The woods beckons. It always does. With the call of spring now more of an echo of the first days of summer, I'm longing to walk amongst the trunks.
Aldo Leopold, John Muir and my general Wisconsin-ness are tapping on my shoulders these days, reminding me hat the state requires casual naturalists.
A shortened spring break did this to me. Usually on spring break I'll spend most of the nine days at home visiting with my mom and working with my dad.
Instead of a warm destination, I prefer to be up to my knees in snow, struggling to step and a few degrees away from shivering.
With my dad and a few of his friends I'll walk through the woods bringing out its sweet harvest one tap at a time. On spring break we make maple syrup.
Sadly, this year a job on State Street forced me back to Madison early, tearing me away from the woods. Most years the first days of maple syrup season and spring break are at the same time. For a week I can shed the studying and forget the papers to drill a tree, hang a bucket and listen to the sound of a thousand maples dripping.
Maple syrup season in Wisconsin forces farmers to look beyond the back forty, to the forests that surround the fields. The plowing and the preparations for planting can be balanced with a walk in the woods.
Plenty of people are sappers by profession, spreading out a month's task to provide for them the entire year. With 7,500 trees a man and his ambitions can bring in enough sap for a year's worth of sustenance.
Doug Riske, a neighbor of mine back home in Athens, has 10,000 trees under his watch and thinks of it as the best job to have.
The journey from sap to syrup starts in the rich humus of the decaying leaves and fallen twigs that carpet the floors of temperate forests. Flowing up the tree, the sweet nectar of trees makes it to the trunk and empties out through a tap that's placed about an inch-and-a-half in the tree. A sapper picks up a bucket full of sap or lets a line to the tree take it to a collecting point. From there the sap goes to a sugar shack or boiling station to be filtered and cooked.
At the sugar shack, the sweetness of the tree meets purging fires to lose its excess water. From there the sap transforms from a watery yellow liquid into a superior cousin to molasses. The natural sugar is kept and maple syrup is revealed as the finest product of the forests.
My dad tells me this year the woods offered a bumper crop on syrup. From a little more than 2,000 trees he came away with 490 gallons of syrup. While that 500 mark was tempting, he figured he had plenty to last the year. At the end of the season the sap's quality drops and knowing when to take out the taps is as important as knowing when to put them in.
I grabbed a few gallons when the season was over and keep them available for their various uses. It goes on breakfast cereal, on ice cream, in coffee and anything thing else that could use a little sugar. If I had pancakes more often, it would be pushing the butter aside at every possible instance and rivaling even raspberry jam as a favorite topping.
When I walk around the Farmer's Market and see the vendors with their syrup, a small part of me thinks back to my shortened spring break.
Though I wasn't out in the woods as I would like to have been, there is always compensation.
Without the days in the woods, the syrup will keep me satisfied.
Ben Schultz is a senior majoring in English and history. He puts maple syrup in his tea and can be reached at blschultz@wisc.edu.
