I wanted for a long time to write a book about maple syrup. I even started a couple of times, and I had a folder kicking around in my office, with some scraps of paper I’d typed with a pretty broken manual typewriter that had a faded ribbon. I typed those words up one night in sugaring off season when I came in from the sugar bush. That night, it gave me comfort as I typed to realize that, while I’ll never be a maple syrup professional, I am a story teller.
I thought that the book was a kid’s book. Basically, the story was about wet socks. When we were kids we wore boots from Canadian Tire to gather sap from the sugar maple buckets that hung on taps on the sugar maple trees at our family farm near Papineauville, Quebec. The uninsulated rubber boots really were wrong for the job. We shoved our jeans into our boots and as we clambered through the sugar bush the snow filled our boots. Then we lugged the heavy pails of maple sap through the deep snow and the sap sloshed into the tops of the stupid boots and mixed with the snow. My socks got really wet and my feet were frickin’ cold.
The soaking, freezing socks somehow seemed enough to anchor a kid’s book: you suffer, you get wet, and then you get redemption in the end at the sugar shack next to the evaporator where you strip off your wet wool socks, warm up your feet by the roaring fire under the bubbling, foaming sap as it boils, and sip the sap as it sweetens on the way to becoming syrup.
Anyways I thought about it a lot but I never got my act together. I did look up the topic, and saw that the books on maple syrup were either American, or corny olde-timey books about sugaring off at grandpa’s farm with the horse and sleigh, or both. So I knew there was room for a book, but I did nothing. Then quite as a miracle an editor at Doubleday Canada, Anna MacDiarmid, reached out to me, and asked me to write a book about maple syrup. I’d written a few things about the stuff over the years, in the National Post and the Globe and Mail, and the Narwhal picked up a Globe piece I wrote about how climate change poses a risk to the syrup industry. So I guess my name was out there as someone who cares about maple syrup.
Plus in the meantime I’d become a registered professional forester, so my bona fides to write a forest-based book had risen.
Anna MacDiarmid is a Brit; because we as Canadians are so close to maple syrup, we didn’t actually realize that there was a hole in the market, for a history book on maple syrup in Canada. Such a book just does not exist—until now, that is!
Writing the book proved a daunting task—we have been at work on it for three years. For me, who cut my teeth with daily journalism, the timelines are endless; that said, it’s worthwhile, in the sense that what we have produced is a very different book, and far better, than it was at the first draft.
The timing feels good too: Donald Trump has challenged our Confederation like at no time in my lifetime. Canadians have been raw and defensive; it’s time to be loud and proud, and assert our independence as well as our strength. My book celebrates Canadians’ resilience. Maple Syrup tells the story of how we use our knowhow and our sweat to harness our natural splendour into a condiment that is the envy of the world.
I am happy that people will soon be able to read the book: it comes out Oct. 21. There is a bit more information here.