Gathering Berries

Yesterday, someplace between my monthly business expense reports and purplish thunderstorms, I managed a drive up into huckleberry country for a few hours of gathering berries.  Three hours of picking huckleberries wipes clean any ten hours of remorse over my last misspent deed, five hours of vexing thoughts about the meaning of life, and all zillion hours of work I should be doing.

Gathering berries is the most primal and satisfying of all things that I do in this life.  I think of nothing else for the whole time I am in the mountains at a huckleberry place.

Huckleberry places are, without exception, beautiful places.  Somehow, genetically, the berries have been engineered to grow only where the view is stunning, the wind-struck trees laugh instead of creak, and green leaves flow around your knees and across the forest floors like creek water.

I have posted a photo of a “loaded” huckleberry plant and a photo of red baneberries.  Though pretty, baneberries are highly toxic.

 

--Mitchell Hegman