In early spring, my daily foot-habit takes me often to Pennellville, where open skies, sand-soft roadsides and sparse traffic offer miles of contemplative walking.
Throughout March, on my way north along Pennellville Road, I noted that I was passing between two sugar bushes. On each side of the road, buckets hung from many-sized maples, and in a number of sectors, the bush on the left was laced with modern tubing. The buckets collected maple sap drop by drop and needed periodic emptying; the tubing ran from tree to tree, allowing sap to flow toward a few five-gallon points of collection.
Such tapping of maples’ sweetness has long been a New England staple, and that can be traced (as can much of our agri-wisdom) to Native Americans, who traditions prize the sugar maple and its sweet spawn.
It is unusual to find two small sugarbushes adjacent to each other on low wet land, but Brad, one of the two syrup-makers, speculates that these sugar-maples are spawn of a mature roadside line of maples typical of many old houses in northern New England. Brad taps 50 trees, mostly older maples, while across the road, Bob taps 200 maples that run from thick to thin as they compete with other trees for light in the canopy.
Both Brad and Bob reported a middling season. It started well in February but then slowed during some March spells of continued cold or warmth, which varied from the ideal for sap flow — cold nights and warmish days.
All this returned me to my early 20s, when I spent a winter in a wood-heated, old farmhouse near the end of a dirt road in New Hampshire. Uncertain about my future, I’d decided on a writing-winter, but really it had turned into a wandering winter, where my scribings were snowshoe tracks into the various corners of the valley and ridges above.
As spring neared, pails appeared on the row of maples that lined our dirt road. After a few days, I noticed that many of the buckets were full. I figured the collecting truck, a sort of small tanker, would arrive soon. The buckets dripped steadily with overflow now eroding the collars of snow below.
What to do? I got a big bucket, took my ladle from beside the water-pump and skimmed a few ladlefuls from each overflowing bucket. This went on for some days, and I soon had gallons of sap. I paged through my new copy of Helen and Scott Nearing’s “The Maple Sugar Book.”
Time, surely, to fire up the cookstove and break out the broad turkey pan and try some boiling. I had a lot of time and wood, and, even when the tree-tapper emptied his pails and said, “sure you can skim if you spot overflow,” I soon had a lot more sap.
For the next two weeks, I made syrup of varying intensities, boiling in the pan, finishing in a pot. Those who know anything about making maple syrup will recognize the oft-cited 40-to-1 ratio of sap to syrup. What may be less known is the sweet world a room or house becomes if you do your boiling indoors. Sugarhouses are well-vented, outdoor enterprises for a reason.
Which brings me back to Brad’s and Bob’s sugarhouses, tidy, enclosed constructions that open out nicely when the boiling’s on. While each has his system of bringing sap to his evaporator, the mix of heat and sweet is common to both.
What came clear to me as I watched Brad and talked with Bob and later followed him virtually in a fine two-minute video, was their pleasure in the attentive pace of syrup-making. The adding of sap and the boiling off of its water to arrive at amber syrup takes time. There is the careful balancing as the evaporator boils away and the syrup-maker adds new sap at the right rate. There is the testing, and, eventually, transfer of syrup to pot or container. And, of course, there is the fire to tend.
Those many decades ago, by March’s end, I had a gallery of small, mismatched jars of dense amber syrup. A few, hand-labeled jars went for local gifts. And, when I left the valley as spring came on, I carried the rest with me as the sweet writing of maples.
Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. His recent book, “Critical Hours — Search and Rescue in the White Mountains,” was published by University Press of New England in April 2018. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.
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