August is blackberry season here in the Pacific Northwest, and in Seattle the best picking is at the water’s edge where the brambles are accessible only by boat and almost always untouched. Picking blackberries with my daughter, Alison, is a tradition that has a long history. In mid-August of 1993, the day after she was born, we took her out in the gunning dory to pick berries on the brambled shores of Seattle’s Lake Union. This past August, when she flew up from San Francisco for her birthday, she and I planned to go boating together.The gunning dory she’d been aboard as a newborn has been idle and without a trailer, so I pulled the Whitehall out of the garage. The best berry picking would not be on Lake Union but on the Sammamish Slough where the banks 1-1/2 miles upstream from the launch ramp were thick with brambles. Our time was limited, and rowing would take too long, so I did something I’d never imagined I’d do: I put an outboard motor on the Whitehall.In 1978, when I started building boats, and in the years that followed, my interest was only in boats that I could paddle, row, or sail. I began a series of lengthy small-boat cruises in 1980 and took inordinate pride in the thousands of miles I covered under my own steam or by sail. Outboards then were oil-burning two-strokes and I took offense at the noise they made and the rank, blue cloud they trailed. In 1983, as I was putting the last coat of varnish on the Whitehall, if I had foreseen that I would one day willingly clamp an outboard on its beautiful mahogany transom, I could only have imagined that when I reached my late 60s I’d be well over the hill and descending into madness.
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Wunderbar!!!
Sweet!
Beautiful short story of berry picking at sea (or slough) and wonderful portrait.
I just got around to reading your story (I read the magazine sporadically to spread the enjoyment through the month). Picking berries is a tradition for many folks. As a kid I was required to pick for the winter’s supply of jam and future pies. I didn’t care for it, but had I been picking from a boat, well. Thank you for supplying yet another practical use for small boats.
Hurrah to time on the water with our kids. Twice in the past few weeks the 3rd- and 5th-grade granddaughters have reduced the blackberry density, once hiking to Summerland and again along the West Seattle Alki Trail. Must be time to launch for a water-access mission.
A sweet story, Chris, and wonderfully illustrated! Our daughter, now in her forties and with her own four-year-old daughter, forbade me, some years back, from ever selling my Phil Bolger Teal, which she has sailed in since it was launched, back in the early 1980s.