After a long day on the farm, before the sun sets and my joints stiffen, I’ll walk the orchard with a drink in hand, and mark the progress of the apple trees. There are 300 to visit, and to scrutinize each would take hours, but I never have to wander far. Always, there’s something unusual that captures my imagination and ends my tour. But what is “usual” in nature?

Let me preface by saying I make cider for a living, and yes, my farm is technically a “commercial orchard,” but it looks nothing like what folks in the Hudson Valley are used to seeing – rows and rows of conforming trees, something like a military parade. Here in the Catskills, the land is more challenging, and in my orchard, especially, the rocky terrain and poor soils combine with the apple’s infinite genetic variation to create a wide assortment of tree expressions (not one of which would be deemed acceptable to a modern farmer.)

I mention this so that you know I’m used to seeing the unusual, but during my orchard walk yesterday I saw something simply amazing. A fallen apple had landed in such a way that it skewered itself on a fresh root-sucker, remaining suspended like a golden dahlia at knee-height. At first, it wasn't more than a peculiarity to me, but then the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was witnessing a miracle.

A “root sucker” (for those who don’t speak orchard), is a twig-like shoot that emerges from the base of the tree, usually no thicker than a pencil. Over the years, it can grow into a competing tree trunk, but just two-months old as this shoot was, a root-sucker is soft, green and fragile. It can easily be mistaken for a tall blade of grass.

Why didn’t the falling fruit just brush the root-sucker aside enroute to the ground? How could a relatively heavy apple – solid, and with thick skin – lose a jousting match to something as vulnerable as the fresh tree shoot?

Then I examined the orb and noticed something peculiar on the side facing the down. Beside the point of contact, emerging from the very same hole, was a speck of frass indicating that the apple had previously been pierced by an insect.

“Frass” (again in orchard-speak), is a saw-dust-like residue spit-out by a worm as it tunnels inside a fruit or tree, comparable to mine tailings. This proved that the apple already had a hole for the root-sucker to penetrate, but the chances of the sucker finding this exact spot were remarkable.

Then I tried imaging the apple falling, and the math kept getting more and more unfathomable. How is the dahlia apple still suspended, I wondered? How is it not dragging the slender shoot to the ground with its disproportionate weight?

Testing my understanding of geometry, I can only imagine the center-axis of both the apple weight and the long shoot were in perfectly alignment. The slightest off-centering, and the heavy apple would have just snapped the tip of the root-sucker at impact, or it would have simply brushed the shoot aside like a bull in Pamplona. Count me in awe.

Now, normally, I’m enchanted by grander spectacles – shooting stars or fireflies dancing before a dark treeline – and I don’t care about the specifics of these phenomena (in fact, to dissect them might dull it for me), but in this case, the more I dove into the minutia, the more I realized I might not be able to grasp the answer. I was free to just be fascinated, and this made me realize wonderment can happen at any scale, it can happen in infinite ways, and it can be witnessed at any given moment. Epistemic humility, you might call it – to purely experience something directly without the need for explanation (and there might not be one!)

Granted, it’s hard to achieve this perspective every day, especially when I'm working, but there's always a surprise to discover on the farm. Then, suddenly, I’m reminded why people farm in the first place: to participate in the living, not make a living. What a gift it is to toggle away from agriculture and into the wild unknown. Nature never stops proving.