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Comparing mental maps of both foraging sexes also made clear that they lived in different worlds: weighed down by toddlers, women knew smaller, nearer places more intimately, while men, unencumbered and perhaps rushed to return, excelled at remembering long-distance trails but in less detail. It is tempting, from this perspective, to contemplate domestic dynamics, attitudes toward the settled and the unsettled (or the unsettling), the bird in the hand and the birds in the bush. My girlfriend, for instance, loves combing the outskirts of town, looking for musk ox wool, mushrooms, or chips of opaque beach glass—turquoise and cobalt—the kinds no longer made. Although she’s an avid hiker, an evening stroll through the neighborhood suits her just fine. She can pore for hours over furniture catalogues. Not the homebuilder or handyman type, I’ve bunked in barracks, tents, monasteries, a guest ranch, log cabin, sauna, storage unit, stick lean-to, garage, various trailers, rock alcoves, the belly of a ferry, a houseboat on dry land, a survivalist’s underground bunker, and a bluetarp tootsie roll on the banks of the Rio Grande—all furnished minimally or not at all. Only half-joking, she accuses me of ADD and of having become jaded about small things in nature, such as birdsongs, snowflakes, or scents. It is true, I did inherit the wandering gene, possibly from a great-grand uncle who sold the farm and joined a traveling circus. I crave a fresh view, and forever following rivers, and piecing together new backpacking routes—big picture stuff. Even the flat prospect of a topo map tickles me. Luckily, the rewards of wild fruit—culinary and otherwise—prompt me to cherish the tangible and nearby, not just the abstract, faraway. Back home, I carefully rinse leaf litter from my
CIRQUE loot before freezing the berries in Ziplocs. The local Inupiat stored theirs in skins bloated with seal oil, preventing spoilage and scurvy. Our stash likewise provides precious vitamins where produce is airlifted in and therefore expensive. In the bleak pit of December, when snow buries porches and winds wail like errant Janet Levin souls, our berry-inked lips mock hypothermia. Cocooned in the light of our kitchen, we relish summer’s dense flavors, memories of lush life. We fold them into muffin- and pancake batter, fill jam jars and piecrusts, or spoon them directly from a bag as a substitute for sorbet and lost daylight. Berry picking can be many things to many people: livelihood, pastime, fresh-air therapy, pause for reflection, or displacement activity—even act of resistance. I vividly recall a field trip with an ethnographer—a deadringer for Yul Brynner—to an Inupiaq village up the coast. In her single-room home, he was grilling some grandmother, who had dressed in her best kuspuk, about his pet theory—the existence of Eskimo clans before first contact with Anglo-Americans. Repeatedly, and with great patience, she denied ever having heard of such kin groups. When the researcher kept pressing, her gaze wandered out the window. “It’s such a nice day,” she said sweetly. “I think I’m going to look for berries.” On the year’s last fishing trip, to Council, I meet Cassie Walker, an Inupiaq elder with silver pageboy hair and skin mottled—strangely—like the worn-out salmon in the river’s pools. She was born there, in a cabin above the Niukluk, during the Great Depression. As her mind peoples a near-ghost town with spirits, she points out who used to live where. Many of her parents’ generation perished from ills that dog vagrant fortune seekers everywhere. The newcomers drove away game and introduced God, booze, and diseases; but berries kept bluing, in good as in bad years. In 1959, after boarding school in Sitka, Cassie moved to San Francisco, where she still lives. Now, perhaps for the last time, the old woman has come to this river, to claim days long gone, and the berries that mark vital ground.