Driving Home from a
Nature Writers Conference,
I Pick Blackberries for
Dick Maxwell
July, 1997
Because of you, I'm in Colfax.
Mistook the sign for Colton, thought
maybe I'd find your old high school
teacher in a bar––it's Friday––
and tell her, Cheer up! Dick's writing has
improved so far.
But no: In summer, we teachers
plant gardens, travel, take workshops.
From the offramp,
all I can see
are rooftops, dry bushes, and trees.
A row of dead offices, brown
and low, next to a motel, and a parking
lot where
I can turn the car around. If
I'd seen a gift shop, a mail box,
I'd have sent you a postcard from the
wrong home town.
But I can't bear to look. Instead,
I drive across the street, through the
parking lot, and stop.
They roll like arrested breakers
along the driveway's edge, downhill
to the plot behind the motel:
Rows and heaps of brambles, dusty,
khaki green, forlorn
upon themselves, with dark pockets
crowned by sunlight, dioramas
of multicolored clusters, successive
siblings––ripe
miniatures of Concord grapes,
the reddish teens, juvenile whites––
and menacing, between the leaves,
rhubarb-hued sentries armed with
thorns.
I never learned to travel light.
From my back seat, I take a rag––
washed, but stained, for wiping
hands––a water bottle; pad
with clean but crumpled paper towels
the one-quart yogurt tub I've saved.
All this week, lectures, readings, and
debates on issues
philosophical and dire.
Does fictionalized narrative break the
author's pact
with the reader? Should a fire
be allowed to burn unchecked through
old-growth forests, or
is controlled pre-burning better?
Is our worst loss not open space
itself, but our relationships with
animals: Wise
trickster, the coyote, or the wren,
who––if we let
her––teaches us humility?
Dick, let me tell you what I learned
about blackberries. Be cautious.
Step tall, and use your shoes to crush
the front-line brambles. Don't fight them.
Ripe berries fall to your cupped hand
when touched, or break free
when pushed back gently toward the
bush.
Warm and soft, they plead. Relent.
Eat till nearly nauseous.
Blow away the dust and spider
webs.
Wonder at the short, curved thread
of filament that clings, umbilicus, to
things born
in that other kingdom: Wheat, corn,
and this aggregate fruit, genus rubus,
Braille of bumps
rolled, explored, deciphered, cuddled
on your tongue, then smashed against
your palate. A quiver
of pain stabs your salivary glands,
like having mumps––
tart-sour, mouth-watering juice jumps
out.
At first you ask whether this was a smart idea
but then there's a heavenly burst
of dark summer sweetness, and all
you want is more of it: Rivers
of juice that bleed into your
fingerprints, pigment grains
that sow themselves in the hard furrows
around your nails,
staining them purple-red, like beets.
Find the wedge-shaped seeds, still
encased
in their slippery placentas,
ready to drop, transported whole
by berry-loving birds and beasts.
This week, a botanist explained that
hemp seeds contain
more protein than all other seeds. What of blackberries'?
Balanced between incisors, cracked,
or ground between molars, in that
one place where the teeth meet, flat as
anvils: Bitter taste
of wood pulp, tannin, black tea leaves,
astringent. The shocked tongue's released
by the sour antidote of one more––just
one more––
knobby blackberry. But, of course,
there's no such thing. It's two, or three.
I fill my plastic tub, but all
my excuses––too soft, too bruised,
too wet, too small––my stomach gets.
One more thing I learned––I can't
forget to tell you, Dick––
sometimes you'll stop before you reach
for the blackest, fattest berry. It gives a speech:
You'll
get hurt sure. I've grown thorns on
thorns to block your way.
Now, that's the berry you should pick.
Don't save it. Eat it right away.
Because of you, I'm in Colfax.
I imagine if you'd lived here,
you'd come back to cruise these
brambles for an hour. You'd say,
This
old town gave me all it could: An education––
not
a great one, but all three R's––
Readin', 'Ritin',
Richard. And these
blackberries. Man,
oh, man, they're good!
Eve Sutton