“Tree Eater” first appeared in Rooted: the Best New Arboreal Nonfiction

If Joyce Kilmer were alive he would say: “I think that I shall never see / a man who eats a lovely tree” as Jay Gwaltney eats an 11-ft-tall birch sapling. He ate branches, leaves and the 4.7-in.-diameter trunk over a period of 89 hours to win $10,000 as first prize in a WKQX-Chicago radio station contest called “What’s the Most Outrageous Thing You Would Do?” As he finished he said, about the taste, “as far as trees go, it’s not bad” (1982, 505).

The picture in my 1982 edition is black-and-white, so it’s difficult to tell the full truth of this moment. But I suspect that young Jay Gwaltney wears a powder blue tuxedo, white shirt, and matching blue bow tie—something his mother helped him pick out from the JCPenney catalog.

I want to believe Jay was a lot like me. I see his yellow rose corsage, the bouquet of roses on the table. He is seated in a metal chair with vinyl padding. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, maybe an oversize boy with obsessions and compulsions that set him apart from the other kids.

On the table sits a side plate with a saucer and spoon—maybe filled with some thin soup, a salty chicken or beef broth, something to wash down the wood. There is a coffee cup and a large, empty dinner plate. Jay’s blond hair shines in the camera flash. A banner hangs behind him on the wall, the only visible word, “Chicago.”

In his right hand he holds a sprig of birch sprouting seven or eight leaves. With his left hand he pulls at one of the leaf stems. He is ready. He does not look at the camera. He has made his decision. He stares down at his hands, eyeing the last remnant of his eleven-foot dinner sapling, perhaps wondering if it is worth the ten thousand dollars. It must have taken some time, some real commitment. He couldn’t have done it all at this table in the picture, not wearing that pretty powder blue suit the whole time.

…

I imagine Jay’s commitment, his own obsession. He’s in the garage of his parents’ home using Dad’s power tools to grind the sapling down to sawdust. He sees a new image of himself reflected in the eyes of others, a heroic image, and he doesn’t care about what they might whisper.

He’s shoveling handfuls of birch shavings into his mouth, washing them down with buttermilk. His mother bakes sawdust pies with graham-cracker crusts. She mixes sawdust into milk shakes. She makes salads from the leaves and drenches them in dressing. His father cheers him on from the sofa. They’ll do anything for their baby boy, anything to help him succeed, anything to get him out of the basement, and I’d bet Jay is dreaming of a Camaro or a catamaran, a ski trip to Aspen, a motorcycle, or a camper truck with a propane heater.

I doubt that he, like his mother, is dreaming of college or investments in the stock market. But it could be more than the ten thousand dollars. Maybe he knew Guinness was watching all along. Maybe he knew I was watching. I suspect Jay understood the immortality of the page, the legacy of living in a book so full of heroes and freaks. He could’ve been a lot like me, a misfit boy striving for identity in strange ways. Or maybe he just liked the taste of wood.

…

If I could find Jay Gwaltney today, I’d ask why he chose the birch tree. Was it the paper-like quality of the bark, the soft wood? Did his Norwegian grandfather tell him stories of the Old Country and how they used to drink birch tea? Did he consider soft pine or ruddy dogwood, hard oak or red maple with its fire leaves?

I’d ask him if he loved the Guinness Books too, if he’d seen the pictures of Shridhar Chillal and Michael Barban, maybe Benny and Billy McCrary. I’d ask how he made the step that I couldn’t—from voyeur to participant, from off-the-page to on-the-page. How did he turn chance into choice? I’d like to see the moment he heard about the contest on the radio, that DJ’s voice surfacing from the noise, and how it came to Jay as if it were a voice from God. I wonder what made him think that he could eat a tree, an eleven-foot tree, and that this would be enough for the rest of his life.

I think a Guinness World Record would be enough for me. I think I’d be proud of my accomplishments if I were Jay Gwaltney. But perhaps he never chose this path. Perhaps it was some emptiness inside he was trying to fill. Perhaps he graduated to eating forty-foot trees, redwoods, railroad ties, or untreated telephone poles. Perhaps eating wood pulp was all he knew, the only fulfillment he had.

Jay might have spent his prize money on a bungalow in the old part of town, where the cottonwoods towered overhead, and bought a wood-chipper right off the bat. When he worked in the yard, he might’ve put a pinch of sawdust between his cheek and gum.

He’d never fit into the neighborhood—no matter how hard he tried—standing out there in his Carhartt overalls and his safety goggles, feeding everything into that damn wood chipper. He’d frighten the children and old ladies who stopped to watch, because now Jay’s yard must be naked and brown, emptied of green and punctuated with stumps. He has worried the trees down to nothing. The neighbors point at annual rings, the shadow arcs of lost time, lost history.

He has planted a new grove of birch, and he says he’s trying to cut back, but they are still angry about neighborhood character and the loss of shade. They’re angry because their own children have begun to eat strange things too—twigs and paper, nuts and washers, entire boxes of Hot Tamales cinnamon candy, and several number-2 pencils. They’re angry because Jay has a way of getting under your skin. Shridhar Chillal too. Michael Barban, Benny, Billy, and the others. He just follows different rules, different rhythms than everyone else.

If Jay Gwaltney were my neighbor, I’d join him for a pinch of sawdust on his porch. I might ask him to autograph my Guinness Book. I might ask him about commitment and obsession. I’d let him hold my son on his lap, and we could just sit and talk about nothing at all. I might do anything I could to help him fit in with the normal neighbors.

Steven Church is the author of six books of creative nonfiction, most recently the collection of essays, I’m Just Getting to the Disturbing Part: On Work, Fear, and Fatherhood and the book-length essay, One With the Tiger. His essays have been anthologized widely and published recently in Brevity, Fourth Genre, and The Notre Dame Review. He’s a founding editor of the literary magazine, The Normal School, and teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State.