#huckleberry

Acai Berry:

Nourishment, happiness, energizing, motivation, productivity, healing, and blissfulness.

Blackberry:

Banishment, abundance, affluence, healing, dispelling, warding, prosperity, and protection.

Blueberry:

Gratitude, tranquility, harmonization, contentment, understanding, balancing, and healthiness.

Boysenberry:

Growth, ambition, accomplishment, inspiration, rebirth, hopefulness, and transformation.

Cloudberry:

Illusions, nourishment, glamours, healthiness, energizing, distortion, and energy manipulation.

Cranberry:

Healthiness, romance, elegance, purification, healing, cleansing, majesty, and sensuality.

Elderberry:

Blessings, fortification, invocation, healing, summoning, warding, conjuration, and protection.

Goji Berry:

Longevity, growth, motivation, vitality, ambition, expansion, lasting life, and motivation.

Gooseberry:

Happiness, enlightenment, joyfulness, sacredness, delightfulness, transformation, and spirituality.

Huckleberry:

Protection, wealth, defense, insightfulness, fortune, warding, affluence, and enlightenment.

Lingonberry:

Creation, fortune, beauty, wealthiness, good luck, attraction, prosperity, and potential.

Mulberry:

Calculation, abundance, intelligence, prosperity, patience, introspection, strategy, and good wealth.

Raspberry:

Warding, romance, kindness, protection, admiration, fortitude, compassion, and true love.

Salmonberry:

Compassion, courage, kindness, romance, bravery, generosity, insight, and awareness.

Strawberry:

Romance, purification, magnificence, kindness, cleansing, elegance, and sensuality.

Cheeseburger - Huckleberry

In rural North Idaho, Huckleberries are typically sold by the gallon. If you are lucky and berries are in abundance, a fifty-eight year old man with a patchy beard, missing tooth, and torn off jean shorts sitting under a slab of cardboard that says “HUCKLEBERRIES” will sell you a Ziploc gallon bag for forty dollars. More often than not, the season was dry and your wallet looks at losing about fifty to fifty-five bucks. The Sandpoint farmers market merchants typically ask for sixty. Moscow Food Co-Op sells them for 11.99 a pound.

If you don’t know what a Huckleberry is, it is a small ball of gold loosely related to the blueberry - only better. My roommate Cami, a Priest River native, says as I am writing this that “when North Idaho finally succeeds from the nation and goes off the gold standard, Huckleberries will be our main form of currency.”

A currency you truly have to work for. If you are unwilling to part with a portion of your bank account, you must the sacrifice sleep. Early in the Huckleberry season, about mid-summer, it is typical for families to wake at five a.m. and head up the mountains. Or if they are really dedicated, they will take a weekend and camp out.

My family carried none of these necessary burdens. Parents would plan to leave the house at eight, rain or shine. After waking kids up and making breakfast and preparing lunch and collecting buckets we would leave my Gramma’s house closer to eleven. This, of course, meant more hours in the sun.

Large coolers would be stuffed into trunks, not for lunches, but for berries, and hoards of Williams’ (Yes, all related.) would climb steep banks and swat mosquitoes for hours upon hours while carefully hand picking berries we were born knowing how to identify. One more thing that runs in our veins.

We scowled at Californians with pickers that shamelessly destroyed the bushes that took years to grow and years still to produce.

One day, during the only vacation up from Arizona that my Grandma Sharon accompanied my Mom, sister, and I, my dad coaxed us all up the mountain in the rain - I believe it was the Upper Pack River area. We hastily left the car. In is attempt to show up the best berry patch he’d ever stumbled across, we had to cross the river. In order to dross the river, we had to carefully jump from rock to rock. Again, in the rain.

Most of us had made it over when we heard a splash distinct from the rain hitting the water and a “wwwhhhhaaa…” of uncertainty.

My Grandma had fallen into the river. Covered in icy water, she decided to warm up in the car while we picked the not-so-spectacular berry patch. Maybe my parents divorced because dad is terrible at Huckleberry picking. Probably not, but it’s a legitimate cause up here.

All of this was before the mass production of Huckleberry products. Chances are good that those Wild Huckleberry chocolates you bought at the candy stores in Seaside, OR are A. a synthetic flavor B. a cross-bred domesticated plant that barely resembles a real Huckleberry or C. only came to be because they came to mountain patches en mass and tore up whole bushes.

Not to say they didn’t come across true wild Huckleberries in an honest, honorable fashion. I’m just saying that there are too many Huckleberry products out there for every single one to be real.

I have no true issue with what they call “domesticated Huckleberry bushes” but let me explain you a thing: The true berry bush thrives only in specific conditions. It has to be in just the right altitude with just the right amount of sun at just the right time of day with just the right amount of water with just enough acidic properties in the soil. It’s home is in the mountains of the Inland Northwest stretching into Montana and into Canada and that is where it belongs. To ask this organism to grow in your clean, composted garden next to your strawberries is to change it’s entire genetic structure.

Essentially, scientifically, the Huckleberry begins to taste, look, and smell more like a blueberry - entirely defeating the purpose of domesticating the Huckleberry and devaluing the true rarity that makes it special in the first place.