This weekend I washed all my buckets. I have 60 buckets. One of the cool things I am happy about at my sugar shack, which is deep in the forest with no electricity, is running water. I mean, running, as long as it’s above zero. I put a gutter on the front of the shack roof and it runs to a rain barrel that’s on a stand, so that the tap at the bottom of the barrel is just below my waist. We’ve had a rainy spring and there was plenty of water.
As I scrubbed each aluminum bucket and stacked them on the stairs that rise to my other barrel, the one in which I store maple sap in season, I reflected on the sugaring season that was.
It was a good year, even though I thought there was no way that I would make any syrup at all, since it’s the first spring since my book, Maple Syrup, appeared. I had a lot of gigs booked: I spoke at the Grimsby Museum, I read from my book at the Warkworth Maple Syrup Festival, and I signed copies of my book at Shaws Maple, in Oro-Medonte. The Ontario Woodlot Association, Quinte Chapter, of which I am a board member, organized a visit to my sugar shack during sugaring season too; about 25 people showed up. Greg Bridgwater, a fellow board member who has his own sugar bush in Prince Edward County, actually donated 200 litres of sap to the project, because it was a cold spring and we were worried we would not have enough sap for the demonstration. That day was snowy and just above freezing; people roamed around and looked at the trees and the sap boiling in my evaporator; another board member, Rob Wood, confessed that right after he and his wife visited my sugar bush that day he went home and tapped some trees in his own forest.
Another event that cut into my time allotted for sugaring was an appearance at Nerd Nite Toronto, who booked me to tell the assembled the story of the Great Maple Syrup Heist, which is a chapter in the book. When they booked me for March 14 I asked them, “Did you want me to speak in March because it’s in the middle of sugaring season, so on theme?” They said, “No, it’s Pi Day, that is, 3.14.” So when we got there they had 20 kinds of pie—pecan and apple and cherry and pumpkin, and other flavours—for sale, at $2 a slice. It was a hoot.
This was a big winter and a cold spring, which was great for the sap, and for me. The woods stayed full of snow through Easter, which meant (a) that the sap ran well and (b) that I could pull my toboggan through the snow to haul the sap to the sugar shack. Much of the sap though, due to the cold, was frozen in the buckets, which made me laugh: I spent much of last summer developing this elaborate system with a beam and a pulley, so that I can haul my buckets of sap with a pulley up to the barrel into which I pour it. Then the sap flows by gravity into the evaporator. However, this system only works when the sap is in liquid form. Things get even trickier when you pour the liquid sap into the barrel and then you get a cold snap; now you have a barrel of frozen sap that you can’t boil, nor even get out of the barrel for love nor money.
At any rate we had great fun boiling; my daughter brought three girlfriends out from Montreal, none of whom had been sugaring before. They had a great time. It was not warm, but even still on both nights, after dinner and my wife and I went to bed, they went back out to the sugar shack for the night shift, fed the evaporator and played a card game called President.
The next weekend was Easter and our son came out with his guitar. Then my sister Sylvia came from Perth with her husband, Franc, a virtuoso guitarist, and soon the sugar shack was filled with song; we especially enjoyed belting out the old ‘Stones tune “Dead Flowers,” though my sister did tease me about the fact that my firewood was wet.
In the end I had to pull the spiles that weekend and pour out hundreds of litres of sap. I ran out of time, and I ran out of firewood; the atrocious carbon footprint of maple syrup is a dirty little secret of the vaunted elixir of eastern Canada. And, in the end, it was a good season: we made 40 litres. And now I don’t want to talk about maple syrup for awhile.
