Better than Bigfoot

HUCKLEBERRIES PHOTO BY MONIKA GRABKOWSKA

Searching for Idaho Huckleberries

By Heather Hamilton-Post

By Heather Hamilton-Post Idaho’s huckleberries grow in secret places, spots of wilderness so thick, so offroad, so hidden, that you’d be hard pressed to find them, even if you knew exactly where to look. And that’s just the thing—you probably don’t. True connoisseurs will never reveal their prime picking locations, even to friends. You’ll see this reflected in the price of huckleberries, should you stumble upon them at a roadside fruit stand, protected in old ice cream containers in the chest freezer, intentionally set back behind the person manning the produce stand.

I am a native Idahoan, which essentially means that I was born knowing where to find huckleberries, or it feels that way. Some of my first memories are of camping—sleeping in a tent too small for a family of five, our jeans in the bottom of our sleeping bags so we’d wake to warm pants. There are photographs of my sisters and me taken just hours after we’d arrived at our camp spot, covered in dirt but for the whites of our eyes.

On these wilderness vacations, the only kind we ever took, my mother made my sisters and I pick huckleberries until our fingers turned the exotic royal purple of Idaho’s state fruit, the berries rolling from the bottoms of the leaves and dropping into the margarine tubs we carried as baskets. The bottom of a huckleberry forms a tiny target, dark lines cascading into perfect swirls, tiny berries that built slow piles as my sisters and I begged for relief, the river just a full bucket—the cost of playtime— away. Anyone who picks will tell you the same—it is hard work, but it is worth it.

“I’m Your Huckleberry,” the oft-quoted line from Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday in the 1993 movie, TOMBSTONE— and the title of Kilmer’s recent memoir—is as much of an enigma as the fruit itself. You might be surprised to learn Doc Holliday spoke the line in real life too. FYI: the old Southern slang usage of huckleberry meant, “the right person for the job.”

Huckleberries and grizzlies often reside together in the wilderness.

PHOTO BY JOHN THOMAS

Curious about why this berry holds such value as an adult, I performed an obligatory internet search. The huckleberry, despite years of work by university scientists, has never been fully domesticated. Propagation and repeated efforts to combine seedlings that produce an abundance of healthy fruit have proved futile. The huckleberry exists in the space between nature and nurture— exceedingly rare, and unable to be cultivated. When genetic vulnerabilities couple with environmental stressors, something significant begins to manifest itself, spanning generations like baldness or blue eyes, incapable of being fully tamed.

My mother, who instilled in me a love of all things wild, inevitably calls me when she sees huckleberries for sale to remark on how unbelievable it is, some version of we should have sold huckleberries to pay for your college. I don’t disagree—growing up, I was made to pick them anyway, and it would have been wise to turn a profit, although I’m grateful to have those memories unsullied by capitalism. Still, pound for pound, the purple berry is way more valuable than most of the cars I’ve owned in my life.

The spots where we pick, say somewhere around McCall, are sometimes discovered, which takes them off of our list as they grow in popularity. Others remain mostly untouched, or the bushes are fruitful enough to fill all of our buckets. We’ll pack a picnic and make a day of it, my mother and all her children and their children with purple stained fingertips.

Warm huckleberry crisp with ice cream is worth the search for your own private Idaho berry patch.

PHOTO BY KAREN DAY

That wildness is why we (and other pickers) come back, year after year—a drive that feels fundamental to me, a sort of Idaho coming of age story, my own feral children with juice dripping down their faces as they work their way toward the water.

And after the summer has passed, we’ll ration huckleberries into our cereal or Saturday pancakes year round, careful to leave enough in the bucket for a rainy day or dry year. Half the thrill is the hunt, certainly, but the allure of the berry is real too, and, if we’ve had a particularly good season, we’ll splurge on something like a huckleberry buckle, which highlights the berries’ sweetness and impresses all our friends, who just might understand the hype once they’ve sampled the fruit.

Though there have been several reported (and I use this word loosely) bigfoot sightings in Idaho, campers are unwilling to pinpoint the exact location, which, I can only assume, is to protect their picking spot. I don’t blame them. Given the choice between internet fame and a shady spot to harvest Idaho’s favorite berry, I’ll keep the secret too.