Dennis Anderson: A sap for spring

For quite a while this winter alongside a road near my home a deer lay dead, hit by a car. This was during the season's coldest days, and two bald eagles, suffering a precarious survival balance of their own, alternately perched nearby in a towering red pine and descended on the fallen animal, picking it apart until nothing was left except hide and bones.

But time passes, and the lucky among us have emerged now on the other side of winter, safe from suffering the deer's fate. Given the latitude at which we reside, this shouldn't be taken for granted. If winter represents the narrowing of life's hourglass, this one was narrower than most, an undertaker's cash cow.

Around our place, Tuesday marked the arrival of spring. Not officially. But unofficially. Telltale of this, the dogs carried an extra bounce in their steps on their morning walks. Also on the early breeze swirling from the south was a seasonal warmth that had gone missing during the frigid months. Overhead, against a brightening sky, geese honked, a flock of them, then another flock and another still, heading to feed.

Tuesday also was the day that sap began running from our maple trees. You don't want to be caught unaware when this happens. Spouts need to be scrubbed and bags hung. Also the cooker must be cleaned of its cobwebs and the boiling pan retrieved from storage.

My neighbor, Lon Navis, is all over this maple syrup thing. His sugar bush is productive and his homemade cooker approximates the size of a small landing strip. He might boil 400 gallons of sap. Standing in the snowy remnants of winter, babysitting his boil, Lon is a chemist of sorts, and when he and his wife, Karin, finish a big batch of syrup nouveau, they break out ice cream and drown it in the sweet stuff, celebrating spring the same way now for more than a quarter-century.

This year, Lon has a new neighbor, John Perko, and he's deep into syruping also. A welder, John modified an old trailer of his from which he hangs bags of sap he collects from the woods. He pulls the trailer with his lawn tractor, its tires wrapped in chains; a goofy-looking contraption, yes, trucking down a country road en route to a storage tank near Lon's cooker. But it's spring, and the real oddballs are those in suits and ties who mark time in cubicles. You dress how you feel in the sugar bush, and you feel good.

Of our two sons, Cole, the younger, is the syruping nut. He has a sweet tooth and will pour maple syrup over oatmeal, muffins, hamburgers, whatever. Also of course pancakes, French toast and waffles. Slow to wash dishes, he nonetheless will tramp through a spring snowstorm to retrieve full bags of sap and empty them into the large plastic farm tank we strap to the back of our four-wheeler. The important twin elements of spinning tires and fuel combustion are thus added to an already-thrilling enterprise, and the eventual lighting of the cooker, match put to wood, only excites him more.

"We need at least four gallons of syrup this year," Cole said. "No less."

So Wednesday, we hung our bags, 37 of them. A friend, John Weyrauch, is part of our crew also, collecting and boiling sap on our property, and he was recently back from a restocking pilgrimage to Anderson's Maple Syrup near Cumberland, Wis. This is the Holy Grail of the syrup biz, and you can buy as much equipment there, plain or fancy, as your budget allows. Also they produce their own syrup, widely available.

This higher calling in spring amid maples isn't only about collecting and boiling sap, pleasantly distracting as these exercises can be. If it were only that, shed hunting is easier and less expensive. Or a fellow could train his dog or hang wood duck boxes or slip a boat into the Mississippi below Red Wing, looking for walleyes. Or simply stroll in the woods.

None of these would produce a natural delicacy, however. The Chippewa knew as much when near Mille Lacs in March they padded into their sugar bush. Also those near Sandy Lake and to the east, in Wisconsin, the Menomonie. Then as now, finishing sap to sweet perfection is an art, not unlike painting or sculpting, and the result is only that much better when compared today to the corn-based abominations sold in plastic and stacked on grocery store shelves -- cheap, nearly, as water. And not much tastier.

Last year about noon on a Saturday after we gathered our sap, I lit my fire. Two days later, I finished my syrup. For the most part I kept the fire going throughout, and I remember one night standing outside beneath a cloudless dark sky listening to sandhill cranes following the St. Croix River north. Singing their ancient song, they seemed happy to be back in this good country.

In the end, for all of us, the days blend together. Spring becomes summer and you reach for a long fly rod hoping to catch a trout. Then it's fall and the same cranes that flew north return south, followed by the narrowing of winter's hourglass.

All the while, kids grow up, and old dogs pass on.

Late Friday night, I put a boil to our first batch of sap. I figured I'd stay up pretty much all night. Standing alongside the cooker, perhaps I'd hear a string of sandhills winging overhead.

Spring had arrived, and I didn't want to miss any of it.

Dennis Anderson • danderson@startribune.com