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 reverse osmosis—RO, in sugaring shorthand—a process adapted from desalinization technology, whereby the sap is pushed through a membrane that allows water to pass but not larger sugar molecules.

      In dawn’s dim gloaming, or after a long day at work, I’d lift the overhead door of what looked like an ordinary garage. Flicking on a bare incandescent bulb revealed the enchanted space of the sugarhouse. There among buckets and various other containers, tangled hoses, a splitting maul, and the other tackle of small-time sugar making, I’d kneel before the cast-iron doors of the firebox, called an arch, light a nest of paper and kindling, and watch the flames begin to dance. Soon I could feel uneven warmth on my face. Along the wall, the blaze cast shadows on the lawn mower, garden tools, and children’s bicycles that seemed to have been hibernating since fall. This plain space for the equipage of suburban life seemed momentarily transformed to a wizard’s lair of alchemy where what looked like water would soon be transformed, if not into wine, at least into a kind of liquid gold. Expanding with the heat, the stainless-steel pan startled me with irregular pings. I slammed the cast-iron doors and got busy.

      I opened valves on the white PVC sap line that ran from the outside storage tank through the wall and across the sugarhouse to a rectangular galvanized container, like a loaf pan, resting on top of the back of the evaporator, where rising steam would warm the fresh sap before it dripped through yet another valve into the boil below. I made sure there was enough sap in the back of the evaporator pan where the stainless was formed into corrugated channels, called flues, giving the fire more surface area so the clear liquid would boil faster. The front pan, where denser, more sugary pre-syrup flowed, was flat so it would boil more slowly, since sugary liquids can quickly caramelize and burn, destroying not only the syrup, but often the pan. I adjusted the valve that regulated flow from the back to the front pan and stepped outside to split a few chunks of wood.

      Pin-prick bubbles formed in the pan, and I heard slight rumbles as the vaguest wisps of steam began to rise like mist off a chilling pond in autumn. Opening the firebox, I tossed in a couple more pieces of wood and listened to a low roar like dragon breath as the hungry flames sucked in oxygen. Jerkily moving like a butterfly from flower to flower, I played with the valves, prepared the next charge of wood for the fire, tested the more viscous liquid with a scoop to estimate its density, and readied cone-shaped felt filters suspended over a bucket for my first draw-off of nearly finished product. Thumbprint swirls of heat in the pan soon turned to churning bubbles and then to large cauliflower-like upheavals. Steam hung in the sugarhouse like fog before rising out a skylight in cumulous puffs. It was a day of clear sky and high pressure when the sap seemed eager to boil and time moved quickly.

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