I made my favorite mistake (maybe a series of them) deep in a swath of heavily timbered mountains while trying to locate a parcel of land for sale. I was following a strange map given to me by a realtor. The map was more a list of cryptic instructions: 'Stay left where the road forks near a huge boulder… take the well-travelled road… Look for two dead-standing trees standing side-by-side…'
Somewhere along the way, I climbed the wrong hill
or turned at the wrong “big tree” in the most beautiful deep of the forest,
where one knows, even when lost, that something good might come of it. And
then, at once, a primitive road brought me into an expansive patch of
huckleberries. Not the parcel I was looking for, but better. Orange butterflies
and smaller no-name insects flitted through shafts of light extending down to the
understory through the tall pine and fir trees.
I stopped and waded through waist-high berry
bushes—all of them loaded with ripe berries. Though not prepared to harvest
berries, I did have a plastic bag in the truck. After fetching my bag, I picked
my way into the patch.
—Mitchell Hegman
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