In early summer, our main sugarbush is a lush, earthy place. Limestone knolls roll into soggy spring-fed depressions. Two-hundred year old maples loom – their hard, vertical shapes softened somewhat by Virginia creeper garland and archipelagos of softly colored lichen. The canopy is expansive and sweet smelling, the soil beneath the leaf-litter is rich and dark. Trillium, Columbine, and a wide variety of other wildflowers comprise an understory that can seem whimsical – at other times, solemn.
Winter, however, equalizes the picture and brings an Eastern Bloc aesthetic to the forest. Snow evens the topography and creates a kind of thickly-wooded desert; the trees, from a distance, all look the same.
The blue sap lines are the brightest thing in the winter landscape and they seem, stretched from tree to tree, to be holding the whole forest together. Since we don’t take them down, the animals probably assume that they’re tendrils from some sort of gigantic, oil-based shrub. Some animals eat the plastic. If some wash water gets left in the lines, the squirrels will chew through to sate their thirst. Coyotes, especially the puppies, use the lines like chew toys, marking up whole sections with their needle teeth.
In the southwest section of the sugarbush, where I started tapping last weekend, a flock of wild turkeys has been roosting in a copse of white pine trees. One morning I was there early enough to watch their maladroit decent to the forest floor. Possessing extraordinary vision, turkeys detect human presence in a hint of movement, at which point they form a single-file line and scurry away to more private quarters.
The larger animals, hindered by the still-substantial snowpack, seem to visit the sugarbush in waves. I’ll go days without seeing anything but squirrel and mouse tracks, the latter connecting rocks and stumps in dainty morse code trails. Then, like teenagers converging on a weekend party spot, overnight, all the large animals move in together. The deer mill through, scratching for ferns and denuding saplings; coyotes, fishers and the occasional bobcat search for violence. The snowcover becomes a testament to this hunt. In the past, I’ve seen in these tracks the cruel story of a floundering whitetail that ended up in a pile of broken deer, but this year the predators have contented themselves with the area’s booming squirrel population. One squirrel made it three hops after he left the safety of a tree. All that remained of this unlucky decision was a crimson pile of offal atop the monotonously white forest floor.
I’m fixing sap lines as I tap, which on good days makes me a high-brow engineer; I’m constructing a massive skeleton of arteries and veins, an infrastructure that will harness an invisible force with which I’ll compel droplets of sap to be drawn towards the core of the earth. On bad days, though, I’m a frustrated child tinkering with an overgrown erector set. I spent several hours recently trying to get our major mainline artery pointed downhill, a run that defies the natural pitch of the land. After my efforts, the sap was still sagging in the lines in great droopy pockets. In these defeating moments, I remind myself that Einstein spent most of his life trying to figure out gravity and was never really able to do it.
Despite the frustrations inherent to getting the maple season up and running, it’s a hopeful time of year in the sugarwoods. Winter’s baggage feels lighter of late. I was fortunate enough to see a cardinal framed against the Taconic mountains last weekend, his feathers a literal defiance of the season’s limited color-pallet. He sang “whoit-whoit-whoit; tear, tear, tear,” which I think roughly translates to “just hang on a bit longer, spring is almost here.”