Handful of berriesjpg

Nancy and I paddled into Quetico Provinical Park for eight days of solitude. We had no timekeeping devises only maps and a compass and ate and slept when our bodies requested the favor.

On the last morning of our sojourn, I crept out of the tent as the sun climbed out of the eastern horizon. With camera in hand, I quietly headed off for a discovery stroll. I didn’t get far as I was hijacked by clumps of beckoning blueberries that teased me with their plumpness and sweet promises.

I like eating things that are titled “wild.” But they have to be truly wild, not falsely christened “wild.” Just because the menu offering or grocery store product broadcasts its offering as “wild” doesn’t mean that the plant, fish or beast had any aspect of a wild life.

The early morning blueberries I gathered were quintessential wild blueberries. They were glistening with the night’s wash of dew and they grew in the company of a boreal band of flora.

Admittedly Nancy bears a black belt in berry picking and she picked most of our daily indulgence in blueberries. Two favorites stand out on this trip. Of course you have to tip the hat to blueberry pancakes when the blueberries made up more volume than the batter mix.

blueberry pancakes

After living for awhile in the Yukon, in northern Canada, we learned to love the French Canadian word for blueberries. Bleuets.

I really like intuitive cooking and our colorful walleye, red cabbage, onion and garlic stir fry topped with bleuets was a four-star supper. Add any French word in your cooking vocabulary and you can fool the best of them.

Walleye stir fry cooking

On my morning walk I discovered and marveled at one tight cluster of twelve berries growing on the same stem. The heavy berries weighted the small branch to the ground. These dozen berries were immediately drafted to my team “handful.” It didn’t take long to cup a collection of sweetness. I carefully brought the foraged bounty to my mouth and poured them in. Rather than chew, I simply held them in my mouth, feeling their roundness, before I slowly lifted the mouthful to the roof of my mouth them with my tongue.

“Sweet, sweet, morning sweet” was the refrain that came to my mind as the combined juices released their nectar over my tongue.

On this morning it didn’t matter if I was getting a major infusion of antioxidants, my elevated sense of being was heightened by all kinds of sensorial stimuli that surrounded me. Red and white pines strained the morning breeze and provided string music that is never repeated; each moment is a new song. The heavy smell of fresh white cedar likely enhanced my taste buds. And somehow I want to believe that the duet of loons just offshore from this patch of blue serves to inspire the wild sugars to greater sweetness.

The low-bush blueberry was officially classified by the famous 16th century Swedish botanist, Carl Linneaus. He named over 8,000 plants and animals with scientific names using a naming or classification system that he developed called binomial nomenclature. It’s way easier to simply say “blueberry” than low-bush blueberry. And I’ve yet to bump into any berry picker referring to the year as a “good Vaccinium angustifolium year.”

Domesticated blueberries don’t hold a candle to the wild variety when it comes to pure sweetness. While smaller than their lesser, more plump, domestic counterparts, the wild blueberry contains less water in each berry, making them easy to freeze and thaw. The wild blueberry has more intense flavor and twice the antioxidants than the garden variety. These fruits are among the most rich antioxidant fruits. One cup of wild berries has about 10 times the USDA’s daily recommendation.

The medical community is continually revealing the value of antioxidants in combatting free radicals in our bodies that are often associated with cancer, heart disease, and the effects of aging.

Wild and organically grown blueberries have significantly higher concentrations of total antioxidants than conventionally grown domestic or farmed blueberries. They also have significantly higher total antioxidant capacity.

As Nancy and I were blissing out on berries, fresh fish, swimming, reading and casual exploring, two good friends were doing their own fishing and berry foraging in a lake no more than five miles from us as the raven flies. The primary difference was that the lake they were on had experienced a major burn less than ten years ago. During a wildfire, the blueberry shrub can burn but the deep horizontal rhizomes can survive. Consequently the plant vigorously resprouts and spreads. Burned over forests can become the motherlodes of blueberries. My two buddies ended up gorging on berries and bringing home eight, yes, eight, gallons of blueberries!

Even without a clock, we returned back to Basecamp, our house, on the proper day. Not long after returning home to Basecamp,  I was reading and came across a 1920’s slang expression, “the berries.” It was used to declare how great something might be.

Seems fitting, because our trip was “the berries.”

red pine clusters and clouds