Where I grew up, picking strawberries was a way for kids (and adults) to make money in June after school was out.
It sounds like fun, children, I know. But let me assure you that it's not.
You have to pick the berries early in the day while it’s cool; otherwise they smoosh into jam in your hand. So, before dawn, they truck you to the fields in schoolbuses and assign you a nice wet endless row of strawberry plants. You crawl down the row on your knees, or you do a grotesque hopping squat, whichever you prefer. The work pays next to nothing. Then there are the field bosses who yell at you and berate you for picking too slowly, or for missing too many berries, or picking too many unripe berries.
You’re home by mid-afternoon, muddy and covered in sweet red goo, and you can actually see strawberries when you close your eyes.
Raspberry season comes after that. Raspberries grow upright. Much easier to pick, right? Well, they have thorns. And they smoosh in your hand even more easily than strawberries.
Then, toward the end of the summer, people go up into the Cascade foothills to pick huckleberries. For fun! (Huckleberries are a wild variant of blueberries; they don’t have the powdery sheen that blueberries have, and they tend to be sweeter. There are whole thickets of them hidden on the mountainsides.) We took coffeecans with makeshift wire handles and went up into the hills (everyone had a favorite secret place to go) and spent whole August days picking. (The black-and-white picture above is my mother, on Doughgod Mountain, in 1970. If you look carefully, you can see that she's holding a coffeecan full of huckleberries.)
I was a terrible huckleberry picker. My family never lets me forget it.
But the views from the mountaintops are spectacular.
Someday, when we're visiting the Northwest, maybe I'll get Partner to go up there. We can pick a few huckleberries and watch the sunset.
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