With my brother-in-law Jeff Nelson at the wheel of his truck, we leave Halifax, N.S., early on a cool April Friday and drive straight through to the Fenwick Hills near Amherst. At our destination, Ripleys' Sugarwoods, the last camp at the end of a rough road, the truck slides on the narrow, muddy track through the hardwoods. In a couple of hours, we have gone back in time to a world of forest and sky, wind and water. Trees are down from recent storms. Underneath the bands of softwoods, the snow is deep. The blue plastic lines that carry the sap from the sugar maples down to the camp replace the metal buckets of past decades and the earlier set-ups of the Indigenous people who showed the first European settlers how to get sweetness from a tree.
A few families walk the track, the eyes of the children and their parents and grandparents shining with excitement. This is an annual adventure, a special time of memory making. Parents avoid the puddles. The younger kids stomp into them with delight.
It’s warm from the evaporators inside the camp: the burning wood below, the hot steam billowing from the evaporators above. Ancient wooden snowshoes and dated tools line the walls. Sugar making is now partly high-tech, but there’s still a lot of muscle power and handiwork involved.
Even with the help of power saws and ATVs, the days can be long in all kinds of weather, and everything about the pursuit demands precision and a certain amount of risk. Ask anyone who has wielded a chainsaw or an axe or navigated an ATV or snowshoes through the muck and snow. Plus there’s the high temperatures of the boilers and the sap as it is carried in containers to the next processing stage.
In the fall, producers cut wood to fuel the boilers in the spring. They have to clean the lines that carry the sap and the spiles that tap into the trees are inserted anew before the sap runs. Stomping along in snowshoes, using a drill to tap the trees, walking over downed trees and under branches for hours at a time is a long hard workout. Piling the wood and later shoving it into the boilers is not easy.
The burning wood fires the evaporators that reduce the sap by a ratio of 40 to one. The water boils off in a haze of steam, leaving the delicious syrup, the same sweet stuff the Indigenous people discovered millennia ago. You can tell when it’s ready by its temperature.
The sap runs up from the roots to feed the creation of new growth, new leaves, around the month of March, on and off as the temperature rises and falls above and below freezing. It’s get-to-work time in the woods and camps. Mother Nature doesn’t wait.
A hired hand tells me he loves to work outdoors, seasonal work in the woods and fields. He carefully draws off a bucket of syrup and pours it into a smaller tank to boil again. He could never spend his days indoors, in an office, he says.
To work in this industry, you must be tuned into nature and love the outdoors. The way we all were in millennia past, or we wouldn’t have survived as a species. Spending all your time in a cave, fire or no fire, was not a survival skill. Nowadays we can do that. Electricity provides light and heat, and computers provide our work and entertainment, with a side order of dating apps so our species will survive into the future, for a while anyway.
Neil Ripley, the guy with the gray beard and the quick eye and hands, is well known in these parts. Decades ago, he built a water wheel with milk cans that dipped into a stream to power a generator that provides electricity to the house and the sugar camp. In spring, the streams are high, coinciding with the peak of the season when the holding tanks are full of sap.
Tracey (Ripley) Bowden, his daughter, tends the cash as workers make maple leaves and angels and maple butter in the open area behind her. More boiling and stirring. It’s all about the temperature and the timing. Small groups come in in to watch. Memories are made of this.
Later we leave the truck, put on our boots, and walk down a dirt road to another property. We take a side route over a track that is a combination of snow and slippery mud. You concentrate to stay on your feet, your whole body moving in three dimensions; one slip and you’re down. The wind bites into your lungs while the smell of spruce, pine, and maple turn on a part of the brain that is mostly dormant indoors. Squirrels chase each other through the trees, blue jays call from above. Bobcat and deer tracks intersect. This is nature. It is beautiful, a feast for the senses, but you better pay attention.
The bright lines flow down the slope to collect the sap at another camp. Even with reverse osmosis that draws the sap down into some of the holding tanks, gravity is still key. We talk with an older couple who have their own hobby operation: a cabin, a separate building for a small evaporator, a tractor, and a few buckets in the trees. They love being in the woods, they say. They come in all seasons, as long as it’s not too hot, too cold, or too buggy.
Then we drive overland to the Bay of Fundy. Again, there is snow under the softwoods and the dirt roads are wet. Whitecaps churn in the bay. We look for Mr. Fox, but he’s not around right now, assuming he made it through the winter.
The Masstown Market is packed as we stop for a quick lunch. The rest of the drive back is quiet. The truck cruises along. Our souls are still back in the sugar woods, tuned into the hot sun and the cold wind, the wet snow and the slippery mud, the maple and birch that stick out of the snow like ancient creatures protected by occasional patches of spruce and fir.