The valley recently lost a really good apple – Rod McIver.

We had been warned, myself directly when I met him, and then en masse with many of his friends and admirers at the annual meeting of Citizens for a Better Flathead this spring, where one of the organizers, in introducing the board members, said, “Who here knows ‘Johnny Appleseed’?”

The crowd at Flathead Valley Community College murmured, reporting on McIver’s condition and saying that hospice had been called.

McIver had been equally open about his health when I met him on a cool afternoon in October 2022. As a relatively new journalist looking for ideas for a column in the Flathead, I contacted him at the urging of my distant cousin Katrina Mendrey, who had worked with McIver on heirloom apple varieties while grafting trees across the state of Montana for the Montana Heritage Orchard Project.

Her eyes lit up when she mentioned McIver. I would be meeting not just an Apple expert, but a local luminary.

I already had an inkling from his website, A Montana Home Orchard Project, where he warned that no one should assume he had any technical knowledge: “Don’t let this blog fool you, it was created by my daughter.”

Wearing a brown stable coat and a bucket hat, he met me in the driveway of the house he bought in Rose Crossing in 1998, mostly because he was “too broke to buy anything in Missoula,” which had been his base for smokejumping for more than 20 years.

In his South Carolinian accent, he admitted he was a little slow to get going in the mornings, but was looking forward to a productive day after falling behind due to the “radiation.”

He looked up at the sky to see if the weather was good for housework. “My goal is to get this place in order before I burden my children with it,” he said. “Sometimes I think it keeps me alive, sometimes it kills me.”

McIver showed me his 3.5-acre “redneck garden of Eden,” which included a “lazy hideout,” a grain elevator and Subarus in various stages of decay. Near the house, he pointed to his first trees and said, “I planted trees by the light of a truck. I couldn’t wait to get started.”

His passion grew as the trees did. At the back of the property, the trees were lined up in rows. “This is where I started to get serious,” he said, pointing to the dozen rows of 50 trees each. We looked at Chestnut and Centennial apple trees, then Enigma, Liberty and Williams Pride apple trees.

Over time, over 200 different types of fruit grew on the property, including apples, crab apples, crab apple varieties and pears.

McIver stomped through the orchard, shaking down trees to find the last fruits of the season and quickly pulling out a pocket knife to cut samples.

He mentioned that there are nursery digging days in the spring, around April. Regarding ideal planting weather, he said, “If you are not unhappy when you plant your trees, your trees will be unhappy.”

I planned to schedule my story for a U-Dig day. But spring passed, and now McIver.

During our last snack break in the orchard, I asked him to name his favorite fruit.

He chewed and then grinned: “This in my hand.”

Margaret E. Davis, executive director of the Northwest Montana History Museum, can be reached at [email protected].