Blueberry Hill
(Welcome to Saturday Stories. I’ve been sharing a few things I wrote about our experiences on our recent vacation. I hope you enjoy reading about it).
Jim, the owner of the Big Bay Motel, met us outside the motel when we walked back over from the Hungry Hollow Cafe. He said he had never run our credit card when we called and made reservations, so we could go ahead and settle up and he wouldn’t need to bother us again during our stay. I asked about places to hike and where we might possibly get a sight of the Northern Lights; he made several suggestions. Later, when Monica walked down to the small office that seems to have been created out of a large storage building, Jim told her that a friend had gone out to pick wild blueberries the day before and brought back more than he could ever eat. He told her how to get there if we wanted to give it a go at picking wild blueberries.
We put our heads together and decided to do that first before we did any hiking.
Monica explained to me what Jim had told her about going blueberry picking. About two miles east of Big Bay you turn on to county road 510. Keep following that but when it makes a left turn, stay straight; that becomes county road AAA. Follow county road AAA all the way. Now, eventually you run out of pavement when you get to Eagle Mine. Then it becomes a dirt/gravel road. That’s where the blueberries are.
Jim’s directions and Monica’s interpretation were spot on. I was a little surprised at how nice county roads 510 and AAA are. They are more like a good two-lane highway than country roads. I realized later that the reason those roads are so nice is that mine at the end of the pavement on AAA. They have big trucks rolling in and out of there, plus all their employees. They need a good road.
Once you pass the mine though, it is a wide dirt path scrapped out of the forest timber. We drove along at a modest pace, partly because of the road condition and partly because we were looking for blueberries. We looked for several miles. We didn’t see anything. Of course, to be honest, we didn’t really know what we were looking for. Yes, blueberries, but as far as what the blueberry bushes would look like or where they would be we didn’t know. Were they next to the road, off in the forest, scattered about randomly, or in some open field? We had no clue.
I had a large glass of water and my fill of coffee for breakfast and the effects were being felt. I pulled to a stop and told Monica I was going to get out and do my business, something men have a distinctive advantage in when in the wilderness. She said she was going to get out but she would be on the other side of the truck for obvious reasons.
Then, while still taking care of things, I heard her exclaim, “Blueberries!”
“Where?” I asked.
“They are all over the place.”
Sure enough, we had been driving right by them for miles. The whole road on both sides was lined with blueberry bushes. They just weren’t what we imagined they would be. Instead of tall bushes of a foot or so, these were more like ground cover; the tallest of them being only three or four inches. And they were covered with blueberries.
The berries were small, maybe half the size of the berries you can buy in the store. But the flavor is much more intense than store bought blueberries, which I find to be kind of bland. Monica hunted around the truck and found a plastic bag to put them in since we didn’t think ahead about what to do with what we picked. She started picking and I started picking and we kept on picking and eating a few too until we both were wishing we had a way to keep some of them until we got home, but we realized we will just have to eat them all.
We made ourselves quit picking them, got in the truck, drove up the road until I found a place to turn around, and headed back in the direction we had come. I stopped to take a picture, Monica got out. It was a little more shaded than where we had been previously. She said, “Oh my. These blueberries are bigger and nicer than the other ones.” She started picking again.
I believe there are enough wild blueberries in the Huron Mountains to feed everyone in Rogers County, Oklahoma blueberries for a month. We just have to figure out how to get them there.
