It was 9:30 before we all rolled out of the tents. At this elevation, there aren’t many birds…or maybe it is the time of year when migration has already occurred. But it was conspicuously silent up in the gap. Reheated pancakes hit the spot and the coffee was awesome. We all had to stop drinking coffee when we realized we used all of the filtered water we collected the day before. We would have to hike to get more water.
What do you do when you have a whole day to spend in the wilderness and nothing to REALLY get done? Nothing to get done…this really goes against my daily scramble to get everything done at the office. Well, when you are with Eric and Paul, you will have plenty to do. These two guys must be related to
Rudy Mancke, the naturalist on ETV here in Columbia. I am not joking when I say that we could not walk 10 feet without getting a nature lesson. “Oh,look at the striated veins on the back of this beech leaf, its hairy so that makes it genus “e pluribus unum” (or some other latin)”. Or, “is this a silver maple or a sugar maple?” “Wow, this parasitical plant lives on the host plant and is chlorophyll deprived therefore depends on the host plant”. I mean it took us on average one hour to hike a mile. Don’t get me wrong, this is all very fascinating stuff and I enjoy learning. But their minds are like information warehouses. I am a point A to point B kind of guy. We spent all day “smelling the roses.” I decided to play along.
I already mentioned that Eric is a missionary in Kenya. His job is to help Kenya develop in an agricultural sense. He provides a service to the locals where he will develop a crop management plan and help them implement it so they can grow their own food. To support his family, he raises bees for honey and quail as well as pheasant. His knowledge is more pragmatic and practical. Paul is just as knowledgeable, but is more academic in the sense that he learned what he knows in labs and degree programs. He is currently a biology teacher. Eric was on vacation and was in the states for about a month or so. It was evident that he knew this wilderness like the back of his hand. He spent a lot of his childhood hiking around this area with his Dad trout fishing. He was back in his element and he was enjoying every minute of it.
This leads to the theme of this day: Blueberries. We were about a week early but the balds were covered in almost ripe wild blueberries. I am referring to hundreds, if not thousands, of acres of blueberry bushes. Eric noted that the short bushes are called huckleberries and the tall bushes are blueberries. As you walked down the trail, you could pick blueberries from the side of the trail almost in unison with your stride and pop them in your mouth. You could use both hands and while you were popping a few in your mouth with one hand, you could grab another few in your other hand. They were not super sweet like the store bought “cultivars” (Paul’s word), but they were wild and delicious. On our way to Shining Rock, we ate at blueberries almost the entire way. We began to look for bushes with the best tasting blueberries. When we all agreed that we had found them, we would pick it clean leaving only the unripe berries. We weren’t the only ones enjoying the blueberries. The birds, bumblebees and butterflies were also partaking. So we had absolutely nothing to “get done” today, but we spent most of the day looking at the details, learning about Gods amazing creativity, and adventuring through this vast garden laid out before us.
