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30.09.09
25.09.09
 A woman on the bus, in some kind of crochet-looking black top, was watching a hand-held video device without earphones, so that her audio was broadcast throughout the packed and drowsy early morning bus. She seemed to be watching a comprehensive inventory of the most annoying sounds of everyday life: loud commercials, weedwhacker motors, bad pop music, babies screaming. A guy got on the train, in sandals, pre-distressed blue jeans, a striped blue and white polo shirt with decoratively frayed applique, sunglasses and an iPod; in other words a clone of any of the stores sporting flying bird hallmarks and a perpetually adolescent brand image. He was carrying a cup of coffee; not some deceptively named overpriced concoction sporting a green circle, instead it had a brown lid and a hint of a yellow curve. Aware that this would be dissonant with being the ultimate poster child for western excess materialism, he was holding a napkin over the cup in such a way as to obscure any logos. A woman, in bright leaf green and a with a green tote bag, carrying a bunch of vividly red flowers, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight on the train; mesmerizing. 13.09.09
A raccoon was raiding an overflowing trash can by Coal Harbour last night. Tourists took photos.
Found a store changeroom lit with fluorescents hidden behind the mirror, reflecting off of curved walls of wood veneer. Most flattering light ever, Palpatine could do commercials for L'oreal in there, because he's worth it. 11.09.09
06.09.09
05.09.09
1. The berries we pick are the Himalayan variety, Rubus discolor, endlessly invasive, horrible to remove, a blight on the landscape for 11 months of the year. Then you hit late August - early September and you can walk up to any thicket and help yourself to the distillation of summer into a warm, dark, sweet syrup.
2. "Urban Foraging", the 100-mile dieters called it. The only time you see people commonly collecting wild foods in urban settings and no one bats an eyelid. If you said you were going to scare up a load of salad greens from the local woods (totally doable), you'd encounter far more opposition and likely a degree of horror.
3. Everyone has their spots, like fishing holes. The woods closer to here used to be good (and convenient, more than anything). That site has since been made into a more formal parkland, with better maintenance meaning worse berry yields. I suggested another under-used park area, and it turned out to be surprisingly good. I'm not telling you where it is.
4. The best-looking berries are always the ones hanging just a little too high to reach. Plenty of sunlight and space, and each berry resembles a cluster of dusky grapes, tantalizing. In the past, I've cheated and brought extension trimmers (or whatever they're called, like a bypass pruner on a pole, with a cord you pull) to cut them down. That was a little closer to home; in a more public arena, it doesn't seem quite sporting. You can see how being tall gives you a fitness advantage if we were hunter-gatherers (instead of compulsive shoppers).
5. Of course you never just pick the berries. First to come up out of the buckets were the spiders and inchworm-like things. On the first rinse, the hemlock needles and other organic detritus washed away, though the collembola and mites remained. I ended up soaking the berries in the sink for a while, letting the various arthropleonid and symphypleonid collembola, as well as prostigmatid-looking things float up to the surface. The berries weren't any more infested than other food, it's just we saw them straight from the source. Usually our produce has had plenty of time for the creepy crawlies to die off, or be killed by pesticides. Food; the closer you think about it, the less appetizing it is.
6. Froze a bunch, ate a bunch, made pie. Very Roughing it in the Bush, only with freezers, and electric ovens, and basic infrastructure.
7. My sister's birthday falls in August, and when we were kids we'd have the family over for a bbq outside. One summer we rounded up our cousins after dinner and headed out to the woods to pick a load of blackberries for dessert. I think ice cream was involved. Good times.
8. There's a tremendous degree of variation in taste in the batch we got, from puckeringly tart, to almost too sweet, to disturbingly bland. It makes you wonder about the localized growing conditions of each berry. What was in the soil? How much sunlight did it get? How close can we get to the road before we're eating antifreeze?
9. You acquire a pretty good search image after a while. By that I mean you recognize the good sites, open enough to access with a density of ripe berries that makes it worthwhile, perhaps some overhanging branches to provide some support for the brambles. Usually there's a mass of crushed plants from the last person who was standing there, so that helps too. Also, you can start to differentiate the good berries, with the plump drupelets that release easily from the stems. You can get pretty efficient, and it's enough to give you a moment of false confidence that you could survive out there without the local supermarket.
10. Each berry is an aggregation of individual fruits. Each little round bit is a drupelet surrounding a single seed. Each drupelet (other examples of drupelets include plums, peaches, and apricots) is the ripened ovary of a flower that was pollinated by an insect and is desperately trying to reproduce. By picking the berries, we disperse the seeds, which increases the range of the plants. Tricky little buggers.
11. I wore my weedbusting outfit, that being hiking boots, old jeans, a long-sleeve shirt with pockets, sunglasses, and a baseball cap. You need to stomp down the thorn-bristled stems to get in to the good spots sometimes. It's rewarding to do something which totally stains your hands as an objective measure of your effort. For a couple of hours, it's interesting. For an eight-hour shift, I'd go back to my day job.
12. I suppose this is an annual tradition. A sunny day, some good company, periods of intense concentration interspersed with random conversation punctuated with the occasional "OW" from the thorns. I brought band-aids.
13. Eating local food makes you acutely aware of the place, and how the molecules and processes from that specific site are now being assimilated into your body. We make ourselves from what we eat and so we are patched together from various locations and through the interactions of various people. With food from this close to home, it's easier to visualize pulling nutrients from the soil, carbon from the air, and energy from the sun and solidifying it into this mass of matter we call ourselves.
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