I guess I have to learn to love these berries
I don’t really like salmonberries. They’re a beautiful but insipid berry that tastes both underripe and overripe at the same time. They’re juicy but with no sweetness.
But this summer my kid became obsessed with what’s known around Juneau as was’x’aan tléigu — a berry so ubiquitous the word in Lingit is the generic word for berry. This place has been famous for its berries since time immemorial.
My son is not even three yet and he can tell when a salmonberry is ripe from a few paces away. And this of a berry that comes in three colors: a golden yellow-orange, a blushing pink and a garnet red. He can gauge the ripeness of any variant before we even reach the bush. He’s spotted salmonberries from his carseat as foliage speeds past the window. He knows not just the berry but the leaf shape too. And he knows the telltale fringe of a berry that’s already been picked. He knows when to leave a berry on the plant for one more day and remembers to come back. He knows enough to say we better go get them before the bears do. He never leaves the house without a half-gallon bucket on a string around his neck.
His proclivity is understandable though. He’s from here. He was born in Juneau, the ancestral home of the Áak’w Kwáan, at a hospital on the banks of Salmon Creek. He was born in the fall when the fish were spawning and dying and the smell came into the maternity ward. There’s an honest-to-god eagle rookery in the dark spruce-covered slope behind the building. And there are air horns placed along the walkways for scaring off the black bears that wander onto the grounds. My son has already seen more bears than I have in my whole life.
I’m at home in the high desert and am most comfortable with the smell of sage in my hair and red dirt and my own salt on my skin. Sometimes I wonder if my son feels about Sitka spruce and devil’s club the way I do about junipers and rabbitbrush.
We picked salmonberries every day through some of June and all of July this year. He does a one-for-me, one-for-the-bucket thing. But we still bring plenty home and I rinse them in a colander. I don’t even have time to think about baking them into something because he’ll eat whatever we’ve brought home that day — eating them like popcorn in front of the TV.
Recently, I went on a hike by myself. I was looking forward to getting some miles in and not stopping every six feet to pick berries. I was going for exercise, to clear my head — to get away from my kid and my work which make up the bulk of my pandemic life. I made it about ten minutes in and then there they were — glowing florescent magenta and yellow in the bushes. I swear they were emitting their own light, like little beacons calling to me. I stopped and picked a few ripe salmonberries. At first I was in denial, telling myself I would take them home to my son. But I didn’t have a bucket and I wasn’t about to put them in my pocket, so I popped one in my mouth.
It was cold and juicy, like eating a fat rain drop. And it tasted like the forest — not sweet so much as acrid, but not at all in a bad way. I was stopping every few feet, then, and devouring those stupid berries like a bear getting ready to hibernate. I could feel them inside me becoming something, changing me.
There’s a word for this, of course: transubstantiation. I wasn’t just eating salmonberries. I was eating the holy host of the forest. I was communing with it.
The reason why this was so transformative is that I haven’t really been in love with Southeast Alaska. I’ve been here for nearly four years and I still don’t really get it. It’s not that I don’t like it or feel unwelcome. It’s more like I’ve been a guest here — like I’ve been sleeping on the Tongass National Forest’s couch all this time but haven’t been asked to move in.
But suddenly it was like the forest was offering itself up to me in the most attractive little gem, like it wanted to put a ring on me. I was so grateful then to the forest and to the relentless rain and to this place that welcomed my only child’s life and offered up these treasures to savor when everything else in life felt really grim.
The pandemic has made me live in the present in a way that therapy and mindfulness never quite could. And I’ve been trying to just live here, where I am. Most summers I spend in Idaho or Utah on long whitewater rafting trips on desert rivers with basalt banks and unexpected cottonwood groves. But this summer, I’ve just been here, in the shadow of an ice field getting rained on and slipping in the mud. I’ve seen a bear almost every week and my son picked up sea stars and urchins from the bottom of the ocean on a king tide morning.
We usually share this place with over a million cruise ship tourists during these months. But this year, all those people are staying where they live, just like we’re staying where we live. And that makes it feel so crazy special that we get to eat all the salmonberries we want and that we get the intensity of the this place all to ourselves.
August 2020
