07.22.09

A thorny question

Posted in Experiences and reflections at 4:40 pm by admin

We haven’t put a counter on the Dogwood Journal yet, perhaps out of fear that the count will come back with a big zero. One, two, or if the heavens are really smiling, three readers per entry would be very exciting.  And since I don’t know, I’m going to assume that the readership of this blog exceeds our wildest expectations and in fact their are four readers out there.  Ignorance is indeed bliss.

So as a reward to our four loyal followers, I thought I’d share a couple Innsbrook Insider tips in this edition. First, the blackberries are ripe at Innsbrook. Almost anywhere you go right now, there are blackberry bushes along the road — in some areas, incredibly plentiful. My second tip:   Thierbach’s Orchard is a fantastic place to spend a summer morning in Warren County on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays — that’s when the pick-your-own farm in Marthasville is open. Currently peaches and blackberries are ready to harvest — which brings up a story.

Last week, my wife and I took our three boys blackberry picking at Innsbrook. We found a place that is literally covered with bushes scattered in tall grass (no, I’m not going to tell you exactly where — reader loyalty only buys so much).

Our three boys plunged into the brush and immediately began crawling under the bushes to get the best clusters of ripe berries. The birds tend to get the ones on the top of the bushes first — see there’s another benefit of reading this blog.

They quickly discovered that blackberry bushes fight back with hook-shaped thorns that grab and hold onto pickers whose movements are not slow and careful. After a while, all three boys caught on and the amount of “ows” began to die down. When the picking was complete though, they were covered with scratches and five-year-old Riley’s legs were bleeding freely. But all three boys sported huge smiles, purple hands and many cups of berries.

Now that the harvest bug had gotten into them (along with multiple chiggers) they demanded an immediate trip to Thierbachs to go peach picking. So several days later, we headed over there on a beautiful overcast morning with the temperature in the low 70s.

The boys picked three bags of peaches immediately, and were ready to start a fourth when they noticed that Thierbachs also had blackberries.  

We traded in our peach bags for berry trays, waled over to the huge stands of bushes and began picking. The berries were much larger that the wild ones we had been harvesting a couple days earlier and there was another difference — no thorns.

Apparently the geniusses at some plant science company found a way to breed blackberries without thorns. The immediate reaction was delight.

But after a while, I noticed 11-year-old Aedan looking a little somber. A little questioning revealed that he missed the thorns. “I don’t know, it just isn’t right without them,” he said.

Honestly, I agreed. Not only are the domestic berries inferior to the wild in taste, the picking experience just wasn’t the same. Yes, we weren’t getting scratched, but in a way, the scratches are kind of nice. It’s part of the experience.

In the wild, you feel the berries, you enjoy the chaos of meadow plants they thrive in — sumac, grasses and wild flowers. Birds are everywhere and by the end of the day, you’re almost guaranteed to see a deer. On the farm, the rows are neatly trimmed, the grass is cut and the berries present themselves at picking height on thornless stems. “Now what’s wrong with that,” at least one of our four readers is asking.

Honestly, I don’t know — perhaps it’s that I feel, hear, smell and see so much more when picking the wild berries. The philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche had an idea the future of virtue would be reduced to what is comfortable — no good, no evil — just expedient.  All regard will be for moderation and careful living “he will have little pleasures in the day and little pleasures in the evening.” Thornless blackberries would make sense to him. Nietzsche believed that “last man,” as he called him, would be long-lived and would live very carefully. “They will have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health”.

Another philosopher, Thomas Hobbs, believed similarly to Nitzsche that the future of man was to abandon quest to live good lives and instead, man should strive to live comfortable ones. 

In Hobbes’ world, all of education oriented to the highest good is replaced by education with the sole goal of avoiding death and preserving physical comfort. The aim is no longer to teach men how to live well; it is to “enlarge the power and empire of mankind in general over the universe.”

And so we have thornless blackberries.  We have neat rows of bushes that produce berries at perfect picking height — safe, comfotable and lacking the chaos of the wild berries.

But then Nietzsche countered that it is the chaos that lives inside of us that gives birth to stars. He believed that the height of the human condition welcomed change, chaos and experience. With that in mind, I think I’ll take the thorns.

After all, my favorite philosopher, 20th-century sage Jimmy Buffett, said, ”Let the winds of change blow over my head, I’d rather die while I’m living than live while I’m dead“

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