How huckleberries earned the nickname "purple gold"
How huckleberries earned the nickname "purple gold"
Memories of a Montana tradition
Huckleberry season is winding down out West as summer turns to fall, but there should still be another week or two of good picking in the high country. So I’m sharing an essay that first appeared in my memoir, Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging.
It was fun to introduce my children to huckleberry picking during our Montana visit about a month ago. My eldest daughter got so into it that she picked a quart in about an hour, and her grandparents gave her a little spending money for her trouble. That simple equation of work and reward is a good lesson for kids. My parents taught me to work hard, but they also taught me to be smart about the jobs I chose. Sometimes that meant landscaping for people with lake properties or splitting firewood for neighbors. I suppose you might call it the original gig economy. I think it’s still true that young people in rural America can avoid working for minimum wage if they ask around and think creatively. It’s the kind of freedom I try to protect in my job search now — the sense I had as a young person that I could make a living while breathing mountain air, that I could work for ten or twelve hours a day and still feel free.
Purple Gold
On summer mornings in northern Montana, around the time I had begun to think of myself as a young man, I rose in the dark to join my family for a hurried breakfast of toast, raspberry jam, and peppermint tea before heading out to the huckleberry patch. My parents were in their forties then, my father still sturdy and trim, my mother’s eyes just beginning to soften at the edges. My sister often wore her hair in braids on mornings like these, shrugging into an old sweatshirt and a stained pair of jeans. After breakfast my parents loaded several five-gallon buckets, a few smaller pails, and a couple of large coolers into the bed of our blue Ford, where the four of us crammed into the front seat for the long drive.
Because we sold most of our berries, my folks knew of dozens of places to go, some over an hour away. I was most often asleep within minutes of leaving our driveway, wedged between my sister and the door, my head cradled by the seatbelt. Many of the berry patches, like good fishing holes or hunting spots, were kept secret from all but family and the closest friends, so it is likely a solace to my father that I can only recall the way to a handful of those places, so often did I try to steal a few last moments of sleep from the morning, my head bouncing against the shoulder strap as the truck grumbled up the switchbacks, rattling over washboard ruts in the gravel road.
Huckleberrying was serious business for us, the main way I bought school clothes for the coming fall, and more necessary a source of income for the household than I realized. My father drove with one hand, jimmying the stick shift with the other, and my mother sat quietly with her hands in her lap, gazing over the dusty dashboard at the oncoming day. Though I rarely looked forward to those mornings, my parents never hectored me into coming along. My sister and I grew up working in our acre-sized garden, picking apples from the orchard, caring for chickens, and splitting firewood. We accepted work as a given in our family life. Sleeping fitfully in the cab, I gave little thought to how central these memories of working outdoors might become to my sense of belonging in the mountains, where I now go to recreate but still feel most at home when gathering wood for a campfire or sweating a heavy pack to the next tent site.
Despite my attempt to sleep, the rough ride made me glad to hear the creaking springs of the parking brake, and I piled out of the truck without complaint. Even in late July it was chilly on the mountain just after sunrise. My sister and I cinched down our hoods and chose our pails. We used old rags for belts, running the cloth under the pail handle, knotting the ends like a drawstring around our waists. My parents each brought a five-gallon bucket in addition to the smaller containers we used, and we all carried lids to cover the berries once we’d filled our pails.
Then everyone split up for the day. My mother must have watched where my sister and I wandered, but I was never conscious of her gaze. I slipped across the mountain in solitude, losing myself among the alder as I bent to my task. The idea was to fall into a partial trance, like a pianist who must concentrate in the middle space between distraction and overexertion. Part of me focused on the berries, both hands gently stripping the bush, eyes roaming for the next patch. The rest of me drifted through the free associations of dreams, the curve of a purple berry conjuring a girl’s breast, which led to thoughts of the football coach’s daughter, which made me think with dread of the two-a-day practices starting in August and the plastic taste of water from the Rubbermaid cooler, so different from the spring water we drank at home.
Then I would think of the spring in the woods behind our house, which bubbled out of the ground in what seemed like an endless supply. I would be lost in that thought for a while, meditating on the burbling mystery of water, the way it danced and murmured and glittered in the sun. My junior high teacher had a way of saying water as werder, which I liked for its softness. But words never seemed to encompass it. They were all approximations of the dancing, shape-changing thing. All the while, the taut flesh of huckleberries would be rolling through my fingers into the bucket, my daydreams superimposed over the sense world the way Jimi Hendrix saw music streaming from his amplifier in kaleidoscopic color.
Side note: it is interesting how similar our family outings were to those described by indigenous families in the clip below, yet how different my memories of solitude are from the more communal experience.
We were semi-professional pickers, somewhere between the recreational sort and the full-time harvesters who camped for weeks at a time in the national forests. Some commercial pickers cut a notch from the front of a coffee can, welded steel tines in the space like a row of giant teeth, and rampaged through the woods raking the bushes clean. Others spread a sheet of canvas on the ground, beating the bushes with a cloth racket and gathering the berries with a good deal of leaves and twigs. We sometimes stumbled onto the broken branches and mashed berries left by these bounty hunters. My parents filled orders with a chocolate maker and a few other local producers, then froze the rest of the crop in gallon-sized freezer bags to take on the road. We picked and cleaned our berries by hand, which meant each berry froze individually, as compared to the commercial kind, which froze in a solid block of ice after being pulped by the picker tines. This allowed my father to pull a frozen ziplock bag from his cooler and shake out an exact cup, a stunt that wowed gourmet chefs in Missoula and Bozeman, who sometimes paid us as much as fifty dollars per gallon.
There was a mercenary side to these outings. I cannot forget that my purpose was to take as many berries off the hill as I could, so I could buy Levi’s jeans for the upcoming school year. But more than this, I learned from working in the wild to embrace my inner life. Part of the pleasure of berry picking was the gathering, watching the level of berries rise in the pail. My cloth belt allowed me to pick with both hands, so I began by feeling for each berry with my thumb and forefinger. The remaining fingers made a funnel against the side of my palm, where I cradled the berries I had picked until I could hold no more. Then I poured those first handfuls into the bucket, the berries thumping and echoing like a heavy rain. As they fell I scanned the bush for the fruit I had missed, so my hands knew immediately where to go next. Soon the bottom of the pail disappeared, and the purple mound rose as I straightened and bent and coaxed the huckleberries into my hands, dreaming all the while.
When we met for a lunch of sauerkraut rolls, carrots, and gingersnaps, my father spread newspaper in the bottom of a twenty-gallon cooler and poured the berries in layers, each bucketful cushioned by fresh paper. The next day we lifted a layer at a time onto the dining table and cleaned the purple mounds in handfuls, tossing the leaves and stems into one bowl and the fruit into another. Then we passed our goods to the end of the table, where my father filled the freezer bags with a quart-sized measuring cup.
It took two or three hours to clean a day’s picking, so we listened to music while we worked. In the early days it was the Mamas and the Papas, Dylan, Clapton, and Joan Baez. But during one of our church revivals we were challenged by a traveling minister to give up the things of the flesh. One of our neighbors hosted a giant bonfire where people threw away possessions estranging them from faith. Dozens of vinyl albums were stacked in my parents’ closet from their hippie days. They went through their records before the bonfire, sometimes spinning an LP for the last time to make sure it was bad enough to toss. Clapton’s live album Just One Night did not last long when the crowd began chanting “cocaine.” Sorting huckleberries took on a different tone after that summer. The Christian rock industry began to boom and I bought hair metal with a message that would pass muster at home. Clean berries. Clean thoughts.
But for days afterward my fingers carried the purple stain. People nodded and smiled in the grocery store like they might to a firefighter smudged with ash or a mechanic in his oil-soaked overalls. Huckleberry clothes never really came clean, either. My mother reduced some of the stains by spreading shirts in the bathtub and dousing them with boiling water. She thought the impact and the heat drove the color out, but even then a shadow remained like a reminder of the wild woods.
If we were guilty of commodifying huckleberries as “the crop,” my family worked at the weak end of the commercial spectrum. The contractors who used beaters could get as many as fifty gallons from each worker per day, and those who savaged the bushes with picking tines might get closer to twenty. Even on our best days my sister and I were lucky to get five gallons apiece. Our folks might edge closer to eight or ten. This was a sacrifice my parents were willing to make and one I honor now, because I understand they cared about more than the quality of the fruit. They wanted us to take care in the woods, to leave it as we found it.
Our grandparents sold huckleberries during the Depression, when the first big picking camps emerged. Around this time miners began building sluice boxes to clean the berries, rolling them down a chute to filter the leaves and stems. The name “purple gold” stuck, and the Forest Service briefly contemplated huckleberries as a more profitable resource than timber. Some camps set up makeshift canneries in the woods, shipping the goods off to Spokane and Missoula. Black workers migrated through from Seattle, weaving summer huts of bear grass and willow, and the Kootenai people set up tipi camps from Libby to Bonners Ferry. But few fortunes were made in this business. It was mostly a fallback plan for “folks in hard straits,” as a forest ranger wrote in 1933. By the time my sister and I were learning the trade, most of the buyers ran gift shops, and we were not selling berries so much as memories of how life used to be.
I knew huckleberry picking marked me as different from my peers, but that was nothing new. My parents tried to turn back the clock when they bought the old homestead in the hills above Troy and began a twenty-year experiment in subsistence living. I wore homemade corduroy overalls to kindergarten and even shocked the teacher once by bringing a Tupperware cup of raspberry wine when I had the sniffles. My parents feared the corruptive effect of television so much I rarely spent the night with friends and could only listen, puzzled, when classmates spoke of The Dukes of Hazzard. When my uncle snuck me out to the theater once to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the sensory flood was so intense I went numb with excitement and thereafter glutted myself on movies and video games every chance I got. Yet berry picking gave me a taproot in an older life, a pith drawing from a former time.
Huckleberries, for our family, offered a way to survive without playing by the rules. Even though I sometimes chafed against the long hours, I felt lucky up there among the Indian paintbrush and goldenrod, as I did in college when I came home to join the Forest Service while my classmates suffered through long days at Wal-Mart. I count it as one of my richest gifts now to have had the Rocky Mountains as my page to read, my touchstone for self-making. Picking huckleberries in clearcuts taught me to watch for small good things even within devastation, the way an urban child might admire a violet sprouting through a crack in the asphalt.
Huckleberries are a major staple for most bear species, so every picker we knew had stories about close calls. Some carried handguns, others bought pepper spray, but my parents were of the mind that antagonizing a bear would only worsen the danger. One of my uncles was treed by a sow with cubs one fall when he surprised her while scouting elk for the upcoming hunting season. The snort in the bushes startled him, and when the sow stood on her hind legs — over seven feet tall — he threw his steel lunch pail into the brush. She charged, and he scarcely had time to scramble up a small Douglas Fir before she was there, ripping up after him and slashing at his boots. The treetop bent under their weight, a young man kicking desperately at an enraged mother bear. One of his kicks struck home, and the sow fell from the tree, grunting as she hit the ground. For over an hour she lay at the base of the fir, gnashing her teeth whenever he moved, though she finally gathered her cubs and cleared out.
Even though the threat of a bear attack was real — it had happened to someone close to me — I was made to understand there were other ways of dealing with danger than losing my cool. My mother believed she would be able to speak soothingly to a bear if it came to that, and while it is fortunate she never had to test this theory, I don’t doubt she could have been persuasive. She had trained her steely blue eyes on me often enough as a child for me to imagine that a bear caught in her gaze might suddenly wish to be elsewhere. When I was very young she was fond of reading to me from Blueberries for Sal, a story about a mother and child who go to the woods to gather berries. Just over the hill a sow bear and its cub are browsing in a berry patch. Young Sal and the cub each wander away from their mothers to eat their fill. When they try to find their way back, they each mistakenly follow the sound of the wrong mother, Sal stumbling upon the sow and the cub surprising Sal’s mother. All ends well, as one might expect in a children’s book, and I suppose there was some of this innocent faith in my parents’ belief that the forest was not a truly dangerous place.
I cannot say we were safe, because we spent ten hours a day inching across steep slopes with our hands occupied and several pounds dangling from our waists. Falling was inevitable, and my first thought was not to protect myself, but to keep from spilling my bucket at all costs. If I took a false step, I lifted the bucket with one arm and turned the opposite shoulder into the fall, bruising my shoulders on rocks and gashing my back against jagged logs.
My sister stumbled onto a bald-headed hornet’s nest once at dusk, scarcely thirty yards from the truck. I was leaning against the tailgate, gazing at the dim outline of the mountain, when I heard her scream and saw her arms waving, ghost-like, as she ran across the slope. We wore long sleeves and pants to protect ourselves from the brush, so the hornets mostly attacked her head and neck. Her cheeks swelled horribly, and she spent most of the next day plastered in mud, like a Vedic pilgrim at a spa. What I remember, aside from the panic, is my mother shouting, “Cover your head!” and my father hollering, “Don’t spill your berries!”
I think of the many precautions I would need to take now if I were to bring a group of young people into the wild. There would be forms to sign, briefings about rattlesnakes, bee kits to pack along. And this is well and good. It would be foolish to lose a life through carelessness. But my family’s huckleberry lore also suggests that safeguards can dull the imagination. Living with risks seems essential to any meaningful creativity, and I like to think this was also the logic behind my parents’ refusal to carry a gun into the berry patch, that they thought we should carry our wits with us instead.
I was ringing like a struck pipe with a feeling of triumph.
Every huckleberry picker has a bonanza story. Ours came one August when the conditions had been nearly perfect. Spring had come in and gone out like a lamb. No frosts came after the bushes had bloomed, and summer rains fed the mountainside through July. My parents knew of a clearcut in the Bull River valley approaching its peak for huckleberry yield, just on the threshold of being taken over by alder and tamarack. The road to the berry patch had been gated for grizzly habitat, so chances of competing with other pickers were slim. Many of our outings were based on hunches, and my father probably made the decision over dinner one night, thinking this would be the right elevation for a good August harvest.
It was at least an hour’s drive to the gated road, so we piled into the Ford before sunrise. I nestled against the shoulder strap and fell into my usual half-sleep. The tires hummed on the highway. My sister slept on my shoulder. The cab smelled of clean cotton and sawdust. I dozed fitfully, the seat vibrating with the feeling of hurtling toward the day’s work.
My father took a turn from the main highway onto a dirt road. The truck shimmied on the ruts as it climbed the switchbacks. Alder branches thumped against the side mirrors. Then there was a green gate across the road, the frame bent at the hinges where someone had tried to ram it off the post. The sun was beginning to rise, but the mountain was still in shadow as we slid from the cab. Mosquitoes whined about our heads as we gathered our gear. My father had packed a garden cart for the buckets and coolers, since we needed to hike a mile or so to the huckleberry patch. He began pulling the cart up the road like a rickshaw as we followed.
We climbed for what felt like an hour, and then the tree canopy opened up and we found ourselves on the edge of the clearcut, a steep dirt bank angling up to the edge of the duff. My father said, “Look.” We followed his eyes, and we could see the berries from the road, a sea of bushes heavy with the crop. Adrenaline kicked in then, and we rushed to gather our buckets, scrambling up the embankment and out into the brush and the stumps.
Filling a bucket was usually hard work, but it felt effortless that day, because the berries were the size of dimes, firm and ready to fall from the stem with a gentle touch. For hours I stroked the bushes free of their fruit, big frosty blue berries, fat reds, shiny blacks, all nearly bursting from their skins. My mother recalls picking a gallon from a single bush bent to the ground. I remember nothing of the sun or whether there were clouds or when we ate and drank. My knees ached from kneeling too long, my lower back cramping from the weight of the pail. Each berry bled a little where it had been pulled from the stem, my hands darkening with each blot, staining my face where I wiped away the sweat.
Dusk fell, and then a full moon rose. My father was the last to quit, after dark, though he surely would have kept on picking in the moonlight if we had not topped off every bucket and cooler the cart could hold. There must have been thousands of gallons on the mountain, bliss for the grizzlies and for us. We had thirty gallons between us, less than a single commercial picker could get with a beater, but still the finest harvest we had ever known. As my father began to ease the cart down the mountain, taking care not to lose his footing on the steep pitch of the gravel switchbacks, I wandered ahead letting my hands trail over the alder brush on the roadside and gazing up at the moon, trying to identify trees by their profiles against the night sky. The wings of the spruce. Ramrod trunks of the larch. Great sweeping boughs of the fir. My mother and sister held hands, skipping over the pitted road. I remember the hoot of an owl and gravel gleaming between the shadows. Soon we reached the gate, the truck looming out of the dark. The cart creaking as my father wheeled it to the rear of the pickup. Buckets and coolers scraping over the metal bed. Then the slam of the tailgate and the warm shoulder-to-shoulder closeness in the cab.
I did not sleep on the drive home. I was ringing like a struck pipe with a feeling of triumph. And I want to think now that I was also echoing with something like gratitude for being part of my family. This memory I want to keep safe, bearing witness to a moment when I liked who I was and who we were together. I must do this because belonging is not only a history, a personal past, but also a choice, a prophecy one brings to pass.
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This was such a beautiful story. Thank you.
Your last line...yes and wow. Certainly one to keep front and center.
All of this is rich like the purple on your fingers. Marked forever. There is so much in these memories and in your sharing. For multiple reasons, I think this is my favorite thing of yours I’ve ever read.