Twilight of the Sugar Maples

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Maple sugar is one of the particular blessings of space-time, its sweetness a distillation of life's relationship with a place and its past. Each summer, maples transform solar energy into glucose and then, following the wisdom of genetic record, drop their leaves and wrap some of that energy inside themselves in coils of starch. During winter, the trees convert starch to sucrose, which is highly water soluble and functions as antifreeze. Later, this sucrose fuels spring growth. Maples remind us that the various arrangements of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen that we call sugars are the basis of life. Photosynthesized glucose ignites most of the biosphere. All animal cravings for sweetness -- everything from a bee's attraction to the sucrose in nectar to a child's yearning for the lactose in her mother's milk -- come back in some way to the fundamental dependence of life on energy first trapped in sugar. It is the most ancient hunger, and maples answer it in a most satisfying way. As anyone who has carried a gathering pail from tree to tree, season after season, knows, this is no simple pleasure, no small thing to contemplate losing within the span of a human life.

I don't have any children of my own. It's a choice I've made, one I suspect my father resents. I understand if he does; I'm an only child, his only chance at a grandchild and a fifth generation for the land. Often, when I'm working by his side in our woods, I feel my own regret. But then I consider the lakes I grew up fishing that are now ringed with houses and signs warning against eating the fish, the stars low along the horizon toward town that have been washed from the sky by the rising electric glare, and the specter of our species having so altered the atmosphere that any child of mine could see our maples die, never to be replaced. Many, I know, would say this is crazy, that things are not so dire. I hope they are right. I do not trust their optimism enough, though, to bring a child into the world on its merit. If they are wrong, there will be too little left of me to be a father.

My father and I seem destined, therefore, to lose the farm and its sugar bush someday into another family's hands, a loss no more painful -- and certainly more just -- than those further back in the land's history. We will, if all goes well, leave these new owners some fine trees growing in rocky ground and perhaps some outdated hand tools placed carefully in a box. If all goes poorly, there may be only a story, one by then of little use, of a family who, through its own dumb luck and others' misfortune, settled on a piece of ground where trees of the most amazing sort grew. The trees' boughs reached toward the sky with all the yearning of prayer and shed seeds that whirled to the ground on damselfly wings. In autumn, their leaves flamed like the setting sun and then fell, leaving the trees looking dead and forlorn through winters that made ice boom and crack on nearby lakes. Yet each spring, the trees came back to life and ran sap that was sweet and clear, sap that could be turned through the alchemy of ice and fire into honey. Each spring for generations, the family took some of this and savored it, until finally the winters turned warm and the sap stopped flowing and the family, like the trees, disappeared.

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