Jul 29 2024
Wild Harvest
One of the many pleasures of late summer are the berries that grow in wild places. While hiking in higher elevations I often come upon patches of low-bush blueberries, especially along Adirondack ponds. I pick and eat them simply because I can. They are tiny explosions of wonder and joy in my mouth.
Closer to home, in my backyard in fact, there are blackberries. I often walk barefoot to the edge between my backyard lawn and the woods beyond to visit the wild blackberry bushes. There I witness how the berries are ripening from red to a dark purple. I can’t resist picking a few. Their tangy sweetness is the taste of Nature’s endless progression through the seasons.
I leave most of the berries on the vines for the deer and other wild animals passing through. I don’t need to harvest this fruit. The local farm stands provide plenty of fresh produce this time of year, and it is all delightful: berries, tomatoes, corn, melon, and much more. But what I do harvest when I visit those bushes in my backyard is wildness itself.
The naturalist John Burroughs wrote: “Life is so great a mystery that we need not invent others.” I concur. I feel it each and every day of the growing season. I feel it every time I witness a mayfly hatch, push through dense vegetation while bushwhacking, or spot a creature that I’ve never seen before. I marvel at the mechanics of the simplest life-forms, bacteria, hard at work in my gut or in a compost heap. A huge mushroom suddenly appears in my garden after a thunderstorm and I greet it with all the reverence that most people reserve for church. In early spring, I bite into the leaf of a wild leek. This time of year, I eat a wild berry, making its divine energy my own. We are all connected in this incredible, interwoven tapestry of living things.
The more I delve into the intricacies of wild nature, the more astounded I am by it all. My attitude towards Nature – the whole of it – is nothing short of being religious. Scientific inquiry only reinforces this, revealing as it does the forces that generate everything both animate and inanimate. The laws of nature explain why the berry plant puts forth such a tantalizing, seed-bearing fruit –– one that birds, herbivores, and creatures like me consume then drop elsewhere with ample fertilization. But it doesn’t explain why all this is happening in the first place. The answer is beyond comprehension. So I pick and eat a wild berry, letting the taste of it enlighten me.
