Wild Things

To the uninitiated, picking chokecherries might seem to be pointless endeavor. The pea-sized fruits are pretty enough, hanging on the bushes in clusters that change as they ripen from a bright orange/red to a maroon so deep it is almost black. But each berry is mostly seed, covered with a thin layer of flesh so bitter that eating one will pucker your mouth for a week. Once picked, the berries have to be cooked, then mashed through a colander to separate the juice and pulp from the seeds. Producing chokecherry juice is a labor-intensive process.

That juice, however, is well worth the effort. Sweetened and cooked with pectin, it produces some of the best jelly you could ever hope to taste.

And that’s why I was out in my back yard yesterday morning, wading through knee-high grass that was still wet from last night’s thunder shower. I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and had my jeans tucked into my socks, a fashion faux pas designed to ward off ticks and chiggers.

As I stripped off clusters of chokecherries and dropped them into my bag, I kept thinking about my grandmother. I was remembering summer expeditions when she, my mother, my three sisters, and I, armed with ice cream buckets, would set out to pick chokecherries.

We kids would pick one or two berries at a time, swat at flies and mosquitoes, complain about scratchy branches and tickly tall grass, and periodically compare buckets to see who had picked the most. We always had to taste one chokecherry to verify that they were as tart as they had been the year before. We would get hot, and itchy, and bored, and be ready to go home long before our pails were filled.

Grandma would remind us that we were supposed to be picking berries, not leaves and stems, and that the harder we worked, the sooner we would be finished. All the while she would be methodically stripping off one cluster after another, harvesting every chokecherry she could reach. They would rattle into her bucket in a steady stream, and she usually had her pail half full before any of us had even covered the bottom of ours. She hated to quit while there were any ripe berries left on the bushes.

I discovered yesterday morning that, in the chokecherry-picking department, I am still more like the child I used to be than I am like my grandmother. I certainly pick faster and more efficiently than I did then, but my bag still had an embarrassing amount of stems and leaves mixed in with the berries. I got bored. I kept checking my bag to see how much I had. Even so, I hated to quit while there was still fruit on the bushes, always finding just one more cluster that I could reach if I stretched a little bit further.

I also enjoyed remembering a story that Grandma told me when she was in her 90s. One day, many years earlier, Grandpa had been a few miles away helping a neighbor with some work. Suppertime came, then evening, and finally full dark, and he still hadn’t come home. Grandma lay awake half the night, worrying that he had wrecked the car and was lying hurt in a ditch. Finally, in the wee hours, he showed up, unhurt and quite pleased with himself. On his way home the previous evening, he had come across some berry-laden bushes and had stopped to pick some. He had spent half the night filling the car with chokecherries and brought them home to her.

She didn’t tell me what her response was, but I wonder how pleased she really was with that unexpected bounty. It’s just possible that her plans for the next couple of days hadn’t included cooking a carload of chokecherries. Maybe, that once, there were more than enough chokecherries, even for Grandma.

Last weekend I visited my parents, who still live on the farm where I grew up. They were in the middle of an invasion. The place was overwhelmed by blackbirds.

Leaving the house to go for a walk, we could hear the birds before we saw them. The twittering coming from thousands of feathered black throats made a continuous background noise. The sound was an ominous cross between the buzzing of a swarm of bees and the shrieking of an elementary school playground at recess.

The sight of the birds was as uncomfortable as the sound. Like a new crop of black leaves, they covered the bare top branches of the dead Chinese elms in the old windbreak. Another part of the flock was lined up, wing to wing, along the wires between utility poles.

As we walked down the road, we could see still more birds scattered across the pasture. Sharp black heads stuck up out of the dry grass like a crop of late-blooming dark flowers. When, disturbed by our presence, they took to the air, it looked as if the prairie had suddenly caught fire and plumes of smoke were flowing skyward.

We walked for perhaps a mile along the road, watching the skeins of birds rise up in front of us and settle back behind us. Their sound was a steady accompaniment to our walk, like the musical score of a movie in which nothing bad has happened—yet.

I’ve never seen blackbirds in such numbers. Presumably they were in the neighborhood to take advantage of several nearby fields of ripening sunflowers. It would only take one or two visits by those airborne hordes to reduce a field, and the year’s profits for its owner, to nothing.

This weekend is supposed to be cold and rainy. It will be the kind of weather to curl up on the couch, maybe with a rented movie. I don’t think I’ll get Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Spring. The time of year when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of—rocks, if he’s a geologist.

Actually, that isn’t quite true. Geologists think about rocks all year around. The difference is that spring is the time they can start to go out into the field again to examine the rocks that have been covered with snow all winter.

Living with a geologist, one would think, means lots of opportunities to go hiking. It does. That’s the good news. Those opportunities involve geologic hiking rather than ordinary hiking. That (to a non-geologist) is the bad news.

Because, you see, when geologists are out in the field they aren’t just walking around looking at rocks. They’re stopping to examine rocks. They’re pondering. Some of the time, they’re doing geologic mapping. This is to regular hiking what geologic time is to regular time. The pace might be described as glacially slow.

Here is what geologic mapping looks like to a liberal-arts-person observer who has come along on a student field expedition in the naïve belief that exercise will be involved:

You walk a little ways, and you stop and break rocks open with your rock hammer to look at them, and sometimes you check them with your magnet or your hand lens. You discuss them with your working partner (in the case of the students) or with a group of students (in the case of the instructors) or even sometimes (in case no one else is available) with your liberal-arts-person assistant who can’t tell the difference between marble and granite anyway but is too polite to say so. From time to time you take a GPS reading so you know your exact coordinates. You stop frequently to make notes in your field book or to mark things on your map with your colored pencils. Sometimes you sit down to do this—on a rock, naturally.

The map is taped onto a piece of cardboard so the wind won’t blow it away, and quite often the liberal-arts-person assistant gets to carry it.  Sometimes she even gets to carry the rock hammer—though she has an unfortunate tendency to hit herself in the knee with it if she isn’t careful. She has been told that a geology student isn’t allowed to graduate until he (or she, though this practice seems to be more prevalent among male students) has mastered the art of throwing his rock hammer into the air so it spins, then catching it by the handle as it comes down. She admires this skill. She isn’t ever going to try it.

After tagging along on enough expeditions such as these, I’ve learned the difference between geologists and the rest of us. Most of us tend to think of the earth as static. There’s a hill, here’s a stream, there’s a canyon, here’s a piece of prairie; and that’s just the way things are. Geologists, on the other hand, understand that the earth is constantly changing. They know that this high meadow once was the bed of an ancient stream, or those hills once were deep beneath the earth, or that this prairie was once the bottom of an ocean. They understand that the planet is still being shaped and reshaped, so gradually that most of us can’t comprehend it. They have the ability to think in terms of millions and even billions of years.

That, to me, is even more impressive than the ability to catch a spinning rock hammer.