Things that go Bump on the Farm

You would think a farm kid would have observed the facts of life at a pretty early age, what with  being surrounded by farm animals.  My dad however, took extreme measures to ensure the daughters of the family were in no way subjected to anything he didn't want us to see.  For instance, every season a bull would be hauled by truck and trailer across the farm yard and out to the fenced area behind the barn. I would always see the creature coming and going, but never actually knew what he was doing because  I was ALWAYS shooed away.  I was to be absolutely nowhere in the vicinity of the barn while the bull was there and that was final.  I was told of the dangers of the bull and heard many stories about how viscious the animal could be.  I had a great respect for the bull and still do to this day.  My brothers could go and watch the whole operation, but NEVER me.  I know, you should never say always or never, but those were the facts.  When I asked dad why he brought the bull around, his answer was the same EVERY time, "to keep the cows company".  Then he would smile or laugh and I got so I felt like punching him, just for saying it because I knew there was more to the story.

By the time I was 12 years old, I was in the Hudson Bay Union Hospital for a two week stint because of bronchitis.  My friend and neighbour, Donnie Foster was also in for the very same thing.  Another little bit older friend in the next room was Terry Grant.  He was a town kid who was recovering from some kind of operation.  His dad was the elevator agent and a friend of my dad's.  We were all three enjoying our stay, well, sort of..or as much as you can enjoy being in the hospital. Donnie will remember how he and I would compare how much phlegm we had accumulated in our spitoons on a daily basis.  Gross, but true. 

One afternoon, I slipped through the adjoining bathroom to Terry's room and we started having a game of cards.  We played for quite awhile before the nurses found out and they were not impressed.  They made me promise to never go to his room again.  Apparently, we were in for different reasons and mixing those reasons up weren't good....Now that I'm a nurse myself, I realize it was especially not good for Terry, he had a wound and I had the germs.  When you're bored, card playing sure helped pass the time.   I still love those adjoining bathrooms with the cute little inside locks. About four years later, I became a candy striper at that same hospital and learned even more about those bathrooms and how the whole bedpan idea worked.

My favorite thing about the hospital was that if you rang the bell, somebody would come running.  That was a sweet gig for quite awhile, however, they soon got tired of it when one afternoon all hell broke loose when a lady showed up to have a baby.  I had rung for somebody to get me some more kleenex.  The nurse showed up in a huff, a little later than usual, and I was told in no uncertain terms that they were far too busy for me to be ringing for such insignificant things.  That cured me. 

My favorite treat was this fantastic toast and juice every night as an evening snack.  I almost never got juice on the farm, mostly fresh fruit, so it was such a treat and good for a cough. Visiting hours were over by 8:00 p.m., and one Sunday night, some of us got to sit in the TV room and watch Bonanza which was over at 9:00 p.m.  I think one of the nursing staff,  Agnes Lewellin probably felt sorry for us and let us stay up.  She was from the Etomami area, the same as Donnie and I. 

There was a married lady who was also a patient and watching Bonanza too.  I thought I might as well ask her the same question I always asked dad.   Why do we need to get the bull?  It seemed to have stuck in my brain like a broken record. Neither Donnie,  Terry nor the nurses seemed to know the answer...,either that or they were avoiding me. She looked at me confused for a minute and then smiled.  She asked what my parents had told me.  I said it out loud...."to keep the cows company".  She laughed and I blushed.  Imagine being 12 years old and still being left in the dark about this most important thing!   This lady did not in any way make me feel bad though.  She treated me like I was the most important person in the world and that what she was about to tell me was equally important.  She explained that the bull is brought to a farmyard to service the cows so they get pregnant and have little baby calves.  I smiled and thanked her.  I never felt more grown up in my whole life.  The next chance I had to have a conversation with my dad, I told him what I had learned from this woman and he burst out laughing.  Big joke dad!  I punched him.  I can still remember him laughing and teasing me by saying, "bad, old dad.....bad, old dad."   He was such a teaser. 

By the time I was 16, I had asked to witness the birth of one of the newborn calves.  No way.  I always got shooed away.  I was getting frustrated.  Never allowed to see when the bull comes to visit.  Never allowed to watch a calf being born.  One day, one of my brothers let it slip that one of the pigs was about to give birth to piglets that very day.  The sow was in a separate pen out in the old, low-roofed pig house.  It was made of logs, that's how old the building was.  It was broad daylight.  Dad was out in the field on the tractor.  I seized the moment and went and asked mom if she thought it was a good idea for me to go watch the piglets being born and she said, "why not?"  She obviously could have cared less.  So out I went and watched that sow's every muscle twitch.

I stood there by the hour, knowing that pig houses have rats in them.  I kept watch for anything that might move, but really there wasn't much.   Finally, as the day wore on, the air became oppressive, I was past feeling sick from the smell of the pig barn and now smelled like it myself.  I itched.  The flies were driving me crazy and I was ready to leave.  Suddenly, the sow started to give birth.  Out so utterly slowly came the first part of the first pig.  It looked so white and waxen, I couldn't believe it.  When it plopped out onto the floor, it just lay there stiff and still.  Out plopped another and another and another until there were six waxen, white piglets all laying on the straw of the wooden floor.  They didn't move.  They didn't make a sound.  I waited for many minutes, but lo and behold they were ALL born dead.  I was horrified.  I know that sows will sometimes eat their young, especially if there's something wrong.  The sow started to move around and make some noises like pigs do.  I imagined her starting to chow down on her offspring and ran out of there like I was being chased by a banshee!  There was no way in the world I wanted to see that.  I ran to mom and told her...she was incredulous as was everyone else..  To this day, I don't know what happened to those piglets.

That experience cured me from wanting to see a real live birth for quite some time.  I am happy to say that once I left home and before mom and dad sold the farm, dad let me watch one of the cows give birth to a calf.  It was only because my brothers were there to egg him on, I'm sure.  Even they felt sorry for me because I was about 18 by now.

By the time the cow's labor had progressed, I felt so much sorrier for the cow than I did for myself at not having seen a birth.  Rightly so, as I was to find out myself in a few years.  Don't let anybody tell you that animals don't experience pain, because you could see it written all over that poor cow's face and body.   Her huge brown eyes were glazed over and she was dripping in sweat.  Her body would heave and be wracked with painful contractions and she made a sad noise with each.  I prayed it would be over soon and sure enough, the first thing that poked out was one solitary light colored hoof.That's what sticks in my mind.  The body made it's way out bit by bit and then all of sudden in one last whooshing gush, the whole calf was born.  He fell to the floor and then kept trying to get up little by little, until finally, he stood up all by himself, really wobbly-like.  He wasn't even taught how, he just knew what to do instinctively.  I was amazed.  He wobbled his way over to his mother and knew enough to start suckling.  Unbelievable.  He head bunted her a couple times and she started licking him to clean him up.What a champ!  What a team!  Later, when the cow turned around and started eating her own afterbirth, I knew that was enough for me.  The dog by this time was hanging around seeing what morsels she could get and I decided to leave.

Incidentally, even after all these decades, I still have never witnessed a bull at work in the cow paddock.  I guess I lost track of that somewhere along the line.

The mid-life crisis and finding yourself single after it: a woman's perspective.

 I would not profess to know any more about this subject than the next person, but if you're interested, here is what I've found. So what and when is a mid-life crisis?  Well for me, it was right around the time when I turned 30 during the mid 1980's.  I looked around one day and asked myself, "Is this all there is?"  The realization crept up on me that here I was in exactly the place I was supposed to be, but nothing looked like I thought it would ...The glimmer of mystery and intrigue that I thought the future would hold was growing dimmer every day.  All the eager anticipation and daydreaming of things to come which I had always taken for granted were no longer on sturdy ground.   Like how I was going to change the world. How I was never going to put up with what women had put up with long before my time. All the things I thought the world held for me from opportunity to wealth and importance ..were now NOT as firmly embedded in my psyche as they once were ..I was actually questioning their existence and by extension, my expectations of them in the first place.

I realize now that the mid-life crisis is something of a rite of passage into maturity.  I doubt there are many people who don't go through it.  I could be wrong, but it makes me feel better to say that.  I think during mid-life crisis, we mourn the loss of our youth and what was, as we look towards an uncertain horizon of what will be.  A whole new era of life will soon unfold and here you will be, standing at the pinnacle between robust youth and something else.  The full and abundant social life I had enjoyed both at highschool and university was followed by an engagement period of whirlwind wedding planning and starting a new career.   The excitement of setting up housekeeping, mastering a new job, and rearing children leaves us breathless.  The span from infancy to school-age is over in the blink of an eye and suddenly they are gone...our life starts to slow down. My baby was already five and my oldest was eight by the time I was 30.   The slowing down, the routine, and the calming of life was enjoyed for awhile, but the roller coater ride I had became accustomed to over the first thirty years started to look for a way to prove itself once again.

It didn't take long to come to terms with my new reality.  Men I have seen in this crisis may not show any other  outward signs other than to maybe buy a new sports car, a pair of sunglasses that look like aviator goggles, and a leather bomber jacket.  They may or may not start cruising up and down the streets.  Never accuse one of these men of being in a mid-life crisis because in my experience, they will only deny it.  I can't even speak for the behavior of other women, but I have seen some that start wearing skirts and sweaters a little shorter and tighter.  Their hair may turn an outrageous color.  They probably go for a few counselling sessions and start examining their faces for any signs of fine lines. I knew I had to go back to school.  After all, I do love learning.  Had anyone accused me of being in a mid-life crisis, I would have been highly insulted, so a good rule of thumb is to never comment on that fact to woman or man. 

Altogether, the total number of years I spent taking classes ended up being somewhere in the neighbourhood of 17, (remember, some years I only took one or two classes), so things stretched out.  I finally finished a master's degree when I was 55. I don't want to go into my credentials, but I have a couple other degrees and a few certificates and diplomas.  I could have been a doctor a couple times over, but I didn't want to go to school for seven years..... Those fine lines I talked about earlier?  They are now lines for which I purchase and use what I fondly refer to as 'crack filler'.  Never before have I worked so hard on keeping my face cleansed and moisturized, but there's no stopping it.  If you were a smoker like I was, you can expect to have wrinkles.   Businesses capitalize on this vanity.  Just turn your TV on and hear all the ads for women and anti-wrinkle products.  Do they even help?

Because I've been associated with post secondary educational training for several decades, I keep seeing  older women going back to school. They begin to broaden their horizons at an older age...particularly their financial horizons for whatever reasons.  I have always wondered why girls are in such a big rush to get married, to settle down, and to have babies first?  So many of us compromise our education right out of highschool when that time of our lives would be so much easier to be a student.  Imagine studying without the responsibilities of looking after kids and a family.  Yet some of us wait until after the mid-life crisis to wake up to the fact that one day, we may need to support ourselves in a very real way and move up the corporate ladder.  Those types of decisions I believe are partly animal instinct. We have an innate need to procreate and there's a strong internal push to get us there, even if we don't realize it.  If you know about Erickson's Stages of Growth & Development, you will know that from the late teens to some time in the twenties is the stage of intimay vs. isolation.  It makes perfect sense to me that establishing a family is the choice people make early on if they have insecurities about their abilities to find a desirable mate once they leave the biggest pool of single people they may ever encounter again....school.  Choosing a solitary existence over a family is often not a desired choice.

 I never really thought of it much, but I have classed myself loosely as either the dumper or the dumpee, and I would know these categories, since I've experienced both... and twice each. As a dumpee first, I was about 14 years old. I was crushed after a year of dating to think my life was over.  He had cheated on me with a girl I thought was my friend.  My parents watched me cry for awhile and then one day told me snap out of it because there were plenty of fish in the sea.   I did and there were.  The next relationship went on for two years again in highschool and I'm sad to say that I was the dumper.  He was sweet and shy and handsome, but I went away to work in the summer and didn't see much of him and we just grew apart.   My third relationship would be the second time I was a dumper.  In reality, we both agreed upon the decision.  I was 40, and that was probably another mid-life crisis when I look back on it.  At least, I've discovered that is when alot of people tend to separate.  My fourth relationship was the second time I became a dumpee, at the ripe old age of 56.  

Neither dumper or dumpee feels very good when it happens.  The dumper generally has to live with the guilt of initiating the hurting of the other.  The dumper may have taken a very long time to make the decision.  Firstly, the dumper may be working through trying every other alternative possible to see if there's even a glimmer of a chance that the relationship can be salvaged.  Secondly, the dumper may have had many long, hard soul-searching heart-to-heart talks in the mirror, or sessions with a friend or relative trying to work up the courage to not only make the decision, but to find the strength to act upon it. 

Many would disagree, but from my point of view being in a relationship where there is significant unhappiness in the long run sucks the life blood out of all, and tends to do more harm than good.  You all know that divorce rates have climbed to something like one in four.  That is a sad state of affairs for the children who are always stuck somewhere in the middle.  A household of fighting or not becomes the choice.  Marriages and relationships are hard work, but sometimes there is nothing else to be done.   In past decades, women and men both would endure horrendous situations because of societal rules.  More importantly, women were often undereducated and needed the financial security of their husband.  I still know people younger than me whose fathers refused to pay for their education.  These men felt it would be a waste of money, since the girl would rely on her husband and not need to work outside the home.  The couple may have had a much larger number of children than today. If you took sociology, you will know that rural communities often have large extended families close by.  Couples tend to not divorce in these situations because of the pressures put on them by those around them.  Urban families tend to be more nuclear and somewhat isolated from their extended families, so divorce is more prevalent.  Society started loosening up, probably somewhere around the 1960's, because that truely was a decade of radical thought, sit-ins, hippies, flower children, women who burned their bras and more liberal thinking than ever before.  

Following each break-up, the time period to find a new mate changed according to my age.  At 14 and 17, I was still looking for a life mate and the opportunity to bear children.  Time was of the essence according to my internal clock which I didn't know I had.  The idea of a girl being an old maid was still very much alive and well and that prompted every girl I knew to do whatever she could to find a mate.  At 40, I was in the early stages of change of life, again not knowing it.  I had 20 years of marriage to get over.  It took a full year before I even thought about meeting someone else. This was 1994 and I had one child heading to university and another still in highschool. When I did find someone new it was by word of mouth...someone knew someone. I'm afraid for self preservation reasons, I kept that relationship at a physical distance and it didn't last.  It was over by the time I was 56.  The stage of growth and development is generativity vs self absorption. I had a hand in ensuring the next generation gained a foothold...both my kids received degrees from university. 

Meeting a mate in this decade is a force to be reckoned with, but now internet dating is the way of the world.  This is not for the faint of heart.  It's exciting, it's scary, it's fun. But, it can be dangerous, so please read the safety tips found on the sites.  There are scammers and some dating sites are 98% scammers...you might recognize them because they're English is most often not very good.  But sometimes, you can't recognize them at all. You will exchange phone numbers and meet new local people in a public place for coffee.  You will be enthralled by some and never called.. You will be shocked and turned off by some and then called and called.  You will wait and be patient and hope that some day you too will find just the right person for you.  Your friends will know someone and try to set you up on a blind date.  You might try speed dating, that could be fun.  By the age of 50, there are singles groups forming.  There is hope.  By the time you are 65, it looks like cards and dancing, potlucks and travel could be in your future.   Good luck.

By 65 or 70, we will enter a new stage of growth & development integrity vs despair. Within the next decade I will become a senior citizen.  I will retire from work  although that age is on the brink of being extended.  Statistics say that divorce rates decline in older adults because in order to live on their own, seniors often don't want to or can't live alone. They turn to their mate physically for help with household chores and for safety and security needs.  Having someone else in the house to call for help becomes important.  With emergency panic button technology this too is being overcome.  That means that the person I am looking for today at 57 is someone I want to live long term with...not someone I live apart from that I only see now and then because of a long distance relationship.  We have to be compatible, we have to be patient and have a sense of humour.

I realize today that I need not have worried about what life would hold when I hit the wall at 30 years old.   It's like I can see the view clearly now from 10,000 feet.  I feel as though I can see the big picture of what has gone on before.  I can make some sense of what happened.   I have made a difference in the world and it was for the better.  I have passed my heredity, knowledge, and love along to the next generation.  I have found out and continue to see that life holds wonder and I will always remain in awe of what is yet to come.  There is no predicting or harnessing life or what is coming in the future.  We have to hang on tight, ride it, and take it all in with dignity and grace.  We have to contribute, be thankful and realize the value of having faith, friends, love and caring because we are nothing without our relationships....they are everything.

Berry Picking

Ever go picking berries?  Picking blueberries for example, means you're out in the bush, away from civilization on a warm summer's day and there's nothing quite like the experience. You'll likely be carrying a plastic ice cream pail hung from your waist by a belt or tie.  The hotter the day, the cooler and more enjoyable is the berry patch. You'll be getting the cool shade because the tall trees will block the sunshine overhead. The extra dampness created by the umbrella effect encourages the growth of moss and mushrooms below.  They say moss grows on the north side of the trees, but that is so much hooey as far as I can tell.  You will see other low ground plants such as wild strawberries and low bush cranberries, and flowers such as the Saskatchewan provincial flower which is a rare find.  Some of us have tended to, during our lives as Saskatchewanians, mistakenly, yet fondly referred to this flower as either the Tiger Lily or  the Prairie Lily, yet it is really not called that at all.  In reality our provincial flower is officially called the Western Red Lily according to Office of the Saskatchewan Provincial Secretary web site.  It is a protected flower, so please do not pick it!

Generally you can find blueberries where there is the combination of sandy soil and Jack Pine trees.  Unless you already know where the blueberries are, expect to do some driving around to find just the right conditions and then be ready to do a little walking into the trees. Sometimes a forest fire goes through an area, and many places in that location tend to grow blueberries some time later, like the next summer or so, when things start coming back to life.  For some reason areas near rivers can mean there may be blueberries there too.

If it's a good year for blueberries you are apt to find  multiple thick patches of the short plants with lush,  ripe fruit literally hanging from the delicate branches.  The forest floor will even have a blue tinge to it. You can relax and sit down on a bed of moss in the middle of the forest and milk the berries right off the branches, or you might decide to use a piece of dead fall as your stool.  On one occasion, my usual berry-picking partner, my Mom and I, stopped to pick blueberries while visiting at Hudson Bay.  All we had to pick into were two plastic grocery bags, so when they were full we were done. The berries weren't that plentiful, so it wasn't much of a problem.  Picking berries all dressed up and in high heels is NOT the way to go, but berry pickers will mount all sorts of obstacles to feed their addiction to the art.  We had attended one of the Homecomings and were heading back across country to the cabin at our lake.  The patch we chose was in the vicinity of the regional park, near The Springs, which is located a few miles south of the Bay.

Picking blueberries that are abundant is one of the most joyous feelings, because you're accomplishing something good.  If you love that rush and the spiritual feeling of being one with nature then blueberry picking is for you.  After awhile, a feeling of renewal starts to exist within you that can become quite therapeutic.  Essentially, it is because with every breath you breathe in, you are receiving new energy.  You may not know it, but according to a book called The "Celestine Prophecy", the forest itself is a place where human beings can go to get back, absorb and build new energy stores within our own bodies.  Scientifically, I think it can be explained by the oxygen and carbon dioxide cycles being complementary when it comes to human beings and plants.  Remember what you learned as a kid in school?  Humans breathe in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide.  What is it that plants take in?  Carbon dioxide.  Must have something to do with it.

Think about it, where do we go to renew ourselves on our vacations?  We go to the forest or the lakes or the mountains and rivers...often with our energy at an all time low, or virtually stripped from us, basically because of the heavy demands we face in our daily lives.  Why does our energy get depleted?  Well, certain people, by their very personalities, can suck our energy dry by being aggressive, overly needy, or monopolizing our time by talking us to death.  Fighting high volumes of traffic, being exposed to pollutants, being around hoardes of people in school and at work has to eventually take it's toll.  For the excessive us of computers, watching TV, and being bombarded all day long, we need a prescription for more than just pills. No, I don't know if all this is true, but I am suspicious that it is pretty close.

When the berry picking is good, you may not want to leave the blueberry patch you have found, but dusk will start to roll in and soon an unmistakable chill could run up your spine.  No doubt about it, you will need to get out of the bush before dark.  Sometimes the berries are found close to the road, but often you will have had to walk several hundred yards into the woods to find the better picking.  Previous pickers will often have stripped everything the first few hundred feet in, even worse than the birds, bear and deer.   I think they do this because they are chickens.  I think they're scared of meeting up with wild life or getting lost if they lose site of their vehicle.  With dark approaching and often too fast, that is the very reason why late morning, or early afternoon when the dew dries are the best times to go berry picking from my perspective. Not that I would know, but I'm told that most forest creatures sleep during the day, and move around at night.  There are several nocturnal creatures that you likely wouldn't want to encounter after dark. Bats and owls are two that come to mind, not to mention skunks, badgers and porcupines.

When you enter the bush, you can count on at least one bird, likely a crow or raven, just going snake by making the biggest racket they know how.  Apparently it's their job to warn the other animals that an uninvited guest has arrived in their territory.  If that doesn't make you leave, count on at least one squirrel staring you down from high up in a tree or a safe distance away on some deadfall.  He or she will give you the scolding of your life over and over as long as you stay in his vicinity.  If you hang around long enough though, he might become your new friend as does occur.  Squirrels in general can be a real pain in the butt.  The outhouse at my daughter and son-in-law's cabin is virtually unusable because the neighbourhood squirrel continuously fills the hole level with his winter supply of acorns. 

One summer, Mom and I were picking blueberries on a road somewhere near the Hanson Lake Road.  It was quite late in the afternoon when we got there and it got dark way too fast for us.  The berries were huge and "just hanging" and we did not want to leave.  Luckily, there was some big equipment clearing brush in a field just over a rise, so not too far away and we rationalized the noise was likely keeping creatures away.  Picking blueberries in the dark is almost impossible anyhow unless you have a flashlight.  We wound up driving home in the dark, found our way back to Prince Albert, and didn't hit a deer, even though that's when they like to wake up and start crossing the roads.   Do you know that salting the highways in the winter is one of the main causes of accidents involving deer and moose?  They like to lick the salt.  If you see a salt lick in the forest, you'll know some kind of animal passes through there. 

Another blueberry-picking session was a little more memorable.   Mom and I were picking north of Barrier Lake one late morning, a place that is across the road from a cemetery.  We had driven into the bush along the narrow sandy trail with her car for a fairly long way because the berries were so picked over along the main road.  Again, the picking was good and we were enjoying every minute as we carefreely moved further and further away from the car.  Suddenly, the silence of the forest was broken when we heard a loud crashing coming through the bush towards us.  Not knowing what it was, we both took off running towards the car.  That woman was probably 75 at the time and out-sprinted me by a country mile!  I couldn't even catch her because I couldn't even run, I was laughing so hard at her.  The problem with having given birth to two children is you have to be hanging on to "everything" before you cough, sneeze or laugh.. Let your imagination be your guide.  We never did know what made the noise, but the whole event made for a great fish ...er... berry picking story.

Also, we threw the cardinal rule about being in the bush out the window.  Art Dalgliesh was an old neighbour, farmer, and hunter who lived in Etomami.  Hudson Bay is the Moose Capital of the World, so for years there was nothing but American hunters crawling all over the place during hunting season. White hunting suits with orange caps or all orange outfits were everywhere from walking down the main drag of the town to driving on any given side road.  Art lived alone in a log cabin south of the Ridge Road and north of Merton and Irene Drechsler's and was a hunting guide most of his lifetime.  He actually lived in a different building (possibly a granary) located right adjacent to his original home in later years, because a skunk and a badger got into a fight under his first place.  Eventually by the time he was over 70, he left it all behind and moved into town.   He always gave us good advice about how to act in the bush.  We were afraid of bears, but Art would tell us all sorts of things in defence of bears like don't run, be quiet, they will smell you before they see you and they have to be downwind of you or was it upwind...??.  (Somebody else told me how they kill their prey,.. not Art....they give you the bear hug and while they have their arms wrapped around you, they lift up one of their hind claws and  gut you)....is this true??   Geez, I hope not, but.... 

Anyhow, Art had always maintained that he was far more afraid of a bull moose in rutting season.  After all, my little brother told me that the female moose only goes into heat once a year, so the bull better be ready and by that time, he's kinda cranky.  Art told us the most afraid he ever was in the bush was when he was stalked for way too many hours by a bull moose.  God only knows why the bull decided he didn't like Art.  Apparently though, they rival a grizzly bear when it comes to getting even!  So the cardinal rule in the bush when anywhere near bears is to "not run".  Know why?   Maybe because they're something like a dog and think you want to play....I doubt it.  If you think you can outrun them, forget it...they can do something like 40 or 50 mph....think you'll climb a tree?  Forget that, they can climb trees way better...If it's a grizzly, they'll stand there and shake the trunk of the tree until you fall out of it.  Luckily, the grizzly doesn't frequent these parts that I know of.  Regardless, Mom and I ran off, well at least Mom, with me limping behind trying not to....wet myself.

Another time, Cheryl Washburn and I and our kids took the half-ton truck to pick berries along the Ruby Lake Road north of Hudson Bay.  We both lived out there and this was close for us.  We were the proverbial berry pickers stripping the berries close to the road this time.  Yes, we were the chickens now.  We had really just gotten out of the truck and unloaded all the kids out the back, when wouldn' you know it...a full grown cinnamon-colored bear came roaring out of the bush and crossed the road right in front of the truck!  I nearly had a heart attack and went into instant paralysis and slow motion.  I could barely move, but managed to scream, throw the kids into the back of the truck, yell "sit down and hang on", and get myself into the driver's seat, shut my door and floor it.   I was never so scared in all my life.  Cheryl was laughing her head off, because she was always the gutsy one, but she was rattled too.  Honestly, it was like if everybody had flown out of the back of the truck, I couldn't have stopped to save them.  You never know how strong your fight or flight response is until you have to use it.

Some years, the berries aren't plentiful because of frost for instance, so you may find yourself wandering even further afield just looking for them.  With a frost, the animals are hungry and they may have reached the patch first so nothing is left.  A trip to the dump at the lake one year shows what happens when there aren't any berries.  The bears start hanging around scavenging for food. Presto, the conservation officers show up to rig a bear trap.  A big barrel is laid on its side with a nice, juicy steak to lure them in.   I distinctly recall that whoever got out of the vehicle from our family to throw away the trash got back in and suddenly held a new, and most pungent aroma to their person.  In fact, they were carrying it around with them because it was  stuck to the bottom of her flip flop.  Bear dung....nice.  Again, we had to drive far enough away so as not to be accosted by a bear!!

While berry picking, remember to stay within yelling distance of your partners, because it's easy to get turned around in the bush.   Apparently, when lost in the bush, a person ends up circling and circling, thinking they are travelling in a straight line.  One summer, a little girl about eight wandered away from her home and was lost somewhere in the forested area around our lake.  Search parties and aircraft were brought in and a massive hunt went on for weeks and weeks.  The helicopters flew up and down the lake several times a day looking for her.  Alas, her little body was eventually found somewhere in the forest and it was the saddest day ever.  It seemed the whole world grieved with that family for the tragic loss of their little girl.

Even though the forest can be a devastating place, taking away life, it can also be a life giving entity.  Over the years I have picked blueberries off the highway north of Hudson Bay with my parents and grandparents; at a place west of there called Greenbush with my Mom and aunts Dianne Fox and Margaret Busby; off the Ridge Road at Hudson Bay with my brothers and sisters and parents and aunts and uncles and neighbours - Alex and Beatrice Grant, Emily Foster, north of Melfort in the Pines with my Mom's cousin Beryl, to name a few. 

Happiness is....berry picking - a true Saskatchewan tradition....Need a break from the city?  Want to make a great dessert of plain berries or spice things up with pie, jam, jelly or syrup....the sky is the limit because berries are always there and ripe for the picking summer after summer!

Blueberries are wonderful, but you can also pick saskatoon berries, high bush cranberries, chokecherries, and raspberries to name a few.  Saskatchewan is rife with both wild and tame fruit and many people are thankful and take full advantage of the sheer abundance available to all of us.