Twilight of the Sugar Maples

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I still have the first I ever used, one passed on to me by my maternal grandfather, with whom I often sugared when I was a boy. Its darkly oiled wooden handles still bear the highlights burnished onto them by his hands. I like the rhythm I fall into when I use it, the familiar way it squeaks with each revolution, the way a blond ribbon of sapwood twines down the shaft of its auger as the cutter loops patiently through a tree's annual rings.

My grandfather had me pay attention to this wood. During one of my first faltering attempts at tapping, he gestured toward the curls dribbling from the hole. "Watch the shavings," he said, his voice ragged with age, like the woolen shirts he wore. "Make sure you're not drilling into rot." Stained, crumbly shavings indicated decay inside the tree, and when we saw them, we abandoned the hole for fear the syrup might be tainted. Only when the turnings maintained the pale hue of cornstalks bleached in the sun -- the color of healthy, living sapwood -- would we tap one of his cast-iron spiles into the hole and hang an ice-cream bucket from it. I often lingered then, so that I could watch the first limpid drop ride down the channel of the spile and gather before plunking into the pail. When the trees were running well, the woods were staccato in our wake, the best trees ticking 60 drops a minute.

The trees do not always run this well. Variables like frost depth and soil moisture make sap flow unpredictable, even though the immediate weather conditions that favor good runs are well known: calm, sunny days when the temperature climbs into the mid-40s after overnight lows in the teens or 20s. The run is driven by repeated freezing and thawing, what the naturalist John Burroughs called a "certain equipoise of the season." An enthusiastic syrup maker himself, Burroughs wrote that in "New York and New England, the time of the sap hovers around the vernal equinox. . . . As the days and nights get equal, the heat and cold get equal, and the sap mounts." This timing is also fairly accurate for my family's sugar bush, which, in keeping with the theme of equipoise, sits only 40-odd miles north of the 45th parallel. Here at the midway point of the hemisphere, winter and spring balance nicely on the knife edge of the equinox, the blade that in so many of the world's calendars has sliced the seamless fabric of the seasons into old year and new, beginning and end. There is found poetry on a planetary scale in the fact that halfway between Earth's equator and north pole, on the day when sunlight matches darkness, water can both freeze and thaw. Such is the rare fruit of chaos on which life depends and religions feed.

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