Noberry Home

It was early September, time for Mary Ann and me to go on our annual huckleberry hunt. This year I hadn't had a chance to check out the crop in advance, so we didn't know what to expect. The last two years, boy howdy, the bushes were nuts. Huckleberries pushed at the margins of the forest like they were behind the velvet rope at the nightclub, saying Pick me! Pick me! And, like roadies with all the power, we were able to select just the prettiest ones most likely to put out.

"But you never know," we said this time, perfunctorily modest. The fates frown on audacity.

You never do know. Still, we approached our berry grounds with all the anticipatory glee of a postal worker taking his paycheck to Reno. And we pulled up to our accustomed turnout and charged into the woods with empty buckets and full hearts.

A half hour later, the hearts were running a pint low but nothing else had changed.

"Huh," we articulated.

"Do you suppose it's been picked over?" Mary Ann wanted to know.

With a Huckleberry Hound.

No, I didn't. They don't all ripen at once, and ordinarily you can see little berries all green with ambition right next to their voluptuous sisters. What we had here was that rare non-existent variety. We'd brought along our friend Margaret and a huckleberry hound for good luck, without vetting either one properly for auspiciousness. But berrying is a bright and hopeful pursuit and we gave it all we had. An hour in, I had thirteen berries to my credit. They huddled along the bottom of my bucket like the skinny, morose kids about to be picked last for dodgeball. There were few enough that I got to know them by name, and have favorites.

Two hours in, I had begun to scan the smaller alders in case our berries had switched teams since last season. Whereas the alders failed to turn up any huckleberries, it must be noted that they didn't produce much fewer than the huckleberry bushes did.

Well, you can keep this sort of thing up for hours at a time, especially if you are content to sift quietly through the dappled light of a fir forest to no particular end. There is a restorative quality to the early-autumn slant of sun in the woods, and although this year it has a pinkish cast from not-so-distant fires, it still feels like a benediction. And one of the beauties of our local berries is that you don't have to bend over for them. In fact, I'd say just about all the berries that weren't there this year were at waist-height, probably.

After 7.5 berrypickerhours and a consolidation, we had finally covered the bottom of one bucket, assuming it was kept level. We could achieve two pies if we used jar lids for tins. And added apples.

But that's two more huckleberry pucks than we've made all year. We're chalking it up as a win.

Not A Berry Good Year

Last year.

Mary Ann and I were eager to get up to the mountain for our annual huckleberry harvest. Piecrusts get lonely. We were fully two weeks early according to historical records, but we had a premonition. Things haven't been right. Winter started on cue last November and then it petered out. The sun swaggered in with its arms folded over its chest and shoved winter aside, glowering. Then the sun had to repeat a grade, and came back even bigger and meaner. Things started to flower and set fruit in February out of sheer submissiveness, while later the birds, sticking to their old calendar, came back from their tropical vacations and wondered where the food had gone.

Last summer we had the most stupendous huckleberry season ever. When we thumbed berries into our buckets it sounded like the drum corps in a marching band. This year it sounded like the triangle player in a mouse orchestra: ting!

...ting!

There was a berry here, and a berry there. Many of them were shriveled and disheartened. At best, they aspired to being maybe a pie in a mayonnaise jar lid. Three hours in, we could still see the bottom of our buckets. We'd have done almost as well looking for mangoes.

It's not a good sign when you reach for your phone in the middle of your favorite huckleberry patch just to Google recipes for salal berries. There were salal berries about, but I'd never heard of anyone eating them. The internet solemnly reported that salal berries were indeed edible, and that the native Salish tribes edded them. I briefly visualized a diet for the new century featuring salal berries pounded into animal fat, tied up with entrails, and seasoned in a hide pouch. A lot like a Larabar, I figure. The internet also volunteered that the berries were useful as an appetite suppressant.

Turd pie in phlegm sauce is also, I would say, an appetite suppressant.

Our huckleberry patch is in a little hidden hollow below the main highway on the mountain. Despite the inevitable shard of plastic or a beer can flashing in the sun, it's still a beautiful miniature. A small stream runs nearby, burbling companionably. The light is dappled and green as it sifts through the trees. Individual bushes wobble as a chipmunk races us to the last berries. A wren hops along the ground, poking for snacks in the log rot. There's not much that moves slower than a huckleberry picker in a bad year, and the wren walks right up to us, unconcerned. There are plenty of bugs in the disintegrating woods, and she'll be here through the winter. People are dangerous, as a group, but apparently she doesn't stereotype.

Above us, road equipment barks and bellows, and trucks blat by with their jake brakes on. Even higher, the mountain hunkers behind a smoke shroud from one of this year's six billion forest fires. It's wearing dusty shreds of its remaining glaciers like an old woman clutching rags to her chest for dignity.

Down in our green bowl, Mary Ann and I are little figurines in a shoebox diorama. Huckleberry Pickers Of The Pacific Northwest: "The ancients gathered foodstuffs according to the seasons."

We're nearly motionless, crouched on a beautiful stage, with a smoke curtain behind us, and a wounded sky behind that. We're a future museum exhibit. A tableau of what we'll lose next.

The Bonanza

So this is how it works. At the end of summer, you go up to the mountain to get your huckleberries. You pray for one pieful and hope your humility will be rewarded with enough for two or three. The berries are tiny and sparse, sapphire-rare, and you drift languidly through the bushes like a T'ai Chi dude, as attentive to a blue speck as any miner looking for a flash in the pan. An hour later you can still see the bottom of the bucket. If you drop a berry, you get down on your hands and knees to track it down, trying to keep your tears out of the bucket.

Some years they seem plentiful and you scavenge a gallon over the course of six or eighteen hours. Some years your huckleberries are (botanically speaking) in the Theoretical family. No one has a clue why fortunes change from year to year, but people speculate. There was a late snowstorm. El Nino was in a snit. The Berry Goddess was having her nails done or seducing a televangelist when the fruit was supposed to set. No one knows.

And then there was this year. Mary Ann (purveyor of the World's Finest Salamander Hardware) and I pilgrimated to our usual spot and found ourselves hip deep in a sea of blue. I thumbed berries into my bucket; it sounded like a drum solo. After a while I quit picking the ones I'd have to bend over for. Later I narrowed it down to the ones in the strike zone. Then I passed up the bushes on uneven terrain and sought out the ones with a nice flat spot in front of them. Then I quit picking the large berries and concentrated on the huge ones.

By noon I was patronizing only the bushes that waved their little limbs in the air and said yowza, yowza, yowza. A short time later I was ignoring those in favor of the shrubs that offered free checking and a toaster. Towards mid-afternoon I limited myself to the berries that did a swan dive into my bucket when I passed by. An hour later I began ejecting them if they didn't execute either a tuck or a half-twist on the way in. I held up an explanatory card as I punted them out: 3.2, too much splash.

I began to hold out the largest ones so they would not make my pies lumpy. They'll be cut up for steaks and chops and put in the freezer. I ran out of containers for the rest and decanted them into the side pockets of my car.

I have room in my freezer for four pies, or one more pie than I have the serenity to make. I have enough berries for about twelve. There is no reason to keep picking, but I do. Somewhere in this glade I will find a bush with pie crusts on it.

Already rolled out.