Dan Wanschura
Editor: Morgan Springer
Senior Producer: Ellie Katz
Additional Editorial Support: Peter Payette
Sonic ID: Nic M. Neves
Episode Art: Mikayla Kerba
Special Thanks: Tom Dalluge, Paul Hinchcliff

Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: Welcome to Points North. I’m Dan Wanschura.

Ben McMurray met Dennis in the late fall, when all the leaves had already colored and fallen. Ben was a hospice nurse and Dennis was dying of cancer. There was a lot they needed to discuss.

BEN MCMURRAY: It's just like you have to go through their entire med list. You have to go through their medical history. You talk about every single part of their body systems and what they have issues with. … So I always try to add some extra questions that aren't on the list to just make someone feel like I'm not just a robot sitting there. 

WANSCHURA: Nothing crazy. Just small talk.

MCMURRAY: “ Well, what did you do for a living?" Or, "How long have you lived here?" …  And he mentioned that he was a chestnut researcher and did a lot of work with the American chestnut.  I don't believe we had any big in-depth conversations or anything. 

WANSCHURA: Ben finished up his visit, and left. But the detail stuck with him – he didn’t really know anything about chestnuts.

MCMURRAY:  So I searched his name and chestnuts, and I mean, he'd published a lot, and I think I skimmed some of the abstracts and, you know, kinda learned a little bit about his research and stuff. …  I don't wanna say a lot of it was above my head, but a lot of it was above my head.

WANSCHURA: Dennis died later that week. Ben’s life went on as normal: work, raising kids, chores to take care of on his small farm in northern Michigan. But Ben found himself circling back to Dennis and the chestnut again and again in the coming years. And, eventually, this grew into a fascination, which grew into a mission: he would try to help save the American chestnut. Senior producer Ellie Katz takes it from here.

ELLIE KATZ, BYLINE: If you close your eyes and imagine a tree from a fairy tale — something giant and towering with branches twisting in a dozen different directions, you’d get an image pretty close to an American chestnut. The tree dominated the forests of eastern North America. An estimated four billion chestnuts stretched all the way from Maine down to Mississippi, and spread out to the shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Settlers took them west, and planted them in places like Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Chestnuts were the biggest, the tallest, fastest-growing. In old photos, you can see entire families standing in front of the trees and still not coming close to the trunk’s full diameter. In the fall, the trees would rain down spiky green balls called burs.

Turkeys, and bears, and squirrels would pry them open for the rich, brown, teardrop-shaped chestnuts inside. People would scoop up the fallen nuts by the shovelful, which became soft when cooked, like potatoes. Chestnut wood was made into everything from flooring, to fenceposts, to caskets. Because of all this, the chestnut earned nicknames like the bread tree, the perfect tree, the redwood of the east.

And then, suddenly, things changed. In the late 1800s, a fungus was accidentally imported on chestnut trees from Asia. It was called chestnut blight. Asian chestnuts were naturally resistant to the fungus. But American trees were not. Blight tore through the U.S., floating on wind and rain and insects. It obliterated chestnut trees. Most of them died within a few years of infection.

By the 1940s, American chestnuts were considered functionally extinct. Their root systems underground survived the blight, but everything above ground – their leaves and limbs – was gone. Ben didn’t know about any of this until he met Dennis. And the story of the chestnut — it sparked something for him.

MCMURRAY: And so I was like, "Oh, maybe I can grow some American chestnuts." 

KATZ: It’s not like he fell down the rabbit hole all of a sudden. It was more like he slowly started picking a scab. At the time, Ben was raising pigs and chickens on his small farm. And he wanted to start planting some trees on his land too. He found some chestnuts on eBay and tried to grow them. They sprouted but then died during that first Michigan winter.

MCMURRAY:  So then I was like, "All right, well, if I'm gonna do this, I guess I need to invest a few things." 

KATZ: So he got some more chestnuts, built a greenhouse and started planting out all the trees with protective cages.

MCMURRAY: That's when I got, quote-unquote, serious. 

KATZ: Serious enough to venture onto some chestnut Facebook groups. And he learned there were two huge American chestnut trees on a skinny little peninsula in Lake Michigan, called Old Mission Peninsula.It’s incredibly rare for American chestnuts that big to still be alive, let alone a pair of them. So one day, Ben went to check them out.

MCMURRAY: Somehow I'm trying to equate it to like the Grand Canyon. Like, you know about the Grand Canyon and you know that it's special, but until you stand there and you see it, then it's just hard to describe. 

KATZ: In the spring, chestnut flowers called catkins bloom in little clusters, like tiny white fireworks against a background of green leaves.

MCMURRAY: The catkins had this cream shimmer to them. … And just flowing in the breeze. There's bees buzzing around. The smell was even a unique thing that's hard to describe. It was kinda like bleach, but not in a, like, unpleasant way.

KATZ: It’s clear when you talk to Ben that he cares about the things and people around him. But he’s also a matter-of-fact guy. Pragmatic. So if you think this is the moment where he fell in love with chestnuts, you’re wrong.

MCMURRAY:  I would not describe it as falling in love. I mean, I think those are two completely different things. 

KATZ: Or maybe you’re wondering whether, under the leaves of the big chestnut trees, Ben thought about Dennis.

MCMURRAY:  I think you want me to say yes, but I think the answer is no. 

KATZ: OK. Fine. Ben didn’t fall in love. He didn’t think of Dennis in that moment. But he did think of Dennis in the months and years that followed. Because right there, Ben decided:

MCMURRAY: This is pretty cool. I wanna get involved. 

KATZ: So clearly something happened there at those two trees … trees that appeared to have signs of blight but were still alive.

MCMURRAY:  Standing under those trees and knowing the whole story and knowing that they used to be that grand all over the country and now they're reduced to stumps, it's kind of awe-inspiring. I mean, I still go down there and I stand under ‘em, and I say, "This is a beautiful tree." And [the] reality is it probably will succumb to blight sometime in my lifetime, so it's a passing thing of beauty. 

KATZ: After witnessing those two big chestnut trees, Ben started taking his own chestnut seedlings more seriously.

KATZ: After visiting those two big trees on Old Mission Peninsula, Ben McMurray started to read scientific papers on chestnut genetics. And restoration efforts. And blight resistance. Every once in a while, he’d bump into Dennis.

MCMURRAY: "Oh, there's Dennis's name.” Reading about this, “Oh, there's Dennis's name." 

KATZ: Ben collected chestnuts from those two big trees and from any other big chestnut trees that people would send him nuts from. Eventually, he set up a mini orchard on his farm.

MCMURRAY:  Let's see. I think these are more. … This is the ones from Wisconsin. That one's from New York. Those ones over there are from Indiana.

KATZ: It’s a field with about 20 little plastic cages, each with a chestnut tree inside. Most of the trees are still tiny, around a foot tall with a few leaves. It’s not like Ben will live to see these trees get as big and majestic as the pair on Old Mission Peninsula, but his hospice work has prepared him for that.

MCMURRAY: I think, given my job, I'm pretty well– I'm aware that we are all mortal, and it's a very short time that we're here on Earth. And I think about long-term things and what I want to pass on to my kids or what I want different for people that come after me. So that's why I like planting trees. The trees will hopefully be around after I'm dead.

KATZ: Ben got the idea for his orchard from an organization that’s been doing it for a long time. It’s called The American Chestnut Foundation. The group formed in the 80s. It wanted to bring the chestnut back to its native range — so it could survive and reproduce on its own again. And to do that, they needed regular people: non-scientists.

JARED WESTBROOK:  People will tell us, like, "Oh, there's a tree over here in this, you know, in this township." They have local knowledge, like they know that there's a particular flowering tree.

KATZ: This is Jared Westbrook. He’s the director of science for The American Chestnut Foundation.

WESTBROOK:  There's a few American chestnuts they’re very rare, but there are some trees that have survived the blight.

KATZ: Jared says he only knows of about a dozen blight survivors in the chestnut’s native range. Many of them are hiding on private property, or deep in the woods or in plain sight.

And finding one surviving, flowering tree on its own is great. But it alone can’t produce viable chestnuts that will grow into more trees. You need two trees to pollinate for that. So an army of volunteers spread across the country trades pollen and helps create viable nuts, which is pretty helpful for improving the odds.

WESTBROOK:  Just find these trees and bring them into a breeding program.

KATZ: They breed trees that have managed to survive … some crossed with Asian chestnuts to introduce blight resistance.

WESTBROOK:  We wanna make the best trees breed with the best trees so then we can continue to improve the population as a whole. 

KATZ: Until they get a new generation with a naturally higher resistance. And then they just keep going, improving on resistance generation after generation. The American Chestnut Foundation has been doing this for more than 40 years now. They have several orchards full of trees. And there are state chapters full of volunteers with their own orchards.

WESTBROOK: We're not going for perfection. There is no, like, all the trees are gonna be uniformly blight resistant. But we will get to a pop- we'll get to a population where, like, 10, 20% of them will be able to survive for a long time. … It's like, why climb Mount Everest? Because it's there. Because it's there, 'cause we can try it. And so there’s kind of like a I guess, a redemption quality to the whole story. I don’t know. I mean it just kind of symbolizes a sense of hope. Like, you can right the catastrophe of the past.

KATZ Jared’s Mount Everest is to bring the chestnut back to its native range and keep expanding beyond that. And that begins by helping the trees live long enough to grow up into the forest canopy, flower and reproduce on their own. He’s confident this will start to happen within the next decade or two.

Ben is happy to be even a small piece of this work: find American chestnuts and preserve as much of their genetics as possible. In the greenhouse he built, he’s got even more seedlings growing. The floor and shelves are crammed with wooden boxes and pots full of teeny tiny chestnut trees waiting to be planted into the ground with the others.

MCMURRAY:  The ones over here, some of them will be for, some of them will be for the orchard. 

KATZ: Many of these trees, though, Ben sets aside to give to his neighbors, or to people he meets at local chestnut events. People who will plant these trees. So, ideally, one day they’ll be old enough to reproduce. And he also gives presentations sometimes where he tells the story of the American chestnut.

MCMURRAY:  And once you hear the story, it's pretty easy to kinda fall in love with it. I know I said I don't like using that word for trees, but–

KATZ: It works sometimes.

MCMURRAY: Yeah.

KATZ: Last spring, Ben was looking through a registry of big trees in Michigan. And he realized there was another huge American chestnut only half an hour from his house. It’s on the property of a woman named Janet Reisig-Cieslak.

JANET REISIG-CIESLAK: You know, my dad's had this property– he's passed now, and he loved it. My maiden name was Reisig, and we called it the Reisig National Forest here, so– 

KATZ: We walk down a trail into the woods toward the tree.

KATZ:  I think I see it. 

MCMURRAY: You think? 

KATZ: Wow, that does stand out. That's it, right? 

MCMURRAY: Yeah. 

REISIG-CIESLAK: She's not a beauty, but she's impressive. 

KATZ: Ben guesses this chestnut tree is around 200 years old.

KATZ:  It is so much bigger than all the trees around it. It's kind of surprising. 

REISIG-CIESLAK: Mm-hmm. 

KATZ: Can we go up close to it? 

MCMURRAY: Yeah, you–

REISIG-CIESLAK: Of course. My dad loves this property. I mean, he's been gone eight years now. He always thought this tree was so cool. We have pictures of him in front of it, you know.  … You know, my dad loved to come over here and bring– What did he bring? Sausage and sardines and crackers, you know, and drink a beer. Sit on a stump somewhere, you know.

KATZ: Underneath the chestnut tree are hundreds of spiky, lime green burs. Ben picks up one that’s starting to dry and split open. And then his eyes narrow, and he gets this kinda crazy, bewildered look.

 MCMURRAY: Um– 

REISIG-CIESLAK: Are these split open because they were just– 

MCMURRAY: Janet? 

REISIG-CIESLAK: Yeah? What's that? 

MCMURRAY: That looks like a viable nut to me.  

REISIG-CIESLAK: Well, that's crazy. It does. I've never seen one that big. They’re usually like this. Those are fat. 

MCMURRAY: Yeah. 

KATZ: As far as Janet knows, this is the only chestnut tree around. But there have to be two of them to pollinate — to get full, round chestnuts instead of flat ones.

MCMURRAY:  Let's see if we can find some other ones.

REISIG-CIESLAK: Yeah. 

KATZ: Ben cracks open another bur and lets out this sigh, like he still can’t believe it.

MCMURRAY: Ugh. I mean– ugh! 

REISIG-CIESLAK: Is that another fat one? Yeah. 

KATZ:  What are you thinking, Ben? 

MCMURRAY: This is so cool. 

REISIG-CIESLAK: Jump up and down. 

MCMURRAY: I mean, now I wanna know where another tree is, though. 

REISIG-CIESLAK: That’s crazy.

MCMURRAY: What I'm thinking is I'm just gonna sit here for the next two hours and find all of the nuts that I can.

KATZ: It’s hundreds of more potential chestnut seedlings from a tree that has survived for a long, long time. Ben has this huge smile.

KATZ: You look so happy.

MCMURRAY: I’m just kind of baffled.

KATZ: So this is a viable chestnut? 

MCMURRAY: That has all indications that it's a viable chestnut, which is a mystery to me because as far as I know, this is a lone tree, per Janet. 

REISIG-CIESLAK: Yes!

MCMURRAY: So unless there’s another smaller, inconspicuous tree [on] the property, which there could be, and we just don’t know about it. But if her dad was out here on the trails every day running around–

REISIG-CIESLAK: My dad is smiling in heaven. 

KATZ: Say that again.

REISIG-CIESLAK: My dad is smiling in heaven. My husband believes that you were somehow sent to us by my father.

MCMURRAY: I think people are entitled to believe whatever they would like. 

REISIG-CIESLAK: Yes, yes.

KATZ: Janet goes to her car to find a box for all these chestnuts. Ben keeps prying open burs, shaking his head a little every time. He still hasn’t found where the other tree might be. But he’ll keep looking.

When blight infects an American chestnut tree, it fans out across the inner, living layers and strangles the tree, killing it within just a few years. But it can’t infect the roots of the tree: beneficial soil microbes protect what’s underground.

MCMURRAY: So while the trunk and the canopy are dead, the roots are very much alive. So they will try to send up new shoots.

KATZ: There are old chestnut stumps all over the country that still send up skinny suckers. It’s been seven years since Ben just so happened to meet Dennis. And, recently, Ben decided to visit Dennis’s widow. So he just showed up and knocked on her door one day. She invited him in.

MCMURRAY:  I just told her that I had gone down the chestnut rabbit hole, which she laughed at and understood. And I just thought that she would like to know that her husband was impetus, in a small way, of getting that ball rolling. Not that I feel like I am at all making as big of an impact as he. That's not even, not in the same ballpark at all. But [I] just thought it was a fun way to start a new fire, per se.  It's a small part of– a small part of how I got involved with chestnuts, and I wanted to acknowledge that. 

KATZ:  There's something, and I can't quite put my finger on it yet, in this story about what it means to just be alive in the world, like the trees and Dennis.  Like his, his disease that he succumbed to and the disease that the trees are succumbing to, but he, like, passed on something to you, whether you realized it at the time or not. How do you feel about that? 

MCMURRAY: I think it’s a fitting parallel. I mean, isn't that kinda how death works if you, from a people or a plant perspective, you leave something for what's left behind? Whether the tree dies and falls in the woods, it's feeding fungus and insects in the ecosystem. We all have people that we've lost in our past, and they leave us memories and knowledge and skills. So I think that’s just the– that’s how it is.

KATZ: Ben has his own nickname he likes to call the American chestnut – not the bread tree, or the perfect tree, or the redwood of the east – but the giving tree. The tree that, even as a stump, sends up new life.