We were trudging through the wet snow of a late February. We carried with us an odd assortment of tools: a hammer, an old hand drill, buckets, spigots, hooks, and covers. It was the beginning of sugaring season. The three of us were setting trees to gather sap.
The birds were beginning to return and the air was bursting with the promise of spring. You could hear the slosh of your footsteps and the drip of melting snow, yet nature was far from rushing out of winter.
We turned from the path to a huge maple hundreds of years old. It had many tap scars from the years past, when my grandfather’s grandfather had lived. Finding the perfect spot, on the south side with the most branching and the biggest roots, I placed the drill bit against the soft living bark.
There’s a rhythm to the drilling, and then the sap starts flowing, sweet and steady. A spigot’s hammered in, a bucket’s hung, and a cover’s attached. Then, the sound, you can hear that beautiful sound, one of the best sounds in the world: “plink, plink, plink.” One down, ninety-nine to go. In less than five minutes, we’ve begun the long road to the finished product.
When the buckets are all hung, we wait for them to fill. Then we empty them into 5-gallon buckets and carry them, one in each hand, a third of a mile. Up and down, slipping and sliding through the snow, we return to the sugarhouse, often with less than we started with.
There we pour the sap into trash barrels (clean ones!) to be transferred into the evaporator. The evaporator is relatively small, just four feet by two. It does just what it sounds like; it unhurriedly evaporates the water from the sugar in the sap. This part of the process takes the longest because about 40 gallons of sap make one gallon of syrup. This is the part where we all catch up. In the small, steam-filled room we watch the sap rolling and bubbling.
The fire must be stoked with wood continuously to keep the sap boiling and sap must be added to the pans all the time so the pans don’t burn. In time, we close off the front pans and, with patience, the sap begins to turn. The bubbles change so subtly from large and white to fine and golden.
Now is the time when the entire sugarhouse is focused on one hand as it reaches for the scooper. With an ease that comes with time my grandfather places the scooper into the pan and watches the golden liquid run off it. He lifts the scooper above the pans and waits for the sign. The steady stream slows to a drip. The only sound is the crackle and roar of the fire surging up the smokestack. And as you watch you can see the liquid chasing itself to the edge. If you’re not ready you will miss it: the liquid, so set on catching itself, has, and it falls off in a sheet. The syrup has flaked and is ready to be taken off.
As the commotion and anticipation build, there’s the slightest hint of a sigh. The end is in sight; we are almost finished. The tiny bubbles steadily climb the insides of the pans and someone shouts, “open the doors!”. The bubbles begin to recede as the fire calms. Many are involved in this part: one of us fills the back pans with sap, while another opens the syruping-off valve. As the steaming syrup cascades into the old stainless steel milk can, someone else watches and waits to let the sap from the back pans in to push the rest of the syrup out. You can see the trail it leaves as it races to the valve, destroying the golden bubbles in its path. And the valve is closed.
This is sugaring the old-fashioned way: nothing automatic, nothing to rush the experience. Sometimes we work late into the night to syrup off those last few quarts, because we realize that we are all involved in a process bigger than any single person
We’ve been doing this for as long as we can remember; all the grandchildren watch and learn from the first winter they can walk. We don’t just sugar for the syrup, we sugar for the experience.