Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe - Sap’s Running! - Dave Makes Maple Syrup

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

“It is the best maple syrup I have ever had, said Sam.”We’re celebrating one of the wonders of spring on the pod this week: Stuart waxes lyrical about his favourite tipple, maple syrup, then tells a story about the time Dave tried to make his own.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From the Apostrophe Podcast Network. Hello, I'm Jess Milton and this is Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe. Welcome. It's sugar season where I live. It's the time of the year where people start collecting their buckets and driving spigots into maple trees. Where we wait patiently for the days to turn warm enough to let the sap flow. And pray for the nights to stay cold enough to let it freeze and compress. First we wait for the right weather and then we wait for the sap to collect. Drip by precious drip. And then adding nothing but heat, we make it sweet. Stuart loved maple syrup. He used to take shots of it like it was liquor. He'd pour it into a shot glass and just slam it back. Today on the show, we're going to play you

two stories that Stuart wrote during sugar season. Two stories he wrote while he was making maple syrup. First, a story about sugar season in his neck of the woods in the Laurentians in Quebec. And then a story about Dave making maple syrup. So get a stack of pancakes ready or light a fire in the wood stove or put your snowshoes on if there's snow where you are, and get the dog ready for her walk, because we're going to spend the next hour swimming in syrup. We're going to start with this. From back in 2015, this is Stuart McLean. Of all the months of the year, if I could choose only one, I would choose March as the month to be in the Northwoods. It is the one month that contains all the others. There's winter in March for sure, but it is the best of winter, for winter in March is almost always warm and welcoming.

March snow comes softly, most often on the vertical rather than the horizontal. March snow is snow you can walk under rather than lean into, snow that calls you into the woods rather than to the stove. And if there is winter contained in March, there's also spring and with, the promise of summer. Spring will not arrive in the north for a few more weeks, but she has already sent her emissaries. That's a spring sun creeping into the morning bed and lingering in the kitchen at day's end.

Hiking up the mountain behind my house is more pleasant in March than it is in July. There are no leaves to push through, no bugs to endure, and best of all, there are your footprints in the snow behind you to follow home. You can't get lost in March. You can wander off the beaten path. You can wander anywhere you want. Well, that's true for February too. But in February, you won't be tempted to remove your jacket and leave it hanging on a birch tree to retrieve on your way back down. I was up there yesterday wandering on the mountain. The hike, it's easy enough, anyone could do it, begins through a maple bush.

You cross over the little stream that flows into the lake, it's not running yet, and then head higher through the alders and birch. There's an old bush road near the top, then a last steep climb to a clearing from where you can look down on everything. I sat on an old log up there and caught my breath and ate an orange and pondered my next move. If you keep going instead of heading back down, if you keep going west along the ridge and down the other side, you will soon enough come to another maple stand, the one that my neighbor Francois taps. Francois has been getting ready for the last few weeks, tromping around on his snowshoes, circling each of the 60-odd trees that he'll tap.

You want to compress the snow close to the trunk so you can hang your buckets as near to the ground as possible. A lower bucket means more sap. I didn't know that the first time I came across Francois' February footwork. First time I saw his tracks up there, big snowshoe feet marching from tree to tree and then circling each one around and around like a dog. I had no idea what was happening. Only thing that made sense to me was that some scoundrel was planning on cutting all the circle trees down, which of course sent me into a frenzy of fretting. Then one March day, I went back and there were buckets on each of them and it all made sense. This is back before I was boiling sap myself.

The buckets, however, introduced a new mystery. There is neither a house nor a sugar shack up there, and I decided some rogue syrup maker was sneaking up on the ridge and secretly poaching the trees near the top of the mountain. The idea of that delighted me. Eventually, I met Francois on one of my tramps. He was emptying sap into two big white buckets and carrying them down the mountain to his house. Caught you, you crook, I thought.

Turns out Francois owns that part of the mountain. We became instant friends. He took me to his house and showed me his setup. Like me, Francois makes just enough syrup every spring for his own use and a little more to give away. The sap hasn't started running yet. The biggest runs in this neck of the woods are usually in April. March is for getting ready. Well, the buckets are clean, the taps are ready.

I'm putting in 30 taps this year, 10 more than last, and I hope they bring me better luck. Last year, the thaw was late, and the run was almost over before it began. Hardly anyone around here made any syrup last year. It was one of the worst seasons ever. That's one of the great things about making syrup. It yanks you into spring and asks you to compare it to the ones that have come before. It expects you to remember last year and anticipate next. That's another one of the many reasons why the maple moon is one of my favorite times of the year and why I'm looking forward to today's show. Today, we're going to tip our toque to what must be one of the most quintessentially Canadian enterprises, making Canadian Enterprises, Making Maple Syrup. That was Stuart from back in 2015, talking about making maple syrup.

We have to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a couple of minutes with another story about maple syrup. This one is about Dave making syrup, so stick around. So stick around. Welcome back. Thanks for sticking with me. We're talking about sticky stuff today on the podcast about sweet, sticky syrup. It's story time now. This is a story that Stuart wrote while he was making maple syrup. A story we call Dave Makes Maple Syrup. So Dave's in the kitchen. He's over by the stove cooking pancakes for Sam and Sam's

best friend Murphy. A Saturday sleepover, a Sunday brunch. The boys are sitting at the table watching him carefully. The potential for drama is everywhere. He has two pans going, bacon in one, pancakes in the other. There are three pancakes in the pancake pan. There are three others, which he caught at the exact perfect moment on a plate in the oven. But six have already gone in the green bin, either over or under done. The trouble is, pancakes and bacon are not the only things that Dave is juggling. He's also warming up a jug of maple

syrup in the microwave and telling the boys a story all at the same time. The legend of maple syrup. Come on, says Sam. Maple syrup doesn't have a legend. Maple syrup has, Sam looked at Murphy for help. Murphy said, specific gravity. Maple syrup has a specific gravity. It's a creation legend, said Dave, like Adam and Eve. He has his wooden spatula under the last pancake now and that's with one hand and a fork under the bacon with the other he flips them both at the same time look at that he said not everyone can do that and then he started the legend which went like this there There was an Indian boy, First Nations, said Sam. And so he began again. There was a boy, he began, from the First Nations.

And his mother gave him a birch bark basket. And she sent him to the river to get water so she could boil the meat they were going to eat for dinner. On the way to the river, the boy saw a squirrel, and it occurred to him that if he brought the squirrel home as well as the water, he'd be a bit of a hero. So he stopped and he threw his tomahawk at the squirrel. He missed the squirrel, but not the tree, which happened to be a maple tree. And so he went to fetch his tomahawk, which was sticking in the tree, but he was tired from the long hike to the river,

so he sat under the tree to rest for a moment. He fell asleep. And the next thing he knew, he was waking up and the sun was going down. Well, he knew he was in trouble because now he didn't have time to get to the river and be home in time for supper. And that is when he noticed his birch bark bucket had filled with sap from the gas that the tomahawk had made in the tree trunk. The sap looked pretty much like water, so he took it home. And his mother used the sap to boil the meat, and the meat tasted ever so sweet. And everyone wanted to know where the sweet water came from, and that, said Dave, setting a plate of pancakes and bacon in front of each boy with a flourish.

That is how the Indian, I mean the First Nations, discovered maple syrup. Murphy nodded, poked his pancakes, and said, that's preposterous. Dave said, it's a legend. Sam said, let's go. Breakfast was over. School was out. The boys vanished like a pair of squirrels along a tree branch. And the chatter of machine guns soon floated up from the basement. Dave looked at the plates they had left behind. At least they had eaten everything. Dave looked at the plates they had left behind. At least they had eaten everything.

He carried the plates to the sink, rinsed them and dropped them in the dishwasher. When Dave was a boy, pretty much every farm in Big Narrows had a maple bush. Sugar was expensive, but maple sap and the firewood you needed to cook it, both literally grew on trees. Every farmer made maple syrup, but the Macaulays had the biggest operation. The Macaulays were the Roman Catholics of syrup. They had the most splendid bush Still do Across the field at the back of their farm And up the south side of Macaulay's Mountain

About halfway up Where the land is rocky and well-drained Maple trees do well on a rocky hillside Where they have to work a bit to catch water as it goes by. The unpainted sugar house, worn and winter gray, sat in a bowl at the bottom of the bush, so the sap literally flowed into it as if it was the candy house from Hansel and Gretel. It was revered in town, a sort of secular equivalent of the church. In the 60s, many people were attending Macaulay's Sugar House with the same regularity that they attended church, which is to say, seasonally,

marching up the mountain like pilgrims for the high holiday of spring. So when the Catholic church in town burned, everyone agreed the chimney bricks, the only things that survived the fire, should be given to the Macaulays. After all, making syrup was just as mysterious as mass, and filled with just as many rituals. The Macaulays used the bricks when they built their new firebox. So their connection to the heavens was official. The Church of Maple Syrup.

The magic alchemy of clear water being transformed into golden syrup right there in the holy evaporator, which sat in the middle of the sugar house like a silver altar. Dave worked up there for six springs, a sort of altar boy. He started the spring he was 11. He began the day the sap started running. Walked up the muddy mountain road after school with Billy Mitchell and Sean Marshall. Old man Macaulay had the horse ready and waiting for them. Tied to a post by the wood pile, their first job was to harness him up to the old sled. Macaulay tapped about 700 trees in those days. The horse knew the route.

The boys walked beside him, carrying a large pail in each hand. They'd take the buckets off the trees and empty the sap into their pails and slosh their way back to the sled. Empty them into the eight big old milk jugs. When the jugs were full, they'd walk back to the sugar house and Mr. McCauley would pick them up, 100 pounds each, and empty them into the holding tank. Then they'd head out again. Mr. McCauley was always telling them stories about his father, who worked alone, without a horse, pulling the sled through the bush like he was a mule. Sometimes after they finished, they'd stay and help Mr. Macaulay sap the pans. And he'd dig into the snowbank by the door and pull out a cardboard box wrapped in an old piece of canvas. His stash of frozen hot dogs.

He'd throw a couple of them right into the boiling sap. That was something. To sit there on the old car seat by the fire, holding their sugar-boiled hot dogs as if they were cigars. Sitting there listening to the adults talk. There were always adults there passing around a bottle and smoking. Sometimes someone had a fiddle or a guitar.

Old man Macaulay peering into the fire, peering into the evaporator, skimming the foam off the syrup and telling stories about his father who had to pull the sled himself. Sometimes the steam from the syrup and telling stories about his father who had to pull the sled himself. Sometimes the steam from the evaporator was as thick as pea soup. Sometimes it settled down around shoulder height and Macaulay's head would disappear like it was lost in the clouds. To sit there on that old car seat and watch all that

while you breathed in the heavenly, indescribably wonderful, nutty, buttery smell of boiling sap, that was something, boy. Dave worked there for six springs. Until the spring he was 16, and it was time to let younger kids have their turn. And now here he was, all these years later, the maple moon, as the Ojibwe called it, hanging in the sky. And where was he? Hanging over a dishwasher while his son played some soul-destroying shoot-em-up-who-knows-what in the basement. You could hardly call that progress.

It's a maple, he said, and I'm pretty sure it's a sugar maple. He was standing on his back porch. He was pointing at the tree in the back corner of their backyard. His wife, Morley, was standing beside him. It's hard to know for sure without the leaves, he said, but I'm pretty sure. Sometimes, when the person you love sets off to do something that you might suspect is doomed,

you do your best to stop them. Other times, you know your job is to stand aside. This was one of those times. Morley wanted to say, I could run over to Harmon's. You know they have syrup, right? Harmon's Fine Foods. Instead, she said, I guess you're going to need a horse. To do it properly, I mean, where are you going to get the horse?

That is why he married her. For answers like that. Morley said, where are you going to get the horse? Dave said, you can order them online. Next morning, first thing, instead of opening his store, he went to an auto wrecker's in the East End, and he bought the front seat out of a 1959 Chevy Biscayne. Big vinyl bench cost him $275. He went online to get the rest of what he needed. Four buckets,

four bucket lids, four little spouts, a drill bit, a collection pail, a hydrometer, and a candy thermometer. He was only going to do three trees. The one in his yard, one in the Turlington's, and one in the Chuddery's. The fourth bucket was backup. It turned out the Chuddery's maple was a white ash. out the Chuddery's maple was a white ash. It's an honest mistake. White ash have similar coarse bark to a maple. Dave is not the first syrup maker to make that mistake. So in the end, technically, he only tapped two. The buckets stayed on the trees for a week. He checked them two, three times a day. Sam was supposed to do it, but he lost interest pretty quickly. Nothing, said Dave again on the first morning of the third week, like he had said every morning.

Sap, you see, runs when the days are warm and the nights are cold. Warm means above freezing. It runs up the sapwood in the warmth of the day and back down to the roots in the cool of the night. You catch it on its way by. Soon, said Dave, he checked the weather channel obsessively. Tuesday, Wednesday, 15, 16 days. And then on the 17th, Morley came down for breakfast and he was standing by the door beaming, and saps running.

The magic words of his boyhood springs. They went to the backyard and sure enough, drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Little drops of water dripping into the pail, one slow drop at a time. That's cool, said Sam. but he didn't mean it. It's embarrassing, he said to Morley when they were alone. Why can't he golf like the other dads?

By Friday night, he had a little bit more than two gallons, not much, but enough to make syrup. He began after supper, in the garage, on the barbecue. The ratio is approximately 40 to 1. That is, you have to boil away 40 liters of sap to get one liter of syrup. But that's all you have to do, boil it down. The hard part, like with so many things, is the waiting. And then after all the waiting, catching it at just the right moment. You stop too soon, all you have is dirty water. right moment. You stop too soon, all you have is dirty water. Too late, it can turn to toffee,

sugar, or finally, if you fall asleep or go inside for a pee, it can catch fire. Melt your pans. You let that happen, you're going to be teased by the other farmers for generations. What other farmers, said Morley. He poured the sap, or as much that would fit, into their largest roasting pan, and they fired up the barbecue. And by they, I mean Dave and Morley and Sam, who was there for the beginning, but he didn't stay long. He went back inside. As he went, he said, there's golf on TV, you know. Morley went in soon after Sam. She came out to say goodnight around midnight. By two, the sap had turned a golden brown. It looked like syrup, but he knew he still had hours to go. At four, stretched out on the car seat, he awoke with a start. Dad, it was Sam. Dad, the barbecue's out.

He'd run out of propane. Dave looked at his boy blearily. What are you doing up? Sam said, I don't know. I woke up. I thought I'd check. And a good thing, too. What are you going to do? It had started to rain. And there is nothing nice about April rain at four in the morning, especially if you're

trying to jack your neighbor's propane tank by flashlight. But they got it done. And they got the sap on the boil again. And Dave said, you should go back to bed. I'm going to stay up, said Sam, with you. And so they sat there on the car seat together. Dave pulled two hot dogs out of his pocket. Said, you hungry? And he threw them in the sap.

And they ate them without buns. They didn't taste the way he remembered them. Not even close. But Sam seemed to enjoy his. When it started getting light, Dave went in and made coffee. He brought two cups out. He wasn't even sure Sam drank coffee but he took it as if he did.

It came to syrup around seven. It was darker than it might have been. He'd had it on the boil longer than he should have, but that's the price you pay when you boil sap on propane instead of the resin-y wood that old man Macaulay favored. But the color was a no matter. What mattered was that they had stayed up all night together, soaked and cold like the old days. It tastes fantastic, said Sam, dipping his finger into the cup, which was all they had. You take two gallons of sap and you boil it all night, and what you get for your troubles is about a cup of maple syrup. Go wake your mother, said Dave. An hour later, Sam and Morley were sitting at the table, and Dave was back at the stove making pancakes and bacon. It's the best maple syrup I've ever had, said Sam. Dave laughed. He said, let's not get

carried away here. We've all had Macaulay stuff, so I doubt it's the best you've ever tasted. But you know what? It's the best I've ever made. And he said, holding the cup up, if you factor in the cost of the propane and the pails and the car seat and my time, and he nodded at Sam and yours, this just might be the most valuable maple syrup in the country. He carried it to the table and he sat it down carefully and said, go easy. The sugar is made in the summer when the warm sun hits the green leaves, it descends to the roots in the autumn and stays there through the cold, never-ending winter. Until spring finally comes and it rises with us and the rest of the world. The squirrels and the little mice up the sapwood in a triumphant rush so it can nourish the next set of leaves.

Of all the songs of spring, it could be the truest. For when it comes, it comes like life comes, in little drops, so slowly that you don't notice your bucket is filling until it's full. Nor how sweet each drop is when they are drip dropping. Just afterwards, after the drips have dripped into the big numbers, and your bucket is full and you have held it close to the big hot fire that is your memory. Then, when you taste it, it tastes ever so sweet. Dave looked down the table and caught his wife's eye. They locked eyes for the

briefest moment, and in that moment she winked. Another little drop for his bucket. Dave smiled and reached for the pancakes. He said, would someone please pass me the syrup? that was the story we call dave makes maple syrup we recorded that in oshawa ontario back in 2014 i love the part in that story about the syrup being the most expensive syrup they've ever eaten. I've never made maple syrup. This year is going to be my first year, but I do love canning and preserving. I make different kinds of jam and red pepper jelly and crab apple jelly and curried cauliflower and pickled beans and cucumbers. Every time we open a jar of pickles or jam, my husband jokes that we should savor it because the jar of jam is worth about $75. You know, when you consider my time picking the berries and

making the jam and canning it. But it is worth every penny. I just opened a jar the other day, and when I did, I didn't think about any of that. All I thought about was that warm day in July when I made the jam. It's like a breath of summer in the dead of winter. The ending of that maple syrup story, the part about the little drops collecting in the bucket, it's so lovely, this part. It comes like life comes, in little drops,

so slowly that you don't notice your bucket is filling until it is full, nor how sweet each drop is when they are drip-dropping. Just afterwards, after the drips have dripped into the big numbers and your bucket is full and you have held it close to the big, hot fire that is your memory, then, when you taste it, it tastes ever so sweet. That part. That part. That part right there. That is really what I think Stuart was trying to say with his writing and what we were trying to say with the show.

That life is made up of tiny little moments. That it's the little things, not the big things. The moments so little you hardly even notice them when they're happening, but they add up. Our life is a mountain of moments. So you have to pay attention to those moments, even the smallest ones. You have to make sure that you have a bucket to capture them in, because it is those moments, the little ones, that will remember, that matter. Those extraordinary, ordinary moments, like the sap dripping into the bucket, like the whiff of summer on a wintry day when you open a jar of jam. That's about it for today,

but we'll be back here next week with another Dave and Morley story. And it's one you might not have heard before. It was 4.30 in the morning. And Dave was having a nightmare about something that smelled bad. Something that smelled bad enough to wake him up. He sat up in bed and to his surprise, the smell was still there. It smelled like skunk. In fact it smelled like the skunk was in bed with him.

Looked at his wife suspiciously. Then he got out of bed and he walked around the house. Checked the doors and the windows. They were all closed. Went back to sleep telling himself that the smell would be gone by morning. It wasn't. He was awakened three hours later by his seven-year-old son, Sam. Sam was standing by the bed poking him.

There's a skunk in the house, said Sam. It smells disgusting. Dave pulled on a pair of sweatpants and went downstairs. The dog wouldn't go with him. A bad sign. He walked around the house again. On the second pass, he found a hole leading under his back porch. This will pass, he said to himself. The odor was still hovering when he came home that evening. It was almost visible like a haze. I can't stand it, said Sam at dinner. I think I'm going to barf. It'll go away, said Dave. But he said it without conviction.

That's next week on the podcast. I hope you'll join us. Backstage at the Vinyl Cafe is part of the Apostrophe Podcast Network. The recording engineer is the oh-so-sweet Greg Duclute. Theme music is by Danny Michelle, and the show is produced by Louise Curtis, Greg DeCloot, and me, Jess Milton.

Let's meet again next week. Until then, so long for now.