In the North country, blueberries are not something to be taken for granted. But this summer was bountiful. Rain had fallen regularly. The sun had favored us with beautiful powder-blue berries.
Paths lined their way on up the hill through the underbrush. Most blueberry bushes had been picked over. But my wife and I noticed that at this time of year – when the August sun is hot and days are long – that the best berries seemed to grow in the shade – behind some rock or in the crook of another bush.
My wife informed me that several weeks earlier, my four-year old grandson had been here and with each new discovery he would shout out “Hey! I found the motherlode!” Blueberry picking is not for the faint-of-heart or for the timid.
Several years earlier there had been a fire that had roared through this place – on both sides of the road. It took almost everything. It seared the rocks. Blackened spruce stripped of their branches were the only thing left that really mattered.
Many in town had mourned this loss. Down the Gunflint Trail many of the white pine had come down in the same fire. These giants – remnants of the logging days – had always welcomed visitors to this wonderful land of adventure. They were there when my parents had homeymooned here some 65 years ago.
Now it was broken ground. But seedlings were beginning to show promise. The land was just beginning to heal. It had become a place of surprises.
My wife said that the best picking was near the exposed rock that still bore the scars of what had happened. And she was right.
Blueberry picking leaves you plenty of time to think and this is what came to mind. An elderly woman I have known used to say often “Theirs nothing so bad there’s not some good in it”.
That’s what the blueberry harvest was telling me. We write things off and nature is already writing a new story. We grieve but already the land is in repair. We express unhappiness that things are not the same. Nature wants to applaud. “Theirs nothing so bad there’s not some good in it.”
This is not a Jack Pine forest like the ones to the south but they deliver the same message. Fire scorches everything. But did you know that at a certain temperature the seed pods break open? Fierce heat is required for them to burst open and begin the cycle of new growth.
We conserve, withhold, guard, protect, sometimes over-manage places that hold great beauty. We take a dark view of change. We mourn that things will not be the same.
But sometimes the Old Growth hinders development of what is new. Berries do not grow where sun cannot penetrate. Animals will not return to places that have no forage.
Life can be scared like this forest. We can view our pain and the often terrible, difficult things that happen to us and see only a moonscape – harsh, barren, dismally grey. Words like “a write-off” and “desolate” and “a wasteland” come to mind. But blueberries grow even as we recoup from the damage. No one would expect this. We don’t. But sometimes out of broken ground, life / God / the universe surprises us. It is a moment of grace.
What else can we learn? “There’s nothing so bad there’s not some good in it”. Sometimes the best things grow in the shade. The best picking is often near the exposed rock that bears the scars of the firestorm. That life is like a treasure hunt where on a quite ordinary day we can still happen upon something that truly surprises us, where we can still say “Hey, I found the motherlode!”
And that sometimes something as terrible as fire can sweep across the land and burst open the seed of something entirely new.
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