Huckleberry Hands
Art by Ridge Bethea (2019 archive)
There’s a reason we rarely get the whole extended family together. Too many loose ends: the money grabbing widows, the divorced partners we prefer better, the salivating senior citizens, the dope-dealing twenty-something deadbeats, the doubtfully blood related but loyally present. It’s like mixing unmarked chemicals in an opaque jug; you can’t see exactly how it’s all swirling together, but you know it’s bound to explode sometime soon.
The years it does happen, though, are always ones to write home about. Maybe not on a picturesque postcard, but notable all the same. Perhaps the most violent reunion was the year that Aunt Lisa wielded her singular authority to get us all to fly up to Whitefish, where she was working as a traveling nurse at the time. None of us wanted to admit that she was subtly taking the chance to try to sell the idea of her newly acquired geriatric boyfriend to us, but if she got the log cabin he was loaning us in the will, we could get used to it. It wasn’t that we didn’t like the Western peaks or the endless forests; we didn’t like the inescapable reversion to toddler-like tendencies brought about by our mismatched homecomings. The terminally ill addition to our playground was doing us no favors. The mansion-like accommodations he was providing us with, admittedly, did a few.
To clarify, this is truly an ode to Montana, and to the Huckleberry Patch parking lot where both physical assault and attempted vehicular homicide occurred within the first twenty four hours of our arrival in the state. It takes a special place to retain its beauty as your aging relatives duke it out, scrambling for purchase in the gravel, the Livingston Range dyed the orange of morning behind them. Ironically, I don’t remember exactly what set off the most volatile pair of siblings in the whole clan - they’re considered the most volatile for a reason. Whatever it was, the redneck regulars ooh-ed and aah-ed at Lisa’s perfectly aimed flying elbow popping Uncle Micheal in the nose, enjoying the titillating tourist show. Half-embarrassed and half-given up on the hope for a peaceful breakfast before our morning hike, I grabbed randomly for a purplish informational brochure slotted into a stand by the door to bide my time.
The Huckleberry Patch, a dive we had chosen not for comfort but for the plethora of (you guessed it) huckleberry flavored/infused/derived-from products, is the last civilized stop before entering the wilderness of Glacier National Park. Civilized may be too marketable a term. The shop was adorable in a woodsy cabin sort of way, and their selection extensive, but we’d watched three families fight aggressively over a last slice of pie and another forcibly deconstruct the soda machine when the Cherry Coke went flat. In other words, it was as rough and tumble as you’d expect, and we basked in the glory of fried food and warm pastry.
It wasn’t exactly a tourist destination, and it was very clear from the moment we stepped inside the Huckleberry Patch that we were the outsiders. What’s worse than a bunch of brown-nosing tourists taking up counter space? Ironically, I knew firsthand the answer was nothing.
Within this messed up family of misfits and outliers, my parents and I tended to don our Hawaiian shirts and watch the action through binoculars. None of us are blood related; only a distant adoption that gets more and more complicated each time it’s retold ties us vaguely back to the matriarch of the clan, who over the years had gained a soft spot for us. We were always the least visited, the least known, and the least informed. Maybe we were spared a portion of the melodrama, but we were also often unprepared to cross a certain babbling brook called Tension. “Don’t you worry, dolly,” Aunt Betty had cooed over the phone a couple nights before we landed. “Michael and Lisa have worked it all out, just like they always do.”
To say the brochure told some white lies of its own would be accurate, like all restaurants lavishly, textually furnish their establishments to potential customers. However, with some digging, the captivating truth of how the huckleberries arrived in the store everyday among the gentle fabrications. Devotees to the tiny fruit, and the possible culinary creations that went along with its acquisition, woke before sunrise to stay within the coolest part of the day, and made a sometimes miles-long journey up the mountain, searching bushes and brambles for their treasure. An urgently red box in the corner of the paper issued a warning to any hikers that may see these huckleberry pickers coming down the mountain with peculiarly stained hands. No one was killing anyone or burying a body, only finding some fresh fruit. I made sure to hide the brochure from Lisa, who at this point had aggressively rounded the hood of our rented SUV to throw herself behind the wheel, in case she felt inclined to claim it as a reasonable enough alibi. The tires slung mud and pebbles as she swung wide to peel out of the parking lot, and several generations were nearly hit-and-run in the process.
It’s one of those things that the general public tends not to concern itself with. Who cares how the berries came to be in a pie? I’d argue that anything important enough to get people up and out of bed before the sun rises is worth knowing. And the beauty of the image itself, the aftermath of the gathering - it’s nearly the start of a horror film. A dark avenging angel, shadowed in the post-dawn light, making the trek back down the mountain with a murderous tint on their skin, dark purple dripping almost maroon-ish from each fingertip. Already anxious and on the lookout for bears, any hiker could mistake the fleshy shape and squish of bucketed huckleberries for a forcibly detached limb on the way to become a trophy wall mount.
I guess when you love something enough, you bloody your hands for it. Well - for it or with it, either way.
In the parking lot, my uncle held his fist to his nose, which was beginning to form a little puddle at his feet. We all scrambled to fit the extra passengers previously riding with Lisa into our second vehicle, an unfortunately cramped tin can of an automobile. One of the senior citizens among us gained a moment of consciousness to complain about the extra money the rental dealership would likely charge her if we brought it back with blood on the seats, and insisted Michael should hang from the roof. (Said Senior Citizen hadn’t paid a single penny on this trip, but they’d likely forgotten at this point.) Guessing that Lisa would likely meet us at the trailhead with the hijacked SUV, we set off to meet our fate. I couldn’t stop thinking about the possibility of crossing paths with one of those huckleberry pickers, at seeing that image in real life. Some things are just symbolic from the moment you conjure them; the raw-looking skin of a morning forager, the bloody Renaissance scene of a family fistfight.
The conclusion of this chaos was undeniably underwhelming. Lisa did not meet us at the mountain base, having taken a spin through the countryside to let off some steam, and the cramped ride back with a dozen sweaty sardines still haunts me. No huckleberry haulers passed us on the way up, something I complained quietly about to my father, still worried that my aunt could somehow listen in from afar and drop by to dispose of some of us. The experience was awe-inspiring in the way that all great masses of dangerous rock are, in that we’re all inevitably drawn to what can likely kill us in trying to tame it. Either way, the writer in me shook her head sadly that my allegorical hopes were dashed.
Lisa’s SUV was parked in the driveway of the cabin, still running as our contraption pulled in later that day. We all glanced at Michael, colorfully cussing her out and rallying his ailing bones for round two. But then - there was my allegory. Lisa, stepping gingerly out of the car and making her way towards us. The knuckles on her right hand matched the nostrils and mustache-line of her brother, and clutched in her palm, a sweating quart of huckleberry ice cream. It was an early sunset, and she was backlit demonically - or maybe that was simply my biased interpretation. We all had the same thought, though my father and I were the only ones who had read the brochure: would we be her next victims? Micheal met her half way, the hair on the back of his neck raised, and we watched in horror as her fist raised once more, on a clear path to -
To gently press the cold container against his bruised face.
Yes, I guess, they loved each other - or something like that. Bloody hands and all.
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