Foraging for Blackberries

This past weekend, I made a trip with my friends Katie, Liz, and Arianna to Russian River where we were also joined by our friend's Lisa, Brad, and Sarah. After a trip to the SF Ferry Terminal Market, we only spent a night at Lisa's newly renovated family home, but the food was delicious. While Saturday's dinner was scrumptious, I specifically want to talk about the wild blackberries we picked Sunday morning for breakfast.
Sunday morning we all woke up all in the mood for pancakes, specifically stone crushed oat pancakes with fresh fruit on top. We had some white peaches from the farmer's market that had gotten a little mushed during the car ride up, so were sliced into tasty morsels. Lisa, having been coming to this same place for her life, remembered the blackberry bushes around the corner from her house and suggested we pick some. Bringing a bowl, we reached through the prickly, vine-like bushes to reach the sweetest blackberries I had ever tasted. When they were especially ripe and delicious, they would crumble in your hands as you took them off, which I wasn't able to resist eating rather than putting in the bowl. Every once in a while, I grabbed a not so ripe one, which was reminiscent of the blackberries we are used to buying in stores. Also, the prickers on the vines surround the berries grabbed me a few times, which left a few small scratches on my arms and legs and one larger one on my sandal clad toe (it now bears a band-aid).I have also just finished the foraging section of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma and felt quite the satisfaction about gathering my own food as he felt. I also felt a great connection with what I was about to eat, feeling that I was in fact responsible for each of those tasty bites I took.
In any event, fresh blackberries on top of stone crushed oatmeal pancakes was a wonderful beginning to a Sunday morning.