Making maple syrup

Loren Eash and his sap shack

It is snowing today. The sap probably isn’t running. February tricked the brothers into tapping the trees two weeks early and now she is going back on her promises. Freezing nights and days in the 40s are what you want. I see the forecast is for 46 tomorrow so maybe it will start up again. But I’m glad I got over to the woods last Saturday. I wonder how the trees manage on short-run years? I suppose they endure. They produce their leaves on what juice they have.

My brothers and I depend on this annual ritual of making maple syrup to keep the family juices flowing. The patch of woods belonged to our grandfather, then to our father, and now to my brother Loren. My older brothers remember how Grandpa Eash used to boil sap in a crude setup in an outbuilding on his farm a short distance from the wooded acreage. All I remember is Grandma Eash’s maple taffy, so sweet it almost made your teeth fall out just to bite into it.

We all remember coming over to the sap shack our dad built in the woods itself when we were children. He installed a proper wood-fired evaporator but it was also a crude setup, the dirt-floored shack. We would come over after school to help empty the sap buckets into the tank pulled by a small tractor over increasingly muddy tracks. Then Mom, who always tended the fire, would open the fire door and roast hot dogs in the inferno. Or we would make a bonfire outside. The hunger, the chill, the burned salty dogs, the mud, and, wafting through it all, the maple-scented steam: these anchored the drab days of early March in our family year as firmly as Christmas and Easter.

Tending the inferno

Although we lived on a farm and worked a lot together, making maple syrup was the only thing we all really loved doing together. The rest of it was just work. Chores. Production—not fun. Perhaps we could have made it fun but that was not in our parents’ nature. But making maple syrup was entirely frivolous, unnecessary work. All it produced was way more maple syrup than we needed. I got tired of maple syrup when I was a kid. Aunt Jemima’s on pancakes—now, that was a treat. But I never got tired of the spring ritual.

Adrian Tobias Eash, great-grandson of Tobias Eash, the original syrup maker, comes every year to help his dad.

After the shack was destroyed in a fire the woods stood empty for many years. Mom and Dad passed away. And then, not long ago, Loren took possession of the stand of maples and built a sap shack on it. The setup was better than the old system, but not too much better. Crudeness is part of the flavor of real maple syrup. He enlisted brother Dale, who lived nearby, to help him renew the tradition.

We’ve refined the ritual a bit. Beer and swearing are allowed in our sap shack. We cook the hotdogs and brats in sap on a potbelly stove, simmering them until they are coated in sticky maple. We leave the hard work of gathering to members of the fourth and fifth generations who may be on hand. But my brothers and I, in our 60s and 70s, are just kids again, hanging out. You don't have to be a grownup all the time.