Anchorage Daily News

HAINES -- You might think that if your almost-18-year-old daughter is barely speaking to you because you are keeping closer tabs on her than she thinks necessary, you definitely would not make her fresh blueberry pancakes on the first day of her senior year in high school.

But I did, after I picked the blueberries with her, some friends and her two older sisters. Her fourth sister and a brother are at college in sunny Colorado.

In Colorado they don't need rain gear, rubber boots or layers of long johns and fleece to harvest fruit in August. They also don't take a friend with a .38 special holstered on her hip. (I hope.)

The pistol is for bears, although, "It probably wouldn't kill one" the young lady gunslinger says, "but it should make enough noise to scare it away."

When I ask if she can actually shoot the thing, her mother, picking berries nearby, says "oh yeah," and the pistol packer, who looks more like a beach volleyball star than Annie Oakley, says, "sure."

My 24-year-old daughter, the environmentalist, jokes that her friend's pistol is the only gun the animal rights folks approve of because it's for shooting yourself before an angry bear eats you. She advocates talking to grandfather bear and thanking him for sharing the berries, which is the Tlingit way. I decide to keep close to the gal with the gun, pack pepper spray and talk a lot to whoever, or whatever, is listening.

This does not endear me to the daughter who is already unhappy with me. She rolls her eyes and moves away with her older sisters. She doesn't want to be too alone in the berry patch.

As I feel my way up the steep old clear-cut, over the scrap limbs and stumps hidden under the berry bushes, ferns, and devils club, high above the river but still below the glacier capped peaks all around, the clouds press against the hill like a sponge and wring out mist, and then rain, and then are empty. It is still gray, but clear enough to see the confluence of two rivers in the green valley below us. Over the din of their currents, I hear a chain saw.

It belongs to a father gathering firewood for his family. There's an older boy with him. They buck logs into rounds and load them up to the sideboards of their pickup. Later, when they drive by on their way down the mountain with a couple months' worth of winter warmth in the back, they'll wave, the rig will sway and the scent of hot brakes and fresh sawn logs will linger. It seems that everyone out here today is doing the work we are meant to do in the fall, in a way that is more outing than chore.

In our chatty all-girl party there are dogs too, a big barking mutt, a baying bloodhound and an anxious schnauzer named Oscar who won't his leave his mistress but doesn't think she should be out in the rain or in all this brush that smells like bears and moose. But he loves her, so he remains on reluctant guard duty. Kind of like my youngest daughter and me.

I tell her that Eleanor Roosevelt said that no one can make you feel bad without your consent and other very wise things. I am mostly talking to myself, though. Since she's not interested, I have a whole conversation in my head with her, about good choices, good daughters, good mothers and good berries, and then look down at a bush loaded with perfect fruit and up at that the clouds parting and the view out the valley, and hear my three daughters and their friends talking and picking, and even though everything is not perfect between one of them and me, I'm suddenly so grateful to be here with all of them. Emerson got it right when he said the proper response to the world is applause.

After we get home, and the berries are soaked and the leaves, stems and a few floating worms are skimmed off, I drain them and scoop 1-cup portions into freezer baggies. There are enough for blueberry pancakes every Sunday this winter. I leave a bowl out for pancakes on the first day of school.

Experts say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. They have no idea how much depends on my blueberry pancakes. I'm hoping a good breakfast will make a good day, a good week and whole good school year. I'm counting on blueberry pancakes to make everything OK again.

Heather Lende lives and writes in Haines and is the author of "If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name." She can be reached at hlende@adnmail.com.

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