Behind the Lines: by David Heiller

David Heiller The smell in the air last Wednesday, March 11 took me back 15 years, to Tamarack, Minnesota, to Cecil Booker, to a grove of maple trees and a big pan boiling with maple sap. The smell is sweet like maple syrup, but not as strong. It’s a smell that you want to cling to your clothes, so you can carry it with you all day. Like smoke from a campfire in an old shirt that reminds you, in the dead of winter, of a warm canoe trip. A nice smell. Cecil Booker lived down the road that spring of 1977 . I would help him with chores. He saw that I had a broad enough back to help him make maple syrup. He provided the taps and pan and buckets and brains. I provided the back We tapped about 80 trees. My job was to empty the buckets each morning, fill the big flat pan that rested on cement blocks nearby, build a rip-snorting fire, and boil sap all day. As it boiled, I would add more and more sap and wood, then watch the liquid turn brown and bubbly and foamy and thick. That’...

David Heiller Collin and I headed for the woods late on Saturday afternoon. A fogbank had lifted from my throbbing head. The beauty of the day was suddenly revealed. Mid-March. Temperature forty degrees. Sun shining. Duh. It’s time to tap trees. I couldn’t quite muster an exclamation point behind that last sentence, thanks to a nasty cold and the thought of all the work that lay ahead. I don’t have a spring in my step when I tap maple trees anymore. Collin and David with Rosie, 2003 or 4 . But I did have a helper at least, a nephew, age eight, who is always on the prowl for projects like this. Usually they involve building things like forts, scooters, or the Taj Mahal. Tapping maple trees would do just fine for him, and that was just fine with me. Why is it that a mundane job is so much more enjoyable with a kid around? I carried a hammer and bucket and one tap. Collin carried the brace and bit. Our dog, MacKenzie, went along. We walked single file on the snowshoe...

David Heiller Cindy and I went to the woods on Sunday evening, April 28, with the intention of pulling our 53 maple taps. I carried a hammer along for the purpose. We figured this late in the season, the buds must be full of sap. When that happens, the sap turns a tannish color and becomes “bud sap.” That means it’s time to pull the taps, because bud sap is bitter and makes poor syrup. But when we got to the woods, the buckets were full of clear sap, and instead pulling 53 taps, we gathered about 53 gallons of sap. Those cold nights we had last week, the ones that everyone was complaining about, kept the maples pumping sap. Every cloud has a silver lining. David understood the sweetness of life. Part of my territory in the sugar bush is located near a spring, and that spring was full of frogs on Sunday night. Peepers, and they were living up to their name. They were so loud it almost hurt my ears. But it was a glorious sound to hear, especially when I thought of that ...

David Heiller People in our neck of the woods woke up Easter morning to about five inches of we t snow. It clung to pine tree branches like plaster, and coated the grassy church parking lot like lard. Folks who normally have to be pushed into going to church had to be pushed away from church, wheels a-spinning. Folks like us. Malika and Mama hauling the sap, bucket at a time. The snow came at a lucky time for our family. We had just finished boiling our last gallon of maple syrup on Saturday. That was about the time the tractor quit working too. I had hauled in the last 40 gallons of sap on Friday evening, and it quit Saturday morning, right in the mid­dle of an idle. I guess it wasn’t an idle threat. With no tractor, and with five inches of sloppy snow, I don’t know how we would have brought in the last batch of sap. We were lucky, or maybe more. Sometimes you wonder. We ended up boiling down about 360 gallons of sap for our nine gallons of syrup. That’s just right ...

David Heiller Sunday was one of those perfect days. Temperatures in the sixties. Bright sun. Melting snow. After weeks of below normal, cloudy weather, it was the kind of day that would get you pulling a Roger Jensen and running from chore to chore. Everyone you talked to, at church, at work, in the coffee shop, said the same thing. It’s time for spring. Enough of the bland weather. Bring on Rutabaga Falls. Bring on the big melt. I walked out to the woods that afternoon to check on the sap buckets. Just the day before it had been a frozen landscape. Frozen snow. Frozen taps. Frozen ice in the buckets. Our sap boiling set up. But not Sunday. Sunday was so warm that I was working in a vest and T-shirt. I gathered 25 gallons of sap from the 50 taps in the few short hours that it ran. Combined with 20 gallons we had collected about a month ago, that was enough to start a boil. I lit a fire in the barrel stove that has been converted to a sap boiler. The sap pan was fill...

by David Heiller The mystery of spring has struck, and all the explanations in the world won’t stop me from gawking. Sweet, sweet mystery of Spring! Take those maple trees. We drilled 43 holes and hammered in aluminum taps on March 11, right at the start of a warm spell. Eighteen inches of snow carpeted the woods that Saturday, and three days later, the carpet was threadbare. That in itself mystified a lot of people. It was the talk of the town. “What happened to the snow? How could so much snow disappear so fast?” But maple trees offer a bigger mystery. You’d think when the warm weather hit, the sap would have flowed fast and filled our buckets. That didn’t happen. The sap didn’t run at all during that warm spell, when it was 60 during the day and 40 at night. Jim Sales, a friend from Askov who used to tend the maple trees at Audubon Center of the North Woods in Sandstone, told me why: the trees need cold nights to go with the warm days. The cold nights tell ...