What the maple teaches us about living

I struggled this year with what to give up during Lent.

Lent is the roughly six-week period of penitential preparation leading into the Christian celebration of Easter. During Lent many Christians abstain from something they enjoy, as a way of focussing on the meaning of Easter.

Others, not necessarily following religious practices, find the Lenten period a good time to give up something as an exercise in self-control.

I considered giving up following the news, a daily habit that would take some effort to stop.

Then I read a piece by Margaret Renkl, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, who I enjoy because she is a fine writer with a good sense of the outdoors. Ms. Renkl also thought about giving up the news for Lent, then decided that responsible people in a democracy cannot afford the luxury of tuning out what is happening around them.

She is right, of course, but I had another reason for not giving up the news: I realized that it might be more of a comfort than a sacrifice. Not reading or hearing about the violence, political pandemonium and general mayhem infecting our world would be a relief.

Then came a thought offering a different approach. What if instead of giving up something, I took up something?

I needed to think about this so went to the best thinking place – the woods.

As I walked, a glimmer caught my eye. It came from a stand of maples off to my right and I walked over to investigate.

The glimmer was sunlight hitting drops of sap running down the bark of one maple. A wood pecker had broken the tree’s bark, causing it to bleed sap. Early March is the time that sap flows freely and can be tapped to collect and boil down into maple syrup.

Watching the sap drip, it occurred to me that these maples have lessons to offer about living.

Every year, no matter what convulsions rock the world, maples carry on doing what they have done for many hundreds of years. Wind storms might shake them, their branches might sag painfully under the weight of heavy snow. Temperatures might fluctuate crazily, warming and freezing their juices.

But when temperatures settle to about plus five Celsius during the day and minus five during the night, the sap runs and can be collected to boil down into the excellent food source of maple syrup and maple sugar.

Whatever happens the maple does nothing in haste. It persists, living and working quietly and patiently. When tapped, it releases its sap not in a quick stream but drop by drop.

The maple expects the same from those who harvest what it produces. It rejects the human world’s fast food thinking that encourages getting it all, and getting it quickly.

The maple never hurries. It takes five and a half days on average to give up the 40 gallons of sap needed to boil down to one gallon of maple syrup. It teaches that there are no high-tech solutions, just hard work and patience.

I decided to follow the example of the maple and take up practising patience for Lent and beyond. It will be a sacrifice; patience is not something that comes easy to most of us.

It has been said that patience has its limits and taken too far it can be considered cowardice. True enough in critical situations such as war and disease epidemics. Wait too long in battle before taking decisive action and the enemy will overrun you. Or in a health epidemic, delay action while waiting for more evidence and the disease runs unchecked and out of control.

But patience should not be seen as procrastination. It doesn’t mean never objecting to something, or simply giving up.

Patience is taking the time to think things through to try to understand others and how they feel. In other words, taking time to prepare yourself before making decisions.

Patience is difficult to practise because it is so much easier just to become frustrated and angry.

Getting anything done thoroughly and successfully takes time. Patience is the ability to recognize that.

The maple has practised patience for centuries. It is an essential reminder of how we should behave during stressful times.

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Maple Syrup Mysteries

Spring is a season of mysteries.

For instance: How do plants know when to start growing? How do hibernators such as bears know when to wake up? Why do mosquitoes and blackflies not move to another planet?

But surely the greatest mystery is about the sweetest of all spring things. How did maple syrup get invented?

We know that indigenous peoples were the first to have it. The mystery is how did they make the jump from bitter tree sap to the sweet golden fluid that makes pancakes and waffles so scrumptious? No one has been able to provide the answer in more than 500 years.

It is easy to speculate how these early peoples discovered sap. Walk through the spring woods and look at woodpecker holes or a broken branch. Or cut a recently blown down tree.

The sap is easy to see, or feel if you are handling wood or touching trees. But how did someone realize that collecting a large quantity of sap, then boiling it down 40 to1, would produce one of the world’s tastiest delights.

There are legends, of course. One of the most common is that a chief stuck his tomahawk into a maple tree one night before going to bed. His wife had left a bark vessel at the base of the tree below the tomahawk.

In the morning the wife found the vessel filled with what appeared to be rain water that had run down the tree. So she decided to boil a piece meat in it and noticed the water turning brown and getting thicker. The meat had a sweet maple flavour.

Not likely. The Indians had maple syrup long before the Europeans arrived and gave them metal hatchets.

More likely, maple syrup resulted from experimentation. Tree saps were used for many purposes. Spruce gum was collected, mixed with animal fat then rendered over fire to make the sticky substance used to seal canoe seams.

Someone likely was doing something similar when they dipped a finger in to test thickness, then licked the finger and Eureka!

The Indians pushed slips of bark into cuts in maple trunks to allow sap to drip into bark buckets set below. When the French arrived, the Indians showed them the process, which the newcomers modified by drilling tap holes and using metal collection and boiling pots.

Maple syrup was a nice treat for personal use but processing did not become an industry until the mid-1800s. Most of the cane sugar consumed in the United States back then came from black slave labour in the southern states and the Caribbean.

As the anti-slavery movement grew and the civil war loomed, many abolitionists urged boycotting cane sugar and use of maple sugar instead.

“Cane sugar is the result of the forced labor of the most wretched slaves, toiling under the cruel lash of a cutting whip,” William Drown wrote in the 1824 Compendium of Agriculture. “While the maple sugar is made by those who are happy and free."

Large flat evaporator pans replaced kettles for processing larger amounts of syrup and maple sugar. The rest, as they say, is history.

The maple syrup industry grew consistently with improved techniques, equipment and marketing of maple products abroad. Canada now produces 80 per cent of the world’s pure maple syrup, the majority of which comes from Quebec’s 7,000 or so producers.

The maple syrup industry generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year for the Canadian economy. Some estimates put maple syrup at 13 times more costly than crude oil.

It has become so valuable that it was the subject of a mystery five years ago. Someone tapping barrels in a maple syrup storehouse found that some sounded odd, or not completely full.

Further investigation revealed that thieves had stolen $18 million (wholesale price) worth of syrup over 12 months from a stockpile kept by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers. Thieves with access to the warehouse drained maple syrup from 9,500 barrels and refilled them with water. They sold the stolen syrup on the black market.

Roughly 225 investigators were used in trying to solve the case. Finally, 26 people were charged in the theft, 17 of whom were eventually convicted.

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