We are basking in the pleasure of a week’s visit from son Luke and his two delightful kids, the second visit of the year. Melanie, alas, has had to remain in Montreal dealing with insurance agents and the like. She has had to do that because her neighborhood in Notre Dame de Grace was visited by a flash flood while the family was away on a visit to the West coast. The damage to their own basement was relatively minor compared with that of their immediate neighbors, but not so minor as not to need an insurance adjustor. Actually there has been a fair amount of flash flooding recently up and down the Atlantic coast, including in our own local area. The heat here has also been oppressive, and I blame it for the impoverished harvest of wild raspberries—which will become the main feature of this post in a paragraph or two. Weather is big news these days.
It must have been on a particularly frigid morning in January, 1964—anyway, shortly after the Kennedy assassination-- that I stumbled into the Library of the University of Wisconsin in Madison at opening time. I had discovered that the index of real cold in Madison was the funny feeling of the little hairs freezing within your nostrils. That level had been reached the moment I put my nose out of the door. The heat within the vast vestibule of the library was like a rescue party. There seemed to be nobody else in the building except for a classic old-school librarian of the Gorgon tribe, waiting at the gate. I set out to charm her. “Wow!” I said wittily. “It is just a mite chilly out there.” “Really?” she replied. “I don’t much notice the weather….which is a pity, seeing as how it’s the only thing some people can talk about.” It cut me to the quick . I suspect that this good lady has long since gone to her reward, but if by any chance she has not, even she must now be talking about the weather.
To get back to the local wild raspberries, I have to begin with the admission that strictly speaking they are not real raspberries. My son Richard, and other agricultural purists, in fact most people, call them wineberries. The proper botanical name is Rubus phoenicolasius. The redness is of a particularly alluring nature. Even if you don’t know any Latin you probably know what a rubric is, an annotation or brief commentary in an old book, especially a religious one like the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer. In medieval manuscripts these notes were often written in red ink—or rubricated. And since raspberries confusingly come in three shades—yellow, black, and red—we also speak of “red raspberries”. Wineberries are both smaller and much seedier than the cultivated raspberries that you get in grocery stores. The seeds are a deal-breaker for the faint of heart, but not for those who grew up on breakfast grits. My opinion, not shared by everyone, is that their taste is more intense, and that they are especially fine in baked goods like cobblers topped by a little vanilla ice cream. My son Richard despises the wineberry because it is a foreign and invasive species. This indictment is true. We know from various historical episodes that it is very easy quite without intention to disturb ecological systems by importing, say, a few of those cute bunnies from the old country. Problem is, there may not be any old country vulpine varmints to combat the results of the favorite outdoor activities of the over-sexed rabbits. Somebody, sometime, had the bright idea of importing kudzu into our land. Kudzu is a voracious predator that ought to be the subject of a horror movie. It is affectionately known as “the vine that ate the South”. If you have ever been on an Interstate south of Washington, you are bound to have seen its majestic green curtains smothering the parkways. On the other hand you might argue—and it’s likely that somebody has—that a country of colonists and immigrants ought to be more welcoming. If “diversity” is a cardinal good in the human domain, why should we disdain it in the vegetable kingdom?
But I digress. My complaint is not about the berries but about the weather, which I am convinced has this year distressed the plants and reduced the size of the crop. It simply was too hot during too long a period of the early formation. Yet though berries are indeed crucial to berry picking, they are not what berry picking is really about. No, what berry picking is about is the effort to find in a few undeveloped spaces of the New Jersey suburban landscape something of the wonder and thrill experienced by a young lad in the deep country some eighty years ago. This beautiful thing, so delicious to eat, just lying about free to anybody ambitious enough to seek it out and hardy enough to endure some sunburn and berry prickles. The experience, while not exactly subject to duplication, does turn out to be transferable. So now the pleasure is mainly in seeing the pleasure of our young grandchildren. They live in Montreal, and frequently are in the marvelous parks and deep country of Quebec. They are by no means city-slickers. Even so they thrill at the discovery of brightly colored succulence superficially concealed among the jungles of unattended suburban land that, so far, has dodged the Jersey urge to cover anything green with macadam. There is a pseudo-primitivism or rurality in the activity. It cannot be quenched even by the sound of cars on a road not seventy-five yards away. According to the ancients, the first age of the world, when Saturn ruled, was one of simplicity and bliss, when the still innocent and untoiling human race fed itself on the uncultivated fruits of the earth. This was the Golden Age of the poets; and the famous poetic meditation upon it by Boethius in the early sixth century was imitated by the great poets of our language beginning with King Alfred and Chaucer.
Young John Henry and Hazel are as
yet too young for Latin meters or even their classical English remakings. But they are not too old to thrill at faint
glimpses of Golden Age life. So it
didn’t matter at all that the berries were comparatively few in number and a
bit disappointing in their hardiness. It
is the journey, not the destination; and for young sensibilities not yet taught
that transcendence is not cool, it may still be found in strange places. Thus ardent possibilities of the epic and
heroic are awaiting discovering even in the “undeveloped” open spaces of
suburban New Jersey. Maybe even,
especially there. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!
