A story of Two Trees

 We are having some most discouraging weather. Rain, more rain. Rain yesterday and rain tomorrow. In between the downpours, the sun comes out, or the moon shines down and the leaves glow or are outlined in silver light. Then darkness or gloom and sploosh. We are also, today, having gusty and occasionally really big puffs of wind. There are a few leaves being torn off the trees and those on the ground are being rearranged with amazing frequency. 

But really this post is about a fine autumn day, a perfect day really, when our two big maples that flanked the laneway at the road were felled and cut up. These were old trees, planted as we were told when the land was first opened up and farmed, and so probably over 150 years old. They were handsome trees until the big ice storm in 1998 did a lot of damage to them. They were also, by reason of their location, ‘open grown’, that is, branchy and bushy. And there was a lot of rot in the multiple stems. A breakage on either side could easily block our egress to the road and, worst case, trap us in bad weather. It was decided that they had to go.

And so, in warm autumn sun, I slung my camera around my neck and, carefully distancing myself from falling branches, documented the cutting out party. 

This is the left hand tree, as you face the road, showing trunk and multiple stems.

There was no way JG was doing this himself, and so we hired a tree removal company who arrived with an oversized truck and boom with bucket rig, and hauling a chipper. They also had an assortment of very, very large chainsaws that the young man in the bucket slung around as if they weighed nothing. 

The first order of operation was to take off the long limbs. 

The left side tree gets its first trim.

This done, larger stems were lopped off one by one.

A Very Large chainsaw.

As the branches and stems came down, they were picked up by the ground crew and fed into the chipper. The chips went into the truck. I assume that they will be made into something useful.

Here the right hand tree is all down. 

Here is the left side tree, roped and ready for the last cut that will bring down the big stems. The ground crew is sorting out and chipping the small stuff and leaving the bigger pieces to become firewood.

Both trees are down. It seems very open. But now the small trees that have been overshadowed by the big guys will have room and sun to grow. 

Our tractor is now in use as the usable wood is sorted and placed by the roadside for easy access. Since these branches and portions of trunk have almost all been cut to length and moved by our neighbours, who will split them for firewood. Not much will be wasted, as even the small branches will be chipped and become mulch on the forest floor.

Fighting back

Here are two photos of the oak trees struggling to grow new sets of leaves. These were taken over a week ago (today is August 2nd) and the poor things are now in a bit better case. Unfortunately it is raining and looks to continue all day, so a current photo will have to await better weather. I thought I had posted these, but something went wrong. 

Apologies, and more to follow.

Chomp!

The date is July 8th. The tree is our cherished oak that sits just off the front deck of our house and provides my screen porch with afternoon shade. As of today, it is barren, eaten, ravaged by gypsy moth caterpillars.

They left one branch. Why, I do not know. I guess they just didn't notice it. While they were chomping, my husband tried spraying, both with insecticide and water, and he and our ED both ended up squashing the loathsome insects on the tree trunk as they crawled determinedly up it. We are hoping that it is not too late in the year for the tree to try to grow a new set of leaves.

One happy fellow as a result of this. The dominant hummingbirds sit on a vacant branch waiting for a junior to try to get a drink at the bird feeder nearby. He now has his choice of lurking spots and an dive path unimpeded by leaves.

The last time we had an infestation like this was, we think, in the mid 1980s. If you go outside under the trees, there is a rain, a pitter patter, of caterpillar poop. The joys of nature, eh.

Lawn Ornaments

Some people decorate their lawns and gardens with statues, gazebos, painted truck tires with flowers in the centre or motorcycles pasted with 'For Sale' signs. Our back field, which JG mows and I guess should qualify as a Very Large lawn, is decorated, this summer, by a doe. We see her (I am just guessing that it is just one her, but the behaviour is characteristic) almost every day. She checks out the feeding station, nibbles with more or less enthusiasm at the plants in what used to be my rock garden, and reclines here and there on the mown grass, ears twitching. She is very decorative.

The header photo shows her, with a lot of editing, wandering in the dusk. The editing was necessary because the light when I shot this was pretty poor and I got a blue cast on everything. It will do until I get a better one. Although, I do have a lot (erm, far too many) deer-on-the-grass photos. A disciplined photographer would purge.

Over the last week or so she has been joined, from time to time, by a turkey and twice by a small and somewhat nervous varying hare. Or two; the hare size varied. It is more than a bit distracting, actually, as I should be getting on with the housework instead of peering out the windows.

If one must self-isolate, it is surely a fine thing to be able to do so here.

Systemic Racism in Canada

Racism in Canada is a fact. No one is denying that or arguing about it with the possible exception of Rex Murphy. Link https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-canada-is-not-a-racist-country-despite-what-the-liberals-say. I believe that it is also a fact that open prejudice is less overt in Canada than it is in the United States. We are a politer people, for one thing. Instead of calling Michelle Obama ‘an ape in heels’, she gets the label ‘callipygian’. Conrad Black was the perp in this case and I have despised the man ever since I read that column. Link https://themsmysentiments.blogspot.com/2008/01/more-than-just.html

 I am white, middle class, well educated, in my 57^th year of a solid marriage and damn lucky to be Canadian with roots here that go back some generations. I am also lucky to have grown up in a community that was, to an extent, mixed race. I went to school with black kids, socialized with black kids and was unsurprised that my parents socialized with black professionals. And I got my education about racial epithets in Grade 3, when I repeated a comment my teacher had made to a classmate, calling him ‘her little chocolate drop’, and the classmate pushed me down a set of stairs. I liked chocolate and I liked George. He neither apologised or explained, but his hurt was clear. The lesson stuck.

 All my life I have believed that all the kids of whatever race and religion got the same schooling in my home community, with the exception of the Catholics who had a separate school system. As they still do, in Ontario today. The black kids were more heavily represented in a couple of the high schools, but as far as I knew, got exactly the same courses and calibre of teachers. I was smug, in fact, about how my community handled race.

 After writing that, I wondered just how good my recollection was. I have been looking at photos from a Windsor History website and it hit me that almost all the photos, elementary and secondary, were of white kids only.  And so, I did a quick literature check. Guess what!  Link https://www.tvo.org/article/the-story-of-ontarios-last-segregated-black-school?fbclid=IwAR2D9ptY035ZrBaTvvDkuaQNDFgJG5vDMwH-7PILtdOUXEKG7K57J-pijZE. I also found a nicely structured timeline of blackhistory in my community. Descriptions of actions in the 1940’s and 1950’s reveal a mixed bag of prejudice and fight against prejudice. See https://www.publicboard.ca/Programs/K-12/africancanadians/Documents/Roads%20to%20Freedom%20Sec_Feb%202011.pdf 

 I left my city to go to university and have never lived there again. Looking back at that time (and the yearbooks) I realize that there were very few black students. At the time I was oblivious. I recall going to a movie with a black male classmate and being puzzled at the glare I received in the lobby from a friend. I was engaged to be married to a guy who was not at the university and if I thought anything, it was that she believed I should not be with another male.

 I tried to teach our daughters not to let race get in the way of friendship and fellowship. I probably overdid it. My younger daughter tells me that racial prejudice and epithets were a factor in her schooling. If she told me that at the time, I probably told her to ignore the perpetrators as not worthy of attention. If I thought anything, it was that these creeps were too few to matter. I followed with interest the efforts to overcome racism in the USA, but I was a young mother with money to earn, kids to raise and a house to manage, and it did not appear to me to be my fight. After all, I thought, overt prejudice is illegal in Canada and those experiencing it could have recourse to the courts. Police beating up African Americans for no reason? Only in the States. Even a stint on the city’s Board of Education did not teach me much. Kids of all races were in trouble for various reasons. A few years working in the Board’s Personnel department did not cause me to count the number of blacks in positions of responsibility either. We had black teachers. So, no problem.

 I am white, middle class, and, I have come to realize, a stupid person. Over the last few years, I have learned more and more about the ‘racialized’ experience. And it just makes me sick. The fact that I don’t think I contributed to it is pretty lame. By not noticing, yeah, I have been on the wrong side. What was I thinking? Well, that the LGTBQ community needed some support. That agism needed fixing. That women are second class citizens (both of these latter from personal experience). But that Canadian blacks were routinely being subjected to hassle and worse from the police just went under my radar. I read about what I assumed were isolated incidents and also assumed that this would be dealt with. That the First Nations people were also hassled and worse is something I knew from reading but also assumed that the assurances from our politicians that this was being remedied were true.

 What I have just had shoved down my throat is that we cannot trust the police force not to use force when it is not needed. That police seem to be allowed to act on biases without penalty. That quite a few of our institutions are systemically unfair and that nothing has been done to change them. And that all this has happened and is continuing to happen because people like me, and including me, have not been paying attention and have not been enforcing change.

 Demanding change is not the same as getting change. I learned this in a very minor political position, on a Board of Education in fact, where, once elected, I quickly found out that as an elected official I was doing the equivalent of riding on an elephant with no reins. If you whacked the animal hard enough with a goad, you could get a minor change in direction, but the minute you stopped whacking, the change stopped happening. Why did this occur? Because the majority of the people in positions of responsibility were content with things as they were. Most of them, like me I suppose, were people of good will who thought that the bad stuff was aberrant and could be dealt with case by case. Bullying in the school yard was normal, always had been, and was relatively innocuous and besides, the kids would grow out of it. Or toughen up. Or you put a program in place and your elected official bogs off, happy. And never stops back to ask if the program is working or still in effect, even.

 Someone should ask if the school yard bully has grown up to be a person who will kneel on someone’s neck for eight minutes, ignoring pleas for air. Has the kid who teased someone about skin colour turned into an adult who blocks access to medical care at a reasonable price for ‘those’ people because they don’t look after themselves and don’t deserve it? Have the ‘elite’ groups of middle school madness become adult NIMBYs? And, equally frightening, what are some kids learning at home and internalizing. Because, don’t believe that little kids are innocent and are taught bias. Kids are inherently biased, like chickens pecking the one that looks different, and have to be taught, carefully taught, that all people are equal. When they see adults literally getting away with murder, what do they learn?

I am convinced that any of this is not going to be changed by a top down fix. That there are laws on the books and a Charter of Rights is nice, but not good enough. The elephant just keeps clomping along and here we are still sawing at the reins. Any change will only begin when a majority of people demand it and keep demanding it. Starting with sorting out the police, ditching politicians with tin ears and being aware, on every street, in every office, classroom and store, of prejudice in all its many subtle and overt forms. And calling it out, then and there, as it happens. In fact, by stopping being stupid and complacent and enabling. Yes, all lives matter, but the priority for our ‘racialized’ brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, matters more.

Note to readers: I am trying out 'New Blogger' and not getting the links to work. I have therefore included the URLs.

Adding Insult to Injury

This happened yesterday, May 12th, in the middle of the afternoon.

After I spent the morning at the Emergency at Perth Hospital getting a diagnosis of arthritis in a swollen and painful wrist. The dominant hand, of course. My poor husband, who had to drive me to the hospital, spent the morning in the car as he was not allowed in, not being a patient. Patience was thus enforced. I will say for the fine young doctor in the Emergency room that I am back to being able to type today, after he prescribed for me and showed me an Xray of the wrist that he categorized as one of the worst cases of arthritis he had ever seen. 'You must have used it a lot' he said, cheerfully. 

May Day

There is a fine and well-tuned chorus of spring peepers this evening, in full throat for the first time this spring. Earlier, as they were warming up, they provided a back-up for a robin’s triumphant solo with all the grace notes and considerable volume. I was out on the porch a short while ago (9:00 pm ish) and the sky was still blue well after sunset and a bright star (probably a planet, in truth) had been hung in the branches of the oak tree. May 1^st, and, yes, spring. Finally.

Lots of buds

In fact, my daffodils are finally deciding that they are going to bloom after all. We had a day yesterday of soft rain and the back field turned green and the tight, cold-rejecting buds in my bulb bed began to take notice. Today a lot of the minis are in bloom and the whole bed begins to look promising.

The oak tree is now the only tree in what I think of as the front of our house, even if the front door is on the other side. Very close to the screen porch there was a large and somewhat decrepit black cherry and in front of that a clump of birch that had never really recovered after the ice storm. To get the cherry to fall away from the house, JG had to cut the birch away. So, down it came, and the cherry followed. Poor guy has just finished raking up all the dead crunchy stuff that broke off when it was felled, but it did land exactly where he had planned for it to go. He hauled the trunk away while there was still snow on frozen ground and cut it up. Today he split some of it and remarked that there was a lot of rot in the lower trunk. Good thing he got it down. But it does change the view from the screen porch.

The two stumps, one centre and one just showing to the right of the oak trunk are the new cuts.

 Word Nanny wants me to put a comma after ‘But’ in the sentence above, but I am not going to do it. That is how I write and I WANT that to be two sentences. Word Nanny is just about as unreasonable as my Grade 13 English teacher sometimes. If I want to be colloquial, it is for a reason. Damn it! And I will swear if I want to. This is a blog, not an erudite essay. I still recall that teacher with a mixture of horror and amusement. Her name was McIntosh. We had Macbeth as our Shakespearean play and the woman hung a wooden knife from a light fixture when she read us the ‘Is that a dagger …” speech. Honest. She did. Ever after, we referred to her as Mac the Knife.

Um, where was I? Oh yes, May, spring, flowers and song. There will be a half moon along before very long. We have a small flock of turkeys wandering in and out of the back field, mostly to check out the feeding station to see if the deer left then any corn. The male is hopefully displaying and pacing and the females are paying him absolutely no attention whatsoever. Poor guy.

I took out the corn and deer ration to the feeding rock this afternoon and there was a doe who just stood close by and watched me set up the piles. As soon as I stepped away, four more, all does, simply materialized out of the bush. I had made five piles. Three deer trotted up and started eating. The fourth ignored her pile and chased the smallest of the five away from the rock. Mean. The deer are not quite as horrid to one another as the hummingbirds, but the fully adult does can be pretty ugly to the smaller ones.

I have to rummage through the storage room and find the hummer feeders asap. There is forsythia out in Perth, I am told, so the hummers will be along. No trillium yet. One mosquito in the kitchen at supper time. Ah, spring.

Hey, you up there on the snow cloud.

MEMO

TO:         Weather Gods

FROM:  MPG

RE:          Overnight Snow

DATE:    April 22

Please note date above.

As of this date, no more snow is required. Please send warm and gentle rain instead. Sunshine would be good also, but that may be beyond your capacity at present.

Propitiation will continue as burnt offerings in the woodstove until further notice. Weather dances are cancelled for the present due to cold-aggravated arthritis.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Faking it.

The lock-up affects us all in different ways.

In a moment of madness I went looking for face  mask patterns through Google search and found several. My helpful husband also found and printed off one for me to use. I dug into boxes of craft materials that I have not accessed since the grand girl got too old to come out here and make things while we looked after her for her parents (she was putting in her own zippers by her last visit). I have piles of suitable fabric and filter material. I looked for and found an incredible assortment of sizes of elastic. And got at it, yesterday.

Needless to say, the first try was an abject failure. I used the pattern JG found

and it turned out to be way too big and too loose. I am now about to embark on a second that strikes me as being a bit small, but we will see. Goodness knows I have lots of stuff to keep at it until I get one that actually works. In the meantime, a Facebook friend who is an incredibly talented seamstress has made one mask (that she posted about anyway) that not only works and fits but has a matched pattern on it. Oh, well.

More on this topic later. Maybe. For non-sewers, I promise to warn you.

My other preoccupation has been, of course, news. On the internet, on the radio, in our two daily papers. Quite a bit of it is very confusing. Quite a bit of it is bad for my blood pressure. Some of it made me cry. And I made a most embarrassing discovery about a mistake I have been making for quite some time.

I have this prejudice about the meaning of words. I like them to be used the way I think is accurate. I can work myself up to a really good grumble when someone uses ‘decimate’ to mean a high but indeterminate number of deaths. You see, I was a Roman era scholar back in the day and learned that ‘decimate’ means ‘destroy one in ten’, * I know that the meaning has broadened, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

* Definition of decimate (transitive verb)

1: to select by lot and kill every tenth man of, decimate a regiment

2: to exact a tax of 10 percent from

3a: to reduce drastically especially in number. cholera decimated the population

The connection between decimate and the number ten harks back to a brutal practice of the army of ancient Rome. A unit that was guilty of a severe crime (such as mutiny) was punished by selecting and executing one-tenth of its soldiers, thereby scaring the remaining nine-tenths into obedience.

It's no surprise that the word for this practice came from Latin decem, meaning "ten." From this root we also get our word decimal and the name of the month of December, originally the tenth month of the calendar before the second king of Rome decided to add January and February. In its extended uses decimate strayed from its "tenth" meaning and nowadays refers to the act of destroying or hurting something in great numbers.

Decimation by William Hogarth Beavers, Roman Military Punishments, Chapter 4 (Wikipedia)

Um, I was going somewhere before I got diverted into Merriam-Webster. Oh yes. It finally percolated through my thick skull that the modern world is using ‘fake news’ not to mean something that is made up rather than real but to indicate something that is exaggerated by the press beyond its neutral news value. Not as in ‘fake it till you make it’. Back to Google.**

** adjective: fake, not genuine; counterfeit.

Similar: forgery, counterfeit, copy, sham’ fraudulent

(of a person) claiming to be something that one is not, "a fake doctor"

There are even several definitions*** of ‘fake news’ that could have clued me in earlier if I had not been so arrogant.

*** Fake news is written and published usually with the intent to mislead in order to damage an agency, entity, or person, and/or gain financially or politically, often using sensationalist, dishonest, or outright fabricated headlines to increase readership, (Wikipedia)

Words that ‘stray from their original meaning’. Little lost sheep, Bah, humbug. I feel obliged to take a different look at what President Trump has been trumpeting about, much as I would rather scrub toilets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/what-it-really-means-when-trump-calls-a-story-fake-news/2020/04/13/56fbe2c0-7d8c-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html

It is so easy to misread someone’s comments when a word is not being used in the same sense by both parties. I recall pleading with my junior high school students to regard language as a tool and realize that the sharper the tool, the better the result. I have not long since been hammering at my ESL students to try to get them to understand that there is a difference between the simple tenses and the progressive tenses. (‘I eat my breakfast at 8:00’ am vs ‘I am eating my breakfast’) My father was a lawyer, my mother a life-long student and teacher of English. They used to argue about language, my mother accusing my father of obfuscation in some legal document he had written and my father complaining that Shakespeare was not poetry because it did not rhyme. (Not hard to see why I turned out the way I am, eh.) And misreading plays hob with cooperation and fellowship.

To top it all off, of the patterns I found that made sense to me, only one mentions seam allowance width and it is not clear whether you are to cut it outside the provided pattern or not. I am going to have a lot of masks of wildly variegated sizes before I get one right, I can tell. Ah well, I do have a lot of time to spend on this project.

A Distanced Diary

This is a very dull set of sort-of diary entries. I am going to make it more fun, for me anyway, by adding, quite randomly, some photos that I like.

Saturday

It is a grey sort of day, cool cloudy and still. It is not melting the tired old snow and ice. It is not enticing me to go out and walk. But when I was out, I could hear a robin, cheerful soul that he is, happily singing, interspersing the song with the odd chirp. He couldn’t see me any more than I could spot him, because the last few days when he did see me, he stopped singing and scolded me roundly, I guess for disturbing the concert. He surely does not see me as a competitor for nesting sites and worms.

I am getting somewhat tired of my nesting site, even though we have only been social distancing for ten days or so. I will probably be stir-crazy by the time the restrictions ease up. Ours are voluntary restrictions as we have not travelled or, to our knowledge, been in contact with anyone contagious. But the virus is out there… one of my neighbours (from the regulated distance) told me that our local shopping town had its first hospitalized case yesterday. I can’t imagine how the medical community is coping, waiting for the onslaught that we know will come. I am so amazed at how brave they are. They remind me of my local robin in fact, cheerfully preparing for the season with occasional pauses to scold.

On a winter's day. This set of old buildings is on a farm two down from our land. It actually has some fields that can be tilled and used. If  enough rocks are picked up.

Monday.

Yesterday it rained and rained and misted and thundered off in the distance and rained some more. It was a dark, damp and dismal day all around. A lot of snow got away, though, and there is water running everywhere. I read that the melt has been long enough and early enough that even this amount of rain is unlikely to cause flooding. And a good thing too. I cannot imagine how anyone could cope with a flood on top of everything else that is going on. In vulnerable areas people rely on volunteer sandbaggers and helpers and, at the moment, no one is supposed to get within a shovel length of anyone else, let alone toss them sand bags. Let us hope that the forecasters are right, for once.

JG spent a lot of time this afternoon organizing a comprehensive grocery list and he is going into town tomorrow to get what he can of what is on it. We are well-supplied with most of the items that are hard to get, I believe, so he should do okay. He has been planning this get-away since last week and I do hope he enjoys it.

The remains of an old barn in the middle of a beaver flood on our property. The beaver pond was once a hay field with a stream flowing through it. Then the beaver arrived.

Wednesday

JG came home with everything on his list. The store even had our usually hard to find favourite bread. We did forget to add a couple of things to the list though. I guess we will do without those for the next while. He said that there were some empty spots on the shelves, one being dishwasher pods. It occurs to me that this might be a problem with our local YIG grocery’s ordering patterns, because they are erratic, rather than a run on the soap. But I will never know for sure. I guess if toilet paper is an hoarder's item, so could soap be.

Another view of the same beaver pond. The dam that keeps the water there is at the right, between the two clumps of evergreens.

Thursday

This morning we had our usual first Thursday of the month book club meeting, using Zoom. Or those of us that thought we could cope with it met. Several members emailed to say that their computers or their computer skills were not up to it. It was a bit of a choppy meeting, as we are just learners, and also because the initiator of the Zoom session did not seem to have enough bandwidth to carry her voice and her video properly, making her hard to understand. We spent more time on things peripheral to the book than we did on the book itself. The setting was Russia and two of our members had experience living in a communist country or visiting there. The consensus was that it is a tense place to live in, or even to navigate inside, with fascinating stories to illustrate.

Rain is forecast for tomorrow. It is harder to stay cheerful when it is rainy and dull and muddy and cold. Not impossible, however. It may be impossible, though, to find anything to write about.

Yet more beaver floods. This rather unfocused shot was taken by the sister of the girl pictured, from their punt. 

Ah, maple.

It is clear that we will not get our usual spring excursion to a sugar bush to see the maple syrup in production and top up our supply. Sad, but necessary. Because of this, I have finally got around to posting the description of making maple syrup that I have been threatening to write for years. Two caveats. Those of you who know how it all works may find this overexplained. And for those of you who don’t, know that our operation was a small one. To see how the big guys do it, go to Wheelers, Fultons, Temples. And know that there are a lot of people who are just making syrup for themselves on all sorts of jerry-rigged boilers. We started with an iron kettle. But we grew.

Sunday was a gloriously sunny day, but cold. I understand that the syrup producers have been having a good year so far but expect that this weather will give them a day of rest. I looked forward a lot to cold days when we were boiling. A gift of time to take a hot shower, cook something to eat that wasn’t hand held food in the camp, and sleep. The ting about making maple syrup is that the weather sets your work schedule. It is not possible to put something off until tomorrow, mostly, because if you do you might never catch up. The biggest run we ever had, we boiled from when the lines thawed to when they froze up again, about twelve hours, and for three days we ended up with more sap in the tank when we dropped the boil than we had when we started.

 

All of this probably is somewhat mysterious to anyone who has never seen a sugar shack in operation. Our bush (stands of sugar maple trees) was almost all on slopes and so we were able to run the sap lines into two main lines and gravity pulled the sap into our holding tanks. Sap lines are arrangements of tubing that run from tree to tree, each maple tree having one or more spiles (a small spout inserted into a drilled hole in the tree trunk) dripping sap into the tubes. The tubes are then joined to a larger pipe called the main line. Holding tanks are large receptacles into which the sap pours from the main line.

Good sugaring weather occurs when there is a freeze of five or so degrees (Celsius) at night, and a rise in temperature to about five degrees through the day. This temperature variant ensures that the tree stops pumping sap at night and pulls it back into the trunk and branches during the day. If there is a properly drilled hole in the trunk, the sap runs out instead of going up all the way. The only problem is that if it freezes at night, the sap in the lines freezes since its sugar content is only about 3%. Morning becomes a waiting game because you need a good quantity of sap before you can start it boiling so that it condenses.

To make syrup you start with the sap at 3% sugar and boil it until it is 66.6% sugar. Huge amounts of water boil off as steam, giving the sugar shack its characteristic plume of steam shooting out of vents in the roof. The sugar maker keeps adding sap and syphoning off the condensed syrup. When the sap slows down or stops, you had better have enough left in the tanks to allow the partly finished stuff to cool down and not burn. This is a tricky operation. The sap is boiled, if you have any sense, in a dedicated evaporator. 

Sap is let in at one end, heat is applied underneath, and as the sap condenses it is pulled forward by the operator draining it off at the other end.  Especially if they are using a wood fire to boil the sap, many operators ‘take off’ the sap before it is quite thick enough, and ‘finish’ it in another pan, smaller, where the heat can be controlled better.

Our operation depended on a holding tank at a level above the evaporator so that the sap was pulled by gravity as needed. The choke point was the hose between this tank and the evaporator, because the sap in the hose would freeze at night when the temperature dropped. The rate of flow was also regulated by a float that was supposed to drop and cut off the flow if the pan was too deep, and raise and open the sap flow if the pan was too shallow. Adjusting the floats was the second trickiest job in the camp because if you got it wrong, you could burn the condensed sap or flood the pan and make yourself hours more work.

The trickiest job was determining when the syrup had reached its optimum density of 66.6% sugar. There are several ways of determining this. Simplest is to go by temperature. At a specific temperature, the sugar content ought to be correct. (I will have to look up that number. Once I knew it by heart.) So, a really good thermometer in the pan should tell you when the syrup is done. There are also dedicated instruments, a spectrometer for instance, that the commercial operators use. Again, tricky, as it involves smearing a drop of sap on a plate on the instrument and reading the result. Temperature of the instrument and the syrup is critical to get an exact reading. Also, there are the lifetime syrup makers who swear that they can tell when the syrup is done by pouring it out of a ladle and seeing how viscous it is. (As your mother judged fudge candy doneness the same way by dripping the product into cold water and looking for a ‘soft ball’.)

The sap coming out of the tree carries a bit of sediment with it and boiling it causes the sediment to form sand. No one wants their syrup to be gritty, so the sap is filtered going into the holding tank, coming off the evaporator and before it is put in containers. Unfortunately, if it is too thick, it will not filter. If it gets too cold, it will not filter. If the sediment is a certain type prevalent at the beginning of the season, it will not filter. The person in charge of filtering can be pretty frustrated. (That would have been me.)

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This is the operator, carefully adding selected wood, a mixture of hardwood and softwood usually, to keep a rolling boil going in the pans. Our rig had two pans. The rear one as shown here had a steam hood attached with sliding window openings to check what was going on. The 'front pan' had a suspended steam hood because it contained much thicker sap and needed constant checking. You did not want this pan to boil so hard that it boiled over and we kept a can of vegetable oil to spray if there was too much foam. Some old-fashioned sugar operations used a piece of pork fat haxnging above the pan, causing the syrup to be non-kosher.

Even with all the steam hoods, the building where the boiling took place smelled marvellous and the workers ended the day with a fine layer of sugar on their faces and clothing. But in my experience, no one, ever, got tired of eating the syrup.