COLUMN: ‘Blinded by berries’

This is my weekly column for the Sunday, Aug. 16, 2009 edition of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. A version of this piece ran on an edition of KAXE’s “Between You and Me” program.

Blinded by berries
By Aaron J. Brown

So I’ve been picking raspberries lately. I moved out to the country a few years ago so I guess I should have started this sooner. All the cool rural people pick berries.

Cool takes on a different meaning when you live in the country. In a city, cool means knowing the best restaurants, the hot music spots, the hippest coffee joints and the best place to see “Of Mice and Men” performed as a ballet in the street by reformed gangsters. That’s nice and all, but you can’t make jam. I mean, jam the preserve, not jam the vague term used by people with marginal talent at playing musical instruments. In the country, coolness is knowing the names of birds and the location of berries. Berries are, at their core, free food. Birds know this. Bears know this. People who know this like to point out the retail price for much of what cityfolk buy in the grocery store, or worse yet, the fancy chain grocery store where their fancy children shop.

When I was a kid, my great-grandmother had a patch of berries by her place. I remember running down the rows of raspberries, gorging myself on as many as possible. Then my family sold the lake place with the berries and I spent the rest of my childhood in various swamplands, where the only kind of berries you found had already been digested by something halfway up the food chain. I lived in town for a time after that and then we moved to the country, where nature’s bounty again entered my life.

I’ll admit it’s taken a few years to get into the natural rhythm of the berry world. Our first few years out here we let a lot of berries go unnoticed. Maybe that was a good thing because those unpicked berries turned into a forest of raspberry bushes all over the countryside by our house. The abundance of berries, their red siren colors calling out from along the roadside, is the reason I first started taking a bucket out with the boys when we would go for our walks. Before long the berry picking became more than a ruse, but rather an obsession. After my first day of adult berry picking I noticed something that expert berry pickers say is a very real phenomenon. You know how bright lights burn into your retinas so that you see them even when you close your eyes. Well, after a day of picking, when I would close my eyes I would see berries – big, red, hanging berries dangling just within reach. They were real enough that at night I would feel like reaching for them.

That might be why I have taken up picking with even greater fervor through this raspberry season. While I love the taste of raspberries, my interest is somehow more primal than specifically necessary. I don’t need the berries, I want them. I want them because if the supermarket is overrun by rioters, the way cable news would have us believe, I can always count on the sustenance of berries.

While jogging last week, I scaled a small hill to access a berry patch, not to collect berries but simply to eat them. Eat as many as possible. I was supposed to be exercising. Berries have fiber, I said. That’s a good thing. After consuming some big, red berries I leaped like a tiger to the ground below, twisting my ankle and ultimately hobbling back home.

I have learned much about berries this year and the ways of the woods. Most of all, I have learned respect.

Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Contact him or read more at his blog MinnesotaBrown.com. His book “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range” is out now.

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