Published: July 23, 2008 12:32 pm            

Picking berries in the summer

Does anyone go berry picking anymore? I’m not talking about a casual drive out to the U-Pick-em farm where you spend 20 minutes filling up your baskets; weigh ‘em, pay ‘em and go home for berries and ice cream.

I’m talking about those old-fashioned all-day sojourns to distant field and wood lot where rugged lanes and barbed wire fences bar your path, the streams you have to cross have slippery, muddy banks, and where the blackberry briars are hidden behind chest-high scrub oak and unfettered thistle.

Those were the places we went berry picking every summer during The Dark Ages of My Youth. There were a dozen or more destinations over the years, and not one of them was easy to get to.

My dad was a forester in those days and regularly surveyed timberland on numerous farms around the state. Whenever he found a promising berry patch, he made note of it and asked the landowner for permission to come back and pick when the berries were ripe.

I don’t think anyone ever said no to Dad’s request, and when the relentless sun of mid-July baked the ground to swirling dust and the trees wilted in the heat, he would announce that it was time to pick blackberries or, in southern Missouri where I went to grade school, boysenberries.

It always happened on a Sunday. Right after the breakfast dishes were washed and put away, Mom would pack a picnic lunch while Dad squeezed fresh lemons for a jug of lemonade. Then we loaded our one-gallon berry pails into the car and headed for the country.

Usually we drove for miles on the main highway, turned onto a county road for several more miles, and ultimately finished the trip on a one-lane dirt road that ended at the first of several farm gates that had to be opened and dutifully closed behind us.

When the farm lane ended, we got out and walked, picnic lunch and buckets in tow. First, however, everybody got a dusting with sulfur to fend off wood ticks. Ticks were always a problem and ever since Dad got deathly ill from tick bites one year, he insisted on everyone getting a good shot of sulfur around the waist, ankles and armpits. We objected, of course, because in a matter of minutes we all stank like rotten eggs. Still, it was better than tick bites.

The berry patch was almost always lush and abundant. It was also remote and nearly impossible to get to, which is probably the reason the picking was so good. After all, almost everyone was willing to suffer a little hardship for something good like fresh blackberries, but my dad was a master at going the extra mile, sometimes literally, in the hard-to-get-to department. By the time we got there, the sun had baked the tops of our heads, and our faces and arms were scratched raw by underbrush. More than once we also ran afoul of a nest of angry yellow jackets.

There were four of us and each carried two pails. Within an hour the pails were full. Of course, my sister and I would have filled our pails faster if we hadn’t taken our wages in berries, eating one out of every five. Still, eight gallons of blackberries was a pretty good haul.

Most of the time we discovered that Dad had also scoped out a good place to eat lunch, usually on the shaded bank of a flowing creek. It was not only a good place to rest, eat sandwiches and drink lemonade, it was ideal for catching crawdads and collecting polished stones.

Almost always my sister and I overdid the stone collections and wound up reluctantly emptying our heavy, bulging pockets halfway back to the car. After all, it was tough enough to gingerly carry two overflowing pails of berries through the wilderness landscape without also being weighed down with about 15 pounds of rocks.

Back home, bitten, burned and exhausted, we dumped the berries into a large dishpan for washing. Mom then scooped up about a quart of them to have on ice cream after supper. The rest she and Dad cooked in a large pot to make jam. Late into the night the magic aroma of fresh blackberry jam filled the house. And throughout the winter, whenever we opened a fresh jar, we shared again briefly that sun-baked day in July.

I seldom think about berry picking any more. I buy my jam at the store and most of the berries I eat come already washed and packaged in plastic boxes. Still, every time the small patch of raspberries in my back yard ripens in July, I grab an empty container and go berry picking.

It’s not the same, of course, and that’s fine with me. I don’t thrive on hardship the way I did when I was younger, I heal more slowly from cuts and scratches than I used to, and I never could get used to the smell of rotten eggs.

Ward Degler is a Zionsville writer and artist. E-mail him at wdegler@att.net.

        

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