#sandpoint

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.

In rural small towns of Northern Idaho that lay in the foothills of the Bitter Root Mountains, one finds it very difficult to  grow up without knowing or knowing of every singular person of the town. This can get you into some peculiar situations.

I will disclaim right here, right off the bat, that this is not my story, it is my father’s.

A number of years ago, when I lived in Arizona and my dad was living in Idaho, my Gramma asked my dad to pick my cousin, Cameron, up from school. He agreed.

They were driving down the highway when Cameron turned around in his seat.

“Max! Turn around!”

“Why?”

“There’s a dead raccoon!”

“So?”

“I Max, I want a coonskin cap! Turn around!”

When dad thinks you’re an idiot, his eyes open a little wider, his eyebrows raise, his head tilts down a little bit and shakes quickly from side to side as if to say “Who gives a shit?” without actually saying it.

“Max!” Cameron doesn’t elongate vowels to whine when someone doesn’t want to give him something he wants. A lot like his older brother, Ryan (from the knife fight), he is straight forward and demanding. “I want a coonskin cap.”

“If it’ll get you to shut up.” Dad pulls a u-turn on the highway, pulls over opposite from the raccoon, and tells Cam to stay in the car. He crosses the road and when he gets to the carcass he notices in it something like breathing. 

“Cameron, I don’t think this thing is dead,” he shouts.

“Yeah, Max, it is. Pick it up!”

Dad reaches his foot out and nudges it.

It jumps, runs into the highway, and gets hit by a semi.

It’s dead now.

He waits for the traffic to pass, picks it as he crosses the highway, and throws in the back of the truck.

“Thanks, Max.”

As they continue north on the highway, maybe a mile or so up the road, dad sees a couple walking along the side that he recognizes and pulls over. 

“You guys need a ride?”

Dad’s clocked a lot of hours hitchhiking and likes to pay it forward when he can. Of course, this time they are beyond gone on something hard.

They climb into the back of the truck. With the dead raccoon. Don’t say a thing.

Dad stops at a gas station and tells Cameron to stay in the truck. He’s perusing the refrigerators for a cheap tallboy when Cameron appears next to him with eyes wide and breath held.

“Max.”

“I told you to stay in the truck.”

“She cradling it.”

“What?”

They come out of the gas station and the woman has the raccoon tucked in her arms like an infant, rocking it and singing.

At this moment, dad chooses not to do anything. They both get back in the cab and Cameron looks my dad in the eye and says “I want my ‘coon skin cap." 

'Cause he’s Davy Crockett or some shit.

The guy tells dad to drop them off at a nearby motel and he gladly agrees. He pulls up outside the motel office and the woman gets out with the raccoon still in her arms.

Cameron is freaking out.

"Max! Max! She’s takin’ it!”

Dad gets out of the truck and catches up to them. He sees now that the woman is in tears, still singing, and shuddering violently (induced by either grief or severe drug use). 

“Look lady,” he says, “my nephew really want that raccoon. He want to make a hat or somethin’. Could you just leave it?”

Her whole face twists and distorts into some kind of iconic B-movie horror close up and she sputters her one clear, lucid phrase of the day: “I’m gonna give it a proper burial." 

With that, she walked past him toward a motel room, presumably theirs, and dad walks back to the truck. As he sits in the drivers seat and closes the door Cameron gapes at him.

"Max.”

“No." 

To my knowledge, Cameron never got a Coonskin cap, real or fake,  and probably for the better. Though he still get’s a little worked up about it when the story comes up.

The lesson: Maybe don’t pick up roadkill? Or maybe don’t pick up hitchhikers? Maybe both?

I don’t know.

He does.