Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 10, 1994 TAG: 9408250063
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LIZA FIELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The harvest, anyhow, extends beyond this rain-hammered crop, for berry season is a long one in Southwest Virginia. If you hankered to be a migrant picker, working for nobody, you could start out July in hotter parts like Roanoke and Lynchburg, move your way higher to Blacksburg or Wytheville, and finish late August in a storm of blueberries at Mount Rogers or Massie's Gap.
Or you could stay put. The peak seasons of varying kinds of berry are happily spread across the Virginia summer.
Black raspberries ("black-ends") arrived first, back in June. Tiny, fire-pink and purple, these berries taste of stars and springwater, of wildflowers and rocks hidden deep in a forest.
It is difficult to eat such a berry and remain angry at anyone, or worried. Everything in you becomes wonder, a wonder that says, "How"? This taste that is always new, always divine - the odor of wildflowers, maybe, but thicker; the feeling of becoming suddenly awake - how can it just appear there, along the roadside?
These tiny star-fires of fruit are, maybe, supposed to get us used to that question - get us out of our indoor, processed-food rut, and prepare us for wilder things. But they never quite dull our startle at the next arrivals.
Red raspberries appear in late June, and it's always a shock. For a month, their only evidence along the roadside is clumps of sharp husks you wouldn't poke your foot in. Then one day, out of this gnarled gray drought, pink! Pink, sticky, skin-clean berries bulge their way out of the stickers in clumps of 10: berries so damp and frail you have to pick them loose-handed, nonchalantly, pretending you aren't desperate to run a handful to someone - anyone - and cry, "SEE? EAT THESE! It - they - right there by the road!"
Wild raspberries do that to a person. By the time the blackberries arrive, the seasoned gatherer has learned to calm herself before poking a hand in the briars. "It's just berries," you tell yourself. "It isn't communion. It isn't that food-and-drink-of-new-and-unending-life." But one berry in the mouth and the words fly out: You can't shake the notion that you are partaking of something holy.
What blackberries lack in refinement, slopped in your bucket with the June bugs, they make up for in strangeness. Never will one heap of brambles produce quite the same flavor as the heap two feet down the road. Some are sour and gritty. Others taste of midnight and the innards of a cave. Others have a flavor of ... old books? Some dank, forgotten homestead?
Perhaps the most provocative thought is that this strange fruit - which no one need pay for and no one can buy - is offered out of the most forsaken waste places. The shale behind dumpsters. Back sides of gas stations. An eroding roadbank with trucks zooming past. Moreover, it comes out of stickers - in particular, that uncouth wild-rose family of brambles never allowed in your nicer neighborhoods.
Blueberries don't thrust themselves at you; you must go out of the way to fetch them. Dry, sandy ledges that grow mountain laurel, Japanese tea and scrub pine generally host blueberries. You can smell them before they appear: that odor of rocks and black humus and twigs. At Grayson Highlands, they grow in bogs and bluffs alike; around Roanoke, they thrive on sandy mountains like Tinker and Catawba.
Our blueberries don't offer the variety of flavor that blackberries do, but a few distinctions stand out. The lavender and pink kind, whose colors are everything you love about Virginia: the pale blue mountains at sunset, laurel blooming on a ridge. These have that flowers taste of pleasant sweet and sour.
Among these grow another berry: char-black, flabbier. This berry is sweet in the manner of prune juice - yet attached to a kind of dark gritty bitterness like something dug from a coal pit. It is a tonic taste of a good-for-you something, like chewing on a sassafras root. A handful goes a long way.
A botanist told me that none of these Virginia varieties is a real blueberry; what we have are huckleberries, gooseberries and whortleberries. Blueberries are what you pick in a clump off a bush in Maine; they are a fat, grocery-store berry it takes no time to fill a can with.
Fine. No wonder the New Englanders actually make jelly and pies out of blueberries; it's hard to imagine such an irreverent, wastrel act in these parts. We in mountain Virginia have a lot more time to wonder what use could possibly merit the pint of pellets it takes hours to pick. Send them to the queen? Plant them?
Of course, no end merits a pint of Virginia whortleberries. No pie, no muffin is holy enough - so you take them home to dump in a bowl with milk; or give them to a stranger, or a dry-looking turtle; or eat them right there on a rock for supper while the sun drops through the pines. It's a reminder, somehow, that life is brief - is wild-tasting, bitter and sweet and gritty, to be swallowed on the spot.
The entire berry season is a reminder. It returns us to a state of wonder that gets trammeled under car wheels, instant grocery-store food and busyness. Somehow, where no one planted anything, and there is no one to pay, a divine fruit grows for the traveler.
It inspires to go on foot, to slow down and look around as we travel a road, to expect treasures that will cause us to stop.
It gets us to dirty our hands, to give grubby presents in margarine tubs to the neighbor, and find ourselves saying, "Thank you" - to a bush, the sky, to no one in particular.
And it makes us wonder, if only for a moment, why we have devoted ourselves to living indoors, instead of wandering the back roads and mountains, picking fruit and letting things grow.
Liza Field of Wytheville has taught writing at Wytheville Community College.
by CNB