She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight
Oh, yes, they were, insists my wife. Oh, no, they weren’t, I counter.
The beauty’s not just in the hunt. When brown and obviously barren plants give way to green at a turn of the road, when tiny pricks of deep purple show themselves from the shadow of a forest mosaic, therein lies the Phantom of delight.
To stop and pick? Hold out for bigger berries farther up? This will become the first of three patches, nestled below pines and between fallen limbs, on a slope to be known to only the two of you as Manyberries. Big Kahunas and the Mother Lode await, but you don’t know that yet.
I saw her upon a nearer view,
A Spirit, yet a Woman too!
Time to get down to business. Off our bikes and into the berries. We chatter: the kids, next week’s schedule, I’ve got half a cup, how ’bout you? Then you drift apart.
The berries tumble from stem to butter tub. We’re drawn higher, across slope, back to the ones we missed. Maybe we’re racing, maybe not. There’s no clock up here. Duties beckon below. They have to wait, but there’s a car to service before the weekend’s gone, college costs to figure out, bills to make go away. Seems there’s always a room to redo, a wedding on the calendar, forever a funeral in the paper.
A Creature not too bright or good/
For human nature’s daily food
It’s happened twice now. An airplane drones overhead and a wild turkey gobbles somewhere below. There’s a bark and a yip. Then a yip-yip-yowl, and a cacophony of coyote angst or poetry, it’s hard to tell which. It comes from just over the brow, or far across the canyon. The imp director who batons these hills cries “cut” and then there’s silence.
“And now for our next number,” Linda quips. But there’s no encore.
The temptation is great to eat these berries, not just plop them all in a bucket. Satiate thirst and hunger and, oh, your whining taste buds. Bang for buck, the flavor of one small huck is difficult to beat so far from kitchen, dining room, or bar and grill.
I’ve found a substitute. The leaf of the huckleberry plant doesn’t have the same tang these berries do, but it’s not bad. Chewing on it, the hillside becomes a veritable salad garden.
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A Traveler between life and death ...
We’re different pickers, Linda and I. She’ll fill three cups to every two of mine. I blame sausages and wanderlust. Her fingers are deft, her approach steady and dogged.
I sneak a peek at her technique. She works mostly from her knees. I’m flat on my butt, down at berry level, a foot or two above the earth.
It’s the summer the bugs left early, at least in these parts. No mosquitoes, and the horseflies are no hungrier than our imaginations.
The berries don’t care. You can fall and skin your knee. You can strip them from their rightful stalks. One way or another, come September they’ll be a memory, a false excuse for someone to repair to the mountains, a scrumptious pie, the ultimate icing on ice cream, antioxidants on breakfast cereal. Next summer they’ll come again, though it’s hard to believe they’ll be this prolific.
What I know about William Wordsworth would fit in my picking thimble, with room left over for the berries. He was British, born in 1770, died in 1850.
Google tells me Wordsworth collaborated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge on “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 to launch the English Romantic movement.
The 30-line “She Was a Phantom of Delight” was probably penned a few years after that, maybe even as Capt. Meriwether Lewis led 10 explorers past this same mountain in July of 1806.
As far as I know Wordsworth never wrote the word “huckleberry,” let alone picked one.
Together we harvest a pint, a quart, another. I run dollar figures through my head, but no, Linda is emphatic: These will go toward a pancake’s cause, a jam, as personal remnants of August ’08.
A perfect Woman, nobly planned/
To warm, to comfort, and command ...
There’s probably less sweat and more berries in Missoula’s Crazy Canyon, above Whitefish Lake where Linda’s family picked as a child, the drainages of Gold Creek, Sheep Mountain, either fork of the Bitterroot.
I grew up at the base of this mountain, and we’ve lived near here for almost 20 years. We’ve always known about the huckleberries up here. We’ve never done anything about them until today.
Our hands know when to quit, They’re grape-rich testaments to this spell that has mesmerized us for - holy moley - three hours now.
A friendly breeze is blowing in thunder clouds. We combine the loot into one pail and turn wheels down the hill. The world spreads out below. It’s summer in Montana and it feels good. Linda laughs as she glides around a berried mound of bear scat.
The huckleberries ride nobly, in a sack draped from my handlebars.
... And yet a Spirit still, and bright,
With something of angelic light.
Reach reporter Kim Briggeman at (406) 523-5266 or by e-mail at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)