LINN COUNTY, Iowa — The sap is running in Iowa and New Hampshire.
No, not that guy. Besides, the Iowa and New Hampshire presidential contests were two months ago.
This is a different kind of sap, and a different kind of March Madness. We’re officially in the middle of Maple Sugar Month, when part-time farmers and major producers harvest their crop. It comes in the form of a viscous clear liquid that bears a faint hint of maple aroma. When boiled, it forms a rich, dark syrup that is a staple of breakfast tables and roadside diners.
Why a meditation on maple syrup in the middle of the political season, when the two presidential nominees have been selected and the general election campaign already is underway?
Why? Because the typist of this column is weary of writing about those two and needs a one-week break. Because he believes that you need one, too. Because maple syrup is a North American delicacy that he’s loved since he was a boy, and he suspects that you feel the same way. Because there’s a tangential relationship between maple syrup and politics: The sap often runs best during town-meeting season in New England, which is right about now. (There’s some authenticity to these musings, because I’m actually writing this column on the second Tuesday in March, traditionally town meeting day in New Hampshire and parts of Maine.)
One more reason to linger for a moment on maple syrup: Because it provides a rare bright spot in a blighted planet that’s teetering on the edge of cataclysmic climate change.
But let’s not get carried away with the optimism here. A changing climate does in fact affect sugar maple trees. Global warming brings the threat of droughts, and sugar maples don’t flourish in droughts. Climate change brings high winds and ice storms, and they affect the tree canopy in a dangerous way.
But the conditions that allow the sap to run? Well, those don’t change, though they may arrive a few weeks before Granite State town meetings — sometimes in February, when parts of Vermont hold town meetings.
“We might be tapping our trees early, but the good news is that the trees are still able to produce sap regardless of the calendar date,” said Steven Roberge, the state forester for the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension. “Trees don’t know what day it is. As long as the conditions are right, the sap will flow.”
Now that we’ve disposed of that bit of business, hop with me onto Joe Golding’s John Deere Gator utility vehicle here in eastern Iowa for a bumpy ride.
We’re off to visit the maple trees in a picturesque setting, the urban landscape of Cedar Rapids melting into rural Iowa, the horizon going on forever. The farm that Golding and his wife, the food chemist and Iowa Republican state Sen. Cindy Golding — another political tie, for she’s in Des Moines on this splendid mid-March sunny morning, tending to her legislative duties — is one of those small centers of the maple sugar art, some of which have operated in North America for centuries.
They’re scattered around the country — would you have thought that Michigan has more taps than New Hampshire, though with one-sixth as many taps per capita? Or that Nebraska and Arkansas get into the act each year? And this is a good place to remind readers that 80% of maple syrup worldwide comes from Quebec, where there are 13,000 maple producers and where family visits to a cabane a sucre are a sticky lunchtime tradition. (That springtime ritual begins with a bowl of yellow pea soup flavored with a ham hock and maple syrup, followed by maple-baked ham, beans baked in maple syrup, and pork rinds deep-fried in maple syrup. Don’t have your blood test that afternoon.)
Here in Iowa, 1,100 miles southwest of Quebec, there’s a small gusher of maple sap in the trees at the Goldings’ Sweet Maple Farms — “white gold,” Jed Clampett would say, if he tapped sap instead of simply owned land with an oil gusher. It flows from knee-level plastic tubes parallel to the Iowa plain, just the way it does in the big-production states out east. Vermont has the most taps (6,350 last year, according to the agriculture department, accounting for 2,045,000 gallons last year.) New York and Maine were next.
“The big boys up in Vermont ask the same questions we ask,” Golding said as he poured the sap into a bucket. “When do we tap? When do we boil?”
These are not idle questions in an industry where the syrup sells for an average price of $34.70 per gallon. The Goldings know it is a Goldilocks thing: Tap early, when the temperatures are low, and the flow will be slow. The ideal time is when temperatures are below freezing at night and around 40 degrees during the day. In short, about now.
Maple syrup producers are keenly aware of the precarious balance of nature’s powers that are part of their craft. Trees are embattled members of the landscape. They fight fungi, pollution, ice, insects, poor drainage, variations in soil moisture, and the browsing of deer. Here in Iowa’s Linn County, the Goldings lost an enormous portion of their sugar bush when a derecho, which is kind of like an inland hurricane, wiped out a substantial number of their trees.
“We’re allowing the trees to regenerate,” said Mrs. Golding, whose non-legislative duties include testing the syrup for density, viscosity and sugar content. “That means we won’t be able to tap most of them for the next couple of years.”
A few weeks ago, Roberge explained to an audience at the Tin Mountain Conservation Center in Albany, N.H., that snowfall is an efficient insulator for the sensitive root systems that sugar maple trees possess — and that the alternation of freezes and thaws that are essential for the production of maple sap won’t be eliminated by climate change. This, too, won’t change: Maple syrup is gluten-free. No cholesterol, either. Good for you. Leaves you with a good taste. In that regard, better than the campaign.
There. I’ve just written, and presumably you’ve just read, more than 1,000 words of an op-ed column without the appearance (so far) of the words “Joe Biden” or “Donald Trump.” That may be a world record. Is there a prize for that?
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
