Waking at dawn to freezing straight-down rain when only a week before local rivers were weakly wiggling toward an early destructive drought, I thought of my grandmother’s incantation.

At age 7 or so, I got into trouble with Mom.

She asked why, when we were left overnight with her parents, my little brother steadfastly refused to give Grandma a goodnight kiss. I said maybe it was because Grandma was so very wrinkly.

Oh boy. Not the right thing to say.

“I was just spec-a-lating!” Talking fast, I assured her that we both dearly loved Grandma, wrinkles and all.

Grandma was powerful in ways maybe only old women and young children can be, free from the restraints of self-consciousness and rational explanations. She was a wise woman in both the ancient and modern senses — a kindly witch and a smart old lady buoyed by optimistic confidence in the mysterious powers that still reside deep in the tendrils of willow roots and the bubbles in pure spring water. It is magic that vanishes the split instant anybody notices or tries to tame it.

Once in our arid mountain valley, Grandma breathed an avid hope for “a good all-night rain.” Out of nothingness, clouds banded together from a clear sky and began wringing themselves out by midnight, sending a deluge that uprooted house-sized rocks that last budged when the glaciers were alive. I can still hear their voices as they pressed past one another in the Popo Agie River, granite grinding against granite like sumo wrestlers thirsty for a barrel of beer.

If that’s not magic, what is?

Cynicism is to magic what rock salt is to a garden — long-lasting poison. Intellectual snobbery, not science, is the enemy of magic. My life is made richer by belief that Grandma could set in motion an epic rainstorm by breathing her hope into the expectant air. What pathetic wretch will tell me otherwise? As Mark Twain observed, faith is believing what you know ain’t so.

Another kind of magic is stirring in the dune grass and forest clearings of the outer coast this mid-June. It is the enchantment of sweet berries, perhaps brought to early fruit by the prayers of bears.

Grandma used to note randomly selected events like gardening milestones, weasel sightings, first snows and family birthdays on the pages of gaudy paper calendars she hung on a nail above the white enamel chest-freezer on her “back porch.” In practicality, it was the entryway everyone actually used. A black iron bell was suspended outside that we many grandsons delighted in ringing to announce our presence (except between the hours of 1 and 3 p.m., when we knew she was napping). If we still had her calendars, there’s a chance I could tell you on what date her plum thicket began blooming in 1967.

Though I’m no more methodical about record-keeping than she was, in 2012 when I last noted the ripening of the little wild blackberries, they weren’t abundant until around the first or second week in July. On Aug. 7, I wrote “the first finishers arrived a month ago, deceptively dark but shy of sugar. A wise old home species, they appreciate the urgency of completely utilizing every halfway decent day here on Bad-Weather Beach. For the past 10 days, they’ve mostly been sweet as kisses. Like a high-school romance, the fact the end’s so near makes them all the more delicious. In a process reminiscent of the 1960s board game ‘Operation,’ I make my hand small as possible and snake it through gaps in the prickle-covered vines, braced for the electrical shock of a thorn penetrating to a nerve. Fishing out about six berries at a time makes a mouthful.”

Last Wednesday evening, June 15, I ate deliciously early blackberries while walking Duncan in a foggy glade above the ocean. I returned from our walk looking like I just voted in an Arab election, right thumb and fingers dyed bright reddish purple. Wild blackberries are all-too-easily crushed but, wow, what a taste detonation.

Salmon berries also are reaching full abundance just now, but are my least favorite. They ordinarily have a watery, washed-out flavor in keeping with their anemic pink-tinged yellow color. Thimble berries — which remind me of a variety of tart dime-store candy from boyhood — are getting there, but still maybe a month away from eating.

Very best of all are wild strawberries, which my old Peterson Field Guide says “possess a flavor and sweetness not equaled by the cultivated varieties.” Seldom larger than a pea, they prove the entire universe is good.

Heavenly, and healing, too. “Indians not only utilized the berries but made a tealike beverage from the leaves,” the field guide says. This tea — along with that made from wild blackberry leaves — is a well-known folk remedy for diarrhea. In addition, “The Quileute chewed the leaves and applied them as a poultice on burns,” according to Pojar and MacKinnon.

Although wild strawberry vines are prolific along parts of my customary path down to the Pacific, until this month I was sure they either never fruited here or were gobbled by wildlife the moment they became edible. The Haida are supposed to have noticed the wholesale disappearance of strawberries after deer were introduced to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Washington’s Cape Disappointment has tame deer aplenty, and it’s easy to imagine the devils delicately nibbling every last berry just before I stride into view.

However, Atlas Knott of the Long Beach Peninsula now has me pondering a different reality: You have to be a child to consistently find wild strawberries. Better eyesight, closer to the ground, or just maybe a special kind of boyhood magic. When his mom posted Altas’ photo on Facebook with a whole handful of coastal strawberries, I figured maybe I’d better try to recollect what it’s like to be an observant boy.

Sure enough, the secret is stopping long enough and genuinely looking, with a renewed expectation of succeeding. I was rewarded with my first wild strawberries since I was about Atlas’ age.

There were just three — not even a meal for a mouse — but they somersaulted me back to a long-ago day in a remote river gorge, the summer sun filtered by quaking aspen leaves. I was the “finder,” the boy with sharp eyes. The “Luck of the Matt,” my mom used to call it. Those berries were the best dessert of my life, gobbled down before a lunch of chicken fried over an open campfire.

Any planet with wild strawberries is a world of magic.

—M.S.W.

Matt Winters is editor and publisher of the Chinook Observer and Coast River Business Journal.