I THOUGHT I had died and gone to blackberry heaven. It all started when I fell into a hole in a brush-covered slash pit.
This is normal for those of us who pursue the wild blackberry. Trapped in a stack of rotting limbs, up to my waist in stinging nettles, thistles and the prickly vines of the blackberry, all you need is a sweltering day to make it perfect. Because as long as we have a good blackberry patch, we don’t care what we have to endure to pick them.
If you consider the invasive Himalayan or Evergreen berries that grow along the road in late summer to be wild blackberries, you should stop reading this now. We are after the little wild blackberries that grow in secret places, the farther from the road, the better.
They like clearcuts and old burns. Once the conflagration settles, it only takes a couple of years for the berries to sprout and produce a crop.
We spend all year scouting blackberry patches. Spring is the best time to find a berry patch, when a carpet of white blossoms makes them easy to spot — but you can’t make a pie out of blossoms. So you might have to scout a number of blackberry patches before you find blossoms that turned into berries.
Once you find your secret blackberry patch, it can be a challenge to keep it that way. There’s no better way to lose a friend or gain an enemy than by revealing the secret location of a blackberry patch.
As a kid, I once stumbled upon an old timer in his secret berry patch. There were giants in those days. Al picked over 50 gallons of wild blackberries a year. He did not do this by sharing his patches with nosy kids. He all but accused me of tracking him down to find his secret patch. Which I never did. Still, it took him years to forgive me.
Blackberries have always been a valuable commodity here. The Native Americans used to devote a lot of effort to picking berries. Blackberries were formed into cakes and dried. Berry patches were owned. Dried berries were wealth.
Little has changed.
At the height of the season, it’s possible to find wild strawberries, huckleberries and blackberries all ripe at the same time. It’s what we call the grand slam of berry picking.
There are not enough hours in the day to pick all the berries, so we concentrate on the blackberries. That’s how I fell into the hole in the first place.
Not that I cared. Skeins of berries hung all around. I began filling my bucket before I gained my balance, ignoring a buzzing sound until the pain of a hundred red hot pokers got my attention.
Hornets! It is a curious rule of blackberry picking that all the best patches are likely located above a hornet’s nest. You can’t allow a little thing like that to get in your way or you will never enter the ranks of the five-gallon-a-day club.
Keep an eye peeled for bears. Bears prefer picking their berries at night, so it’s hard to compete with them. Once the bears move into your berry patch, you might as well find another one.
Berries grow best in clearcuts that have not been sprayed with herbicides. Timber managers spray Olympic Peninsula clearcuts to kill anything that would compete with Douglas fir, the King Cotton of the Northwest. As a result, wild berries have been eradicated throughout much of their range.
I and many other wild creatures have suffered.
The band-tailed pigeon, whose flocks numbered in the millions in historic times, is now almost a rarity. The pigeons fed on elderberries, another casualty of herbicide spraying. The night hawk, a crow-sized, insect-eating member of the goat sucker family, is another rare bird these days. They nested in clearcuts. They were sprayed. Now the nighthawks are almost gone.
Leaving us blackberry pickers to conclude we might be next. You cannot have your pie and spray it, too.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.