Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
I began writing the following piece several weeks ago and never finished more than a few sentences at a clip before becoming too tired to write another word. The work on the farm is difficult, it is labor intensive and it brings with it a deep, satisfied exhaustion that is hard to explain. None of it compares to the sugaring season when we make maple syrup from the collected sap of over a thousand mature maples each year. It begins in the deepest part of Winter when the snow pack can be three foot deep or more, on snowshoes across a boulder strewn landscape that rises almost a thousand feet from bottom to top and it ends with the budding of the maples in early Spring with the final cleanup of the gear and equipment only days before the first seeds are sown. I apologize for the erratic style of the chronicle and for the often technical nature of the piece, but I thought it stood on its own despite these flaws and I wanted to present it as I wrote it, rough and unpolished.
When we first bought the farm we didn’t know anything about the maple trees. The former owner had pointed out the derelict sugar house, it’s roof caved in, the back wall blown out from decades of inattention, but it hadn’t really occurred to me that we would wind up making maple syrup as a crop. The farm had a reputation for it’s syrup back in the early part of the last century, it’s sugar house was state of the art by the standards of 1900; indoor running water, dual evaporators, a finishing room and even tin lines. To my eyes all I saw was a gloomy ruin half buried in the mountain side of the farm, what I missed were the majestic maples that clustered around it and spread upwards for almost a hundred acres, row after row of closely cropped sugar maples, two centuries old.
When you’re tapping you carry your tools with you; hammer, drill with and extra battery and a couple of 5/16″ bits, ratchet tool, tie wire twister, insertion tool, 2 “stainless steel ring shank nails, taps, three ways, joiners, drop unions, caps and extra wire. There’s a small torch, assorted hose clamps, ratchet strainers, flat tip screwdriver, a flat bar and Y’s. You learn to carry your a folding Buck belt knife instead of cutters or a pocket knife because it’s easier to get at. You know to take an oil stone to it every night because plastic hose cuts cleaner with a well sharpened knife. Everything is packed into a canvas slouch bag, with three outside pockets and plenty of room for everything else in the main bag.
Continue reading “DROP BY DROP”
