Sauvie Island, 11:27am

There’s something atavistic in it: some back-brain voice that says tonight, we eat

As this year’s berry season starts, here’s a flash essay I wrote last summer that has yet to find a home. 🍓🫐

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Sauvie Island is golden light and green waves—not of water but of leaves and grass. Cut from Oregon’s mainland by a triplicate of rivers, the place isn’t tropical but tilled. I’m crouched alongside a close friend in one of the infinite parallel lines that stripe its surface, picking strawberries. Nearly every time I drop one into the box I carry, I pop another into my mouth.

The island is a snowless globe of earth and sky. Of quiet. In the half hour it takes us to drive here from northeast Portland, the world shifts; cafe-lined neighborhoods give way to industrial riverfront, where a billboard advertises a vegan strip club on one side and admonishes passersby to READ THE BIBLE: GUIDANCE YOU NEED on the other. Crossing the Wapato Bridge over Multnomah Channel, we see three stratovolcanoes on the horizon—still, in late May, powdered-donut white with snow. Then, abruptly, the meditation of a winding, two-lane country road.

I’ve come to this berry-picking farm—a rotating cast of beloveds in tow—every summer since I got to Portland five years ago. It’s the longest I’ve lived in one place as an adult. I say I spent my 20s traveling, the newly comprehensible words remote nomad tucked into my Twitter bio. Runaway would have been more honest. Anorexia had shrunk my body, but it was my capacity for intimacy that disappeared completely. As soon as anyone started to know me, it was time to go.

My taking root in the Pacific Northwest was, honestly, circumstantial. This was simply where I’d happened to land when I was finally ready to slow down, to expand. To stay.

Which is to say, I got lucky.

Planes take off, one then another, the sun glinting off their bellies as they angle toward their destinations; 74 degrees and not one fucking cloud, everything so bright it feels fractured. The sunshine is disorienting, a kind of gaslighting; the last eight months of cloud and drear seem nothing but a fever dream. Our fingers are stained red. We laugh about how there’s something atavistic in it: some back-brain voice that says tonight, we eat. There’s a hardness to it, too—especially strawberries, whose closeness to the ground demands a hunch. Marionberries and black caps are trellised, but thorned. It is sheer privilege that turns this from poorly paid manual labor to leisure activity. Still, I bypass the pre-picked berries lining the farm fridge every time.

Because the process is the thing. As I press each berry, sun-warmed and dusty, to my mouth, I am reifying my presence—allowing myself to be where I am in space; to take up my own dimension of it. Each small sweetness is a benediction: I am here, I am here, I am here.

For whatever time I am allowed, I will remain.