KEWEENAW PENINSULA — The Keweenaw is spending five days this week celebrating a fruit that is difficult to pick, nearly impossible to ship, produces only a handful of berries on each plant and can apparently be destroyed by placing several of its own friends on top of it.
This is the thimbleberry, and people up here absolutely love the thing.
The second annual Keweenaw Thimbleberry Festival began Tuesday and runs through Saturday, with farmers markets and events moving through Houghton, Hancock, Lake Linden and Calumet. There are thimbleberry baked goods, jam, drinks, ice cream, a guided hike, a storybook walk and a digital passport encouraging people to visit participating businesses around the peninsula. Organizers describe the whole affair as a celebration of a “tiny berry with big local pride,” which is accurate, although it leaves out the part where the berry itself seems determined to make everyone work for it.
Thimbleberries are perfectly edible. They’re sweet, tart, related to raspberries and blackberries, and particularly at home in the Keweenaw. The problem begins approximately three seconds after you pick one.
A ripe thimbleberry is extraordinarily soft. Local picking guidance recommends carrying them in a wide container because just a few layers of berries can crush the ones underneath. They need to be refrigerated quickly, last only a few days after picking and don’t pack or ship particularly well, which is a fairly serious occupational problem when you’re a fruit.
Consider the blueberry. You pick a blueberry, put it in a plastic box, put that box on a truck, send the truck halfway across North America, throw the box around a grocery store for a while, forget about it in your refrigerator and then discover it Thursday behind the ranch dressing. The blueberry understands the arrangement.
The thimbleberry apparently considers this beneath it.
Pick one and you immediately enter negotiations. Don’t stack too many together. Don’t squeeze them. Don’t wait too long. Don’t expect them to survive an interstate journey inside a refrigerated semi with 14,000 of their closest associates. If you want one, the thimbleberry’s preferred distribution system appears to be you walking into the woods and finding the darn thing yourself.
That’s one reason you don’t normally wander into a supermarket in Ohio and encounter a majestic pyramid of Keweenaw thimbleberries next to the strawberries. They’re rarely cultivated commercially, and the plants aren’t exactly built for industrial productivity either. A thimbleberry plant typically produces only a few berries, so gathering enough for jam requires the sort of patience normally associated with fly fishing or waiting for road construction on US-41 to end.
And somehow, instead of recognizing any of this as a problem, the Keweenaw turned it into an industry.
Longtime businesses around the peninsula have built reputations around thimbleberry products, particularly jam. The Jam Pot near Eagle Harbor, The Jam Lady in Eagle River and Wood’n Spoon in Mohawk are among the names associated with that tradition. This week’s festival expands the idea across farmers markets and other businesses, where the berry is showing up in breads, Bundt cakes, baked goods, cocktails and ice cream.
The entire modern food economy is built around making things easier to grow, easier to harvest, easier to package, easier to transport and available every month of the year whether nature likes it or not. Somewhere along the way, nobody explained any of this to the thimbleberry.
It grows where it wants, ripens during a relatively short northern summer, gives you a few berries at a time and has approximately the structural integrity of a sincere apology. If somebody in Arizona wants fresh Keweenaw thimbleberries in February, the berry’s response appears to be “That’s unfortunate.”
So the Keweenaw adapted to the berry instead of making the berry adapt to the market. People pick them locally, turn them into things that last longer, sell those things through small businesses and have made the flavor part of what visitors associate with the Copper Country. This week, four communities are effectively passing a festival down the peninsula because this fragile little red fruit somehow became part of the local identity.
The festival continues Thursday at the Hancock Farmers Market, Friday in Lake Linden and Saturday in Calumet, with additional thimbleberry specials and activities at participating businesses around the peninsula.
And perhaps the thimbleberry works here precisely because it isn’t terribly interested in being convenient.
The Keweenaw spent a century digging copper out of solid rock, built towns in places where winter occasionally attempts to erase them, and continues maintaining roads in a landscape that receives snow in quantities normally associated with clerical errors.
A berry that is inconvenient, stubborn, highly local and requires entirely too much work for the amount you get back was probably never going to scare anybody off.
Frankly, it may have found its people.
