Field Trip
In a Wonderfully Sticky Situation
Upcoming festivals keep the sugaring tradition alive.
(Ricky Carioti - Twp)
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Friday, February 16, 2007
"Ymmm," Adam Hsu, a bouncing 5-year-old from Potomac, hums as he bends over a metal spigot tapped belly high into a maple tree at Brookside Nature Center in Wheaton Regional Park.
"Yummy," he says, touching the little spigot with his fingers, then his lips, licking the clear, untreated sap. "Sweet."
It's maple sugar time, the season when rustic types from Maine to Vancouver -- and even Maryland and Virginia -- celebrate a folk art perhaps most people associate with flinty New Englanders. It's an image of those wool-clad guys with flappy hats walking the woods to draw maple sap to boil down for its delicious "sugar."
There's even a poem for the occasion by Robert Frost, "Evening in a Sugar Orchard," a lyric picture of sugaring maples from long ago and far away:
The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show
On every tree a bucket with a lid,
And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.
Tradition dates sugaring to the Mayflower pilgrims, who supposedly were taught by Native Americans to get sweet syrup from trees at a time when white cane sugar was only for the very rich. For the founding fathers and mothers and up to World War II, most country folk in the northern United States sugared trees this time of year. Summer was the time for the humble honeybee and figs.
Though times have changed (if anything, Americans are probably over-sugared today), sugaring hasn't disappeared. There are several regional festivals celebrating the art. On Feb. 24, as many as 500 adults and children are expected at Brookside's 15th annual maple sugar fest.
"We do the whole nine yards," says park naturalist Sara Lustbader, who organizes the annual event. She and the small park staff set up a sugaring operation weeks ago to tap sugar bushes and other maples ringing the hill just behind the nature center. That's where Adam and his mother, Mei Yu Hsu, and a host of other families dropped by earlier this month as Lustbader's crew collected the first sap of the season for boiling down.
On Feb. 24, visitors will take a walking tour of the trees and taste the raw sap before heading down the hill to a fire pit where the sugar water will be boiled down to syrup. Visitors can watch the whole process, including siphoning off the syrup and tasting the fresh maple on pancakes cooked over an open fire.
"Oh, they love it," Lustbader says, "and it's so much fun.
