Oh sure, tell me there is a time for every season, what goes up must come down, what swings left will swing right, but echoes of homilies don’t make a dent in the flushed swirl of sleeplessness I feel at 3 a.m. Too often inside the long hours of a winter night I blink at the dark, staring down shapes I can’t see, dark forms I can’t name. But not this morning! At 5 a.m. I inventory the curl of my arms around a pillow, the embrace of my body’s heat from head to toe, and savor my float into this next March day. I feel stirred back into my bones and flesh, my heart and brain eagerly rising up toward daylight.
“Like sap reaching out of roots,” I think. Of course I think this, I realize, because my heavy arms remind me where I’ve been all week, carrying buckets from the sugar maples where my sister lives in northwest Connecticut. We’ve been gathering from more than 100 trees where the plink, plink, plink of dripping into pail is one of the surest sounds of a New England spring arriving. When the nights are freezing and the days are not is when sugar oozes from roots up toward hungry branches. Tap a metal spile a couple inches through the bark, hang a bucket on it, and boil down what you gather to make maple syrup.
While it is a commercial affair from Ohio to Canada, people also do it for the joy of it. My sister’s husband is the perfect handy fellow to continue his family’s generations-long tradition. They put up more than 120 quarts in plastic and glass last year to fill the basement pantry, a fine wealth to give friends and family the enjoyment of the real stuff on their pancakes throughout the year.
People in the west, I’ve noticed, are often puzzled about the process.
“Is it a spigot?” asked the woman who cut my hair before I left Arizona.
“Or is it like tapping a keg?” asked the fellow in the next chair.
Yes it is spigot-like, the hollow metal tube with its hook for hanging a bucket. But you can’t turn on the flow. The tug of war between cold and sunshine, the pulsing when spits of snow meet the warming of earth toward mud season is what controls how fast the sap rises and how fast the buckets fill. Gushing might mean a gallon bucket fills twice in 24 hours; a sleepy return to too cold slows the drips to half a bucket overnight. In 40 gallons of sap there lurks one gallon of syrup, a sweetness so faint you barely smell or taste it fresh from the tree. It takes patience and presence to simmer all that sap down to the golden color and delicate flavor in a harvest of syrup.
“Like rendering in cooking,” said the woman with scissors at my ear. “Or is it reducing …”
I guess that might be a model for the process a cook might understand. I’m not sure. I think of it as like the path toward writing a poem. Take all of your reaching and wondering, all your days of a life puzzling over details of wisdoms large and small, and tap into an essence rising between psyche and speech. Simmer it a good long time and a sweet word-shaped understanding arrives eventually.
“Forty gallons for a gallon?” exclaimed my hairdresser, “No wonder it costs so much.” Yep. Think of that next time you are soaking in a bathtub. If all that water around you is sap, you have considerable boiling to do to get the syrup from it. In a small operation where you’re not making a profit, you must be doing it for fun.
For two to four weeks friends and neighbors drop by when they see the woodstove sending smoke up the chimney of the sugar shack. Many will lend a hand when you take tractor and small trailer around to the trees at field’s edges and along country roads. Kids especially like toting buckets to the trailer and if they are tall enough, splashing it into the tank, and of course, riding along, legs dangling, chilly air making cheeks red and eyes bright.
Drilling holes in trees, washing and hanging the buckets, carrying sap over snow banks and stone walls, along muddy roads: it is a simple hands-on ritual. And it is plain fun, too, like when you are showered by sap when the trailer bumps over a fieldstone and an unexpected wave leaps out of the holding tank. In recent years my favorite part of sugar season is sitting in the cozy sugar shack by the five-inch deep evaporating pan on the woodstove where the boiling sap rolls with steam for hours. Feeding the fire, reading if I’m there alone, or listening to stories and cooking up hotdogs with friends over a shovelful of coals. Drinking wine.
Of course on a raw day when we really must go around and empty buckets one more time before dusk, I think, “I left the mild kiss of an Arizona spring for this icy circus?” But it is a blessing to tend a process controlled completely by weather pulses. It is pure unadulterated fun to join community willingness to do a hand labor toward a simple goal together. What a pleasure to catch sugar on the rise, boil and boil through the speculations about tree health, winter patterns, tool wisdom; keep boiling through storytelling and laughter, squeeze wonderful old graceful trees with your attention and attendance, tip a 100 buckets one by one and feel the splash of sweetness on the way.
And then there is the rest of the year savoring the gold of first-run syrup on crepes, the amber of mid-season harvest poured on a bowl of rice for breakfast, or the dark of robust late syrup slathered on salmon before grilling. The flavors, the flavors! (And the hard-earned sleep.) Priceless. And this year I’ll be returning to Arizona by train with a bigger suitcase than usual. Anyone want to meet me at IHOP?
