Sugar Camp '25: Postscript

First I wade through snow deep enough to infiltrate my boots and get my socks wet, then I slip through some brushy leaves and check my socks for ticks. It’s a tough time of year for socks. Farming is just a tough life for socks, in general. All my socks are ripped, either at the heel or somewhere else, from a hardscrabble life of eighteen hour days of chores – and the occasional square-head nail that slips out of wide plank pine flooring. I recently went for a trail run up at Lincoln Woods – a rare treat to travel so far from the farm! – and tossed my wet socks in the back of the pickup. Days later, there they laid, frozen, muddy and wet. My go-to sock is a cream-colored cotton with orange stripes, emblazoned with TREAD GENTLY on the toes. Lies, I say! These socks are made for stomping, and that’s just what they’ll do. They stomp through the snow and mud and spilled buckets of maple sap. I long for summer when I can go barefoot in the pasture and give those socks a rest.

Today’s the day I pull all my taps. Hopping along the stone wall and prying spouts out of the trees with my claw hammer. 141 taps in, 141 taps out. Hope I don't miss one! Sap trapped in the tubing flushes out to the end as air enters the spouts, no longer vacuum sealed. Watching sap run through the tubing with little air bubbles reminds me of the scene in the Willy Wonka movie when the kid gets sucked into the giant chocolate tube, and I’m plotting next year’s ridiculous themes for Sugar Camp. Hey there bub, take a chug, of my yummy, tasty maple syrup. Take a shot, nice and hot, it’s sure to make you cheer up…. And if you see on the Sandwich Board “HIRING OOMPA LOOMPAS” you’ll know I’ve gone mad. You should apply. It’ll be fun.

Sugar Camp ends this year with a whimper and it ends with a whimper. But it’s been all bangs in between. I made the fastest ten gallons I ever made, and could have kept going but since my evaporator is outdoors, the winter weather keeps me inside more than I want to be. Seeing winter weather on the report in early April inspires me to just call it. Go enjoy some easy trails and visits with friends before the chickens begin their van life era out in the pastures.

I don’t sleep in March. Between boiling and power company storm duty and spring fever waking me up after a long wintering phase, I’m a wild boy for about 31 days. I often find myself standing around aimlessly in April, when it catches up to me. Here I am. Huh? Where did all this maple syrup come from? How do I get rid of it? Sometimes I take shots of it to wake up. Cold, fresh sap is nature’s energy drink and maple syrup is the Monster version with all the sugar in it. Now that I think of it….Hey you, reader! If you’re interested in any maple syrup, shoot me a message and I’ll cut you a deal! After I finish sleeping in, of course. Today I wake up at 9:00 am and splay shirtless on the front step in forty-five degree sun while the dogs jump on me with muddy paws. Then we all settle down and lay in the golden, beautiful sun while I read Lene Gammelgaard’s account of being the first Danish woman to summit Mt. Everest in 1996:

“Reading about mountaineering,” she writes, “is getting dull because it’s becoming obvious how uniformly we think, express ourselves and are driven by recognizable inner forces. In ‘our universe’ we are the norm, and the others are those that do not understand. We don’t ask why we do it. Nor do we admire. That’s just the way it is.”

I'm not bored by reading about mountaineering yet. I love reading the alpinists when I’m leaning into those March winds trying to keep the sap boiling. Their love for a taste of the death zone can only be emulated on this farm with a taste of hard-won maple syrup. So much work for such a taste. And we might die doing it. If anything, I love reading the alpinists for motivation to stay resilient during hard times, and farming is filled with hard times. Farmers can relate to the alpinists; it is the norm to slog and suffer and scrape by and scuffle on for a basket of eggs and a kiss on a sheep’s nose. My Everest is a dinner I grew, harvested, and cooked myself. I’ve stopped trying to explain why I do the work; I just do it.

Truth be told, this year is much easier for me as a sugar maker as it is the first year I'm using a Reverse Osmosis machine. This nifty device removes water from the sap to convert it from 2% sugar to 5% sugar. (In case you’re wondering, maple syrup is 67% sugar.) This reduces the boiling time by half, if you can believe it. I don’t boil past dark once this year, whereas last year I was out until midnight running out of songs on Spotify. It’s nice to run the RO for a few hours the night before boiling and then go for a trail run with the dogs. Or nordic ski that one day in March there was snow. That was my favorite day during this entire sugar season, puttering around the Ferncroft trails on my skis at dusk. Not a care in the world. Except that I can't ski and almost fell into a river.

If I was boiling into the a.m. hours this year, I would have been boiling during the Sugar Moon lunar eclipse of March 14. Instead, I go to bed around midnight and wake up at 2 am to watch. I step out to the crispest, starriest sky as the last grasp of earth’s shadow splays its fingers around the moon’s throat. Soon everything goes dull. The stars are bright but quiet. Wilder presses against my leg with an affection that swells my heart. White and fluffy and radiant, he is literally made of moonlight and I think he is feeling the eclipse a bit personally. Pip, normally my black little somber shadow, becomes a wild thing of the woods. I feel his intensity out there, staring back. I'm drawn to Pip's wildness, but anchored by Wilder's calmness. Yin and yang, my two doggos. The sugar moon and the earth's shadow.

We stand under the halo of a moon for five minutes and I feel that switch flip. It’s time to go back to bed. I dream of getting lost in a labyrinthe Kathmandu-sized city under hazy moonlight. Lucid, novellic, questing. I wake up to the sound of sap hitting the bottom of an empty bucket and the smell of burning pine and that comforting swirl of sugar steam. The sun is out and I’m able to lie on the bench and read my Everest book. Toss another chunk of something in the firebox. I look out to Whiteface and the Sandwich Range through the bare trees. I’m grateful for this time. It will end quicker than I realize. I'm here for it.