By Ray Bilderback
When I was 11 and 12 years old, I lived with my maternal grandparents on their little farm. On that farm, there was a respectable raspberry patch I liked to frequent and there were the usual gardening chores. You might think that was enough farming to satisfy a growing boy, but it was not.
Sometimes I got to visit with Cousin Marjorie; a year older than me and no doubt a lot wiser. On their farm, she was in charge of watering long rows of corn, beans and whatnot. Hoe in hand, we would help the water along the 100-foot rows and plug up gopher holes in the process. When that was done, we chopped buckets of clover and scattered the goodies in the chicken houses (they had about 3,500 hens).
Such chores took about three hours. Finally, we got to the part I liked best: picking strawberries. The berries we picked in those long-ago times were much smaller than the berries you buy in today’s supermarket. They didn’t have to be shipped anywhere so they didn’t have to be large and tough. Instead, they were small and juicy.
Lunch was often chicken with egg noodles and strawberry shortcake topped with whipped cream from their cows. After lunch, we had to wait a half hour before hiking down their long drive to the river for a cooling swim. Sometimes, I cleaned chicken houses when Uncle Johnny could not. He suffered from a mustard gas attack in the World War I. I never asked for pay; working with Cousin Marjorie was its own reward.
Part of those “growing up” years, I lived at my paternal grandfather’s ranch where Auntie Ann presided over the kitchen. I often roamed the fields and the oak-covered hills, scaring up covies of quail or tracking deer in the fashion, I imagined, of Daniel Boone. Sometimes I would forget the time and miss lunch.
One summer day began hot and brassy, and such wanderings were out of the question. I hung about in the gloomy depths of the ranch house reading Horathio Alger’s Pluck and Luck for the third or fourth time. Outside, the horses sought shelter under the apple trees and the chickens refused to come out the cover of the lombardies. We were in for a drenching.
About 1 p.m., rain clouds built across the valley towards us and shards of pure energy rent and slashed the advancing mass. Thunder rumbled through a hole in the sky. We pulled in our ears.
Out of all that racket, we got a fine rain. Afterward robins bobbed across the lawn looking for the sounds of lunch, and the chickens chased soggy grasshoppers in the pasture. In the far hills, rainbows faded in and out. Pretty soon I caught the sounds of my aunt singing in the kitchen. I grabbed a berry pail and headed for the wild blackberry patch in the upper pasture. Visions of crusty, sugary ripeness rattled about in my head. If I was quick enough, there would be blackberry cobbler for supper that night.
That was then. This is now, and I hunt different game. In eastern Washington, there are wild chokecherries and elderberries, and they have their uses, but the prime berry on picker’s minds is the delightful huckleberry. There are seven kinds of huckleberries in our state, and often two or three kinds in the same patch. Although abundant one year, a patch may be pretty disappointing the next. That’s why, to be successful, you need to know the location of several patches and those at a variety of elevations.
Huckleberries range from the very small “grouse berries” with bushes a few inches high to larger berries borne on waist-high bushes. Most huckleberries are a very deep, (almost black) blue. So, imagine my surprise when I came upon a large patch of wildly, red-when-ripe huckleberries on … creek. Surely, you didn’t expect me to give up the location? Wild berry hunters are a secretive lot, so if you get invited to go picking with someone, you know two things: they wish your company and they are willing to share their spots with you. You are friends and, as Polonius noted in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Your friends, their adoption tried, grapple them to you with hoops of steel.”
Grab a bucket and get out of the house. Finally, a word about attire: long, trousers, sturdy shoes and long sleeve shirts will help you avoid scratches and mosquitoes.
Happy hunting!
Ray Bilderback, creator of the Reuben Braddock novels, was born and raised in the Sierra foothills of California. He served in the U.S. Navy Seabees during the Korean War and taught for many years in the west. He makes his home in the mountains of eastern Washington with his archeologist wife, Madilane Perry. “In the 1930s and 1940s, where I lived, we still used horses and hand tools, canned and preserved what we grew or raised, lit our kerosene lanterns, stoked our woodstoves. In my writing, I draw from those times like water from a sweet well.”
