By the time we left Spokane that weekend she had found a few stores that sold huckleberry products. We loaded up on specimens and shipped them off to friends in the distant south and took some home for ourselves. Wow! Huckleberries are sweeter than blueberries and about as close as you can come to tasting a piece of heaven itself. Everything we put them with — yogurt, ice cream, pie — tasted great. I even put huckleberry honey on ice cream and loved it!
Being relatively new to Seattle, we thought Huckleberries must be quite popular here in the state of Washington. Man, were we ever wrong. I felt like I was trying to explain white cheese dip to people again. I don’t know why, but I seem to develop acute cravings for specialty foods that no one has ever heard of. And people look at you weird when you ask about foods they don’t eat.
“Huckleberries?” they said. “What are those? Maybe you mean lingonberries? Marionberries? Blueberries?” Lordy, lordy, we was among the heathens!
We visited every store we could think of. We frantically searched the Internet for huckleberry retailers and specialty foods handlers in Seattle. How could people living in a city so engrossed with the environment and natural foods have no knowledge or resources for huckleberries?
One day we took a trip down to Mount Rainier. We drove through the park and stopped at Longmire in the evening to have dinner at the Longmire Inn. On a whim, I decided to look and see if the general store had any huckleberry products. Ohmygoodness, they had huckleberry chocolate, cocoa, and other sweet things. I bought about $60′ worth of candy, honey, and whatever else I could find and left in huckleberry rapture. (NOTE: Be careful when you break off a piece of the Mount Rainier chocolate — it exploded onto my chest in a dark movie theater).
My girlfriend is more adventurous than I. We’ve occasionally passed bushes on sides of roads where she would say, “Huckleberries! Let’s pick some!” To which I always respond, “How do you know they were huckleberries?” I fear she may find a huckleberry picking class and sign us up for it. Much as I love huckleberries, I’m not a berry picker.
Although I’ve lived in the country from time to time I grew up mostly in cities and towns. The closest I’ve come to growing my own food and foraging for food was when my mother decided we had to have the freshest strawberries possible. She rounded up the kids, threw them in a car, and drove for an hour until she found a farm where you could pick strawberries. We spent 4-5 hours in the blazing sun bending over, fighting over strawberries to pick. I managed to get out of picking peas a few years later but still had to spend an afternoon shelling them.
Then there was a time when I was about 10 years old that a friend told me about honeysuckle bushes. We spent an afternoon denuding a bush of its sweet nectar. Only later did I realize some local hummingbirds went without a meal because of us. I’ve never been able to eat honeysuckle again. I’ve also picked carrots, celery, and green onions — all safely grown in friends’ and relatives home gardens. Domestic foods and I, however, usually meet at the grocery store where they are properly canned, cooked, frozen, or otherwise safely processed.
I’ve picked limes, oranges, and other fruits from trees. I’ve gathered pecans and a few other nuts. I’ve picked ears of corn and things I’ll never know the names of. I’ve walked through the wilds of Florida and Texas, Georgia and Washington, Indiana — well, I’ve been around the map. I look but I don’t touch out in the wilderness. I’m not particularly fond of thorns, snakes, and other prickly things. I’m the guy who always wears heavy shoes and long thick pants for a brief stroll in the woods. I’m also usually the only one who isn’t bitten by bugs, scratched raw by briars, or burned to a crisp by the unforgiving sun.
When people go camping, they may take a blanket or a sleeping bag, perhaps even a tent. I do own a camping chair but I do all my camping at the Doubletree and Holiday Inn Express. Roughing it for me is having to cool down a hot hotel room by turning on the air conditioner. I don’t see myself fending off bears, competing for huckleberries.
And while it’s true that bears eat huckleberries, I’m afraid I feel no guilt over their loss. One doesn’t have to pick huckleberries to enjoy them, nor to enjoy all the different ways they can be prepared. Just finding and collecting products by the various families and small businesses that produce huckleberry products is a challenging pursuit. I may devote years to documenting all the little huckleberry product companies out there.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what you find here.