Little did I know last weekend when I posted about wanting to go maple sugaring, that we would be doing it so soon! One of Dan's professors from the medical school lives in a small town about thirty minutes from Burlington where he and his neighbors have built a hobby sugarhouse for themselves. He invited Dan's class out for a day of maple sugaring yesterday, so Dan and Mariam and I drove out with our friends Mark and Annie (also known as Annie 2.0). I learned plenty of interesting things, including the fact that Annie 2.0 has been keeping secret her considerable skill at driving small tractors.
The woods all around the professors house (and his neighbor's houses) are filled with maple trees that have been tapped and fitted with small hoses and five gallon buckets. Our first job was to go through the woods on the way to the sugarhouse and empty the buckets into a large container (which was on the back of the tractor that Annie 2.0 was driving).
The bit with tromping around in the woods finding and retrieving buckets was ridiculously fun. I think I actually heard Dan say something like "This is the most fun I've had... maybe ever." Good company was certainly part of the equation, as was learning about something new and and kind of mysterious, but the really cool part was just witnessing how this neighborhood of people ("neighborhood" is perhaps a loose term here since the houses are about a half-mile away from each other) has established a routine for using the land around them in a collaborative way to make life richer and well, more fun. There are beehives and chicken coops, wild raspberries and gardens in the summer and maple sugaring adventures in the winters. Oh, and there is also the neighborhood wood-fired pizza oven.
One of the neighbors built this himself, using stones from all over the world. Apparently Dan's professor would ask his students to bring back stones from their travels and amazingly, a lot of them actually did. This pizza oven has bits of the Great Wall of China as well as the Berlin Wall in it.
The sugarhouse itself has a bit of Stonehenge somewhere in one of the corners, as well as a couple of more ordinary rocks that were unknowingly carried back by the neighbor's children in their packs on a family backpacking trip one summer.
Inside the sugarhouse is the equipment for boiling the maple sap into syrup. It's a pretty cool system, all wood-fired. The amount of steam produced is amazing, really. There is so much water to cook off.
At some points, the steam got thick enough that you couldn't really see the people that you were talking to anymore. And there is a good deal of standing around talking. The process of making syrup from the sap takes hours of cooking, so we spent a lot of that time talking with Dan's professor and his neighbors about the birds they've seen lately and what kinds of plants grow well in their gardens.
We weren't able to stay until the syrup was finished; Dan had to get back home to study and Annie 2.0 had to work in the afternoon. Still, I think we got to do some of the most interesting parts of the process and we all kind of know how it turns out in the end. There is a neighbor a little farther down the road from Dan's professor who apparently has a pretty big sugaring operation and sells syrup by the gallon if you show up at his door when he happens to be around. We got directions to his house, and I think we all know what that means.
