I was nine years old when my family returned from being missionaries in the Amazon jungles of Ecuador, and after a year of camping out inside my grandmother's house in Akron, Ohio (I actually slept on the floor in a sleeping bag set up beside my grandmother's bed), we moved an hour-and-a-half away to a tiny farming/resort village called Loudonville.

Loudonville is popular statewide for its canoe liveries and campgrounds on both the Mohican and Blackfork rivers. It's also home to the Mohican State Forest and nearby Pleasant Hill Dam. Tons of campers fill the area each summer.

My summer jobs in high school included working at one of the liveries and at a custard ice cream stand in town. For two summers while attending Ohio State, I worked at both a water slide and Putt Putt golf course inside Wally Campgrounds (yes, just like in the Chevy Chase movie "Vacation," but its name precedes the classic comedy by at least two decades).

I spent all my free time during these summers cross-country cycling through the gorgeous rolling farm hills or woods that stretched for miles any direction you ventured outside Loudonville's city limits.

I preferred the back roads (and sometimes had to fight off unchained dogs with my attached bicycle pump), but would also ride country highways to destinations like Millersburg (known for its large Amish community), Mt. Vernon, Mansfield, Wooster, Butler and Mt. Gilead.

Whenever I rode up Route 60 (the road my family lived on) into Ashland, I'd pass a large fruit stand my mom always bought her cooking apples from every fall. The outdoor/indoor market was named for Johnny Appleseed, who was said to have spread the apple seeds and nurtured the young trees that led to the property's apple orchards.

Because Johnny Appleseed was known to have been all through the territory surrounding Loudonville, clearing trees and brush to spread seeds and plant orchards, I'd think about him now and then on my excursions—actually more often than I should admit!

I was fascinated by the guy's story. He was a true free spirit, roaming the earth barefoot in a tattered, patched coat with a Bible buttoned inside it, using his head to haul around the cast-iron stewpot he cooked in.

He loved children, animals and nature and befriended the Indians even as he helped settlers avoid them. Historical records even verify that in the War of 1812, he traveled 30 miles to summon American troops to Mansfield, Ohio, thus forestalling a raid by Native Americans who were allied with the British.

Johnny's real last name was Chapman and he was born in Leominster, Mass., in 1774. He left home at 23, heading westward into the wilderness with a simple dream to plant apple trees. All he brought with him was his stewpot, a hatchet, a flint and steel for making fire, a bag of cornmeal and a sack of apple seeds.

"He gave away his clothes to anyone who needed a coat or trousers or shoes," says the children's book I have on him, "The True Tale of Johnny Appleseed," written by Margaret Hodges. "Most of the time he wore no shoes. One man said that he saw Johnny breaking the ice in a creek with a bare foot.

"All along his path he planted apple seeds. If he was invited to spend the night in a cabin, he would not take a bed, but slept on the floor. He would not eat until he was sure that the children in the family were full. He loved honey but would never take it from a bee tree until he saw that the bees had enough honey to keep themselves alive during the winter. A strange man indeed!"

Johnny followed creeks and rivers westward using borrowed canoes, then crossed the wild Alleghenys on foot. When a record winter storm caught him unaware, he wrapped his feet with pieces of cloth torn from his coat and wove tree branches into makeshift snowshoes.

"As time went by, Johnny walked so long and so far that his feet grew almost as tough as an animal's paws," writes Hodges in her book. "In other ways, too, he came to be like an animal. He could curl up to sleep under a bush or in the hollow of a tree."

Of course, there were people who thought Johnny was nuts, walking about in no shoes, a ragged coat and stewpot hat, but the children always loved him and they were the ones to coin his famous name of Appleseed. He would read stories from the Bible to them and even would tear Bible prayer and devotional books apart, leaving sections in tree boughs during the summertime for children to find.

By the spring of 1845, Johnny had come as far west as Fort Wayne, Ind. and was staying with a family when news arrived that cattle had broken into one of his new orchards 15 miles away.

"The weather was cold and wet, but he set off at once and never stopped to rest on the long walk," writes Hodges. "'Cloudy. Snow showers,' an Indiana farmer wrote in his diary that day. The next day the weather report was, 'Snow showers all day.' When Johnny got back to his friends' house, they put him to bed with a high fever. During the March snows, Johnny Appleseed died, and his body returned to the earth that he had loved. By early April, winter was past. The weather report read, 'In the night thunder showers—then fair—first apple blossoms."