Berry Picking

All the slapping in the world didn’t keep the mosquitoes away, and dampness seeped through my jeans, making my knees itch.  I knew that my nails would be stained and ragged, and that I’d feel imaginary spiders crawling on me long after we’d cleaned up for the day.  And the bucket rim seemed to stretch up and up.

I never thought I’d like berry picking.  Ever.

Berry picking was a fact of life in rural Alaska where I grew up.  In a place with no roads connecting it to anywhere else and where every orange, apple, carrot, grape, and gallon of milk had to be flown or barged in, food prices were always up.  In our family of six ravenous stomachs and the slim earnings of one traditional fisherman, that meant that we had to gather all the free food we could get.  We weren’t picking berries to have some sort of quaint pancake breakfast.  We were picking for a winter’s worth of vitamins. I remember reading a book about a family going berry-picking and looking forward to lazing through a warm afternoon and picnicking on the fruit they found along with cheese slices and individually-wrapped crackers.  I figured they had to be very rich people to be able to take berry-picking so lightly and to spend only one day doing it.  We picked on weekends and after school, and no one was allowed to stop until the bucket was full.

Subsistence living is very much a way of life for Alaska’s rural residents.  Subsistence tradition ran so deeply in my father that he coped with the day of his mother’s funeral by going berry picking.  He found solace in green moss on trees, the turnipy smells of wild celery and rotting leaves, and the knowledge that he was doing what his family had done for generations.

I didn’t get quite get that.  I found nothing soul-filling nor comforting in getting bitten by bugs and dismayed by the lack of progress towards the bucket’s rim.  I saw berry-picking as one of those things I planned to go to college to avoid.  I figured that I’d move to a shiny city where berries came already cleaned and frozen in neat little plastic packages and where I’d never again wonder if the purple stains were making my backside look bigger.

Like most growth, I can’t pinpoint a moment when things changed.

I know that moving to the shiny city taught me that quiet, even when punctuated by the occasional drone of a mosquito, is a limited commodity.  Berry picking is a place where no energy need go toward tuning anything out and where every sound escapes being noise.

Entering a career in public education meant that my rewards wouldn’t be financial which was rich for me as a person but not accepted as legal tender for any debts, public or private.  The plastic-package berries are more expensive than practicality allows, and I’d rather pay with time in the sun and a good walk where I don’t have to dodge masses of people.

Participating in an activity that has remained unchanged, save for the plastic bucket and advent of denim, for thousands of years can’t help but make me feel connected to something larger and more solid than my current spin-around world of adolescents, deadlines, meetings, phone calls, websites, paperwork, and streaming videos.  I’m reminded that my life isn’t an email and that I come from a past of tradition and stability where gratitude lent grace to every chore.  And none of it was ever measured in backside size, purple or not.

Most dear to me is that choosing to go berry picking honors my father in ways that Father’s Day cards and phone calls can’t.  By doing what he taught me to do, I demonstrate that his life is valuable enough to become a permanent part of mine and that I accept his offer of an inheritance that grows back every year.  When I pour my berries from the bucket onto the cookie sheet, carefully pick out the leaves, bugs, stems, and anything else that isn’t a muffin or smoothie ingredient, and pack the berries into the freezer, I show that he has taught me what wealth is.  He will never need to worry about me being poor.

I suppose that I appreciate berry picking now because it isn’t just about berries filling the bucket anymore.

The mosquitoes aren’t as bad as they used to be either.