The Berry Grail (How I Became an Urban Forager)

A few springs back, I took to riding my bicycle along a riverside path generously provided and maintained by my adopted city. It stretched on for miles, all the way out to a national historic site in the suburbs, and my trips covered progressively more of its length as cherry trees threw off their pink confetti for a callow chartreuse and then a deep, sedate green. The path traversed woods in places; on its shoulders grew underbrush that was cleared in a regular effort to prevent the woods from claiming it back.

Along about July, just in time for my birthday, speckles of bright ruby – the color of my birthstone, no less – began appearing in this underbrush. Now, there are many cyclists who would never dream of interrupting their training to examine a trailside burst of color. These people generally have svelte road bikes handcrafted of some miracle alloy that marries the sturdiness of cast iron with the weight of meringue. Their expensive, high-tech cycling apparel swathes bodies so bereft of fat that their poor calves appear flayed, with every gristly contour immodestly revealed. I, untroubled by the sort of athletic ambition that drives such people, had the leisure to slow to a halt; my trusty overalls, though sweat-sodden, protected my legs against minor insults offered by the brush. I looked closer, and I saw berries!

By god, they looked like raspberries. I reached out and gingerly plucked one; it nearly jumped into my hand, so easily was it harvested. Like a raspberry, it was hollow -- a tiny red cup. It left its little core, an orangeish, truncated cone with a smeary red bull's-eye at the center, to sit among its pointy sepals like an antique cartoon star. Okay, it was a brighter red than raspberries I had bought, and translucent, without their dusty bloom: stained glass to their sueded silk. But the form was so similar. And somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious was the memory of a summer day of my childhood spent on our ancestral farm in the Tennessee hills with an older cousin and a horse. The horse was so thoroughly lathered with foam that we had guiltily given up riding it, and our eyes were reddened and irritated by the sweat that kept dripping into them. Our hands were not free to wipe the sweat off our foreheads, you see, because we were picking berries.

Those were blackberries, not raspberries. And it's not as if I were thinking of that day as I held the little red gem I'd picked on the bike path and contemplated popping it into my mouth, but perhaps I had some deep knowledge that a landscape similar to this one – next to a fence row between two disused tobacco fields, a liminal middle ground bridging clearing and trees – was a hospitable environment for brambles of the genus Rubus. Really, it's not even accurate to characterize what I did as contemplation: I scarcely hesitated. Although I am often catastrophically indecisive in other arenas, I am rarely plagued by diffidence when it comes to the question of whether or not to eat.

Blessed instinct! That berry just exploded in my mouth. Its flavor perfectly matched its color – bright, startling, infinitely gratifying. Well, not infinitely, I guess, or I wouldn't have needed to gobble up every ripe berry I could see, or to return a few days later with a girlfriend and a bucket. What's infinite, perhaps, is the desire to discover more berries. For a month or so out of every year, it makes me something of a menace on the road: although looking at the shoulder of the road can roughly approximate the effect of looking at the road itself, it's not precisely the same thing.

A couple of weeks or so after I discovered the bike-trail berries, I spent a steamy morning collecting scratches, mosquito bites, ticks and berries along a tree-lined street in the northwestern reaches of the city. At one point, a nearly overgrown driveway caught my eye. I braved the muddy ruts and a moderate herbaceous barrier to penetrate a bit further, and I found myself in a clearing abutting some railroad tracks that were about to go through an underpass. It was a brightly lit, roughly semicircular space concealed from the street by a border of trees and shrubs that dappled the noonday sun, and the place was just lousy with berries. I collected about a gallon of them, honest to god.

In Tennessee, blackberry brambles volunteered along our backyard fence row, and you didn't have to look so hard to find them. Blackberries, good old-timey fruit, were everywhere. But raspberries – for some reason, they didn't seem to do so well down there. We couldn't even buy fresh raspberries in my town, for most of my childhood; it wasn't until I was in high school that our supermarkets became that sophisticated. To me, raspberries were an expensive delicacy, on the order of smoked oysters or champagne or professional ballet, and when I saw this stand of raspberry canes with its profusion of plump, juicy berries waiting for me to harvest them, I felt as if I'd found a hundred-dollar bill lying on the ground.

This is the Berry Grail. You risk a trespassing citation, a boggy misstep, some scratches and stings and poison ivy, perhaps a bit of West Nile virus or Lyme disease, to go further into a promising copse. A few steps in, you find a sunny clearing whose edges are crowded with berry canes. Hitherto untouched, unregarded, they yield up fat clusters of their intoxicating ripe fruit sweetly, easily, to the hand that is their destiny. Find it once, and you will never give up the quest.