Just Berried

One of the best parts about visiting northern Michigan in July or August is the abundance of wild blueberries. Most dry, wooded, sandy areas will be covered with the ankle- to shin-high shrubs, and those that get sufficient sun and water will be heavy with berries. Of course, depending on the year, those big finds may be few and far between.

This year, for instance, has been very dry in the upper peninsula, and many blueberry bushes were barren; others had a few very small berries. The first night Kristine and I tried to pick some, last Thursday, it took us an hour to harvest about a cup. Of course, the next morning, some riverside bushes gave me nearly twice that in 15 minutes. On Saturday, we took a hike along Lake Superior in Luce County and hit what, at least this season, passed for the Mother Lode. Bushes in a couple of clearings at the edge of the dunes were laden with ripe, oversized berries. Your average wild blueberry is a bit smaller in diameter than a pencil eraser, and many of the ones we found in those clearings were cranberry size. We emptied our water bottles and filled them with berries, two litres in less than an hour. This Monday, Kristine made a blueberry pie; Tuesday she whipped up a couple dozen muffins. We had blueberry pancackes for dinner last night, with enough left over for couple days' breakfasts. As if this weren't enough, our backyard raspberry vines are hitting peak production. At least through early August, it'll be raspberries for breakfast, raspberry smoothies at night, raspberry muffins, rasberry sauce on ice cream, baskets of raspberries for friends and co-workers. My tounge should stay red for the better parts of two weeks.

When I was a kid, picking blueberries was a loathsome chore. About every other week in July and August, my father would pack the family off to a commercial blueberry farm to fill bucket after bucket with fruit, which my mother would freeze for a winter of baking. Under the influence of fertilizer, pesticide, and mechanical irrigation, the bushes grew taller than me, and the berries reached the size of dwarf plums. We would pick to the accompaniment of CO2 cannon blasts intended to scare away birds, my buckets always filling about as half as fast as anyone elses. Much as I liked to eat blueberries, I would gladly have paid a bit more for our winter stock and avoided the muck of the fields and the sun, to say nothing of the admonitions to pick faster.

I don't mind picking wild blueberries at all. The harvest is often small, the work is actually harder (you seldom had to bend over to pick farmed berries), there is always the possibility of a bear disputing your claim to a patch, but these complications are leavened by the setting, and the pleasure in taking something wild, the free and tangible spillage of the sweetness intuited in a place.

Of course, if that holds no attraction, and you'd just as soon avoid bears and backache, you always have this option.