An Excerpt from Kate Lebo’s
The Book of Difficult Fruit:
Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly

H: Huckleberry

Vaccinium ovatum (evergreen huckleberry) and

Vaccinium membranaceum (mountain huckleberry)

Ericaceae (heath) family

Also known as winter huckleberry, thinleaf huckleberry,

black huckleberry

Huckleberries refuse to be domesticated. To thrive, they need a particular spot within a particular type of forest. They need fires to consume light-hogging conifers and to muffle the soil with ash. Despite a century’s efforts to breed bushes that thrive in monocultures at lower elevations, huckleberries still can’t be cultivated as a profitable commercial crop. They must be gathered by hand in the woods. For some Indigenous peoples and their descendants, picking these dark-purple, powerfully flavored berries—imagine a wild blueberry, but more sweet, more sour, more wild—is part of the social fabric of the tribe. It is not resource extraction. Nor is it agriculture as non-Natives generally understand agriculture. This reflects some biological truths that attempts at domestication have tried (and must try, by domestication’s definition) to breed away: Huckleberries are wild. Their interdependence within their environment keeps them wild.

The English love a good lawn, or at least Captain George Vancouver did. When HMS Discovery entered Puget Sound in the late spring of 1792, he was amazed by the meadows he saw just beyond the beach. “Nature had here provided the well-stocked park,” Vancouver wrote in his three-volume account of the voyage, “and wanted only the assistance of art to constitute that desirable assemblage of surface, which is so much sought in other countries, and only to be acquired by an immoderate expence in manual labour.”

These “natural” parks were not natural at all, but the result of controlled burns by native tribes from British Columbia to the Willamette Valley, east through the Methow Valley, all the way to Montana. “Firing in the camas beds, huckleberry fields, oak groves, and tule flats, as well as other environments, took place after harvest, as a kind of post-use cleanup process, with ecological consequences in following seasons,” writes Robert Boyd, the editor of Indians, Fire and the Land in the Pacific Northwest. He details how the tribes knew that fire could reset a landscape, turning back the succession of plants to softer-fleshed annuals with easily accessible nutrients (like berries) instead of longer-growing, tougher perennials (like conifers, the “weeds” of the huckleberry patch, as one of the Methow elders Boyd interviewed considered them). They knew that fire adds nutrients to the earth, creating ash-cap soils that huckleberries love while clearing the landscape of shady canopy. Fire one year meant a better harvest the next. Where Vancouver thought he saw the hand of nature, he was actually seeing strategic and careful resource management by many different tribes.

Today’s rules of huckleberry picking in the Inland Northwest are the social kind, restricting behavior  to  benefit the community rather than the individual. LaRae Wiley, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes and co-founder of the Salish School, put it to me this way: “The idea that you come in and you over-pick, you don’t share—that affects everybody. When you’re in the huckleberry fields, you’re there with all the other animals. What you do matters.”

LaRae founded the Salish School with her husband, Chris, in 2010. They teach Salish kids how to speak their native tongue through immersion learning, with the hope that children, who are natural language-learners, can bring Salish back to their homes and help restore it to the community. She was in her early thirties when she first heard Salish, at the funeral of an elder. “Growing up where I did,” she says, referring to Cheney, Washington, “I didn’t learn much about my family’s traditional ways. It’s like my roots there were broken off.”

Huckleberries grow below their leaves, so finding the berries is a matter of perspective. I like to bend down on one knee, as if I’m trying to look a child in the eye. As my center of gravity descends toward the earth, what had appeared to be a scrubby little bush suddenly reveals its prize.

You can rake huckleberries instead of picking them. One instrument for that looks like a covered hand-shovel with teeth. We’re meant to swing it at the branches and let the teeth strip the berries off. This method strips leaves and branches, too, which robs next year’s pickers of a good harvest.

Another fast-collecting method is to spread a blanket under the branches and shake the bush until its berries fall. This, too, shocks and injures the plant.

LaRae and her family never rake. They pick. It’s slow work, but only if you’re thinking about work in the short term.

The simplest way for me to pick huckleberries is to wait for August, point my car at the nearest mountain, and stop wherever the roadside looks not too well traveled and sufficiently bushy, promising a large harvest without grime from passing cars. These are the berries LaRae would leave behind for her elders to pick.

If you’re younger, LaRae advises, go up higher, into difficult terrain, leaving the flat places and roadsides for elders. Give thanks. Some people leave tobacco before they start picking, some say prayers. Never pick all the berries on a bush. Leave some behind for the bears—they are our family, too. Pick, don’t rake.

Since white settlement, but especially since the Great Depression, when so many people were so poor, huckleberry picking has been a subsistence option for all sorts of people who want piecemeal summer work. That’s still true.

By the early twentieth century, Native huckleberry camps and white huckleberry camps were sharing the same forests. In the Indian camps, people relaxed before salmon season, spent time with friends and family and neighboring tribal members, gambled and drank, flirted and sang. Sometimes marriages were performed in the fields. In People of the Dalles: The Indians of Wascopam Mission, Robert Boyd records the frustration of one early Methodist missionary, Henry Brewer, with these camps. On a trip to the Mount Adams “whortleberry” fields (as Brewer calls the berries he encounters) in September of 1845, Brewer laments, “The absence of our Indian converts so long a time during the berry season, being surrounded as they are by every possible bad example, and separated from the watchful care of their teachers, in many cases proves very injurious to their piety.”

In the white camps of the early twentieth century, extended families also picked and partied, but at the end of the summer they sold much of their crop. As food-preservation technology improved, people brought canning tools into the fields and processed the berries around the fire, moving camp every week or so to follow the berries up the mountain as they ripened.

Today, commercial foragers fill their buckets by picking and raking; there are no laws to restrict method. The harvest is never certain, and the labor is intense—two variables guaranteed to turn a food that’s free for the taking into an expensive delicacy. A gallon of huckleberries that was $40 one year might be $90 the next.

On Washington State’s public lands, pickers may take one gallon of berries a day, up to three gallons of berries per year. These limits are mostly self-monitored. To pick more than that, obtain a permit from the ranger. At the Pine Creek Information Center on Mount Saint Helens, you can pick up huckleberry maps in English, Spanish, and Russian, but not Sahaptin, the family of languages once spoken by the tribes in that area, and today nearly—but not quite—lost.

From what I’ve found in old horticultural texts and pre-twentieth-century literature, English speakers seem to give “huckleberry” as a common name to any wild, dark-colored, strongly flavored berry, regardless of genus. Like wild blueberries and cultivated blueberries, what I call huckleberries belong to the Vaccinium genus and the heath family. Huckleberries native to the East Coast, however, are usually not Vaccinium but Gaylussacia, a relative of blueberries and another member of the heath family. In Cyclopedia of Hardy Fruits, U. P. Hedrick’s huckleberries were exclusively Gaylussacia (“The New England usage of blueberry for species of Vaccinium and huckleberry for the Gaylussacias is best,” he wrote), which is confusing to a twenty-first-century reader only familiar with huckleberries as a signifier, mascot, and value-added product of the Northwest, where Gaylussacia is not a huckleberry, no way. The name game continues today: the 2019 Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalogue features a species of purple-black, berry-sized Solanum that originated in Africa. This berry is related to tomatoes and eggplants, not blueberries or heath, but Baker Creek calls them “garden huckleberry.” The genus and species names can be hard to follow, I know. Blame their profusion on a clash between plants that gleefully mix genetic material and Linnaean taxonomy’s drive to categorize and name each offspring. Scientific names go through a community vetting process that can split one variety into two if scientists find that their DNA is different enough, or join two into one for the opposite reason. At the same time, common names multiply, giving one thing multiple names according to different cultures, even those who speak the same language. In English-speaking areas, for example, daffodils are also known as jonquils and narcissus, depending on where they bloom. Or common names are informally weeded from casual usage until we rely on one name for many different species, like huckleberry.

If you burrow further into huckleberry classifications, you’ll find the two major species available for consumption today: Vaccinium ovatum (evergreen huckleberry, found west of the Cascade Mountains, dominant where I’m from) and Vaccinium membranaceum (mountain huckleberry, found east of the Cascades, dominant where I now live). These huckleberry fields are, some botanists say, part of  a vast field of huckleberries that covered North America before geologic changes reduced them to berried islands clinging to mountainsides.

And what about Menziesia ferruginea, or “fool’s huckleberry”? Not a berry at all, but a plant with leaves and flowers that look huckleberry-like and host a pink, berrylike fungus, Exobasidium vaccinii, that grows on the undersides of the leaves. According to Betty Derig and Margaret Fuller’s Wild Berries of the West, “Some tribes of the Northwest Coast ate the fungus berries, which are apparently not poisonous.” (The rest of the plant is.) “The Tsimshian of coastal British Columbia ate the fungus even though they believe they were the snot of Henaaksiala, a mythical being who stole corpses.”

In English, the word “huckleberry” is probably related to “whortleberry,” meaning “little berry,” a name first hung on the hedge berries of England, many different types of hedges and many different names, but with a common quality: little berries produced not as a crop but as a by-product of the plant’s role as a boundary.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a common use of “huckleberry” was as a way to express personal humility. “You’re a persimmon over my huckleberry”—meaning, “You’re bigger/more important than me”—hasn’t aged as well as “You’re a peach,” but I could see plain old “huckleberry” making a comeback as a term of endearment. The littleness, the dearness, the lesser-than-ness, the wildness—that’s what Twain wanted for Huck Finn’s name. When Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday says, “I’m your huckleberry,” in the movie Tombstone, he means both “I’m your guy” and “I’m gonna cause you trouble.”

In Salish, the word for huckleberry is st́xał̣q. “St́x is ‘sweetness,’” LaRae says, “and ał̣q is ‘sweet smell.’” To have “huckleberry eyes” means your peepers are sweet, dark, and round.

Every Thursday from April to October, Mo unloads his Ford Aerostar in the parking lot of the Shop, the hub of Spokane’s Perry District, and sets up his foraged-food booth next to my table of pastries. We greet each other by taking turns grabbing the legs of our polyester canopies and muscling them into place. We can put our canopies up alone, but it’s easier with help.

Mo is more hard of hearing than I am—so much that I’ve stopped noticing how loud I have to yell to get his attention, since this is the only way we can talk. When I shout-ask how much his elderberries are, he startles like I just snuck up on him.

In May, Mo sells morels; in June, he sells porcinis. In July, there are raspberries in aqua-colored crates, and blue-purple sea holly dangling from the buckets he fills with water and ties to his canopy to keep the wind from tipping his whole operation over. In August, he sells perfect purple-black huckleberries, though lately they’ve been arriving earlier and earlier—just after Fourth of July this year, thanks to all the sun we’ve been getting and last year’s forest fires. He is the market’s most dependable source of berries year-round.

Sam does not like Mo. Has refused to buy berries from him since Mo snarled at him for questioning his huckleberry prices. “Ninety dollars a gallon? Really?” Sam had asked. “Best price you’ll find,” Mo said. “Don’t you know it’s been a bad year?”

The bad year was the summer when forest fires so completely circled Spokane that we couldn’t leave our houses. Like a blizzard, but of ash. One million acres across the state were consumed by fires so hot, in weather so dry, that they couldn’t be extinguished until it snowed in October. Three firefighters died in a blaze near Twisp. A dark scrim of soot fanned from a window we forgot to shut and spread over everything the breeze could reach. Cans of ash from the 1980 Mount Saint Helens eruption that I’d set as decorations on the windowsill were smeared with ash from the new fires.

The year after those fires was one of the best huckleberry years in local memory. The berries, like the heat, came early and stayed. We bought gallons of them for $60, sometimes $50, feeling lucky to pay so little. Sam ate huckleberries on his granola every day—such an extravagance!—and made his huckleberry pie, just huckleberries and sugar and a little lemon wrapped in pastry, nothing to distract from the star of the summer, those deep, sweet, plentiful hucks.

When I ask LaRae to teach me how to say “huckleberry” in Salish, she says, “Close your eyes. I’m going to say the word and you’re going to listen. Then say it back to me.”

I am hard of hearing. In conversation, if I can see a face I can hear better. With my eyes closed, without facial expressions or the speech of eye contact, I am afraid I’ll mishear.

But it’s not like that. Instead, with my eyes closed, the buzz of the café fades, and I tune in to LaRae’s voice, willing myself to feel comfortable in this posture of reception. Her voice is the only thing. She’s saying st́xał̣q. St́xał̣q. St́xał̣q. To catch the sounds, I imagine they are topography. This one has a steep incline, a sharp peak, then a shallow descent with a quick hitch up at the end. “Now you,” LaRae says. I fumble through, and she says, “Good, try again.” This is one of the methods she and her teachers are using to revive Salish—repeating words, playing games with them, as you would with any child, until the words lodge themselves next to English.

It is hard for me to get the sounds right. I’m embarrassed by this. I wonder if this tiny shame is a boundary I have momentarily crossed, if I’ve moved from a place where I am comfortable and fluent into a place where I am an outsider and strange, possibly suspect, definitely illiterate and (in the old-fashioned sense) dumb. She says it again, st́xał̣q. I try to master the air between st́, which sounds the way an English speaker would expect, and xa, which sounds like ash. Then the front-of-the-throat “k” sound of ł̣q. “We are children in the language,” she says. “We are learning, and we will get better. Mistakes are part of that, and nothing to be ashamed of.”

In the car, leaving our interview, I try to say the word again and I can’t. It’s gone. I can’t even recall how it begins. But I can remember how to say “medicine.” Mrímstn. A little trip on the r, so you skip directly from m to r to the “eem” sound, then a new syllable, familiar this time: “stn.” When trying to pronounce Salish, English speakers might imagine an i in there—“stin”—but the sound is shorter, acutely angled from the t to the n, not a full i (like “pin”) sound. I imagine this as a hollow my tongue steps over. When I can’t remember the Salish word for “huckleberry,” I say the Salish word for “medicine.”

When Sam first moved from Long Island to Spokane, he saw a McDonald’s sign that read “Huckleberry shakes are back!!” and thought, Holy shit, I’m in another world.

Huckleberries are, to him, not just western but Western, the direction he was learning to call home. In Spokane, he could buy huckleberries in the freezer aisle of the fancy grocery store, fresh at the farmers’ market, and swaddled in milk from a drive-thru that would also sell him a burger and fries.

Huckleberries evoke the West in packaged products that can be bought on summer vacations at Evel Knievel Days in Butte or ski resorts in Sun Valley, or eaten in pancakes at Frank’s Diner in Spokane. Bear-shaped huckleberry honey jars, bear-logoed huckleberry wine, huckleberry syrup, huckleberry fudge, huckleberry taffy and jelly and jam—when you see these in a gas station, you know you’re in the West. The hardest thing to find, if you aren’t local, is actual fresh huckleberries.

In 'Asta Bowen’s The Huckleberry Book, she uses poetry to explain their lure. “The huckleberry is wildness in your hand,” Bowen writes. When you eat them, you take wildness into your body. “Imagine it storming your veins all day, coursing your heart like a western river, lining your bones with what gives the grizzly its grunt.”

Bowen invokes what Sir James George Frazer would call sympathetic magic, a way of making meaning through metaphor (in the sense that metaphors aren’t just units of language we learn about in poetry class, but also habits of everyday thought that move meaning from one thing to another). Bowen’s magic is contagious magic, whereby objects, substances, and elements can transform the person who wears them, touches them, eats them, etc., by giving that person the characteristics of the element in question. Like eating steak to feel manly, or wearing diamonds to feel forever loved. Like those of us who feel food is mrímstn.

This is not the kind of magic Frazer calls imitative magic, whereby a tree planted in the name of a dead relative whose roots are nicked by a lawn mower might make you feel like you hurt the person the tree represents, and rip your grief back open.

I am not suspicious of contagious magic. I am suspicious of how wildness can become a marketing ploy—a McDonald’s marquee, a jar of tourist-trap jelly. A sales pitch that uses our craving for what’s deep and real about the places we’re from to sell an easy, sweet product.

But I also love that kind of bullshit. Maybe it’s capitalism, but there is a wholeness—or a modern truth, at least—to having the authentic thing that’s carefully gathered exist in parallel with a commodified version of itself. One preserves a true connection to our land. The other takes the fruit that signifies that connection and makes it accessible to everyone, regardless of whether people understand the history and effort that attends each berry.

Huckleberries are struggle and sweetness. To all of us who live in huckleberry country, whether we pick our huckleberries or buy them, they taste like home.

The first time I meet LaRae is at an event where she and Chris tell their life stories onstage. While LaRae speaks Salish, Chris translates. Then they switch—Chris speaks Salish and LaRae translates. I can tell which audience members speak Salish because they get all the jokes before I do, a ripple of laughter that makes me anticipate my own. This exchange of language is intimate and expansive at the same time. The closest thing I can compare it to is a bilingual Easter Mass in which my childhood community, split between English and Spanish speakers, came together to worship at an altar they did not usually share, carried there by a story of suffering and redemption told slowly, taking turns in everyone’s tongue.

Salish is endangered because LaRae’s grandmother’s generation was “taken from their land by force of law and taught shame”—and English. “When I started learning my language,” LaRae says, “I became complete. I think and I hope that’s how it will be for our students and their families.” “Language is a way to respect the heritage of this place,” says Chris, who identifies as white and, like his wife, is a polyglot—fluent in English, Spanish, and Salish, which he learned alongside LaRae. He asks us to imagine Salish being spoken on the street, in restaurants, at the bank and pharmacy and café, bringing our region’s original culture back into earshot and into the mainstream present, restoring a wholeness to our city. He’s not talking about the whitewashing of an imagined shared heritage. He’s talking about having Spokane become visibly and audibly the place we are, the home that European settlement carved out of Native land, where the descendants of both peoples—plus transplants like Sam and me—make their homes.

Should domestication of the huckleberry for crop production one day succeed, it would breed away the quality that makes these berries so special: their interdependence with each other, their mountain environment, their stewards, their place—all the elements that give huckleberries their flavor and their importance.

Near the end of the evening, when the story is almost over, LaRae picks up her hand drum. She says in Salish, then English, “This song is called ‘My Great-Grandparents Got Me Ready for This, My Grandparents Got Me Ready for This.’” She starts the steady thump of the beat, opens her mouth to the music, and sings.

Kate Lebo’s first collection of essays, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is out now from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and from Picador in the UK. Other recent work includes the chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books), which she edited with Samuel Ligon. Her essay about listening through hearing loss, “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in New England Review, was anthologized in Best American Essays.

She is also the author of Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour & Butter (Sasquatch Books) and the poetry/ephemera/recipe collection A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press). Her poems and essays have appeared in This is the Place: Women Writing About Home, Ghosts of Seattle Past, Best New Poets, Gettysburg Review, Willow Springs, The Inlander, and Poetry Northwest, among other places.

A graduate of the University of Washington’s MFA program and Western Washington University, she’s the recipient of a Nelson Bentley Fellowship and a Joan Grayston Poetry Prize, and grants from Spokane Arts and Artist Trust. Through the Arts Heritage Apprenticeship Program from the Washington Center for Cultural Traditions, she is an apprenticed cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm.

She lives in Spokane, Washington.