Twilight of the Sugar Maples

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For the maples, as for us, there is something bodily familiar in the way our planet rocks its poles back and forth between the torrential light of the sun and the frost-crystal glinting of distant stars. Cut a maple so that its stump can be studied like the face of a clock: Its rings record the pendulum's swing, each annulus, like the year itself, both dark and light. The light portion of an annual ring is the rapid growth of spring and tends to be wider than the dark, which is added as summer progresses, growth slows, and cell structure changes. Winter halts growth completely until spring triggers another burst, adding a new tally mark to the reckoning.

In four generations, no one in my family, so far as I know, has ever cut one of our large maples so that its rings could be counted. Clearly, however, the trees are old. Sugar maples grow slowly and can live more than 400 years. A "wild-grown" tree, one not managed to receive optimal light and nutrients, often takes more than 50 years to reach the 10-inch diameter considered minimum for tapping. Our sugar bush, more wild than not, has trees nearing 30 inches in diameter. That my family never cut these trees is remarkable. Sugar maple vies with red oak in our region for top lumber prices, and my great-grandfather, grandfather, and uncle all logged and operated sawmills on the farm. They also cleared land to make fields. What saved our maples I'm not sure; most likely it was some combination of the sweetness of the trees' sap and the rockiness of the soil beneath them.

My father and I did recently cut a smaller maple in the sugar bush, one about nine inches in diameter that was damaged when we felled a large, sickly pine. The maple's oval stump, like a finely banded agate, had 98 annual rings, the tree in some years having added no more to itself than the thickness of a heavy coat of paint. What this means -- part of what it means, at least -- is that when I bore an inch and a half into one of these maples to tap it, I may well be drilling back in dendro-chronology roughly to my own birth, the fragile helix of shaved wood falling to the snow at my feet a transect of my own life.

Sugar maples are also called hard maples or rock maples; their wood is used for bowling pins, and the trees themselves seem similarly resilient. In Wisconsin, where they thrive, the highest recorded temperature is 114°F and the lowest, recorded one county east of our sugar bush, is -55°F: a span of 169 degrees. A bicentenarian tree hulking patiently through such extremes on a buttressing flare of roots can seem beyond human concern. My great-grandfather and grandfather both, I'm sure, trod beneath the boughs of our maples confident and content that the trees would outlive them. Neither man died young, but both were right.

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