By The Campfire

August 6, 2008

A while back, in my mother’s backyard in Alabama, I got into a conversation with several elderly Southern women about the difference between blueberries and huckleberries. I found out more than I cared to know about both berries. So did Rudy.

My mom’s blueberry bushes are a perfect example of the 49.876 million varieties of blueberries in the South. There are so many kinds it boggles the blueberry mind. And sometimes the very bluest berries are actually huckleberries.

My mom has four distinctly different types of blueberry plants in a ten foot square area that attract Rudy, our Jack Russell, like a pig to slop. He is addicted to them. His blueberry jones is as big as a Doberman. When we visit Alabama, Rudy’s tongue is stained purple for a week and when he hassles, he looks like Ozzy Osborne in concert.

Jack Russell’s have some ancient, genetic connection to blueberries, not unlike their oneness with tennis balls. Rudy eats blueberries as fast as he can yank them off the bush. He sucks them off the ground. He’ll steal them from your collection bucket if you aren’t paying attention.

I watched him try to climb up in the blueberry bush and gnaw off fruit-laden limbs so they would fall for easier access. I picked buckets-full of the fat berries and if I left them untended, Rudy would ram his head into the blueberries and eat them like a possessed weed whacker loose in a Bahia Grass patch. I had to wash off his face lest he be stained like a bruised-headed hound from blueberry hades.

Huckleberries are different. From what the old women told me (and old women in the Deep South know a lot about plants - even cannabis), many people confuse blueberries and huckleberries. Dogs confuse them as well. But only once.

Huckleberries, for the most part, are fuzzy. One of the women produced an article from the Mobile Press-Register newspaper (by Bill Finch, Garden Writer) explaining that the huckleberry was a Southern mispronunciation of the old English hurtleberry or whortleberry. A blueberry was a whole other berry, they said.

I have seen huckleberries growing on our farm but, quite honestly, thought they were poison. Anything that grows and is fuzzy seems like poison to me. Sorry Mr. Twain if I am putting words in your considerable, Southern mouth, but I’d imagine it’s why you called Huck Finn by that name. I’ll leave the implication to interpretation.

On our farm, Rudy shagged a mouthful of huckleberries, thinking they were just like blueberries. I watched him shiver as they hit his tongue. His face contorted, he looked at me as if to say, “What the –?” Then he spewed fuzzy beads out like little paintballs smacking the ground.

He soon found a blueberry bush and was in purple-slobbering, chomping heaven.

As I watched Rudy eat enough of the little dark orbs to choke a large bear, I thought about how blueberries and huckleberries have contributed to the language and culture and literature of the South. Above me, the relentless Southern sun cut through a metal-gray afternoon thunderhead that had just drenched the woods and steamed the pavement out on the road. I pondered Faulkner and Twain and Tennessee Williams. Across the way a scraggly cat was doing an ironic walk on a hot, tin roof, literally. My thoughts were loudly interrupted by a barfing sound coming from behind the blueberry bushes.

It is possible to get too much of a good thing.

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