Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff

      IT’S ROUGHLY AROUND the middle of January that sugarmakers, even retired ones like me, become vigilant about weather. We don’t necessarily pay attention to the forecasts of professionally cheerful meteorological evangelists with their Doppler radar and satellite data. We notice the small local details visible from the doorway or sensed during a walk down the street or a hike in the woods: the temperature, amount and intensity of sunlight, the cloud cover. If the old saying that “when the wind’s from the west the sap runs best” can be believed, we notice the direction of the breeze. We become hyper-aware and somewhat obsessive as we get psyched to tap. Tapping day is the ribbon-cutting on a new season, a portent like the first robin snatching a worm from the lawn.

      Since maple sap runs with the fluctuation of daytime thaws and nighttime freezes, traditional sugarmakers using buckets have usually tapped in late winter at the outset of the first stretch of sunny weather when thermometers rise to about forty degrees Fahrenheit. But like most everything about sugaring, tapping time is a wager with Mother Nature. A sugarmaker’s rabid weather watching creates a pressurized excitement, and with all the anticipation it’s easy to tap prematurely and get a small run of sap lasting only a day or two. It might not even be enough to make boiling worthwhile. You can find your storage tank clogged with a solid block of sap ice and the trees locked in a cold snap and refusing to yield a drop more.

      In parts of southern New England, Lincoln’s February 12 birthday has been the cue. Vermont sugarmakers customarily waited until after town meeting day, the first Tuesday of March. Years ago, according to some old-timers, a farmer might base his number of taps on how much he had to pay in taxes following passage of the local budget. But the calendar and political events are useless. The sugaring world sculpts and bends time in a unique way that belies the orderly mechanics of any clock. Whether it’s tapping, sap flow, evaporating, or bottling, sugaring’s compressed season distorts the progress of hours, speeding them to a frenetic pace or slowing them to a glacial crawl in an Einstein-like warp of normal experience.

      Sure, it’s a crazy big leap, but if Albert Einstein had been a sugarmaker, the experience might have induced him to propose his theory of special relativity earlier, sooner consigning concepts of absolute motion to the trash heap of ideas. In the early twentieth century, around the time the Cary Maple Sugar Company of St. Johnsbury, Vermont, became the world’s largest maple products wholesaler and the U.S. Pure Food and Drug Act outlawed syrup adulteration, Einstein postulated movement as a relative measurement between frames of reference, replacing distinctions between space and time with a four-dimensional continuum called space-time. Though destined for much more lofty purposes, the great scientist’s theory also illuminates the way in which sugarmakers experience time, as well as the deep intimacy between location and seasonal movement that is a hallmark of sugaring, seemingly fusing time and place into a single phenomenon.

      Few sugarmakers are likely to be impressed by such theories. Those with even a modicum of experience have a sixth sense about when to tap, like gamblers knowing when to play their hand and when to fold. It’s nature’s casino, and you take your chances. Of course, with innovations like tubing, high-tech taps, and vacuum pumps that suck sap from a tree, dried-out tapholes from early tapping is not so much of an issue anymore. Besides, big sugarmakers with thousands of holes to drill need days or weeks to get the job done, even with many hands using speedy electric drills. They have no choice but to tap into frozen trunks long before they begin to drip.

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      IT’S THE SMALL-TIMERS with buckets, like sugarmakers past, who still tap on sunny days of soft air after weeks of frigid temperatures. Smells are again on the breeze, and the steepening angle of the sun warms the nape of the neck. With no more than eighty taps, I had the luxury of drilling the holes myself, using a hand-powered carpenter’s brace fitted with a seven-sixteenths-inch bit (though now five-sixteenths are used with smaller spouts, with no appreciable reduction in sap flow). The holes were no more than two inches deep at a slight upward angle into light-colored, healthy wood. Since previous tapholes should be eight to twelve inches distant vertically and at least an inch horizontally to avoid wood no longer conducive to sap flow, I always gave the trunk a quick inspection. I got to know each individual 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