Spring may be my favorite season of the year. I probably say that about each season as it arrives. That may be due to the change in the temperature and the change of scenery that we get to enjoy by living in this area. The Upper Peninsula has been blessed with a true sampling of the four seasons. Every season here looks markedly different from the one preceding it and the one that is to follow. Each one could be a picture postcard representation of itself.
As a teen, spring was a time for tapping maple trees to collect the sap that had started to run just beneath the bark. Every year at this time my best friend Denny and I would make our preparations for collecting sap with the intention of making maple syrup. There were three things that we needed: short pieces of copper pipe (the taps), jugs or other containers to attach to the trees just below the taps, and fire to boil the sap down into syrup.
The fire was the most important of these three things to us. Every day, after school, we would walk the mile or so into the woods to check our taps. Checking a tap involved little more than walking close enough to a couple of trees to see that there was a marginal increase to the level of sap in the jug over what had been there the day before. There was no sense in checking all of them; the story was always the same.
The real purpose of going out to check the taps was to build a fire. We wouldn’t really need a fire until we had collected enough sap to make syrup, but we figured that we might as well make sure that our fire pit was going to be adequate enough when the time came to press it into the service of syrup rendering.
A fire was also a source of entertainment.
At risk of sounding like my dad or grandfather, I will say we didn’t have 4600 inch, flat screen, high definition televisions with 900 channels back in those days. We had two and sometimes three channels, and almost none at all when B-52 bombers were practicing touch-and-go landings all day long out at K.I. Sawyer AFB.
Only the rich kids had Ataris (if you don’t know what an Atari is, you either grew up with radio as your only form of entertainment or you grew up thinking that personal computers have always been here) to occupy their time.
Fires were sort of like an interactive TV show. There was always a great deal of talk, a lot of comedy, occasional drama, even a bit of news now and then.
A fire seems to have this magical ability to spark conversation and imagination. Hours would be spent talking about the events of the day as well as the telling and re-telling of stories and jokes.
Great conversations were sparked by each and every one of these fires. We were all fireside philosophers, pondering all of the imponderables.
Maple tapping season wasn’t the only time of year for fires.
The summer would find us on the shores of Lake Superior, where we would have what seemed to be a perpetual beach fire at times. There was a group of us that knew about a stretch of private beach, the owners of which had never been there in all of my childhood years.
We would arrive there early in the day and, in the sand, find the smoldering remains of the fire from the night before. We would gather wood and re-kindle the fire. This we would keep burning all day and into the night. The whole process would repeat itself the next day. At times, the beach fires had been known to burn continuously for almost a month straight.
In autumn and winter, the fires served as a source of heat. We didn’t want to spend time indoors, and it would be too cold to just stand around outside. We would have a fairly well established neighborhood fire pit by the time the snow would fly. It would often be located near Lake Kawbawgam, where we could sometimes ice skate in the winter.
At almost any time when school wasn’t in session, you could find someone at the fire pit. There would be six or seven of us standing around the fire, smoking cigarettes and telling lies. I’m sure it looked like the rural equivalent of the homeless gathered around a barrel fire in an alley in the city.
It’s kind of funny looking back on all of these fires, especially the fires in the spring. Every year for many years we would perform this ritual of tapping, checking and fire building. Every year we managed to make the exact same quantity of syrup.
None.
At least I got a few good stories and a lot of great memories out of the deal.
No comments:
Post a Comment