The dog and I were out for a ramble at a place not far from home.

Our typical walk here is along a makeshift circuit of fairly indistinct side trails that crisscross back and forth over the main loop. We can thus customize our hikes to suit time, energy, and weather — anywhere from half an hour to half a day.

Most of these minor offshoot paths appear untrammeled — rarely if ever used other than by us and the occasional whitetail deer or cottontail rabbit.

That’s a good thing in my book, though it does mean, as we amble along, we’ll be the ones to clear any pesky trail-spanning spider webs.

Daisy the dog, eager and insistent at going first, takes care of anything knee-high and below; I’m responsible for everything upward. I don’t think Daisy minds, but I possess enough of a recessive arachnophobic gene that as the seasons progress, and strand-stringing spiders grow ever bigger, the possibility of being suddenly face-planted by some eight-legged horror the size of a chihuahua becomes a recurrent trepidation.

So, I walk slow, look close, and in line with Teddy Roosevelt’s sage advice, always carry a big stick.

Our favorite route takes us up a steep hill, through a lovely mature woods, into bits of succession forest lower down, and then across several sections of long-abandoned farmlands. Nowadays, those now fallow fields are either brushy, second-growth meadows dotted with pasture cedars, or else dense expanses of native weeds and grasses showing aspects of prairie inclinations.

For sure there’s always plenty along this biological mix for both of us to see, sniff, and examine.

Depending on the trail variations we choose, our course might also skirt around a few boggy corners, mucky flats, or wet places that won’t dry up before August. There are also several small brooks — both seasonal and spring-fed — we might need to cross.

As you would suppose, rain can mess things up along a number of our possible routes — often for just a day or two, but sometimes for several weeks. This can occur on both lowland and hillside pathways and is not as predictable as I like to imagine. A portion of dry trail can unexpectedly prove too wet or too muddy to manage with any hope of remaining clean and dry-shod.

I still get fooled and stymied by water and mud. That’s why a recent walk had to be modified en route.

What two days earlier had been dry footing was now ankle-deep in sloshy black mud. We backtracked, tried another path, and when that one also turned out to be impassable, decided to go up and over the hill and hit another network trail on the opposite side.

Coming down that sunny, southern-facing slope a half-hour later was when I noticed the berry patch. Well, a distant tangle of briars I thought were blackberry, though were too far out in the field from the trail for me to be sure. Certainly too far away to know whether they harbored any berries.

Daisy and I plowed and waded through the intervening weeds and grasses to investigate.

Oh, ho! They were, indeed, blackberries — and there was also a bumper crop of berries on those thorny canes. Berries doing their magical thing and ripening to juicy deliciousness in the warm summer sun!

Alas, “ripening” is the critical word. Not a berry was ripe…not a one. It would be at least another two weeks. Waaa-a-a!

Well, at least I knew where to find them when that time came.

As I stood looking at those berry-bedecked briars, memories of my father unexpectedly flooded my consciousness.

Dad, you see, was a blackberry connoisseur. A passionate peruser of bramble tangles near and far.

The root of my father’s unbridled blackberry zeal came from a lifelong enthusiasm for Mom’s deep-dish blackberry cobbler. Dad was so enamored with Mom’s pie dish that he would eat it with every meal — including breakfast.

Regardless of season, whether we were hunting, fishing, mushrooming, wild flowering, or just tramping fields and forests close to home or a hundred miles distant, Dad always kept an eye out for potential berry-picking sites.

Should a thorny tangle exhibit potential, you could bet when the next blackberry season rolled around, Dad would be smack in the middle of the briar patch, conducting his field investigation with a tin pail in hand.

I happily accompanied him on these berrying expeditions.

Blackberry patches were generally good for a snake encounter or two. Plus, whenever I got hungry, I could eat a handful of luscious sun-warmed berries. The real trick was keeping me from entangling myself in the snarl of thorny canes.

Dad did his best to instill either common sense or at least a notion of self-preservation into his headstrong offspring, but I could never resist trying to thread my way through the briars like Br’er Rabbit — though with considerably less aplomb and way more blood-shedding.

How I survived, or at least escaped without a later need for extensive plastic surgery, remains a minor mystery. I also suspect the only thing that kept my mother from freaking out entirely on our return home was the similarity between blackberry juice and blood stains.

To this day, I can rarely pass a prime patch of blackberry briars without thinking of those berry-picking adventures with my father and Mom’s savory cobbler pies.

Great memories — treasures — ones I pray never fade.

This was a briar patch Dad would have been delighted to find — a place he would have added to his list and one we’d have checked and rechecked as ripening/picking time drew near.

I intend to do the same.

“Com’on, Daisy,” I said, “let’s finish our walk.”

She looked up, hesitant.

“Hey, don’t worry…,” I told her, adding a reassuring pat, “…we’ll be back.”

Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].