The huckleberries were no more than 100 feet from the broad, trampled parking lot on the summit of Mt. Wachusett. Not just a few huckleberries, either, for the low bushes were loaded with them. I bent down and tried one. It was a little dry, maybe a few days past its prime, but it had an excellent flavor. I started eating greedily. I must have gotten lost in the pleasure of eating, for I didn’t hear the man until he had come around the bend of the trail. You never want to give away the location of a good berry patch to anyone, so I quickly stood, but he had already seen me.<\/p>\n
“Ha!” he said. He was an older man with a white beard, sensibly dressed with a bucket hat and daypack. “Don’t eat all the berries!”<\/p>\n
“Look at them all,” I said. “These bushes haven’t been picked over at all. Tells you how far most people get away from their cars. And look how many there are!”<\/p>\n
“Yes,” he said as he bent over to pick and eat berries. He looked up at me. “It must the all the rain we’ve had.”<\/p>\n
“They’re a maybe little gone by, and they’re kind of dry,” I said, “but then huckleberries always are.”<\/p>\n
“That’s because huckleberries are all seeds,” he said. He left soon after that. I don’t think he liked them as much as I did. They were<\/em> a little dry, but they tasted so good; –not good enough to stop and pick a bucketful to take home, but good enough to stop for ten or fifteen minutes to pick and eat them on the spot.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n I came up the steady incline of the trail to the top of High Meadow, breathing pretty hard because I was pushing myself pretty hard. But I wasn’t walking too fast to notice the black raspberries. I picked one and ate it, and it was so good, but then I had to stop to catch my breath before I could eat more.<\/p>\n I was most of the way back to the parking lot, and thirsty because the Audubon sanctuary didn’t have any drinking water available. The black raspberries had been well-picked over a few days before, probably over the weekend — you could see the empty stems where people had pulled berries off — but quite a few more had ripened since then. The ones I picked were perfectly ripe, and because I was thirsty, they tasted especially good. In among the black raspberries I came across some blackberry canes, and they too had ripe fruit on them. Blackberries used to be one of my favorite fruits, but now I don’t like them nearly as well as black raspberries; now I think they have a funny almost-dusty taste. I ate some more black raspberries to have a good taste in my mouth before I walked on.<\/p>\n Nine miles, four hours, total elevation gain about a thousand feet, lots of sore muscles.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The huckleberries were no more than 100 feet from the broad, trampled parking lot on the summit of Mt. Wachusett. Not just a few huckleberries, either, for the low bushes were loaded with them. I bent down and tried one. It was a little dry, maybe a few days past its prime, but it had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sauntering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}