Of Lowbush Blueberries and Memory

Lowbush blueberry photo taken at Seeley Lake August 26, 2011


Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium caespitosum) are sweet and delectable, with a tinge of apple to their flavour. They grow on low bushes (hence both the common and scientific names) some 15 cm (6 inches) in height, and the tiny berries are a bright blue, hiding under the waxy spoon shaped leaves. I have encountered these lovely berries rarely, as they are easily overgrown by bigger, faster growing species, but the memories of the places I have found and tasted them are sharp. The first time was now thirty years ago on a rocky alpine ridge just above timberline on the Seven Sisters in northwest British Columbia. I was hiking with my friend Joan while our husbands were canoeing on the Stikine River….we decided to take an overnight trip up the old Magnatron Mining Road to treat ourselves to something special. On the flank of the ridge above the trail in a rocky fell field were tiny blueberry bushes sheltering among the stones…. these minute bushes were not above 3 or 4 inches tall, but the berries were sweet. I remember my sense of wonder at their hardiness and tiny size. I remember our camp on a bench overlooking the Flint Creek basin below, our pup tent pitched in a flat grassy patch beside a tiny pond among the rocks, the northwest flank of Weeskinisht (Wii Ska’niist, the Big Mountain) with its small remnant glacier and snowfields above us.

My next real encounter came on another trip in the Coast Mountains, this time about 1985. My then husband and my daughter Rose and I hired a floatplane to take us in to a pair of lakes in the subalpine just below Telkwa Pass. We camped with another couple, Sheila and Peter, and the plane hauled our canoes in as well so we could explore the small lakes. Access to these with a canoe is impossible any other way, as the Burnie Lakes empty by way of the totally impassible Chlore Canyon, draining west into the Copper (Zymoetz) River near Terrace. The rugged glacier clad peaks of the Howson Range soar above the lakes, which are a milky blue with rock flour. Fishing for trout (camo-coloured a grey blue on their backs) was noteworthy, because you couldn’t see the trout until it was nearly landed, though the water looked clear enough. After a hike up to the snout of a glacier above the upper Burnie Lake, we moved camp to the second lake, walking by trail the short distance between the two. Here in the more sheltered woods along the little stream were mega-lowbush blueberry bushes, nearly a foot tall, and loaded with their delicious sweet berries.

In the years after those initial encounters, I began to study Gitksan and Witsuwit’en ethnobotany, and I learned that these little blue berries were ‘mii yehl in Gitxsanimax, and yintimï in Witsuwit’en. People used to manage the encroaching brush and grass by landscape burning, ensuring abundant and productive fruit. The area in the valley bottom between 2 Mile and Hagwilget was “just blue with berries” Alfred Joseph, Gisde We told me in 1987. People often used toothed berry pickers to strip the tiny fruit, and I could see why. But in the time I lived in the Skeena, lowbush blueberries were scarcely ever encountered. Berry patches became pastures, gravel pits, or were brushed over. Trails up the mountains to berry patches were overgrown or truncated by logging cuts. The little bushes linger in some places, but, in common with most blueberries and huckleberries, don’t fruit well when shaded.

On a visit home this past month, I was restless for places to walk. My friend Shari’s place is amazing and beautiful, nestled beside the Bulkley River between Hagwilget and Bulkley Canyons, with eagles perching across from her dining room window…. and bears walking casually through the yard in search of berries or heading down to the beach to fish. August is the “hyperphagous” stage when they are putting on fat for winter…. so walking the trails along the river seemed ill advised. However, driving down the Skeena toward Kitwanga, I decided to stop at Seeley Lake, a beautiful little lake right under the towering flank of Stekyoodin, known officially as Rocher de Boule. (Seeley Lake has its own stories, of the supernatural aquatic grizzly Medeek, and how it punished youth for failing to respect the beautiful fish of the lake- see Men of Medeek by Will Robinson as told by Walter Wright, Northern Sentinal Press, Kitimat 1962. The story is also briefly recounted on one of the Ksan 'Hand of History' signs at the shore of the lake.)

There is a little provincial park on the lakeshore with campsite and picnic area, and after enjoying the view down the valley, I noticed a sign for a hiking trail. Here on the rocky knoll by the lake and in a campground I was less likely to interrupt a foraging bear, so I set out on the trail…. and realized that one of the better stands of low bush blueberry I’d seen in years grew under the open tree canopy on the thin soil over the rock…. I began to scan for fruit, and picked a couple of small handfuls, reveling in their remarkable flavour. I mused that if I came back with a container, I could probably pick enough to take home. Because the knoll is so rocky, lusher brushy vegetation does not thrive, but the tough little blueberry bushes spread well.

A couple of days later I was back, enjoying the opportunity to walk and botanize again…and I remembered my yoghurt container to pick into. I realized that there was actually quite a lot of fruit in some areas, though it was hard to see as it was under the low leaf canopy for the most part. As I picked, I thought of my Elder friend Lavender, and her stories about picking lowbush blueberries some 65 years before. Lavender is from Fife in Scotland, and came to Kitwanga with her decorated Gitksan war hero husband Ray in 1945, a fiery and diminutive 18 year old. In 1945 the village was still quite traditional in many ways; the last longhouse was still standing, and the road had only been in for a year or two, though the rail line had run down the Skeena since the Great War. In summer of 1946 Lavender was recovering from the birth of her first child Naomi. She spent a lot of time sitting on the ground in the sunshine picking lowbush blueberries. Her mother-in-law Martha suggested she prepare the fruit in the traditional way and give it to the Elders. They were so delighted the Frog Chief adopted Lavender, and gave her a name that reflected her wonderful gift of berries. I think it was translated as something like “bringer of gifts from Heaven”. Lavender is 85 now, and stopping by her place in Kitwanga a couple of hours before I had just learned that she is in the clinic in Houston, frail and debilitated. I decided that I would give the berries to Lavender when I stopped down to see her later that afternoon, and redoubled my focus on picking.

We sat on her bed in the late afternoon sun, and Lavender lay back savouring the tiny berries one at a time, perhaps thinking back to happier times when she and her late husband were young and her little daughter was by her side. And I reluctantly headed East on the highway in the morning, returning to the city where I now live.