An Excerpt from Rewilding: A Process of Healing Matt

Chappel

Winner of the Tyner Prize for Creative Nonfiction

Nominated by

C. Vince Samarco, Professor of English

Originally from Marlette, Michigan, and now living in Freeland, Michigan, Matt Chappel graduated from SVSU in May 2021 with a double major in English literature and creative writing, and with a minor in sociology. He was a member of the 20th class of Roberts Fellows and previously won the Tyner Prize for Fiction.

Much of Matt’s work focuses on rural people and rural environments. His aim in writing is to create enjoyable but understandable pieces that are rich in imagery and use everyday language. In the near future, Matt plans to return to SVSU to pursue a master’s in social work.

The following pieces were originally produced in Creative Writing: Creative Non-Fiction (ENGL 303) in Winter 2021. The goal of this independent project was to create themes and threads that created an overarching narrative.

I Still Remember

Grandpa had arrived with his wooden trailer and drove up the curb to pull it through the backyard right under the apple tree. The apples were ripe, and some of them overripe. And today we were going to shake them all down so Grandpa could haul them away to the Forty and use them as deer bait. He boosted me in and then followed after me. The tree had not grown one central leader, but had branched out and grown two central leaders, and the strong old tree branched out like a Y. He took one side, and I took the other. When the apples were down, we climbed out, raked and shoveled the apples that hadn’t made it in the wagon, me on the rake and him on the shovel. And there we were, two central leaders from the same rootstock, Grandpa sometimes shivering in his old blue coat.

In The Heart of the Thumb

I grew up in a small town in the middle of the thumb of Michigan. The town’s nickname is “The Heart of the Thumb.” It is a typical Midwestern agrarian township, surrounded on all sides by sprawlingfields I remember thinkingwhen Iwas young,maybe six orseven, that here wildlife couldn’t and didn’t exist. To my mind, between the flat-scape of farmland and the tight housing of our neighborhood, there was just no place in this heart for wild things to live. But, on the fringes of the heart, just beyond the city limits, my grandfather Lawrence Grant Chappel owned and cultivated about 20 acres of the last remaining wildness that our town knew. Here, along the slope of a hill he planted trees Scots pine and silver maple,Norway maple and blue spruce. Just beyond the hill he dug a pond and planted three willows and a catalpa. And in the far cornerof the property, wedged between the hardwoods and the corn fields, he planted a small apple orchard.

I didn’t get to spend time there often, but when I did, there was an almost imperceptible electricity of excitement in the air, because Grandpa let me help with projects that my dad thought were too dangerous for me.

My grandpa would sometimes take me into his workshop where he was making a coffee table, and he might have me join the project and ask me to hold a leg to the frame while he screwed in the bolts. Or he might have me clamp lumber in the vise, mark a spot for me, and hand me the crosscut saw. I remember atime I was in the woodshed with him in October. He stoked the potbelly stove, but I was still cold. He took off his blue coat and, setting it over my shoulders, helped me slip my armsin. But I wasn’t wearing the coat; the coat was wearing me. But Grandpa said, “You’ll grow into it.”

Dead Bodies, Living Souls

HediedwhenIwasnine Ihadnotcriedatallduringtheshowingorthefuneral.Iremember my parents holding each other at the showing, shuffling over to me in their black clothes, their cheeks tear-stained, and saying, “It’s okay to cry.” But I did not feel like crying, I felt curious, awkward… out of place. When I saw myself in the bathroom mirror, I sobbed inconsolably. I tried to look at myself in the mirror, but I couldn’t. I was hideous. Unsure of how to cope with what I innately knew was loss, I did the only thing that made sense to me, I went outside and climbed the apple tree. How strangely ironic it was then that within the hour Lawrence was put in the ground I fell out of that tree and broke my arm. My arm would heal, but something else in me was fractured.

The Corn on Your Side

There was another property my grandfather owned that he called “the Forty.” My dad liked to go visit the Forty every now and then, especially in the fall to look for deer. I couldn’t tell at the time, but he too was suffering from his dad’s death, and visiting the place where my grandpa had spent so many years was, for him, cathartic.

My dad would take me for drives out to the Forty during the late summer and early fall. And even then, at the age of ten, I could feel a growing distance between us. We used to play this game when we were driving out there. It would be all silent between us, with only the hum of the motor and the tires crunching gravel interrupting that silence. But maybe once on the hour drive, as we rode between fields, my dad would say to me, “Hey, how’s the corn on your side?” And then there would be a pause as I looked out the window at the waves of corn standing behind the veil of dust the van was kicking up.

“Good,” I would say quietly. And then I would lean forward to look out his driver side window. “How’s the corn on your side?” And then a long pause.

“Good,” he would say quietly, his eyes honed forward on the dusty road.

After high school I decided to take a gap year as a missionary. I had recently applied to a missionary training program in South Africa and been accepted. I just had to raise $10,000. At this crossroad of my life, my parents spoke with me little and seemed to want little to do with me. I left home and took on two jobs to raise the money. But the money raising was slow. I kept missing deadlinestogobecauseI wasn’traisingthemoneyintime. TheDecember after Imissedmysecond deadline, I got a phone call from my father. I was discouraged and I thought if I explained the situation, my dad might sympathize with me, encourage me. But when I broached the subject he screamed, “Matt, stop it! Stop being an idiot. It’s a lost cause, and you’re a lost cause too. You’re never going to make it.”

I had to work an evening shift that night, so I told my dad I had to go. I got in the car and started driving to work and hadn’t even driven a hundred yards when I burst into tears. I had lived so long without the emotional support of my dad that inside I had put up a wall, guarded and hardened against emotion. It had been years since I’d cried, but there the wall fell, and I found myself weeping all the way to work. Sobs welled up out of my throat, and the salt stung my eyes. I could see myself in the rearview mirror, my face flushed and swollen with hopelessness. And in that weeping, a phrase welled up out of me too, impulsive and involuntary, that I repeated again and again, “I just want my dad, I just want my dad, I just want my dad.” It was a wound I’d never recognized, and it had been long coming

Father Stone

9-19-2015, Nature reservation in Pretoria, South Africa

I plucked a stone out, soaking and cold. Rivulets of water trickled back into the river. The stone’s splintering red veins branched and converged and interlocked like barndoor spiderwebs. I threw it back, but something in my own undercurrents spurred me to fish it out again. But I denied the instinct, pushed myself up off the boulder, and walked back up the banks to sit in the sun.

My father hadn’t taught me how to be dangerous; how to reach into the wet, deep, and low of my fledgling manhood and pull out the beautiful, ugly stone and cherish it for what it was.

Some years later I found a flat, smooth stone. Someone had painted on it a silhouette of a fatherteachingasonhowtofish. Thefather’sarmswrappedaroundtheboy,bothworkingtogether, one keeping the rod steady, the other reeling in. And that stone I did keep. It is now a reminder that I still need to be fathered, still need to reel in the vital life on the end of my line.

The Maple Tree

“A wound is tender, sensitive, painful to the touch a source of shame. When a wound heals, it becomes a scar, and you can touch the scar and there is no pain.”

A wise South African man

Another remedy for my woundedness was exploring woods and identifying trees. Maples weremyfavoritetoidentify. Ilovedthedifferenceintheirleafveins,intheshapeandfeel ofdowny or leathery leaves, in the color, texture and design of the bark. Silver maples tend to be thin and long, green on top with a pale downy underside. Sugar maple leaves are rather stout, pale green and have upward curving bottom lobes, like smiles. But it was the Norway maples that I was really attracted to. The leaves are large, leathery, and if you break their stem, they secrete a bitter milky substance.Inthisregard,IwasmostlikeNorways:ifyouwerearoundwhenmystemswerebroken, you would see the bitterness seep out. I had been bitter about many things, but particularly about how my childhood had been emotionally stunted.

One May afternoon I stumbled upon a large maple tree, among the thickest and tallest in the area. It was magnificent, I thought, but it was dying. No buds were blooming. I stood there a moment, mourning its loss. As I walked around the tree, my leg caught on something cold and sharp a piece of barbed wire had torn my pantleg and scratched my calf. I kicked it away, frustrated that someone would be so careless to leave wire in the woods. But then I noticed something odd. The wire seemed to be coming right out of the tree. It was, and there were three strands of it. I went to the other side, and there were three strands of wire there too. In the near distance I saw a rotten fence post. The wire had probably torn into the flesh of the tender wood and the tree had grown around the fence, swallowed it up. The fence was taken down, but the wire would never be separated from the tree.

I will never be separated from my past. The tree kept its scar, but the wound had healed and the tree had outgrown it and lived a long and healthy life. It was then I suddenly knew, too, that I had to accept the wound for what it was, stop being bitter, and outgrow it.

Coming Back Home

I had cultivated that wild part of me, and gone through a process of healing, but the healing would never be complete until I made peace with Mom and Dad. I sat down with them many times over the course of a year and talked about how they had influenced my development, and how I had felt unloved. They talked to me about the poor way I treated them my perceived dislike of them, my stonewall communication style. It used to be that any time my father would talk to me, no matter what it was, my voice would take on a tone of exasperation. Sometimes I ignored them altogether. I recognized these and worked to break those habits. Also, for the longest time, I hadn’t been able to look my father in the eyes because I was ashamed of our relationship. I began deliberately making and holding eye contact. These little things eased some of the tension between us, and I slowly stopped feeling that shame.

Likeanyotherkindofhealing,itwasnotlinear. Thereweregooddaysandbad,regressions and progressions. What really helped me was the open spaces. Just after I moved away, my parents had sold their house and moved into my grandfather’s old place. The property that I loved so much was now at my disposal. I adopted the woodshed as my own where he had left behind many tools for me to begin with. I started by making axe handles and small Christmas decorations, and, with many hours of practice, I have progressed through a series of more complex projects.

Sometimes in the late afternoons I can hear my dad mowing the lawn. I lift my head and look out the window, see him hunched over the steering wheel, his wire-rimmed glasses halfway down his nose as he hones his eyes in on the blade-line. I hear the muffled hum of the mower as he turns the corner of the house. And I stand in the woodshed, hunched over the workbench fitting things together, setting the wood legs straight on a table, squaring away the frame. Grandpa is long gone, but I still wear his old blue coat when I go out to the woodshed, or stomp around the yard, or slip off to the far field to look over the apple trees.