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Many of life’s most significant rewards require getting down on hands and knees: marriage engagements, for example. Gardening. Innumerable yoga positions.

Strawberries.

There is just one way to get the best strawberries, and that’s to pick your own. Thus I am fully grounded on this June day, knees set in wood-chip mulch, early summer sun warming my back, plucking strawberries by hand in the Carnation Valley east of Seattle. Nearby cottonwood trees waft their musty scent on a diaphanous breeze. The berries hang above and beside the raised-bed plants, vermilion in the sun. It’s easy to grasp fully ripe berries just right, twisting a bit, so you put just the fruit in your basket and leave behind the stem.

Yes, I can go to a store and acquire boxes of strawberries without ever lowering anything but my bank balance. These are usually gelatinous, strange-hued, flavorless items that bring to mind space station food. Grown in distant climes, bred to be as big as small dogs, they may have been doused with fungicidal chemicals so toxic they’d be forbidden by the Geneva Convention if used in battle. I’m a food snob; I avoid store berries.

It’s not a problem, though, for those of us lucky enough to live in the Northwest. Puget Sound and the Fraser and Willamette Valleys are epicenters of the U-pick phenomenon, a century-old tradition that has gained new currency with the return to favor of locally grown foods. Picking your own is a simple pleasure that offers fun, food and spiritual benefit.

The latter derives not only from supporting local farmers and providing yourself good food, but from taking part in a longstanding cultural tradition. Farms of all descriptions used to carpet the valleys around Seattle, Portland, Vancouver and other Northwest cities. Kent and Auburn, now growing world-class warehouses, had truck farms end to end. Not only could urbanites head out to the fields for a day of picking, thousands of children took their first stab at wage-earning by spending a few weeks in early summer picking berries. Child labor laws and generational trends killed that tradition (What? No wifi in the fields?).

But the citizen-picking heritage thrives in a few spots, chiefly Carnation, Monroe, Puyallup and Sedro Woolley, where enterprising day-trippers can spend a few hours in pastoral surroundings and come home with buckets of the glories of summer. Strawberries are best known of these, but one can also find places to pick (in rough chronological order, starting in May) rhubarb, sweet and sour cherries, raspberries, marionberries, blueberries, apples and more. Each autumn brings pumpkins online; head to the Yakima Valley and one can find corn and other vegetables, not to mention the marvels of hot-weather lands—peaches, apricots, grapes—not reliably grown west of the Cascades. I consider savoring a peach picked right off the tree a greater pleasure, a more worthy life achievement, than my high school diploma.

It’s easy, in the space of a couple hours, for a family to pick many pounds. We head out each August, for example, to an East Side blueberry farm from which we come home with 25-50 pounds of berries. This is not counting the ones that fell into our mouths while out in the field, because tradition holds that you pay for what you leave with; what you eat on-site (within reason) is the frequent-picker bonus.

I say so because, having once done this, it seems to me impossible not to return each year. I’ve now got my own strawberries, raspberries, cherries and such growing at home; but still we head out a couple times each summer, a family tradition as deep and meaningful as Thanksgiving dinner, to pick the fruits we don’t have in our back yard.

And what does one do with 25 pounds of berries, cherries, apples or such? A fresh-baked pie is in order, of course; maybe two; maybe two and invite neighbors for dinner who could thus convert into next year’s companion labor.

The rest go in the freezer. As I write this, marionberry season is eight months past, or three months imminent. Yet I made marionberry sorbet for dessert last night, bringing summer to late winter like a magician. The color was a royal crimson-magenta; the aroma that spicy tang so unique to dark red berries; the flavor sweetly fanged, like an Irish ballad.

I picked these berries on a late July day 30 miles from home. Now it’s early spring in my kitchen. The whole process is a low-tech, uniquely precious time travel.

Eric Lucas lives in Seattle; visit him online at www.TrailNot4Sissies.com. For more information on U-pick farms, visit www.pugetsoundfresh.org. For other areas, visit www.pickyourown.org. And don't get lost along the way, pick up your free AAA map at your local AAA office.