A sappy soliloquy

This weekend, with kids in tow, we made our seasonal pilgrimage to Wheeler’s Pancake House, just outside the village of McDonald’s Corners (within an hour’s drive west of Ottawa for those not familiar with the topography of rural eastern Ontario, Canada). From our vantage point, it’s roughly a forty-five minute drive over country roads both familiar and vague to our recollection.

You get the idea you’re entering a simpler time when you are faced with a large sign that tells you not to rely on your GPS (or SatNav), and that the large signs along the road will point you in the correct direction.  Of course, there was the pleasant irony of having to brake at a caution sign warning about pedestrians in order to allow a deer to run to the other side (with two others waiting their turn for a quick prance).

Once there, you come to a collection of log buildings, one being significantly larger than the rest.  On one end is the dining area, which could easily accommodate over 100 patrons, while the other displays two stainless steel evaporators that apply the steady heat that transforms the maple sap into syrup. Of course, the fare on offer consists of breakfast, and each table is given a sizeable bottle of maple syrup to complement their order.

Amid the litres upon gallons of amber liquid, you would get the impression that the stuff is as plentiful as all get out, and that we Canucks just have to jam a spigot into a tree trunk and voila - we have something to pour on our French toast.

I love maple syrup for the taste, but it goes a bit deeper.

First, it is only a particular type of maple tree that produces this sap, and it tends to be located in just a very small geographical part of the nation. If you live in western Canada, for example, you would be hard pressed to find a maple tree of any species – period. I lived in northeastern British Columbia for six years, and if you were to find maple syrup for sale, it was shipped in from Ontario or Quebec.

It’s also time consuming to produce. Yes, it’s pretty much about the boiling, but consider that to get one gallon of syrup, you need to start with forty gallons of sap. You also need to get that sap from trees that release the fluid at the rate similar to that of the steady drip of a leaky faucet. Once you collect enough, you have to get that sap to the ‘shack’ where it’s boiled down. To do that, you need to traipse through snow drifts that might still be a foot deep. Also appreciate the fact that usable sap only runs during certain conditions – no warmer than 5 degrees Celsius during the day and no colder than minus 5 at night.

The Wheelers, like many large producers, have employed innovations that help the process, like running miles of flexible tubing between the trees in order to run the sap to a central collection point. Despite that, they need over 700 acres of land and over 14 kilometers of piping to accomplish this task.

I may sound as though I am fixated on the time, effort and labour expended in this pursuit – and I am.

The syrup reminds me of the spring of 1985, and my grandfather. It was the spring that he had resolved to tap some sugar maple trees and that I was going to help him.

Late February in rural eastern Ontario is a case study in fickleness.  The temperature straddles either side of zero degrees with nary a warning, while the elements disperse equal amounts of rain and snow with the capriciousness of a fickle lover. The caress of an engorged snowflake is suddenly replaced by the rude slap of a pellet of rain, hard against a chilled cheek.

Along the shore of the lake, the large boiling pan was propped on its corners by old cinder blocks, while the space below was crammed with logs and kindling. Gallons of clear sap, painstakingly collected from solitary trees that escaped frost, wind and the gnawing jaws of beavers, was poured into the heated pan. Steam, laden with the smell of sugar and smoke, rolled like ethereal mist over a graveyard.

Over the course of hours, the foot deep bath of liquid dissipated into a brown distillate that stood no more than a quarter-inch from the scalded bottom.

The fire was extinguished and the remains were poured into a large milk can and brought back to the house. There, my grandmother ladled the liquid onto a piece of cheesecloth that covered the pressure cooker pot on the stove. Bits of dirt, grit, twig and bark lay in its wake.

The cooking continued, with the familiar maple smell permeating the walls and ceiling of the kitchen. The liquid, now as viscous as gravy, was on a rolling boil. Light brown foam began to form on top, with yet more bits to scrape off. Under her instruction and watch, I continued the work of removing the sediment. After what felt like an eternity, I reasoned that my work was done. My grandmother, however, put that lie to rest by pouring a quarter cup of milk into the pot. Almost immediately, the thick, white foam appeared with yet more bits of bark – as though I had accomplished nothing up to this point.

When all was said and done, after the days of sap collection and the hours of boiling and straining, we had produced enough to fill a large mason jar. Within a week, it was gone.

Never before that year, and never after, did I ever do the trees. Funny enough, though, neither did my grandfather – at least in my lifetime. While he was not an overtly sentimental man, he always found reason to pass on to me knowledge of what had been. To this day, it shocks some people in their late 70’s and early 80’s that I know where a particular barn, or local cheese factory sat – places that had burned or demolished four decades before I was born!

The syrup means many things to me. It marks the transition from winter to spring, and it defines much of who we are in our part of the world. It also reminds us of who we used to be before the modern world homogenized us into a monotone culture that, like anything mass marketed, lives in the shadow of the lowest common denominator. It’s a fact that we don’t recognize or appreciate until we’re older and have seen change first hand – when we’ve been around long enough to compare and contrast.

My grandfather has been gone for nearly a decade, and the land where we tapped and boiled now belongs to me. I’ve not subjected my son or daughter to making our own syrup, but I’ve inflicted the story of my experience on them – usually every time we make the pilgrimage to McDonald’s Corners.

Much drier and far warmer.