Cornelius Krieghoff (artist); Sarony & Major (engraver), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
.jpg){kind=link}
Sunday was a brisk blue day on the ridge which the Norlands occupies in beauty. On either side of those high fields— with their far views —tall bare trees growing thickly downslope—the sugarbush.
We stood together watching as a team of powerful draft horses pulled a large red wagonload of folks across the fields, over ruts of stubble and mud, clots of old snow. Its bells clanged, swaying ponderously. The great wagonload lurched like a ship. We moved aside onto the sand shoulder as it came down the road toward us on its way to the stately New England mansion of another time. Were it not for our clothes and today's cars lining the road, we might have stood in that other time, mute witness to an old-fashioned hayride.
The stout draft horses clomped past, driven by a beautiful girl with long chestnut-colored hair wearing a gown of old red, deep like Christmas wine. I smiled to see her beauty and purpose, but my smile was not returned. With holy solemnity she turned the great red ship up the lane toward the mansion.
Drawing near the bush, Allen went ahead down the rocky slushy path toward the sap house. I stood to one side, watching as a massive yoke of oxen came, ponderous through the woods. The monstrous pale cloven hooves gripped uneven earth, where sodden leaves and slippery mud were held together with rocks. In concert with their mass, the sorrel and white oxen moved slowly, halting and swaying over the path. Great white muzzles were covered in baskets made of chicken wire. A farmer from another time in straw hat walked beside the yoke, driving them. He quickened their pace as they passed close by me, saying, "Get up." He flicked one massive flank with a switch.
When they had gone I stood my ground. My attention was taken elsewhere. Much smaller and more colorful creatures were in the sugarbush. Little children in big boots carrying buckets, moving about, visiting trees. Like hobbits or elves. Looking around, I saw the maplewood spangled with galvanized metal buckets complete with galvanized lids.
One small boy approached the maple across the path and solemnly struggled to raise the lid of one bucket. Its catch would not give. He set his bucket down and quietly fiddled in an unrequited attempt to release the huge sap container from its hook. He gave up and went toward the next tree, carefully tugging his own large bucket over the rocky uneven ground. The next container was cooperative and he soon collected its contents, restored it, secured the lid and moved on. The woods were dotted with these bright, moving, and determined little folk, silent and solemn every one.
I turned and picked my way down the mushy path toward the steaming sap house. As I approached, Allen, his sunglasses glinting, turned to greet me with an exclamation over the great swaying oxen: harbingers they seemed at that moment, not throwbacks. And we had never seen their like.
Then together we entered the sap house. Open on two sides to the weather, it housed a long waist-high brick furnace, stoked with maple ash and hornbeam; and topped with a foaming shallow hundred gallon sap reservoir. Native Americans were the first to evaporate sap into syrup. They did this by placing heated rocks in troughs of maple sap, reservoirs made of scooped logs. Beside this metal trough stood two weathered wooden barrels, each partly filled with sap.
A middle-aged man with straight gray hair hanging in his eyes spoke: "Try some?" He held out a white enameled cup that he had just dipped into the nearest dark barrel.
"Looks like water." I handed the cup to Allen.
"That's what it is," returned the man.
"Then why can't I boil water and get maple syrup?"
"You could, but you'd have to add a little Karo syrup to it." He smiled. "This water is about four to eight percent sugar. Maple leaves manufacture it in summer and store it in the roots during winter." In a telling introduction to his "Winter's Garden," New York Times writer William Bryant Logan writes that the "dramatic inner life of trees helps them stand up to ice, snow and harsh temperatures...." The tissues drain, leaves fall, inner sap thickens to resist freezing. The process provides energy to soar upward in spring budding. Sap then runs when nights get below freezing, followed by days with warmer temperatures.
I took the cold cup to my lips. "It is like sweet water," I said. "Maybe a bit heavier than water."
The man nodded and poured the clear sap into the bubbling trough. Then he dipped the cup into the evaporator and brought out the true substance of our quest. This cupful was hot in my hands. Carefully I brought it to my lips and sipped. The strength of its sweetness was surprise on my tongue. Nor was I accustomed to its richness, its fullness in my mouth. I handed it to Allen, warning of its heat. Thus we tasted, shared the tree's inner life, and handed the old white cup back to the middle-aged man.
Some children came up with their half-full buckets and set them by his foot next to the barrels. One child teetered and his sap bucket spilled some on the man's shoe. His shoes had a homemade look to them, smooth and worn, hand cut. "Now you have a sweet food," I said.
"Sweetfoot—sounds like a good name for a dog." Things like this will happen when children transfer sweetness.
I could think of no response to his play with nomenclature, but I said, "How'd you know when the sap is ready. When it is syrup?"
"I don't," he grinned. "They take it and finish it off up at the house in the kitchen." A white-haired woman standing opposite the reservoir said that she had made syrup like this for many years. "The kitchen is always sticky. It gets all over everything as it evaporates." I pictured curtains coated in sugar, frosted knickknacks on shelves. A house turned to gingerbread.
Initially it takes twenty five gallons of sap to boil down to a gallon of syrup. It gets harder: As the season progresses the sap's sugar content drops. Then it may take fifty gallons to yield a gallon of syrup. And the syrup darkens as the season moves.
Later Allen and I walked over the historical grounds, saw the old structures of a magnificent connected dwelling, the old high stark maples planted in a day gone by. May the dwelling, like trees from ancient and classical times, flourish again. We sauntered down the road toward our car, one of many strung along the road where once horses, oxen, and pedestrians moved. And I had rekindled vision.
In his old age, blind Israel Washburn walked here to get the mail. Along this road neighbors kept their sections passable in snow and mud. They laid out this road in the wilderness Town of Livermore before the turn of the 19th-century. Now the majestic swaying ship, draft-horse with red wagonload, lumber over fields toward the road. The beautiful driver commands mighty beasts to a halt. A car moves past, a throwback. With a shake of the rein she got them up again.
As they pass with bells clanging, I notice that their great clomping hooves are sharp shod: their spikes pounding into the pavement. Horses must be shod so in winter, over ice; or in the sweet season, when there is mud.
© S. Dorman from Maine Metaphor put out by Wipf & Stock