With warm, unusually springlike days this past winter so soon bringing bloom and growth, it seems certain the blackberries will arrive early.
I speak not of the big, seedy blackberries of late summer, luring pickers with their bountiful charms and easy picking, but rather the rare, small blackberries of early July, shyly hiding their treasures, stingily surrendering them as a precious gift to those courageous enough to seek them.
This is the blackberry of my growing-up years on Magnolia Bluff.
In those early days, Magnolia Boulevard was a potholed, asphalted, two-lane road winding its way from the new Garfield Street Bridge to Fort Lawton's southern border. A dirt path along its edge served walkers on the bluff side overlooking Puget Sound. Huge logs formed a guardrail, remnants of which can still be seen in places.
Along the Boulevard, houses were here and there, along with numerous vacant lots. Native madrona, dogwood and big-leaf maple rose above shrubby ocean spray, mock orange, wild currant and hazelnut.
The wild blackberry vines crept along the ground, half-hidden amongst the native grasses and weeds, scrambling over fallen branches and stumps. It was a landscape designed by nature.
Back then, those lazy days of summer vacation were absent of any demands or schedules beyond those we made for ourselves, my sister and I ... save one requirement.
That was our mother's mandate in the days of early July to pick black-berries.
On the hunt
With the promise of mouthwater-ing blackberry pies and jam, the daunting task held the promise of future reward. So Alvara and I would don our purple-stained, blackberry-picking rags, collect old, beat-up saucepans and coffee cans and sally forth on our mission to fill them with the black gold and return home to praise for our efforts. A stick picked up along the way equipped us to push aside the underbrush, the more easily to find the small, stickered vines bearing blackberries.
The sun came up early in July, and it grew steadily hotter as it rose overhead. The best time to pick was morning, but for another reason. More Bluff residents were on the same search and trying to beat the competition by being the first to arrive at a particularly good patch they had discovered. Information about the best locations was coveted selfishly and never shared by the "owner." It was very bad form to pick in someone else's patch. A brief perusal of the area would tell you that someone else was working there, so move on.
Berries did not ripen all at once. All stages of development could be found on the same vine, so it required about three days between pickings, waiting for green to turn to light red, then dark and, finally, black. The ideal, shiny, juicy black could change in a day to overripe, mushing in our fingers, and then to dried up and useless in another. Timing was crucial.
Human pickers vied with other creatures. All manner of small vertebrates competed for the little suc-culents - birds, tiny lizards and occasionally garter snakes - surprised us, escaping the human invasion rapidly and unseen, noticed only by the rustle of their slithering through the underbrush of last October's dry leaves.
The excitement of finding a bonanza of berries all in one place was heralded by a cry of jubilation between my sister and me, because that meant actually standing still in one place (or more likely bending over or squatting) and adding a half-inch of berries to our buckets.
A cause for self-reproach and disappointment was losing a small cluster out of clumsiness and watching it irretrievably disappear into the mass of organic debris at our feet. Tragedy was announced with a cry of pain and loss when a bucket spilled, wasting a morning's worth of painstaking search.
The thrill of adventure and discovery had us enthralled. Never was there talk of quitting, but only forging on until the last berry in our patch was plucked and we dragged ourselves home with our pickings, scratched and sunburned, our fingers looking as if we had dipped them in red ink.
In those days, a bucketful of glistening blackberries meant happiness. My memories of hot July days in the blackberry patches along the boulevard, Mother's blackberry pies and blackberry jam on homemade bread will never be forgotten.
Berries today
Now the native berry patches of those times are fewer, the areas often invaded by the vigorous, thorny scourge of "Himalayas" and other non-native blackberry varieties, their vines overarching other vegetation and turning uncultivated areas into impenetrable brambles.
I have no argument with those who joyfully collect their huge quantities of fat berries, praising their flavor and fecundity. Recalling the others we picked, I cannot participate. Anyway, these pickers cannot compare them with what they have never known. (Can one compare the nectar of the gods with apple juice?)
A few years ago, walking along Magnolia Boulevard, Alvara discovered a small patch of the old wild blackberries on the edge of the Bluff next to where big rains once washed the ground away, destroying houses on Perkins Lane. She and I met there, trying to recapture youthful pleasures and pick enough for a pie. We were making good progress when a young woman in helmet and backpack, riding a bicycle, stopped and hailed us to ask what we were doing. We replied: "Picking blackberries."
Observing us bent over the task, her response was: "You must be really desperate!"
Not being able to think of some way to explain our zeal or form a witty response that would not sound pompous and insulting, we just smiled knowingly and went back to our labor of love.
I have not been back to the patch for a while. Recently I looked to see whether it is still there. It is. But like a true Magnolia berry-seeker, I'm not telling where. You must search out a remaining scarce patch this summer and learn the secret and romance of this simple fruit.
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