It started this June, with the strawberries, but really it started at the end of last summer. We were hiking in a place we’d been a half dozen times before, and on the way back to the trailhead, we saw two people crouched in the underbrush, clearly picking fruits. We stopped too in imitation, a little ways away from them. I remember looking at the low, delicate groundcover that was so familiar to me and seeing tiny purple berries tucked under the small leaves. I remember the dawning sense that something amazing had been right under my feet all this time. Joey and I tried a few. I’ve always been more cautious than he is about eating wild foods. Let’s just try a couple, I said, and then let’s do research when we get home.
They were sweet and tangy. Joey and I were both convinced the berries were edible and delicious. But I tried a lot of permutations of search terms (“colorado wild blueberry,” “blue berry rocky mountains,” “berries colorado rocky mountains,” “purple berries mountain west,” “alpine blueberries”) and nothing really satisfied me. So what were they? Blueberries, billberries, huckleberries? None of the pictures I surfaced with my searches were a perfect match.
I picked up a foraging book in April or May to try to learn a little more (Foraging the Mountain West, by Kris Reed and Thomas J. Elpel). I read that although they are not all palatable, almost no blue or purple berries in the mountain West are actually poisonous. And there are dozens of species of blueberries and huckleberries in North America. The authors encouraged the forager to decide what to call a berry in part based on taste: does this little purpley-blue berry taste like a blueberry to me, or like a huckleberry? And if it does taste like a huckleberry, why not call it that?
It helped me, being reminded that there are many ways of relating to the natural world. I may not have been raised here or handed a legacy of plant knowledge here. Still, there is always the possibility of me developing my own familiarity with this land. It is not so impossible for me to find kinship in the plants through my own experience. This book, or at least this passage, offered a redirection for me. I went looking for book knowledge and found instead a gentle recrimination that said, Taste for yourself, notice for yourself, do what human people have always done and search for some helpful patterns in the world around you. And you will find fruit.
Anyway, that’s all to say that by the beginning of this summer, I was primed for berries. For the first time ever, the strawberry plants in my garden produced more than one lonely specimen. The fruits were so red, a sunsoaked neon red, with a holy, floral sweetness. Like the idea of a strawberry, only better.
Then came the alpine strawberries. Another cascade of moments of recognition. I’d always seen the red roots on the side of trails, thought for years that they looked like strawberry runners. It turns out they look just like strawberry runners. And on a sunny afternoon in late June, I noticed the little white blossoms and a few tiny fruits. Alpine strawberries are about the size of my pinky nail and so flavorful they are almost pungent. When I finally noticed them on the trailside, I swooped down on the plant and whooped with glee. I was so excited to present Joey with a little berry like a prize.
I started seeing them every time we went hiking, so that each Saturday the world seemed more and more like a feast. In August, Jason and Chaz drove out from Atlanta and we all went backpacking together. The second night, I saw strawberry runners all over our campsite and combed the ground for berries. I found a few green ones, but only one ripe red fruit. On the hike down to our car, I couldn’t help but rake the side of the trail with my eyes, eager for more. Joey and I each spotted a couple and handed them around to the boys. Halfway to the trailhead and a thousand feet of elevation lower, we stopped in a sun-dappled clearing beneath the pines for a drink of water. And there were strawberries everywhere. All four of us stooped to gather fruits and came up with big handfuls. They were warm from the sunshine. A creek gurgled in the distance. I said thank you to the world and the berries and felt so glad to be in a beautiful place with friends.
In late August, we were both so excited to hike from Hesse Trailhead where we had seen the huckleberries last year. Up to the lake, Joey and I searched for berries, plotting where we might stop later, and down from the lake we paused again and again to squat amongst the huckleberry plants and pluck the darkest, juiciest berries we could find. We crept off the trail downhill to get a better look at the underside of the leaves where the berries hung. I tried to pick only the really ripe ones, and left so many more than I took. I thought of Robin Wall Kimmerer all the while, who taught me that the Earth makes a gift of the berries. We both deposited our harvests into the old plastic ice cream tub I’d brought along. The next morning, I shook the huckleberries out into pancakes and we dined on the most gleeful Sunday breakfast I’ve ever had.
Meanwhile, the raspberry bushes in my garden plot were going wild. I think they benefitted from a cool, rainy spring in the Front Range. The canes positively dripped with fruit. Every time I brought a basket home, I was so proud. Joey and I ate them with yogurt, with cake, standing over the sink with red-stained fingers.
All summer this sweetness hung around my shoulders like a wreath, like a shroud. So much fruit, so much perfume. Heavy handfuls of harvest sweetness in the garden, sweetness in the mountain fruits like so many dark jewels. In the air, on my tongue.
How could it be that the world had held such treasures all along? I thought I knew, really, how good it was, and it turned out I didn’t know the half of it.
Even in Pisgah I was eager for berries. I went for a walk with George and Henry on the Art Loeb over Labor Day. We were all feeling sentimental about the ten years we had spent knowing these mountains. Walking on that sacred ridgeline with friends was a little walk in heaven, the main kind of heaven I know about. There were blueberries and blackberries all along the path, hanging down from tall, wooded bushes, so different from the Colorado plants I’d been getting to know. I was hoping I would find some, and they were even more plentiful than I had remembered from so many summer trips. I scooped some into my hard-sided sunglasses case to ferry to our other friends back at the campsite.
And then the crescendo: on a fall morning in early October, Joey and I went for one last big mountain hike, a perennial favorite to a pair of cold blue lakes nestled under the Continental Divide. We romped down the mountainside after our mid-day lunch. My eyes feasted on the spread of rock and brush and lake and pine trees stretched out below us. I love seeing the alpine shrubs in their autumn colors, triumphal red and gold and brown swooping lowly amidst the iron-gray rock. I hadn’t expected to see any huckleberries so late in the year, but a peek of dark purple snagged at my eye, and I knelt to examine it.
Just as it had been doing all summer, the world suddenly shifted. I saw that we were not too late for fruits after all, and that the brush all around us was heavily laden with purple huckleberries as dark and gleaming as amethysts. Clusters of fruit hung below every leaf, magnanimous exuberant groundcover bursting underneath with sweetness. Neither of us had been looking, but there were more berries here than we had seen all summer.
That moment of abundance was as remarkable as any I have ever experienced. Here I was, thinking I had begun to understand how magic the world really can be, and here I was — schooled again!, and gobsmacked-thankful to be a student. It happened to me so many times this summer, that moment of joy. It happens to me all the time, is what I mean.
There’s something I want to say, clearly and not obliquely. I often want to say it, and I often find it hard to trust myself later — could I have meant it, really, completely? Still, I’ll try: picking huckleberries on an alpine hillside that October afternoon, I was so happy. I was overcome with a small and large sense of rightness. The entire world seemed a miracle. I felt myself in right relationship with the world around me, with each berry. I understood why so many cultures the world over have harvest holidays. I felt strongly that there is abundance in the world and that, despite every broken and grieving thing, I am unconscionably lucky to be alive at all, to get the smallest taste of that abundant sweetness. I saw clearly that my species has evolved in tandem with the bushes and the fruits of this particular world. I understood that my ephemeral hair’s-breadth place in this intergalactic epic of spacedust and time is so privileged. Every part of me was suffused with gratitude and joy. Every part of me said, Thank you, world, thank you, water and sunshine and dirt of the world.
I’ll try again: I was so happy and everything was a miracle.
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Sometimes, driving in the car, we listen to the Nature podcast. It’s really good — they run through stories published that week in the Nature journal, with interviews with the paper authors. The hosts feel like friends (Ben! Shamini!) and there’s this charming quote in the intro about new knowledge being refreshing and, on some level, astounding.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, a story came on about genetics research having uncovered that an early human ancestor nearly went extinct around nine hundred thousand years ago. Their population collapsed from about a million people to about a thousand people: close to a 99% reduction. And they stayed at this small population for a hundred thousand years or more before growing again.
The podcast stories are often good, or wacky, or striking, memorable segments about superconductors and lab-created blastocysts and all kinds of exciting science. But this one really moved me. I remember looking over at Joey in the driver’s seat, unable to contain my awe at the scale of this calamity, the completeness of this devastation. The persistence of it.
I wonder what caused this extreme crash. Illness, natural disaster, exceptional violence? Maybe all of the above and more. The online version of the article mentioned drought conditions. What an apocalypse it must have been, and so absolute. An extraordinary decline to almost no one remaining. I wonder how it felt for our long-ago relatives. They didn’t have the language that we have, ideas about God and money. But they must have grieved. What was it like for them to live through the end of the world, and then to stay at the end of the world for a hundred thousand years?
I imagine a dry world. I imagine no food, no water, the fear, maybe the paranoia. The desperate turning of one against another, the clinging to a group, maybe the care. I imagine it like a nature documentary, the dire stalk of a thin polar bear through melting icefields. Sometimes I think that I know just what that would have been like. I see that kind of desperation so often in my work, or in pictures of terrible violence from all over the world lighting up my phone screen. There is a profound wrongness to the human-made apocalypses I see every day. Some people live at the edge of the universe always. The eviction notice, the police at the door, leaving behind every material thing to fall out into nothingness. The explosive agent, a bullet or a bomb, ripping through real human flesh.
I think too of the wasteland days after someone has died. Then the weeks and years, the way the grief echoes through everything, clanging. The devastation can be so complete, so total. The world has him in it, and now he’s gone, and so in a very real way the world does not exist anymore. The world has ended. And again, and again.
Does the fox dwell in apocalypse the way we do? Does the otter or the trout or the mosquito? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think this belongs to us.
Our place in this human drama is so limited. The scope is so epic, beyond my understanding. I think of my foremother nine hundred thousand years ago, maybe getting pregnant, maybe raising a child. Is she familiar with the people around her in her very small community? Has everyone she knows died of malnutrition? Does she understand that she and her child are stoically bridging a catastrophic past and an uncertain future, with more catastrophe guaranteed? Or is her own small tribe relatively untouched while, maybe unbeknownst to her, other communities have blinkered out one by one, leaving hers the only human-like family surviving for many miles, one of only a handful remaining on Earth?
I don’t know what she experienced. But in all my ranging speculation, I do know that she is the place that I come from. We all come from the end of the world.
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How do I square this with the berries? Why does this, in my mind, belong right alongside them? Here’s one part of it: when I started bringing home pints of raspberries midsummer, Joey told me about another Nature story he’d listened to about how difficult it is for robots to pick soft little fruits. The story featured researchers who had developed a squishy robot raspberry sensor and used it to attempt to train a robot fruit picker to pull the berry from its stem without crushing it. But the picking is difficult and imperfect. Human hands do it much better, and almost all soft fruits are still collected by hand.
The raspberry, especially, is a funny fruit to pick. You don’t just pull. It takes a very particular tension to grasp the berry and separate it from the receptacle (the firm white core that stays attached to the stem and leaves that hole in the center of the berry – I had to look that word up just now) without crushing the flesh. A light touch, but not only a light touch. The raspberry releases from the receptacle with an almost imperceptible thwump or whoosh, the sensation of discharged tension sending a leap of recognition up the fingertips. It’s really satisfying. Imagining a mechanical fruit picker trying to do it and failing only multiplies the satisfaction.
I read a book recently about bipedal walking and how essential it is to our experience of being humans. It postulated that upright walking freed up the hands to evolve in tandem with our brains, growing larger and more complex together. The bigger the brain, the more complicated the tasks our hands can complete. The more our hands can grasp objects and work with tools, the bigger, more sophisticated the brain can grow.
I like knowing that my hand plucking a berry from the bush is a marker of so many generations of living and dying on this garden planet. When I pull the fruit from the branch, I do feel lucky. How extraordinary, this skillful hand, this sweet and abundant fruit. I owe so much to the people before me who survived. I owe so much to the lavish pleasures of the natural world that made me. I owe a fathom-deep debt of gratitude even to the droughts and the pestilences that made me too, because I am glad to be here, in this time, a human person who, for all the terrible trappings of modernity, still knows how to pick a raspberry. Let the agrobusiness suits in tall buildings dream of uniform rows of produce. Let so many engineers build ever more sensitive robot-fruit-picking robots. Let the robots plunge their cool metal arms between the glossy green leaves and come up, falsely triumphant, with a squashed berry, dark juice dripping like blood onto the ground below. Let each of them try their hand at it, and I’ll try mine. I already know the heavy delights that await me.
