It’s cranberry season, and time to forage. My parents went up to our secret spot on the ridge last week to hunt for them (don’t ask me where, I’ll never tell), and

it seems it hasn’t been a very good year. That’s how it goes sometimes, when the harvest is subject to nature’s whims. The weather is a little too warm, or too dry, and we climb up there and find only a few dozen sad little berries.

Other years, it’s a bonanza. We sit for hours picking until our fingers are numb. It’s peaceful, a touch tedious, almost meditative. This grated on me when I was little – some of my earliest cranberry-picking memories involve nothing but discomfort: the cold, the aching crouch. Our old harvesting spot was at the top of an enormous hill that took ages to climb. But we always brought a big thermos of hot chocolate, more than enough to motivate me.

We lost that spot for good when a family of beavers moved in and built a dam, drowning all the cranberry plants. I remember the lake the beavers created was beautiful, but it ruined our cranberry prospects that year.

As foragers, we are at the mercy of the wildlife, the sun and the rain, and that’s what I love about it. We let go of our anthropocentric ways, just a little bit, and see what the seasons have to bring us.

My parents got me started young. My mom recalls bringing me out in a jogging stroller and plopping me down in the middle of a bush where I’d pick everything I could reach. I liked the blueberries the best.

I hear this year was a bad one for blueberries, too. I didn’t see any at Minnewaska over the summer (did you?). But my sister and I did find a trove of blackberries along one of the carriage roads in July, and we got such strange looks from the passersby. Granted, we were standing neck deep in brambles, picking and devouring like maniacs, but the passing scowlers just didn’t understand the glory of found treasure, sweet and tart, and worth a few thorn scratches.

Foraging was also essential to morale when I worked a summer job for the DEC. My coworkers and I were sustained by the huckleberries out on the rocks and the tiny wild strawberries in the fields, barely bigger than pomegranate seeds. It was all we needed to keep trudging through the Adirondack backcountry.

My city friends are absolutely entranced by this. It’s so elemental, finding food in the wilderness, using your surroundings to keep you alive. We did a foraging tour of Central Park last year with Wildman Steve Brill (a true character, I wrote a column all about him) and we ate all kinds of edible weeds growing in those well-traveled lawns. That was a good time – for you city readers, I recommend it.

But really, there’s no match for a true backwoods find. It was a bad year for berries, but my sister and I found chantarelle mushrooms in astonishing abundance this summer, hundreds of them, truly. We stood there agape, marveling at the magic a little summer wet spell can make. Those things really taste like the earth, and we ate them all week. It was a real treat, and next year, the harvest will be totally different. I can’t wait to see.