Huckleberries

I drove into the stone and tree mountainscapes yesterday to pick huckleberries with Bill and Miles. I tell anyone uncertain, but curious, about picking huckleberries that the most important thing to know is that huckleberries refuse to grow in an ugly place. No exception to that yesterday. We climbed high into the Rockies and began picking in a wide and handsome bowl, sparsely populated with tall pines and awash with pink-to-red fireweed and yellow brush-stokes of stickseed. The berries, unfortunately, were mostly green and not plentiful on the whole, so we began to slowly unwind down from the high elevations on a road the clings to the mountainsides like a crack on the side of a porcelain cup, always looking for berries.

We stopped often to scout the vividly green steeps and swales. I thought about my wife as we either rolled past or stopped to pick berries at familiar landmarks. When first diagnosed with terminal cancer, a bit over four months back, both of us agreed that we would be in the mountains together for this. Our agreement did not, as they say, hold water. In spite of that, I still found myself looking for holes and flats where Uyen, who could barely walk on bad days, might be eased into a productive swath of huckleberries. For the last ten years of her life, nothing brought more joy and excitement to Uyen than picking huckleberries. My habit, after settling her into a “honey hole” was to orbit all around, picking, keeping watch for grizzly bears, all the while calling out my location.

Yesterday, each time we stopped to scour the understory and half-light breaks in forest cover, I allowed myself to quietly scramble deep into the timber and deadfall. I struggled to keep myself from looking back.

--Mitchell Hegman