by Bobbie Carpenter

Created on: July 07, 2008

There Is No Free Lunch

Each June the smell of ripe strawberries in stores and at farmer's market sends me on a happy memory of my younger days spent foraging for wild berries: raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, high bush cranberries, any berries I could get my hands on.

My finest berry-picking moment was a truly wild one. It took place at the family cabin in Togo, no not the small country on the western-most edge of the Ivory Coast. The Togo I'm talking about is found at the intersection of Minnesota Highway 1 and U.S. Highway 65, forty-some miles south of the border between Fort Francis, Ontario, Canada and International Falls, Minnesota, U.S.A., closer to the Arctic Circle than the African steppe.

The property has been in our family since the turn of the 20th Century. The phrase family-cabin up north' conjures up woodsy images of towering pines, fieldstone fireplaces and hand-hewn logs; this is not one of those cabins. This one is a bona fide hunting-shack. In lieu of the fieldstone fireplace: my great-aunt's ornate wood cook stove, and instead of hand-hewn logs: green shingles over wallboard. It does, however, have the towering pines.

When I was ten, my mom, dad, baby sister, big brother and I, along with assorted uncles, cousins and north-woods neighbors, planted fifteen thousand Norway pine seedlings over the Memorial Day weekend, filling the field my great-grandfather had clear-cut in 1903 to build his homestead, plant his garden and pasture his cows and horses. As they grew, the trees dropped their lower needles creating a plush rust-colored carpet that received filtered sunlight through the broad branches; the perfect acidic medium for wild strawberries.

It doesn't get any better than to be crouched down on the ground on a warm, dry, sunny day in June, surrounded by a fragrant carpet of jewel-like fruit the color and size of rubies. But anyone who has picked wild strawberries will tell you it's probably the most difficult of all wild berry picking. The berries are small, low to the ground and easily stepped on, requiring near-acrobatic flexibility and the eyesight of a sharpshooter to gather.

And so it was one warm four-day June weekend during my college days when I went to the cabin alone to pick these little gems. I wasn't exactly alone, Cinder, my dad's aging black Labrador, was with for company and to help me navigate the underbrush. She knew those woods better than I did, having traversed them more intensely, and lower to the ground, in

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