"Sugaring"

The One Where Life is Sweet

I’m surprised I missed it. As much time as I’ve had to contemplate my predicament, I hadn’t recognized or understood how UTTERLY USELESS I felt before DBS gave me my life back. I have always been a person who considers my worth on the basis of what I DO; not what I think of, not what I intend, but by what I accomplish. Perhaps I did recognize that what I was accomplishing while fully symptomatic was enough, but boy did it feel good to do real work, and taste the real results.

A friend posted mid-week that he was looking for help this weekend gathering sap from trees he was tapping on his gentleman’s farm. Knowing that I would need to exercise this weekend—and would prefer a walk in the woods to just another jaunt down our road—I enthusiastically responded. I’m pretty sure that pre-PD Piet would not have done so, but post DBS Piet was eager for a new adventure, so I contacted him and offered my (and Julie’s) services. He agreed to keep us posted as the week went on.

As promised, he reached out and texted that Sunday would be the better of the two days, so we made a plan for Sunday. The weather was indeed spectacular (for Maine, in March, that is—sunshine, very little wind, and roughly 40-45 degrees.) I forgot that I “run hot” since PD and actually overdressed for the occasion, at one point unzipping my sweatshirt and coat and removing my hat. Although he had warned us to bring an extra set of gloves, I found it unnecessary to use any at all, particularly given the manual dexterity that the task required; which amounted to wandering from tree to tree with a five gallon bucket, emptying the frozen sap pucks from said five gallon buckets mounted on each tree, then dumping them into a larger bucket to be picked up by the ATV.

Tapping sugar maples to make syrup and sugar began with Maine’s indigenous people long before European settlers arrived. As was often the case, the natives freely shared their practice (collecting sap in birchbark containers or hollowed out logs and boiling the sap with hot stones) with the immigrants, who adapted their methods to more familiar technology, collecting sap in buckets and boiling it in kettles. For those of you unfamiliar with the practice, here’s a “how to” guide offered by Maine’s Cooperative Extension Service.

Although large scale syrup producers use a web of plastic tubes to move sap directly from the tree to the sugar house, our operation was more traditional—a tap bored into the tree connected by a clear plastic tube tucked into a hole on the covered bucket, about $12 apiece for each set-up; and required the labor of humans to empty and fill buckets respectively.

It’s not hard work, but it is work. My conditioning is so poor after being sedentary for so long that I was easily winded and had to sit down at one point to give my poor heart a rest before it beat right out of my chest. Our friend had some others helping, assigning Julie and me to a range of trees “on the back 40.” So there was a lot of purposeful walking, from tree to tree and to the larger barrels to dump the collected contents.

Sap begins to run in late winter, flowing best with below freezing nights and well above freezing days. Those freezing nights result in large chunks of frozen sap, it turns out, which do not take well to a bucket to bucket transfer. After about an hour, our buckets were emptied and full respectively, so we made our way to the sugar shack where the evaporator was running full steam ahead (pun intended).

The visual can’t capture the distinctive smell of sap boiling, which unlocked a core memory of sugaring as a kid in New Hampshire before I moved to Maine, which means I was under five. The fact that my memory also involves a Big Bird finger puppet also gives a hint to my age at the time… As soon as I entered the shack and smelled, yes smelled the aroma, that memory came rushing back. Not a lot of details, but I remember the shack with an evaporator boiling and feeling very sleepy in the warm, sugar humid air; I might even have fallen asleep on a bench in the shack.

Fantastic indeed! Life is sweet!

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