On the Rationing of Huckleberries

This month the Forest Service announced there will be no commercial huckleberry harvest in the Gifford Pinchot, and that a person may pick one gallon per day, three gallons per year. My staff filed it as news. I file it here as something older.

I have eaten huckleberries on those slopes for ten thousand years. I was there before the forest had that name, before the service, before the word “harvest” acquired a fence of paperwork around it. I do not recognize the gallon. It is a young unit. The berries do not come in gallons; they come in seasons, and in good years, and in years you do not speak of.

The berries were never the government’s to ration. They were never mine to hoard. They belong to the bears, who file no forms and have never once been cited.

I am told compliance will be monitored. I will comply, in the sense that no one can prove I haven’t.

As for my own picking this season, I decline to comment, citing an ongoing situation in the watershed.

— The Editor