Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1995
The tundra is a carpet of fiery reds, oranges, and yellows right now and, boy, do we Nomeites deserve it! One solid month of rain has kept us a little bit muddy and a whole lot of crabby. So, when the sun finally did come out over the Labor Day weekend, it was time to grab the berry rakes and buckets.
My ancestors back in Germany and Holland probably picked a lot of berries in the fall. But, before I moved to Alaska, Robert McCloskey’s children’s book, Blueberries for Sal, was as close as I had ever personally been to fruit gathering. Published in 1948, the story describes a mother and her little daughter Sal picking berries on Blueberry Hill near their home in Maine. Sal’s mother in the book looks a lot like my mother did back in 1948. The fresh face, dark shoulder-length bobbed hair, the loafers, and even the old coupe she drives out to Blueberry Hill look very familiar. I looked a bit like Little Sal, too, with the overalls, windblown hair, and those little buckled shoes.
The blueberries make the sounds “kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk!” as Little Sal drops them into her empty pail. (Sal diligently keeps that pail empty, too, unable to save any berries for canning back home.) Or perhaps Maine blueberries are a particularly hard, thick-skinned variety. When my family went berry gathering, only my first two berries went anywhere near “kuplink” or “kuplank” as I softly layered each modest handful into my old ice cream bucket.
I didn’t notice Sal’s mother toting a shotgun or a .44 on that little outing, either. According to my Peterson guide on mammals, there are black bears living all over Maine. You just don’t regularly read stories about maulings in New England. It’s not like here where you can walk over to the rec center and see Wally Johnson’s bear scars if he’s in the mood. Here you know that every bear on the western Seward Peninsula is looking for the same succulent blue fruits that you are. Maybe moms are different in Maine. If it had been me seeing my child absent-mindedly wandering behind a bear sow like Sal does in McCloskey’s book, I would have shrieked and 911ed my husband (the man with the large gun) a few yards away. Sal was pretty cool herself about meeting a large mother bear. My kids listened intently to Ranger Ed Brayor’s talk on grizzlies the other night at the Visitors’ Center. They know that mother bears (and mother humans sometimes) aren’t to be taken lightly.
Sal and her mom picked blueberries from big bushes on a sunny day back there in Maine. My family was combing the low bushes on a sunny day in Alaska 46 years later. For thousands of years north country ancestors have gathered berries from Alaska to Maine, from Greenland to Norway to Siberia to Oregon. And it’s a satisfying feeling to think that even a family that enjoys cable tv can get out into the countryside in search of kuplink, kuplank, and kuplunk.
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