Good Good Good · 20 hours ago

A Retired Fbi agent’s Latest mystery: Lost Apples

When Dave Benscoter retired from the FBI, he didn't expect to find his next calling in the gnarled branches of a neighbor's forgotten orchard - but that afternoon of yard work quietly changed the course of his life. What followed was two decades of scouring old nature studies, county fair newspapers, and family recipes to rescue apple varieties on the edge of disappearing forever. The work carries a tenderness that goes beyond botany: when his team finally located the Kittageskee apple in southern Idaho, it fulfilled a lifelong longing for a farmer in Arkansas who had spent years searching - "an apple that he thought he'd never be able to taste." Benscoter and his partner E.J. Brandt have since recovered 30 once-lost varieties through their nonprofit, the Lost Apple Project, grafting branches from pre-1920 trees so that something fragile and irreplaceable might persist. There is something quietly instructive in the image of a former FBI agent learning, in retirement, that the most meaningful things worth tracking down are the ones no one else noticed were missing.