The Village Idiot: Just how sappy can you get?
It’s this time of year when the nights are below freezing and the daytime temperature gets above freezing that the sap starts running in the maple trees. Each tree along our long, Courier and Ives drive will have three or four tin buckets hanging from the spiles — oh yeah, no they won’t. Nobody uses buckets anymore. They might have 10 years ago or maybe even seven years ago, but now the trees are all tapped with bright blue flexible plastic tubing that gets connected and reconnected as the sap runs downhill into bigger and bigger plastic tubes, which all funnel right into a big, thousand-gallon holding tank. Where’s the romance in that? I miss the buckets.
“Yeah? I miss ’em, too,” said Dennis, the man who taps our trees. “I miss being out in 2 feet of snow trying to juggle two buckets of sap into a collection tank. I miss walking along with a bucket full of sap in each hand and then having one foot suddenly sink an extra foot into the snow slopping ice cold, sticky sap down my pants and into my boot. I miss doing that every spring for two weeks. Sometimes the snow was so deep, we couldn’t even get out.”
I was about to say “What about the romance?” but I didn’t want to get that look from him that he saves for particularly dense flatlanders.
Dennis and Barb are dairy farmers, and for years the maple syrup they made provided them with a little extra income. “Some years,” Barb told me, “the only extra money we had came from the sugaring business.” It’s hard enough to milk 70 cows twice a day for nothing, but to have to collect the sap, chop enough wood to evaporate down 40 gallons of sap into one gallon of syrup, bottle it and sell it is almost an insane amount of work. They sell the syrup, maple candy and maple cream at the farmer’s market during the summer and from a little shop on their property. At least once every market day some city person will ask why pure maple syrup costs $35 a gallon. Dennis figures it’s useless to explain the concept of hard work to them, they wouldn’t get it. So he just says, “The profit!”
Dennis has 1,200 taps out this year. He’d like more, but the snow was deep this year. All the plastic tubes from the trees run into a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption in a brand new 200-foot-long industrial-looking building he’s built across the road from his old, tiny wooden sugar shack. The shack where he and Barb and the kids used to stay up all night feeding logs on the fire to evaporate the sap. The new evaporator is oil-heated, there are drains and flow pipes and filters and cleaners everywhere.
Sugaring, as they call the process, is no longer a sideline. It’s taken years but now they make more money selling maple products than they ever did milking cows. So the milk cows have been sold to another farmer. The cows leave on Tuesday.
“That’s sad,” I said, “Won’t you miss the cows?” Dennis and Barb looked at each other. I thought they were going to cry. Then they looked around the clean, un-smelly, well-lit, warm, new maple sugar plant. They started to laugh.
“Yes, we’ll miss them. We’ll miss getting up at 5:30 in the morning, milking them and feeding them. We’ll miss cleaning the barn and spreading manure in 20-below-zero weather. We’ll miss spending every dime we had on the vet. Maybe you should buy them so we can come visit them.”
(Jim Mullen contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at jim—[email protected].)