If for some reason Port Authority and/or God allows my flight to leave from JFK tonight, I’ll be in Skowhegan, Maine by morning.
This weekend is the first part of a much longer period of apprenticeship with Iver Lofving, a seasoned maple syrup man. In this first lesson, I will learn the setup of a sugarhouse (which my older brother calls a shanty) and the process of tapping trees for the eventual harvest of sap later next month. At night, I’ll sleep in the shanty next to a woodstove, and try my hand at cooking with cast iron pots. Iver tells me lunch will “consist of chunk of salt pork, beans, and all sorts of maple syrup, of course.” Yum.
My obsession with the sugarbush (maples that produce the sweet sap) stems from an early childhood memory, when my mom took me to her Uncle John’s sugarhouse. I remember trudging through the snow on a forest trail and approaching what was basically a shack. Steam billowed from the chimney in a massive column. I assumed there was a jacuzzi inside. Instead, there were a bunch of grizzled men sitting on wooden stools, semi-circled around a humungous kettle. These were some of my great uncles and they were boiling maple sap. They were all layered up with sweaters, vests and oversized boots drinking whiskey and playing Euchre, a popular card game on the Great Lakes. Someone put a pancake in front of me, drizzled with syrup straight from the stove.
My mom and the seven generations of her family before her grew up in the town of North Java, NY in Wyoming County. They made a living by farming. And during the famously brutal Western New York winters, when there wasn’t much else to do but bear and grin, they supplemented their incomes with maple syruping, a practice the very first settlers adopted from the natives to augment their nutrition.
As it is now, my extended family still has a large presence in North Java. My older brother lives there, too, but without his own sugarbush he is only able to keep the tradition alive by tapping borrowed trees and boiling in a barrel behind his house. My goal is to acquire some maple forest in North Java and eventually build a sugarhouse for my family to operate.
I belive maple syruping to be one of the most original traditions of industry and socializing in America, and I’m proud that my family promotes it, even as a hobby, today. Above all, I find sugarhouses to be simply beautiful and am eager to innovate with my own architecture eventually.
First, I decided, I must know the trade. To that end, I contacted Iver after a Google search led me to pictures of his sugarhouse known as Chez Lonndorf in Central Maine. He graciously agreed to host me, and provide me lessons in syrup production and forestry. At least, it’s going to be fun excuse to wear my snowshoes.
Coicidentally, I’ll miss the two Bon Iver shows this weekend in NYC. Oh well.
