I could pick berries all day long.  And so I did.  I packed a picnic and Lessa and I drove off to Paradise at Mount Rainier for a day of berry picking and good conversations.  As it was cloudy, we never did see the mountain, but we did see fields of wildflowers, a marmot, and thousands of perfect huckleberries.  We made friends with a trickle of tourists who wanted to know what it was we were picking.  We never did use the story about the berries being marmot berries (the berry whose nutrients give marmots their ability to whistle, of course), and I will neither confirm nor deny that we only didn’t use it because we came up with it too late.  Instead, we were very nice, offering samples and actual facts about berries.

I probably picked my first huckleberry at Paradise.  They’re hard to miss, if you’re the kind of person who knows to look, and I was born that kind of person.  I remember the satisfaction I felt the time I convinced my family to go on their hike without me; as nice as the hike would be, I wanted to pick berries. 

Berry picking is all about resorting to a primal gatherer instinct.  It’s meditative, relaxing, engaging, and delicious.  Lessa and I were in definite gatherer-mode; we were so absorbed in berry picking we got back to Seattle several hours later than we’d intended.  Sure, there’s the voice that says, “We really should be going now.”  That voice is no match for thousands of years of evolution, believe me.  We picked more berries.

Now time to engage the primal instinct to bake tarts...