Blue Beneath The Pines

Noonday sun beats down on a sandy plain thinly covered with grass and ferns and scattered with scrubby jackpines and shrubs. On a cursory scan, only the occasional harebell breaks the impression of sereness and brittleness.



You sweat; you pant. You doubt your memories of the cool, misty dawn. Dried lichens, grasses, and twigs crunch under your feet as you seek what little shade these small, open-limbed trees give. Momentary relief comes on a pulse of wind, then disappears with it.

It's July, somewhere in Northern Michigan.

This locale is neither comfortable nor scenic. In appearance, it's not unique, either, since you might have encountered like terrain in countless places between Saginaw Bay and Lake Superior. But this spot where you stand sweltering today is distinct from many of its counterparts, because unlike in comparable areas you've visited recently, the shin-high blueberry bushes clumped around the bases of the pines are laden with sweet, juicy fruit.

Wild blueberries, or huckleberries, are something I discovered only about ten years ago, and then only with prompting from Kristine. When she was growing up, gathering huckleberries was a highlight of her family's annual week at a cottage in Northeast Michigan. One week when we had gone up to the Pigeon River country, she pointed them out to me on our hikes. We picked a few to put on our cereal every morning, and on our last night filled up a few tupperware bowls with them to take home. Pancakes, muffins, a pie followed.

Since then we've kept an eye out for them on our summer Michigan trips. Sometimes they're everywhere (they were on the Pigeon River trip ten years ago). Sometimes you don't see ten in a week. Last summer we made a big score in a clearing along Lake Superior when berries were scarce in every corner we explored in the nearby woods. You can find them growing in almost any dry, sandy area, though they seem most abundant in areas like the one described above.

This year we saw few blueberries on our hikes, and doubted we would pick enough to take home. There were quite a few around our campground in Grayling, though the number of people dumping dishwater, walking their dogs, and (at least in the case of our neighbors) getting up to take a midnight pee among them discouraged us from picking there. I don't know what that particular jack pine flat had going for it that every other one in Crawford County didn't--maybe just the fertilizer that people and their dogs have left there over the years.

At any rate, by last Sunday, the last day of our trip, we were berryless and had all but given up on picking any. Over breakfast at a diner that morning, we debated about whether to look for them one more time or simply head home. We were packed and ready; it would be nice to get home early and unwind a bit, as we were both pretty beat from our week of hiking, paddling, and swimming. But we decided we'd rather be in the woods than on the road, so we decided to investigate a couple of areas of public land just outside Grayling before surrendering to the highway and the pull of the workaday world.

At the first one, we drove a couple hundred yards into the pines on a two-track and stopped. We could see blueberry bushes, and when we got out for a closer look, we saw clusters of berries on almost every one. In spot chosen at random and probably ignored completely outside of hunting seasons, we'd hit a fructose jackpot.



In about an hour and a half we filled a four-quart tub. They're little things, usually about the size of a dried pea, though that day we found many that were larger than average, say about the size of a cooked one. Their shrubs grew almost everywhere but the berries were thickest directly underneath the pines, which meant regularly scraping our heads or arms on branches or spiky needles. Some forms of nuisance I can gladly accept.

I grew up picking blueberries on a farm where they were cultivated, fertilized, and generally easier to pick. Those domesticated blueberries grew quite large, perhaps to the size of a cranberry, or several cranberries stuck together. They grew on tall bushes which didn't require me to bend down to pick. Even so, I much prefer picking the wild ones. Berries in the woods have no visible residue of chemicals; while you pick them, no percussion cannon fires every ten minutes to scare away birds. You do hear warblers and wild turkeys calling (we saw a flock of the latter strutting down the two-track when we returned to the car). In most years, you also get that thrill of discovery, of finding something the casual passerby never sees. But possibly my affection for these puny treats comes mainly from the fact that they grow in places that I love. Where, and how, we procure our foods can add a sweetness to that they have from taste alone.