Fat, dark-skinned blueberries, some nearly the diameter of a dime, have become a common year-round sight at my supermarket. They are fine, just fine, and like all blueberries they are good to eat as is or cooked. They freeze well, and you can also grow them in your garden if you want, although you’ll need to take good care of them, and you’ll need to put up netting to protect them from birds, rabbits, chipmunks, and all the rest. Your homegrown berries will be luscious though, the store-bought ones a little less so, I think, but all in all they’re very nice.
But they’re not the blueberries I remember. The little blueberries I remember grew out on the windswept “moors” of Nantucket.
In New England, blueberries come in two main varieties, highbush and lowbush. Lowbush blueberries tend to be small, each about the size of a pea. (They won’t be winning any contests for berry size, but that’s not the point of them anyway.) According to the University of Maine, where they know about these things, lowbush plants are not themselves planted, but “inhabit” areas of thin soil on uplands and glacial outwash plains that are unsuitable for other crops. That is, not only do they predate you and me, but you have to take them where you find them and nowhere else. The berries are the right color, not the deep blue typical of the supermarket sort but a strong, appealing medium-blue, a blue with some violet in it, really a blue like no other. The skin is dry, not shiny. Scattered lowbush berries grow in the shady woods behind my house, but the animals usually get the few fruits that ripen.
Highbush blueberries are shrubs that lend themselves more readily to cultivation. The berries have a lengthy shelf life; they show up at the market in all seasons, a long way from where they were grown. But then: a berry plantation called Gundy’s, about two miles from my house, offers highbush berries in late July and early August that, confusingly, are not dark-skinned but the color of lowbush berries instead. At the check-in table you say hello to the Gundys, Ernie and Trudy, who have run this farm for many years and perhaps are growing tired of it. At least, Trudy seems to be. When asked what their adult children are up to, Trudy mentions a daughter who’s settled in Vermont. “It is nice,” Trudy declares. “I’d be up there too,” she continues, waving a hand towards her fields, “if it wasn’t for the berries.”
When I’m at Gundy’s I am not on Nantucket but in my own community, seeing folks that I might know (“Hey, how ya doin’? How’s the picking?”). I feel a sense of dislocation. I’m standing, not stooping, to pick the berries. The air doesn’t smell of salt, and no gulls cry overhead, and the sea is very far away. And I’m not 7 anymore, so there’s that as well.
Let’s touch on this one point and then move along: the Nantucket of my childhood is gone and never coming back. Even while the island has become a popular and pricey vacation spot, and continues to experience a building boom, the land itself is slipping into the sea, while the essence of the place, as I see it, has been crowded out. How do I feel about that? I feel lucky that I knew it when not so many people went there. I feel sad that it has changed so much. I am sorry that people are loving it to death. I am sorry that the seas are rising. I’ll miss it when it goes. Which is a way of saying something else, too, without coming right out and saying it.
We were not summer residents. Our family of five went there for a week or two for about ten summers, starting in 1956 or whenever it was that Ned graduated from diapers. One summer, my folks decided to live large and rented a cottage for a whole three weeks. That turned out to be too long for our family, even if it hadn’t rained for most of our stay, which it did. And there were flying ants aplenty in the cottage, who were enjoying their holiday and wanted to share their good times with us.
Doggedly we went to the beach anyway, because that’s what we did. Around noon, it would be Surfside, down on the southern shore, where the breakers rolled in from the wild Atlantic hour after hour. We would bob among the tall waves, take foolish chances with them, and, when it was time to come in, run like crazy up the beach with the white water and the undertow tugging at our feet. Later in the afternoon we would shift to the Jetties, on the north side near town, with calmer waters we could actually swim in without the risk of getting pummeled by the waves or dragged out by the riptides.
Paved roads connected the two, but my dad liked to take the longer route from Surfside, a narrow dirt byway that went eastward along the shoreline before turning north towards the airport, where the pavement resumed. The road functioned as a shortcut through the moors between the beach and the airport, though not too many used it, and it wasn’t on the map. My dad bounced us along the rutted track, tossing up clouds of dust, looking for his special place. While the road had no name we knew of, for us, here, the moors did: Blueberry Heaven. As we left the shore behind and swung in closer to the main runway, we could see small single-engine planes come buzzing in from over the beach and touch down a few hundred feet away. Once in a while the four-engine DC-6’s of Northeast Airlines would come lumbering in from the big cities. “Tourists,” we sniffed, we who came to the island by sea and knew where the number-one blueberry-picking place was.
My father would pull off the road and we would tumble out with pails, buckets, and old milk cartons, spread out among the low, brushy plants that covered the moors in every direction, and start picking. We would stay until we’d collected enough, then we’d move over to the swimming beach, sometimes stopping for a while at the airport terminal to watch the planes up close.
These were strictly lowbush blueberries, clustered together or scattered among the bayberry, bearberry, grasses, and wildflowers. They came up only to our ankles. You had to bend over pretty far to pick them, or squat, or alternate between the two. As we each found places to pick where we wouldn’t bump into each another, we felt a kind of gentle simplicity (or simple-mindedness) settle over us. We felt the stickiness of the salt on our skin. If it was sunny, we felt the glare and the heat. The salt wind passed among us, arising off the water, and we could just hear the big waves in the distance, booming ashore. There was nobody else around.
Sweet berries and salty air. For a little while, that’s all there was to it. For a little while, it was all there needed to be.
I felt at peace out there in the berry patch. I think we all did. No one had put these bushes here, they just grew there on their own, had been growing there, for a very long time. Somebody owned all of this, but they were far away, probably, and anyhow they weren’t doing anything with it (yet). There were no fences, no “No Trespassing” signs, no one charging admission. Because it was always summer when we were there, my memories are mostly warm and blissful, a child’s mostly flawless daydream. There were no rules, except for please don’t drop any (but of course we were going to drop a few), and please don’t squish them (but of course we were going to squish a few), and please be sure to wash them off before you eat them (which of course we did, except when we didn’t). We were allowed to take all that we could carry. I guess we must have felt that this part of the moors belonged to us, in a way.
One afternoon at Blueberry Heaven, I took a picture of my father with my Kodak Brownie. In the photo he is standing facing me and holding his bucket tilted towards the camera, proudly showing off how many berries he’s already gathered. The moors are behind him, and above everything is the pale blue of the sky descending towards the sharp blue line of the horizon. He is wearing a boatneck long-sleeved beach shirt, and he is grinning from ear to ear.
My dad has been gone more than ten years, so I can’t ask him, but I believe these visits to the berry patch in the fifties and sixties were not his first visits. I think that he spent some time here in 1936, to be exact, a 14-year-old delightedly picking berries and watching planes and going swimming and enjoying the summer. That year, he and his mother and his older brother had come out to Nantucket for an extended break from their life in New Hampshire. Over the years, in his remembering it and selectively recounting it, this experience turned into a wholly pleasant memory of the island in summer, and became the reason our own family went there for our vacations, instead of, say, the Rhode Island shore or the Vineyard or the Cape. We kids didn’t ask him about it back then; something about it told us not to. But there were faint clues here and there.
I believe that they came out to the island, my grandmother and her two boys, after her marriage went to pieces in a not-very-private way, and she packed up and got the hell out of Peterborough, partly just to get away and partly because the gossiping in that insular town had become unbearable to her. Nantucket was truly a far-away place back then, nobody knew them there, and summer lodgings in the thirties were not very expensive.
These lowbush blueberries on the back road to the airport, they required some care in picking. You seized each one gently between your thumb and forefinger, comprehending well the advantage of having an opposable thumb. Each berry was tethered to its tiny branch just enough so as not to blow away in the wind or wash down in the rain. You had to be careful to grip it lightly and give it just enough of a tug. Each berry was a near-perfect orb, almost weightless. The first ones you dropped into your pail went “plonk” when they hit bottom.
Soon you had a small mound of blue in there, a blond boy’s just-right color. Blue like my eyes, kind of, blue like the clothing I looked best in, blue like the ultramarine paint I still splash across canvas and paper, the color that stands out for me in a multicolored world.
So my dad was re-creating a happy part of his childhood, in taking us out there. A happy part, with a shadowy side to it. In some circles this is known as a frozen need, a deep longing from the past that can never be assuaged here in the present, though people do try. I can’t complain. It’s a pleasure to forage for berries in the wild. The activity and the berries themselves cost us almost nothing, just a little effort, out there in the seemingly limitless moors, the breezy moors, the sometimes chilly and foggy moors, where gray mists occasionally closed in around us without warning.
My dad was also hoping to foster happy childhood memories for us, too. But the troubling reasons his mother had run away to sea with her boys remained buried and untalked-about. Happy and Unhappy worked their way across the moors side by side, bent over at the waist and edging forward through the berry fields, swaying slightly with skinny arms extended, like children pretending to be elephants. When you stood up straight to stretch your back, you could just see the Atlantic off to the south, and the endless horizon where there were few boats to be seen, ever. The lonely sea. The cold, vast, impossibly deep and lonely blue sea.
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