FRUIT OF THE LAND

We live near Homer, Alaska, a place noted for its stunning natural beauty of ocean, glaciers, and mountains. Our home, however, is not really part of this scenic milieu. The cabin lies out in the swampy flats along the middle reaches of the Anchor River. It’s an unlovely place when judged by the accepted standards of landscape aesthetics. All around our home are enormous rotting stumps, ghost trees of what must once have been magnificent spruce timber back around the time I was starting grade school in the early 1980s.

In addition to the swamps, the brush and deadfall around here is so dense you nearly have to carry a chainsaw with you and cut a trail as you go. But it is a generous country for the forager, and one of its finest gifts is blueberries.

I hated picking blueberries when I was a kid, an opinion I held fast to until I left home at eighteen and discovered that the only way I was going to eat blueberries was to get my ass into the woods and pick them. Now, twenty-five years later, it’s something I long for every year, something closer to meditation as I move across the muskeg flats bent at the waist. 

I habitually carry a machete and a pistol when I’m in the woods out here. The machete is because as useful as the hyperbole of a chainsaw would be I can’t fathom carrying one into the quiet of the forest. The pistol is for bears, which are known to prowl the area looking for their fair share of the berry crop. The combination can feel a tad silly at times, like walking around dressed as some dopey action hero. But the machete is in constant use, and as for the pistol, well, I know a guy who literally had his face bitten off by an angry brown bear.

My bucket fills and there is the mouth-watering prospect of a bowl of fresh blueberries slathered with whipped cream, my very favorite way to eat them. Alaska’s Native peoples favored versions of this dish, only made with whipped up animal fat instead of the bovine milkfat so ubiquitous today.

When your bucket is full it’s time to quit. You straighten up, stretch your back and dust the muskeg crumbles from the soaking knees of your pants. You look across the flats, unpicked and waiting, more than you can ever get to in a season. Sandhill cranes circle in the distant sky, loitering in the air while they flock up for the impending autumn departure. America’s democracy is apparently now being run by Vladimir Putin instead of the electorate, and Mitch McConnell can commit outright treason without Fox News calling his ass out on it. The world continues its slide toward entropy, but at least the woods are full of fruit.