I celebrated my favorite change-of-season ritual the other day: Tapping the maples, for which I was instantly rewarded by a flow of sap that I plan today, Saturday, to boil into syrup.
It is life itself emanating from these barren trees, awakened from such a long, harsh winter, and I savored the joyful anticipation of other approaching vernal miracles – crocuses and daffodils bursting through still-frozen soil, osprey winging back north, sunlight lingering, temperatures climbing…
That night I tapped the maples a ghastly dread of something terribly askew stirred me from a sound sleep.
One whiff identified the source of my distress: A skunk had wandered into the crawl space beneath the house and let loose its sulfurous spray.
Once again I was reminded that nature does not serve to provide pleasure exclusively for one species, namely humans. For every drop of honey there is a bee sting; for every wild strawberry there is a slimy slug; for every soaring eagle there is a Canada goose making indiscriminate deposits. Those who expect – no, demand – only nature’s bounties are in for a lifetime of disappointment and misery.
Over time I’ve learned to accept this yin-yang relationship with the natural world, even as my attitude toward some species shifted. Not many years ago I thrilled at the sight of deer bounding in the woods behind my house; now I shake my fist at the miserable varmints that have plundered my garden and decimated my laurel and rhododendrons. Everybody in my family also has contracted (and quickly recovered from) Lyme disease, though it’s likely the deer ticks were carried by other critters, probably mice.
Mice! Don’t get me started on mice!
Maybe the overpowering odor from the skunk will drive them away.
While reflecting on where I would place skunks on my list of least-favorite animals – less hated than mosquitoes but less tolerable than snakes – I thought of an e.e. cummings poem I read in high school, “nobody loses all the time”:
“my Uncle Sol's farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when

my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner”

I’m not prepared to imitate Uncle Sol, but I am preparing to take all necessary steps, short of skunkicide, to restore unscented air to the household. I’ll let you know how I make out.
Now, back to the maples. The previous week should have been prime time for sap gathering, but bad weather stalled the flow. Then, it warmed up too fast. Sap flows best when it drops at night with sub-freezing temperatures and rises during the day in warm sunshine.
You’ll recall that it rained and snowed relentlessly last week, and after it finally cleared the temperature didn’t get very cold at night, so instead of the usual 50-60 gallons of sap from my 25 taps I collected only about 20 gallons. With the ratio of sap to syrup about 40 to 1, that means this year’s syrup yield will only be about a half-gallon.
Considering all the time and energy that goes into production, even if I paid myself a penny an hour for my labor my measly jar of syrup would be about 400 times more expensive than a comparable quantity of Dom Perignon.
Here’s what’s involved:
With a half-inch bit drill a hole about 2 feet from the ground, angled slightly upward, a couple inches into a tree that has a diameter of at least 8 inches.
Gently drive a spile – available online for about $2.50 apiece – into the hole and hang a container beneath the spigot. You can spend a fortune on spile-drivers and stainless-steel buckets with fancy hooks, but I use a light hammer, one-gallon plastic jugs and baling wire.
Large-scale syrup manufacturers rig up tubes to collect the sap, but I stroll from tree to tree with a couple of buckets, and then dump the liquid into a clean 35-gallon trash pail.
When it comes to boiling, you can use sophisticated evaporators and custom stoves in a sugar shack, but I fashioned a crude fireplace out of fieldstone and use a section of wrought iron fencing I found at the dump as a grill to hold 5-gallon pots.
Soon after dawn I start the fire, using branches and knotty logs too tough to split for my wood stoves. I spent the past several days accumulating a big heap of this fuel. I also keep handy several bow saws, axes, splitting mauls and heavy-duty pruning shears to be used by friends who come by during the day. If you want syrup you have to work for it.
Once the fire gets going it takes an hour or more to achieve a rolling boil, and then at least another 10 hours before the sap becomes sugar.
During that period you have to feed the flames pretty much constantly, which is why I put out assorted beverages and snacks for visitors.
Again, you can buy all sorts of equipment to measure when the syrup is ready, but as far as I’m concerned nothing beats taste buds, so for the last hour or so I’m constantly sampling. One lesson I’ve learned – the sap goes from almost perfect to burned beyond salvaging in a heartbeat; you have to be extremely vigilant in the latter stages.
Finally, serve the syrup hot over ice cream if there’s no clean snow around, as is the case this year. It is, in a word, ambrosia.
I know I’m asking too much, but wouldn’t life be grand if skunks hated the smell of maple syrup?