Here in the Great Land, our short, mild summer is already beginning to slip away. The leaves on the birches have faded to the dull green of late summer, with the first few hints of yellow showing up. We're seeing more rainy mornings as July moves along, and the fireweed blooms are near the top of the stalks. The silver salmon, the last ones to arrive in the streams, are starting to run, and I find myself wondering why I'm at my desk when the "silver bullets" are running in the Little Su, just south of here.
But that also means it's berry season. We have an expansive patch of raspberry bushes, from which we get a couple of gallons of raspberries every year, for preserves and raspberry muffins. We also have several patches of watermelon berries around, but while those taste much like watermelon - thus the name - they are also called "scootberries," as eating too many of them can give you, you guessed it, the scoots. Caution is in order here.
All good things come to those who pick berries.
My grandmother had several large patches of raspberries and blackberries, in addition to a huge mulberry tree. She scolded my cousins and me for getting into the summer berry patches and eating our fill, but her heart was never really in it. She always had enough berries left over for her own use. Being a farm wife who had raised six kids during the Depression, she had a deeply ingrained habit of harvesting and preserving anything edible, and with berries, that meant preserves - and pies.
Interestingly enough, as Grandma was a teetotaler her whole life, she also made wine. Blackberry wine, mulberry wine, even plum wine. It was all rich, fruity, and sweet. Grandma never sold any of it, just gave it away to anyone in the family who wanted it; I remember fondly her giving me a gallon jug of blackberry wine when I was about 18, cautioning me to "...make sure you drink it at home."
My childhood home in the wooded hills of Allamakee County lay in good berry country, mostly raspberries and blackberries. My folks never made wine, even though, unlike Grandma, they didn't mind a little tipple every now and then. But in my endless roaming through the hills and fields, I often found myself pausing in a berry patch, maybe for a few minutes, maybe for an hour. The deer liked berries, too, and the ruffed grouse and wild turkeys' yearly offspring grew fat on them. Finding any berries for myself often meant racing the deer and the birds. And that was OK; they were, after all, there before me, and I expect that the big blackberry patch at the top of the woods road on that place is still picked over by the deer every year, even now.
The knowledge of what berries were good to eat has come in handy more than once. I remember an incident when I was taking Army Basic Training in the sandy environs of Ft. Dix, New Jersey, and while on a march cross-country, one of the drill sergeants popped a grenade simulator, sending us all flying into the bushes for cover. I managed to land in a raspberry bush, and managed to stuff myself with a couple handfuls before we were ordered back up. A buddy of mine, from a more urban background, asked me how I knew those were edible. I just laughed.
Now, here in Alaska, we have not only raspberries and scootberries, but also low-bush cranberries, and farther north, cloudberries and lingonberries, crowberries, and more. There are two precautions, though, to be observed; keep an eye out for bears, as they like berries above all things (I recommend a good major-caliber sidearm, just in case), and you want to make sure you're on public land. The native communities own a lot of prime berrying land, and they don't suffer trespassers lightly; nor would I, were I in their shoes.
Soon we'll start harvesting our raspberries, to be made into preserves, muffins, maybe some raspberry wine to accompany the dandelion wine, which is already fermenting. Those are the sweet, sweet fruits of our short summer.
Read More: Caregiver's Diary Part 36: Berry Happy
Photographs and Memories: Along the Rural Roadside
Fall will be here soon. It comes early, way up here. The grouse season opens in about three and a half weeks, and it's best to get spruce grouse early, when they've been eating bugs and berries. Later in the season, when they are feeding on spruce needles, they get very resiny - not very tasty. In late summer, though, the sweet berries they eat make them a wonderful main ingredient for a grouse stew, or grouse and dumplings.
All good things come to those who pick berries. Now, it's time to get the berry pails out and start planning a trip north, to compete with the bears for the summer's fruits. The cloudberries will be ripe soon!
