maple better, recalling past seasons by finding completely healed tapholes that left marks like “outie” belly buttons, and gauging the tree’s health by how quickly last year’s holes had filled.
I tended to tap in late morning when snowmelt was echoing in gutters and tinkling into catch basins along the street in my village sugarbush of roadside and backyard trees. At the base of some trunks there might be a little mud pooled on the sunny side. As I drilled, curls of blond wood wound along the bit and fell to the ground. Once the bit was withdrawn, sap would dribble out, followed by a regular pulse of drops whose frequency depended not just on the weather but perhaps the location of the taphole relative to the sun or a big root. I’d gently bang in the metal spout and hang my bucket to the reassuringly regular ping of liquid dropping to the bottom. Ah, the joy of instant gratification.
Most sugarmakers spend such days in the woods, enjoying the sound of wind and creaking trees, chickadees and other birds between the short-lived whine of a cordless drill used in tapping. Depending on cold and depth of snow, it can be both strenuous and peaceful. Sometimes the work is accomplished on snowshoes. But because my sugarbush was in the center of a small town, on tapping day I gave up the serenity of the woods for serendipitous conversations with neighbors. Long before anyone was sitting on a porch, attending outdoor concerts, or slowly strolling the sidewalks, I got caught up on who had had the flu, the neighbor kids’ grades, the quality of the ski season, who had bought a new car, and what was planned for the garden. A harbinger of warmer weather, I was a sight glad to be seen, and my hanging buckets on the trees was an occasion for cheer, a mark of optimism that spring would soon arrive. Needless to say, time expanded relative to the number of people I ran into and the length of conversations. The hours spent tapping had less to do with how long it took to drill a hole and hang a bucket than whom I might meet and the urgency of the conversation. Again, I was caught in Einstein’s theoretical grip.
Though there have been dramatic innovations in production since Native American times, perhaps most in the past generation, sugaring has long remained a process of tapping trees, collecting sap, concentrating the sweet by removing water, putting the finished syrup into containers, and distributing it. Afterward, there’s lots of cleaning, repairs, and, if you use wood fuel, cutting and stacking.
With sap running at the whim of the weather and often responding to micro-conditions not predicted on the morning forecast, collecting it injects a delightful if annoying unpredictability into a world increasingly regulated by alarms and notices where we are regimented with fairly precise routines of work, appointments, meetings, and even recreation planned weeks and months in advance. While a sugarmaker can, to a limited extent, plan when to boil, filter, or can syrup, sap collection is almost completely unpredictable and requires immediate attention. A bucket or tank running over is as demanding as a nagging two-year-old. It feels like money dropping through a hole in your pocket.
On sunny weekend afternoons, collecting sap was fun. Like tapping day, it became a social event. I’d run into neighbors asking about the progress of the season, putting in their syrup orders, spilling a little gossip, or urging me to come to a town meeting or the high school play. As we talked, I lifted galvanized buckets off a tree, poured them into five-gallon pails, and carried the pails to a plastic tank in the back of my pickup. Sometimes a neighbor would join me, riding shotgun and helping empty the buckets, providing more warmth with friendship than a February sun at noon might offer. Time seemed to fly.
Approaching the trees and gazing into their crowns occasioned a kind of interspecies intimacy. I was visiting with old friends. Each maple almost seemed to have a different personality expressed in its size and shape, the amount of sap it yielded, and how it responded to particular kinds of weather. Sugarmakers who have gone from buckets to tubing have few regrets, except maybe when an ice storm turns their lines into a tangle, but they frequently miss knowing their trees as individuals.
A sign of winter winding down
Despite my sylvan affections and sense of camaraderie, the trees never ran at my convenience. I’d get antsy finding myself trapped in meetings that seemed to go on forever at my Hartford office and was unable to concentrate on work during days awash with sunshine when the mercury flirted with fifty degrees. I’d imagine drops so fast that they were almost a stream, buckets overflowing, sap puddling around the roots. The trees had no regard for my overscheduled life filled with a job, children, home repairs, errands, and the occasional dinner and movie out. Often I’d find myself half exhausted, collecting late at night or before dawn. Sometimes it was urgent, as when the temperature was plummeting rapidly and sap might freeze solid in the buckets, causing them damage and leaving little room for the next run. I ventured out in wind-whipped rain and snowstorms, finding my slicker and Bean boots more valuable than my best suit. My fingers froze and my back ached, but the trees were relentless. Toward the end of the season, I’d walk around dizzily in zombie-like depletion and chain-suck cough drops in a vain attempt to keep a cold at bay. The trees kept their own secret schedules, maintained their own measures of time.
When conditions were right, my maples poured gallons to my delight, and irritation at being a slave to their caprice faded. The pace became frenetic. Then temperatures would dip for a few days or even a week or more. I’d quickly recover my sleep and equanimity and find myself eager for the next run. The trees were teasing me. I became fidgety and dull with waiting. I remembered seventh-generation Vermont sugarmaker Burr Morse’s quip that maple people “are more than fussy—we’re downright neurotic.”
Collecting sap did not end with visiting the trees and emptying the gathering pails into my truck. I needed a place to store all that liquid until ready to boil. In my first two seasons, I underestimated how much the trees could yield on a warm day, and after filling the plastic barrel, pails, and carboys I’d procured for the purpose, I began using soda and milk bottles destined for recycling and then frantically filling my kitchen pots until I had to borrow a saucepan from my neighbor to cook dinner.
By the third year I’d wised up. I hauled the sap back to my garage-turned-sugarhouse and backed the truck up the long driveway. With a submersible pump in the collection tank, I sucked the liquid up to a larger tank elevated on a stand made of rusting tubular scrap steel and angle iron leaning against the north side of the sugarhouse. Here it would be mostly in shadow, keeping the sap cool and fresh until ready to boil. A valve-controlled pipe led from the tank to the evaporator.
At first I had a plywood-covered, oblong galvanized stock tank that had once slaked the thirst of cows or sheep. Later I bought a 250-gallon food-grade plastic tank, a necessity in these days of increasing concern for product purity. It took several minutes to pump the sap, but it felt like hours in cold or raw weather late at night. Lastly, I rinsed out the collection tank and flushed the hose and pump, a dull and solitary job. By late in the season my reddened and chapped hands let me know they’d had enough drudgery.
Collecting with buckets is a lot of work, and sugarmakers of any size now use tubing. But regardless of the sap-gathering method, the sugaring paradox is that the next step is to rid yourself of most of what you’ve worked so hard to accumulate. Sap is mostly water, typically ranging from 1.5 to 3 percent sugar. In order to get a gallon of proper density syrup from 2 percent sap, roughly 43.5 gallons are required. At 2.2 percent, just over 39.5 gallons are needed, and for the very rare tree that has 10 percent sugar, only about 8.7 gallons.
Ice and fire are the time-honored ways of concentrating sugar. After a frigid night, sugarmakers often toss away the ice in a storage tank or bucket of sap because liquids with less sugar freeze first, leaving the remainder more concentrated. Though long utilized, this is a small gesture toward producing syrup. Boiling has always been the mainstay of sugaring as far back as Native Americans, who placed hot rocks into containers of sap to drive off the water. Boiling is still necessary to achieve maple flavor and color, though today larger sugarmakers first extract much of the water through
