Fencerows: Swamp Berries
By John Luthens
The final mud hole on the logging road was deep enough to winter-over a school of bass. Jets of clay-colored water splashed above the truck’s quarter panels. I white-knuckled the steering wheel while my mother sat in the passenger seat, shouting navigational wisdom.
“Whoa, stop–I mean– keep going, don’t stop! This puddle is a lot deeper than I remember it.”
I was wearing hip boots, so it would be a semi-dry escape if we foundered. My mom was likewise fortified in duck boots. She also wore one of those round-brim beach hats – to keep the bugs out her hair, so she said. But she looked to me like a first-mate on a charter boat, and she was holding two, empty ice-cream buckets in her lap, as if ready to start bailing operations on a moment’s notice.
In search of swamp berries.
Tires spun and twisted, finally grabbing purchase along a rut of swamp grass and blueberry bushes and shooting us out the other side of the submerged lane. “It’s a truck, not a submarine,” I rasped. “If we get stuck it’s a long walk out. Come to think of it, I’m not quite sure which way is out.”
“Here we are” she said, as we flung mud to the end of the logging road, where a sunken path took over and snaked into the swampy barrens. “This is the trail they told me about.”
“This is the trail who told you about?”
Blueberry bushes on the last day of August.
“Never mind who–these blueberry patches are a closely-guarded secret and I can’t reveal my sources,” my mother lectured, tossing me an empty bucket. “And that goes double for swamp berries.
I’m no stranger to lost, logging-road escapades, having tagged along on more than my share and, having jump-started quite a few, myself. It still blows fresh as a winter’s breeze in my mind, the night I buried my truck to the hubs in back-country snow and was forced to snowshoe out, fording an icy river in the process, my snowshoes, not to mention all my clothes held high above my head.
I followed my secretive guide, knee-deep through Douglas County swamp on the last day of August, warmer than my epic river crossing, but still ranking right up there in the logging-road walks of fame. And it was definitely not what I’d consider blueberry season.
Blueberry picking, as I remembered it, is reserved for late July and early August. I seemed to recall sand barrens, high clouds rolling over a stunted-tree landscape. The blueberry fields I’ve done business with were summer places, resting on a burnt log and surveying likely spots in the shade of a red pine, picking off wood ticks and eating berries out of your bucket faster than you could fill it.
I knew from poking my head in her freezer, as well as from the lingering aroma of baking pies in her kitchen, that my mother had done well in such places. I also knew, from running in the circles of blueberry-picking fanatics, that in the good years, when the berries are plentiful, there is no such thing as too many in the freezer and there is no swamp deep enough to stop the madness.
Dividends of a blueberry outing.
I believe the location where the swamp finally thinned out into stands of scrub oak and aspen was still in Douglas County, but I’m not entirely certain. I couldn’t tell you even if I knew, because to kiss-and-tell on a late-season swamp berry patch is akin to ratting out the mafia. The last you’d see of me would be a blueberry bucket floating on a stagnant pool and maybe a hip-boot buckle hanging from jack pine.
I will tell you that I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. The mammoth blueberries you see in the grocery store must come from such a place. Swampy, blue, ground cover stretched as far as the eye could see. A pack of bears could wallow in there, living off the fat of the land, maybe waiting it right out to hibernation.
We filled buckets in an hour and trudged back through the swamp. My mother has a magic compass in her head, and we were back at the cabin in time for lunch.
“You should maybe write something about blueberry picking,” she said. “It takes some fortitude to get them like that.” I was occupied, stuffing myself with a piece of pie.
“Just be sure not to write too much,” she added.
I nodded, wiping blue stains from my chin and helping myself to another slice of pie. There are some blueberry patches ripe enough and some swamps deep enough, that even a big-mouthed writer knows enough to tread lightly.