There is an old saying: “Spring is the reward for those who live through the winter.” How do we know that spring has arrived? Let’s count the ways: my neighbors, Jackie and Al Smith, are back from Florida looking trim and healthy; Charlcie Delehanty has reported seeing two immature and one mature bald eagles as the river opens near the sorting gap; Jessie’s Bait Shop has stored their ice augers and hung out their “Maple Syrup For Sale” sign in front of their newly updated fishing equipment; and geese can be seen feeding happily on Mary Burns’ front lawn along the the Raquette River, recently freed of ice.

Spring is the harbinger of many good things, one of which is that it is the time sap begins to run in the maple trees and heralds the beginning of the sugaring season.How many readers as youngsters have boiled sap in their kitchen? How many of you have seen the paper peel off the walls as steam from the boiling sap filled the kitchen? (It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. The rest goes up in steam.) Sadly, making maple syrup, a sustainable, responsible use of a resource, has almost disappeared locally.

There a was a period when it was an honored tradition. There were a number of sugar bushes located nearby, each with its own sugar house. The sugar house, usually with a vented roof, contained the evaporator, which in simplest terms consisted of two flat metal pans sitting over a long firebox known as the arch. These pans were divided into multiple interconnected channels, creating a maze that the sap had to follow as it became hotter and hotter and ever more dense.

Sweet smelling steam would chortle from these shacks, producing an enveloping mist not unlike an early spring cloud-laden rain shower. The only thing that could rival that nostalgic smell might be the delicious aroma that would waft its way from blocks in the vicinity of the Sonny Boy Bakery (if you were downtown) or from the Gold Medal Bakery (if you were uptown).

A tantalizing, overpowering, luscious signature presence that cannot be adequately described. You have to experience it. Of course, that would mean you would have had to have been there at a time when milk came in glass bottles with a 2-inch collar of thick cream, and kids could go into the neighboring saloon and get a “growler” of beer for their father, who undoubtedly deserved it after a 12-hour day of intensive labor.

“Rush the growler” (a metal pail with a lid) was an expression of the time. The word “rush” had an entirely different connotation in those days. With its strict discipline, woe unto any youngster who didn’t get that growler home with the greatest dispatch and with it’s contents intact.

For all of its romances as an ancient tradition, sugaring was (and still is) hard work. It meant washing hundreds of buckets; it meant tapping many, many trees by hand with a brace and a bit; it meant gathering scores of buckets (each weighing at least 30 pounds), which had to be carried to a holding tank, where it was then sledged to the Sugar House. If the sap was running good you stayed all night boiling it into syrup. Remember, too, that it took roughly a full cord of wood (4’x4’x8’) to make 5 gallons of syrup. Even in a small operation, that could mean as much as 30 full cords that most often had to be “bucked” up with a buck saw or a two-handed cross-cut saw. Small wonder that an old-age sentiment after a bone-wearying season was, “Glad to see it come, glad to see it go.”

Next column: Tupper Lake’s Master Sugarers.