Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: Maple Sap Collection

So... if you like to go Bump! Bump! Just jump on the hump of the Wump of Gump. - One Fish Two Fish by Dr. Seuss

The best part about Jacob's family is the way they combine serious dedication to completing the task at hand with the contagious good cheer and a sense of adventure: think Protestant work ethic meets Indiana Jones.

A good example of that would be yesterday's maple sap collection. Being unsure of how much or little you happened to know about maple sugaring tradition, I will provide a brief overview: in the very end of winter you get about several weeks when the temperatures stay above freezing during the day but fall below freezing at night. This thaw-freeze-thaw cycle, essentially, causes the tree sap to run during the day, but stop at night and resume again during the day. This is a good time to tap maple trees for their mildly-sweet sap, which, when boiled down, produces a wonderful product that Canadians, New Englanders, and Midwesterners (and others, I am sure) are known for: maple syrup. It's got a wonderfully light texture and a fairly delicate yet distinct flavor, that is great on pancakes, breakfast sausage (sic!), and as a sweetener for various baked goods. You can also make my beloved maple butter - whipped butter with maple syrup that had been boiled down to the soft-ball stage, and snow taffy - caramel-like candy that is formed when a little bit of soft-ball stage maple syrup is poured onto the fresh, cold snow, causing it to cool and set rapidly. In addition it provides a great opportunity to run around in the woods collecting sap, as well as spend time by the evaporator in the later winter - about the time you are ready to be outside.

Jacob and I don't do it - we wouldn't possibly have the time, and, most importantly, we don't have nearly enough maples to make any significant amount of syrup - for the conversion ratio is 40 to 1 - as in 40 gallons of sap yielding a single gallon of syrup. But we do like to come up and help a little with the process.

So yesterday that involved taking a ranger (a mule-type ATV) down the steep, steep Driftless hills, over the river, and through the woods, in order to empty the buckets of sap that had collected over night (about 50 of them) into the big tank on the back of the ATV. At first we wanted to go alone, but another guy up there insisted that Henry - Jacob's younger brother, come with us - not only is he a better driver when it comes to driving off-road in the fresh, thick snow/mud, but also because one more person would make it easier (as in at all possible) pull the ranger out if it got stuck. Also, Henry knew the trail much better, because he did it everyday.

So, the three of us loaded into the ranger and off we went. Frankly, it was literally the most scary experience of the past few years of my life, and I mean it. The ride was extremely bumpy, the trails were extremely steep and narrow, and highly slippery at that. A roller-coaster ride is probably comparable, except that there's actually a real chance of the ranger rolling over, "resulting in serious injury or death." (That's what I thought, anyway, but the boys didn't seem to be nearly as concerned.)

It was fun though, too - we just kept cracking jokes and laughing. You see, we just kept joking about the possible dangers of the adventure (greatly exaggerated by the boys for the sake of good laughs), about my being abandoned in the woods, and other things along those lines. A couple times we had to get out to let the driver (Henry) make it up or down a hill without the passengers (or because I was too terrified to ride at that time). Jacob also pointed out the spot where "Papa [Jacob] shoots his bucks" - his favorite hunting spot, and that, naturally, filled me with the primal, ancestral pride a caveman's wife would have for her hunter.

In addition to all the light-hearted humor, it's was a great outdoor experience - the woods were spectacular in the soft light of the early evening, the air felt slightly chilly and moist - very different from the dry winter air that we were used to, and, of course, it was much, much warmer than most days in the last five months. The fresh snow covered the ground, and the woods were clear and transparent as winter woods can be. It was wonderfully quiet, too. Even the scary ride part was kind of fun, in retrospect, although my heart sank into the abyss of dread many many times. But we came back, laughing, slightly cold, and entirely alive, to warm up in the sweet, moist evaporator steam. (There was a cow giving birth on the background, by the way).

I guess the moral of the story is that though, in my opinion, this task was a challenging one, everyone enjoyed themselves very much, nobody quit, and was definitely going to do it again. It's this very special balance between work and play that drew me to rural lifestyle in general. It's a wonderful, wonderful life.

Tradition

Probably two of the funniest Wisconsin traditions that I've encountered so far are cow pie bingo and deer shining.

Deer shining means that around early November - in the weeks leading up to the Great Deerhunting Weekend - a Christmas with guns which eclipses even the birth of Jesus for Upper-Midwestern hunting enthusiasts - guys (and sometimes gals) take to driving around in pick-up trucks (or other vehicles, but usually pick-ups go well with that cultural group), well-stocked with beers and armed massive flashlights, which they then shine into the dark woods to see if they can see some big bucks. Of course, no shooting is allowed. In theory, the purpose of this is to establish where all the bucks are, but in reality it's nothing other than a form of recreation. And yes, I've seen people with a philosophy degree doing just that. In fact, saying "The deer-shiners are out" means "drive carefully, there are lots of horny bucks out there running around like crazy."

The cow pie bingo involves drawing bingo squares on the ground, surrounding the area with some sort of a fence, and then putting a cow (or a calf) in there. You then let people bet on various positions on the "board," and if the cow goes on the square you bet on, you win a prise. I, personally, couldn't believe such thing existed, but here in the rural area this is a semi-popular form of fundraising. That, and the smelt fries on Fridays during Lent. The latter ones, in particular, are my personal favorite.