“Deep as the sea and as wild as the weather, we will go just you and me to pick wild strawberries together.” — Gordon Lightfoot

On a recent walk along a section of an old Duluth, South Shore and Atlantic railroad bed, there in the day’s fading sunlight, I came upon a sight I didn’t expect to see.

A couple of inches off the rocky soil, in the cool evening shade, was the season’s first ripened wild raspberry. No doubt early, no less welcomed.

There it hung, with three others in varying stages of ripeness, off the red furry stalks of the plants, which sprouted from a cover of dead and crumpled leaves, between pieces of shiny ore and other stones scattered along the railroad bed.

It was an immediate and startling reminder of just how quickly the summer days pass in a blur in these north woods. I then thought about fresh, wild berries to pick and eat, coming up not far around the seasonal corner.

Like many things in the Upper Peninsula, an appreciation of wild berries dates to the days of the early American Indians populating the region.

Some scholars theorize these Native Americans intentionally set fires as a tool to produce finer blueberry crops. Historically, people and black bears have known blueberries to thrive after a wildfire blackens the landscape.

I remember that as a kid I was taken to the local woodlands to pick blueberries on numerous occasions.

Often, I would end up lying across the back seat of the hot family car that was parked under a jack pine tree for shade. There always seemed to somehow be a horsefly buzzing around the windshield inside the car while I tried to avoid some of the picking by napping.

Outside, my parents wore coffee cans off their midsections, fastened with coated wire that had been run through holes punched in the can with a hammer and nail.

The sound of blueberries making that plunking noise when they hit the bottom of the can remains in my memory, close enough to touch.

Decades ago, organized groups of people would make money picking blueberries on the local jack pine plains to send to restaurants in Chicago. This practice was performed in communities like Paradise in the eastern U.P., which today calls itself the wild blueberry capital of Michigan.

A few years back, summer residents on Grand Island were invaded by black bears that would sit in blueberry patches, just a few feet from homes, gorging themselves on that sublime blue bounty.

Sheriff’s deputies tried to drive the bears off with blank “cracker” shells they fired from shotguns. Eventually, the bears moved on, but not until the berries were gone.

Some U.P. towns celebrate berries and their importance, like the nearly 70-year-old strawberry festival held each year in Chassell. Marquette’s got a blueberry festival where they once sold blueberry-trout pie. Yeesh.

The region is also blessed with wild raspberries, thimbleberries, strawberries, huckleberries, cranberries and blackberries. Many of these wild berries are smaller, though often sweeter, than cultivated varieties.

It is amazing how much taste is packed into a tiny summer U.P. berry.

Though blueberries seem to reign supreme, with picking locations coveted like they were trout streams, I prefer to pick raspberries and blackberries.

I remember just a couple of years back, I stood barefoot along a dirt back road for about three hours picking raspberries. There in the warm afternoon, I stood without a single vehicle passing, listening to the songs of hermit thrushes, with grasshoppers twitching and jumping in the sand.

After that, I took the long way home, on almost all dirt roads, stopping here and there to enjoy the sights. One of them was an almost forgotten place called Cleveland Homestead in Dickinson County.

As a kid, our family would stop here to pick apples from orchard trees remaining from the days when the homestead was an active community. One time, while apple picking, we heard an animal approaching through the tall grasses.

My mom ran for the safety of the car with my young sister. We determined it wasn’t the black bear she’d feared, but only a hungry white-tailed deer.

Today, the apple trees continue to grow in that clearing, producing reddish pink-skinned and green apples shook into the back of pick-up trucks by hunters, rather than pie bakers.

I remember another time, way back there in my mind, we’d found a big patch of blackberries growing along a slow-moving creek that twisted through the woods. I recalled we had all pledged to return to this place again and again.

For whatever reason, we never did. Now, we never will.

Turning around at the raspberry plants I’d found, my boots crunched the gravel as I made the slow walk back. The falling night brought down a curtain of mosquitos. I turned up my jacket collar and slowly disappeared down the old railroad bed.

Editor’s note: John Pepin is the deputy public information officer for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.