A novelist I’m very close to — we practically inhabit the same skin — has been spending a lot of time this summer hiding in his backyard blueberry patch, driven there not just by the beauty of the ripening berries and their sweet jolts of tartness, but by his disgust at the events of the larger world, including a presidential campaign so nasty and bitter even tougher souls than his shudder away from it in horror.
He sometimes feels guilty about this, his selfish escapism. When he does, he reaches for Thoreau.
Not just any Thoreau, but his posthumous book Wild Fruits, first published 150 years after his death, thanks to a Thoreau disciple named Bradley Dean who managed to decipher Thoreau’s notoriously difficult handwriting and wrestle the uncompleted manuscript into shape.
Thoreau, looking for a new literary direction after Walden — and with only a year or two to live — embarked on a project so ambitious it would have daunted a younger, healthier man: to write the natural history of Concord, which, given his intensely local frame of reference, meant writing the natural history of his entire world.
He wouldn’t stress the philosophy this time, but focus on the specifics of what he discovered on his rambles through the local woods. He had just read Darwin’s newly published On the Origin of Species, and it excited the scientist/naturalist part of him that until now had been overshadowed by the Transcendentalist.
He had always been a wonderfully accurate observer, an “ecologist” before the term was coined. Today, when climatologists are trying to understand global warming, they go back to his journals to learn how much later in the season wildflowers and berries blossomed in his day compared to our own. (In the case of blueberries and their tubular white blossoms, a remarkable five weeks worth of difference, appearing in early April in today’s Concord, mid-May in his.)
The form of Wild Fruits is simplicity itself: Thoreau will trace the course of one Concord year by describing in detail and successive buddings and bloomings of local plants and trees, from elms in early spring to winterberries in late December.
Blueberries are the midsummer stars in this seasonal procession, vaccinium angustifolium, which he loved to gather on Concord hilltops, or, on longer excursions, the rocky ledges of Mount Monadnock. He was a good, assiduous picker by all accounts — and no essayist ever coated blueberries in a better prose style.
“Blueberries have an innocent ambrosial taste, as if made of the ether itself, as they plainly are colored with it. I see in my mind’s eye the beautiful clusters of these berries as they appeared to me twenty or thirty years ago, when I came upon an undiscovered bed of them behind some higher bushes in a sproutland — the rich clusters dropping in the shade there and bluing all the ground, without a grain of their bloom disturbed.”
“Bluets,” he called these wild berries, using the original French word from Samuel de Champlain’s day, describing them as “little blue sacks of swampy nectar and ambrosia commingled, whose bonds you burst by the pressure of your teeth,” adding, a few lines later, “The blueberry has the wildest flavor of any that I pick; it is like eating a poisonous berry which your nature makes harmless.” Thoreau, as ever, is the master of the unexpected turn of phrase, the perfect turn of phrase, that no one but he could have written.
Aside from sharing his delight in his investigations and insights, what comes across from reading Thoreau on blueberries is just how many of his fellow Concordians dropped their normal routines in mid-summer to go berry picking, especially the young people. He describes how boys came knocking on his door selling blueberries they found in burned-over meadows 10 days before he himself realized they were ripe — and marvels at how adept they are in picking, with 10 quarts in two hours considered only a fair-to-middlin’ rate.
No “nature deficit disorder” to worry about here, not for these lucky Concord children.
“The berries are important in introducing the children to the fields and woods. The season of berrying is so far respected that the school children have a vacation then, and many little fingers are picking these small fruits. Women and children who never visit distant hills, fields, and swamps on any other errand are seen making their way now with half their domestic utensils in their hands. If hot, the boys break up the bushes and carry them to some shady places where the girls can pick them at their ease.”
Idyllic — and yet not perfectly so. Thoreau, who was as skeptical toward man’s world as he was devoted to nature’s, couldn’t help lamenting that not only were more and more local blueberry patches barred by no trespassing signs, but that even the children brought their acquisitive, protocapitalist ways with them to the woods.
“Sometimes, just before reaching their favorite spot, every boy rushes to the hillside and announces ‘I speak for this place!’ indicating its bounds, and another ‘I speak for that!’ and so on; and this is considered good law for the blueberry field, though it is a law similar to this by which we have taken possession of the territory of the Indians and Mexicans.”
Thoreau, trying to stick to blueberries, can’t help widening his focus.
“At the same time we exclude mankind from gathering berries in our field, we exclude them from gathering health, happiness and inspiration and a hundred other far finer and nobler fruits than berries. As long as the berries are free to all comers, they are beautiful; tell me that this is a blueberry swamp which somebody has hired, and I shall not want even to look at it. Such is the constitution of our society that we permit the berries to be degraded — to be enslaved, as it were.”
Enslaved? That’s a strong word coming from Thoreau, who hated slavery so fiercely, and not only wrote in support of John Brown, but helped one of his raiders (“terrorist” we would call him now) escape to Canada.
Again and again you find this in Thoreau’s journals, a duality he refused to let split him. One moment he’s turning his unflinching gaze on the wicked ways of society, the next he’s on his knees examining a blueberry bush up close, trying to penetrate, not just its own secrets, but the laws of a natural world no writer ever loved more deeply.
And that’s what reading Thoreau on berries gives this novelist pal of mine, hiding out in his yard where he hopes contemporary history won’t find him: permission to be outraged at the events of the larger world, and, at least in his moments of escape in his blueberry patch, permission to be serene as well. At the end of Wild Fruits comes the most succinct piece of advice Thoreau ever gave, five simple words forming a prescription my friend — to rid himself of the bad taste of things — intends to follow as religiously as he can.
“In August live on berries.”
W. D. Wetherell is a novelist, essayist and short-story writer. He lives in Lyme.