Aroostook County is infamous for her snowstorms. One particular storm that I remember will stay in my mind forever. It is the time we had a particularly heavy Northeaster. The storm slid into Maine from the east. It had been trapped by an arctic flow that had dipped down into the county from Canada. The storm revolved where it was for the better part of three days and left five feet of heavily packed snow before moving off into the Canadian Maritimes.
On the morning of the fourth day, when the wind had died somewhat and the snow had stopped swirling, Mother, storm weary and child worn, "suggested" that we all go outside and help Dad dig a path through the snow drifts out to the road. We all worked and shoveled until we'd made a small walkway through the heavily compacted snow to the road and just about then, the snowplow made its way down the road. By the time the plow had made its second pass, the newly plowed snow banks reached nearly to the electric wires that ran along the road in front of the house and we had to begin all over again.
Dad took a short breather, smoked a Chesterfield and after seeing how high the snow banks were and how much snow had to be moved, he simply shoveled a hole through the snow bank. We were all so excited to think that we were the only kids in town who might have to climb through a tunnel of snow to board the school bus when it came to pick us up. Imagine our shock and surprise the following Monday when we finally got to the Masardis Road and saw that nearly all the other driveways looked just like ours. We didn't have a monopoly on tunnels in snow banks after all.
When spring finally strolled into the county, everyone was more than ready and they greeted her with open arms and empty wood boxes. Folks held their breaths and waited because they'd been fooled by a "false" spring before and they weren't going to take any chances. More than one person had taken off their winter long johns only to have winter return a few days later and freeze their ass off. They waited for the eves to start dripping and for the little rivulets of water to start running underneath the heavy layer of snow before they believed it was really spring.
All winter Jake had been dreaming about all the sugar maple trees that grew along our dirt road. Once he heard that there was sap in those trees that you could collect and eat, that was all he needed to hear. Night after night, he read books on maple sugaring and plied Dad with question after question about what to do first. Dad explained to Jake the little he knew about collecting sap for maple sugar and he could see the writing on the wall. Dad just shook his head and laughed. Jake was going to have to learn the hard way.
One night Jake thought he'd died and gone to Heaven when Dad come home with a large box of copper pipe. Dad had found some old pieces of pipe at the potato house and he had spent his lunch hours cutting the hollow tubing into three inch lengths. It was just what Jake needed to pound into the hole that he was going to drill into the tree.
Finally, the days warmed up and the nights remained cold and Dad told Jake that the time was right. Jake grabbed Dad's old hammer, his rusty drill, a pocket full of nails, an assortment of Mother's lard pails and lit out for the trees that he'd tied a piece of red yarn on earlier in the spring. He was going to be a sap gatherer.
It was his idea but Jake was the kind of kid that could sell snow to an Eskimo and he soon enlisted Bub and me to be his helpers and we set off through the miles of crusty, melting snow to help collect the sap. Jake would rush up to a maple tree, drill a hole in it, pound in a length of copper tubing, pound a couple of nails in, hang a lard pail on the nails and off we'd go to another tree. We must have tapped fifty trees that first afternoon.
In the beginning, it was wonderful! We'd go first thing after breakfast and gather the sap in old milk pails and again as soon as we got home from school in the afternoon. All the while, Jake would be telling us how good the syrup was going to taste and how wonderful Mother's pancakes were going to be with our own homemade maple syrup on them.
He'd go on and on, as we trudged through the snow with our heavy pails, and our arms falling out of their sockets, about how many pancakes he was going to eat and how much butter he was going to put on each one. The visions of all the maple syrup, butter and Mother's golden pancakes kept us traipsing through the snow, day after day, mile after mile, carrying those pails full of watery syrup. Finally, after about two weeks of collecting sap, Jake decided that it was now time to begin boiling the sap down so that we could try our syrup.
Mother strained the syrup through some cheesecloth and then she took the bottom part of her large pressure cooker and filled it to the brim with the pale watery liquid and set it on the back burner. Day after day, as the sap slowly boiled away, she'd add more. Finally, after about a week of boiling sap, Jake couldn't stand it anymore and he asked her when it was going to be done.
Mother walked over to the stove and looked down into the boiling syrup. She took a spoon off the counter and dipped it into the dark mixture and then she carefully took it out and blew on it and tasted it. "I guess it's about as ready as it's going to get," She said. "I'll make your pancakes for supper." We were beside ourselves with delight. All our hard work was finally paying off.
That night, true to her word, Mother made her famous pancakes and she ever so carefully dumped the syrup into a small serving dish and set it on the table. We all looked at Jake and he leaned over and picked up the maple syrup container. He slowly dribbled the syrup on top of his mound of butter-coated pancakes and our mouths watered as we watched the hot syrup blend with the yellow cow's butter and run like rivulets of gold down the sides of his pancakes. The smell of the hot syrup set our mouths watering and Bub reached over and grabbed the pitcher and started to pour it over his mound of pancakes too.
A small trickle of syrup came slowly dripping out and Bub looked at Jake and me in surprise then he turned the pitcher around and looked inside. He let out a howl of disappointment and set the pitcher down on the table with a bang! "It's all empty Jake!" He yelled. "There ain't none left for us!" He laid his auburn colored head down on the table and he began to bawl. Jake, hesitated for only a second and after looking around at the rest of us, he gathered his plate a little closer to him and proceeded to wolf down his butter and maple syrup saturated pancakes.
Mother, seeing that there was going to be a real fight in a couple of minutes, hurried to the table with a bottle of Aunt Jamima's Maple Syrup and proceeded to convince Bub that it was just as good as ours. Well, we were hungry and hunger usually wins out. We ate the pancakes with the "fake" maple syrup but we knew that it could never really taste as good at ours.
That night, after we'd gone to bed, I heard Jake and Bub discussing our syrup. Bub kept hounding Jake to tell him what it really tasted like. There was a long silence and then Jake's voice, heavy with sleep, syrup and satisfaction, came drifting through the air, "Well Bub, it tasted exactly like," he stopped for a moment and then he had the perfect description, "a mouthful of golden sunshine."
Need-less-to-say, when spring rolled around the following year and Jake began looking for maple syrup helpers, there were no willing workers to be found. Dad, noting that the days were getting longer and that the wind had a hint of spring in the air, looked at Jake. Then, with a smile in his voice, he asked Jake when he was going to start gathering his sap. Jake cast a quick look around the table and seeing no takers, shrugged and said, "Guess we'll just have to go back to that old fake stuff. It wasn't so bad after all."
These many years have passed and from time to time, when I go home for a visit, I always have to stop along the Goding Road and have a look at those old maple sugar trees that still line the dirt road. And all of the trees still have one thing in common; there is a large bump in the side of the trees where the bark of the tree has grown over the nails that used to hold our sap pails.
Copyright (1st Rights) retained by the author, Martha Stevens-David 2002. She can be reached at lmdmsd@megalink.net.
