Everyone measures spring differently, some by the return of robins, others the sight of geese overhead, still others the sound of sandhill cranes at night, following first the Mississippi, then the St. Croix, en route by mysterious reckoning to Crex Meadows in northwest Wisconsin.
For Lon and Karin Navis, spring arrives in March. It's then that they watch with great care the temperatures morning and afternoon and sense in the higher angle of light the coming of the time they will enter their sugarbush, the name given to a collection of maple trees by those who collect sap in the spring.
Lon and Karin are hobbyists. They do not sell the syrup they ultimately will produce from gathering hundreds of gallons of sap. But neither do they undertake lightly what for them is a decades-old tradition that involves, fundamentally, the maple trees, but also taps and bags to collect sap, strong legs and arms to carry it, tanks to store it and, in the end, a wood-burning cooker over which the sap is boiled down into syrup.
"We've been doing it 30 years and we learn something new every year," Karin said the other day.
As she spoke, Lon threw long pieces of split wood into the big cooker that sits adjacent to the house overlooking the St. Croix River he and Karin built some 40 years ago.
Work-intensive, and not inexpensive, syrup making is difficult to defend, measured by typical standards of time and money spent. But if you appreciate days and nights passed outdoors in the spring, when at night while watching the cooking fire you might hear owls hooting and coyotes yipping, and in the morning, if you're still awake and the boil is holding, you relish being brought alert by a tom turkey gobbling from its roost, then this maple syruping might take hold of you, and, in March, like Lon and Karin, you begin to anticipate it.
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I hadn't intended to collect sap this spring. Living not far from Lon and Karin, and watching their bags go up in their sugarbush, I had a feel for the timing of things. But not until another friend, John Weyrauch of Stillwater, began eying with keen interest the maples on property where my wife, Jan, and I and our boys live did I sense I might be caught up in making syrup.