Right smack in the middle of our Unalakleet harvesting season, my family and I moved away. We left for Anchorage — Alaska’s largest city — in mid-July. While my brother, his wife and my dad and his wife were getting nets ready for seining, cutting and drying humpies on the Unalakleet River, my family and I were unpacking totes, not sleeping very well on air mattresses, and purchasing things like a new broom, plunger and dish soap for our new-to-us house.
For the first time in my life, I owned a house with a concrete sidewalk and a mailbox outside my door. With a yard I’d eventually have to landscape. And though I knew I was going to enjoy living near a library, a Costco, coffeeshops and thrift stores, my belly and lungs carried an anxiety. My physical body, for the past 20 years, cut humpies and picked aqpiks, or cloudberries, every July, and cut silvers and picked blueberries every August. Suddenly, instead of cutting and picking, I was … not.
I wasn’t questioning whether moving was the right decision: I wanted to be closer to doctors as well as other writers and artists. But my body wasn’t OK with this sudden absence of activity on the river, fighting 12-pound silvers, or walking the hills in my backyard, touching the tiny tundra plants, gathering their bounty for a fresh berry pie and bagging the rest in Ziplocs for winter. Facebook photos posted by people at home compounded the ache. Photos of the orangey-pink flesh of humpies drying on racks. Friends and family holding plastic buckets full of blueberries, the backdrop of the clean, life-filled tundra behind them.
So, when my friend Zach texted, asking if I wanted to pick berries on a Friday in August, I canceled my afternoon meetings and drove to the hardware store to buy some one-gallon buckets. I was looking forward to being on tundra, away from asphalt and streetlights, where tiny plants, a breeze on the cheeks and the quiet of being with the Earth seem to make life make sense.
For the first time in my life, I owned a house with a sidewalk and a mailbox outside my door. With a yard I’d eventually have to landscape.
MY SON HENNING and I met Zach at a trailhead to walk our way to the berries. I quickly realized that picking blueberries in Anchorage means alpine hiking up above the tree line. It definitely isn’t as easy as driving a four-wheeler to a fecund berry patch to fill a bucket or two. I thought picking berries in Unalakleet takes work, but picking berries in Anchorage is a fairly legitimate physical commitment. It’s a good thing I like hiking.
We walked up the trail holding our buckets, backpacks full of snacks, tea and rain gear, me in my qaspek and jeans, while spandex-clad REI models hiked past us. Realizing I wouldn’t have my own private hill to pick like in Unalakleet, I took a few deep breaths. But the trail wasn’t too congested. It was fine.
In an open area, free of willows, my belly relaxed as I saw the red, waxy leaves of the kaplaks, or, as Naluaġmiut call them, bearberries. Behind my eyes and in my body, deep into my spine, I felt a smile seeing the rounded leaves of the blueberry plant. And a small, ripe blueberry.
We started picking. However, as I picked, I realized most of the berries were hard. More than half were still green.
“They’re not ready,” I told Zach. I was disappointed, but I picked nearly a quart of not-yet-ripe blueberries for smoothies in the coming weeks.
I got home and placed the berries in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag and into the freezer. I was confused. I had been seeing photos of friends picking berries around Anchorage and over near Wasilla, an hour north. I was determined to find these ripe berries.
The next day, the urgent feeling in my body unrelenting, my husband, Timm, and I took Henning on a drive to a popular berry-picking spot north of Anchorage. We hiked the short way to the hill and, again, found unripe berries. So we decided to try our luck at Hatcher’s Pass, a very well-known and very popular and very congested blueberry-picking location where I had seen Snapchats of acquaintances picking ripe berries.
There were people in every direction. No matter where I went, I heard the voices of others. And the berries we found weren’t even ripe.
“I can’t do this,” I said to Timm. “What are they picking?”
I better, sometime soon, be able to look back at this day and laugh, I thought. I sat on the tundra plants and cried.
We drove back home, me dejected. Demoralized. With no berries.
WHILE I KNEW it would just take time for the berries to ripen, my body wouldn’t relax. For two weeks, my lungs and stomach felt tight. Most years, by the end of August, Timm and I would have put away 12 gallons of blueberries. On top of that, we would also fill out our chest freezer with aqpiks, lingonberries and crowberries. But now, in Anchorage, at the end of August, I had not one quart of ripe berries. I was not OK.
Behind my eyes and in my body, deep into my spine, I felt a smile seeing the rounded leaves of the blueberry plant.
THEN, ON LABOR DAY weekend, we made our way up above the tree line. We found some beautiful patches of blueberries, ripe, soft and blue. We picked three gallons from two different locations. And my lungs and belly finally relaxed. The cells in the marrow of my spine smiled.
Though I can simply purchase frozen berries from the Costco just more than a mile away, there’s something comforting and good in physically, tangibly providing food for your family. There’s something that’s set right in my soul, my nervous system, somewhere so deep it’s spiritual, from taking nourishment that’s offered from the land, clean and wild.
Harvesting food from this beautiful Earth will feel, look and smell different, here on the lands of the Dena’ina, in and around Anchorage. I learned it’s OK. We will be fine. The relationship with the land and water, the plant and animal relatives, will continue. I now know I can live here.
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This article appeared in the November 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Hunting for blueberries.”
