Sweet Steam

TODAY I AM A MAPLE TREE TAPPER

Sweet steam fills my lungs as I scrape the laddle handled strainer cross the top of the frothy tray of hot maple sap. All that back breaking labor of tapping trees, running lines, cutting logs, hauling wood, chucking it into this valley where there are no roads, then stacking it up by the shack to feed the fire under these steaming trays: it must be a labor of love!

When we finally hear sap bubbling and boiling after its long journey down the tall trees on the hill side, running into buckets hanging from the maples, or flowing down through a web of blue tubes as gravity pulls toward the holding tank below, into a filter inside the shack, and down to the steaming trays of sweetness, it is love at first smell! Oh, yes, love at first smell!

My host, Steve, has invited old friends, neighbors, and even one of his students to join us this morning for a sugar shack breakfast. There is so much to learn about this process and about these people; they are gathered around heaps of breakfast food set out on a buffet table made of propped up logs beside a camp fire, where each person leads me down another path into even more facinating topics.

I could not get enough of the amazing chef who is actully a dairy farmer and whose wife is an herbalist, much less the a passionate animal rescue fanatic who is building a chord wood house and telling me about cutting bottles in half to wedge in as window. (I really want to visit him bcause he might take me on a mountain tour on horse back!) His lady friend is the Wellsboro Women's Choral director and has a cabin on Pine Creek in the bottom of the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania!

Then there is "Kenzie," a cheerful and hardworking forth grader whose grandfather owns this land. I call him Captain Bob, partly because there are so many "Bobs" around here I need to keep them all straight with titles. (I am not even counting all the "bobs" they boast about which are actually bob cats!) But more than that, I call him Capt' Bob because he sails! And sings! And makes lots of music on a homemade steel guitar! And invited me to a band jam coming up soon! Yeah! I think I will write a song just for that occasion.

SO WHAT DID I LEARN FROM
THE ENDLESS MOUNTAIN MAN TODAY?

There is an endless wealth of learning to be mined in these endless mountains . . . if you don't mined learning!

My advice to you?

"GO ENDLESS!"

As soon as possible!

Look for my Sugar Shack Breakfast slide show on PicasaWeb called "Sugar Shack Breakfast"

Or just come up for a visit and smell for yourself!
The syrup, Silly!
The syrup! ^~^