Michael and me
July 15, 2010
As a guest on the Liberal Express I got first interview of the day.
I was rather surprised when Leeds Liberal candidate Marjory Loveys invited me for a ride from Brockville to Kingston on the Liberal Express, Michael Ignatieff’s ambitious summer march through all of the provinces and territories of Canada.
Marjory Loveys is a terrific interview because she knows politics and has a nimble mind. I use her whenever I can for columns because they always turn out interesting. Whatever she told the crew, they treated me with considerable deference, and maybe a little fear.
While we were waiting through the media scrum for a chance to board the bus a pleasant blonde woman beside me started to chat. I explained that scrums were of no use to me: I’m too deaf, so I prefer a one-on-one interview, and that this was the first time I had left home to do one. “Normally they come to me.” She smiled, amused, and we talked about the freedom which comes when one reaches a certain age. The kids are grown up, and one can start off on a major endeavour.
I introduced myself. She shook my hand, “I’m Zsuzsanna.” Ulp! Embarrassed. She quickly put me at ease and bade me welcome aboard the bus. Good start: I hadn’t recognized Ignatieff’s wife! Sweet lady, though. If I were a puppy I’d curl up at her feet.
The first available seat was with a young man in red t-shirt, one of the crew of interns with the Liberal headquarters in Ottawa. He’s from a town near St. John’s, Newfoundland, majoring in economics at Western. When the guy in charge warned me I was first up for an interview, I left my seat-mate my camera and made sure he knew how to use it.
The bus is set up with a number of seats facing tables. All except the leader’s are loaded with cookie bags, stacks of newspapers, and surprisingly large young men in dress shirts typing steadily on laptops. The bus has Internet. Somebody told me the password so I logged on and dashed off emails until my time came up.
With pen and pad in hand I moved up to join the trio at the table. Marjory beamed from the other side and Ottawa-Orleans candidate David Bertschi looked pleasant, if a bit detached. Mr. Ignatieff shook my hand and introduced himself as “Michael.”
“I’d like to begin with a question from political science, if you will.” Michael nodded. “It concerns the political spectrum. In the early sixties the Liberal Party could be comfortably described as slightly left-of-centre, but does the left-right distinction apply any more when people vote their wealth, their ethnicity, their religion, even their xenophobia? Is there a better way to distinguish between points of view?”
Silence. The Ottawa guy’s jaw dropped. Marjory grinned knowingly. She’s faced my questions before. Michael collected his thoughts for several agonizing seconds, then began:
“Since the time of Mike Pearson, Liberals have been a centrist party, a party of fiscal responsibility, strong defense, pensions, Medicare, and federalism with attention to the rights of Quebec. That was the centre. Some suggest we should move to the left or the right. We have many ideas in common with the NDP, but we are not the NDP. We can get it done.
“Stephen Harper pretends to be centrist, but he wants to move the political centre ten degrees to the right, and the people of Canada can’t let that happen.”
O.K., he’s just affirmed the basic assumption of Canadian politics. Nothing radical there. Time for the follow-up:
“I once wrote in a column that Michael Ignatieff is a better conservative than Stephen Harper. What do you have to offer to the Progressive Conservative who feels queasy these days?”
He’d fouled the first one back, but Michael watched this pitch drift across the plate, then knocked it out of the park.
“My uncle was George Grant, an ardent Red Tory and Canadian nationalist. He wrote Lament for a Nation. I grew up in a family where Red Tories and Liberals mixed freely. Moderate conservatives and Liberals are part of the same family.
“I don’t think Stephen Harper is a Red Tory. The Conservative campaign playbook is lifted from the playbook of the American Republican Party. Red Tories have always been ardent Canadian nationalists. While his tactics come from the United States, Harper’s ideas come from those of the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance. They are no mystery.
“And there is definitely room in the Big Red Tent for Progressive Conservatives.”
I had my interview and time was running, so I closed with a general question about Leeds-Grenville Liberal candidate Marjory Loveys.
“What I like about Marjory Loveys is that she has put down roots here. She knows Ottawa and is unimpressed and unintimidated by it. She can get things done there.
“Marjory cares about ideas. I have talked with her in detail about economic development in Leeds-Grenville. We need for our young people to stay in the community. They shouldn’t have to leave for schooling, or for jobs. People shouldn’t have to travel away from their community for medical care. Marjory should make an excellent MP.”
From what I could see on the bus and in the interview, Michael Ignatieff takes a traditional approach to politics. He’s going about this tour the methodical way, stop by stop, talking with Canadians and picking up ideas and believers as he goes. For example, Michael commented with a smile at the end of our interview: “In four years in this business nobody has ever asked me an initial question like that.” But have you noticed how he slips “Progressive Conservative” into every speech now?
Getting the seeds in straight
June 6, 2010
As you approach Crosby from the east on Hwy 15 you can’t help but notice the precision lines drawn with corn in the huge expanse of land to your right. The whole field is as straight as a die, quite a piece of work.
I tracked Bob Chant down and asked who was the craftsman on the corn planter.
“Burt Mattice does our seeding for us. He sights on a tree and drives straight for it. Then he follows a line the guide on the seeder makes. We have used that 1948 John Deere to do 480 acres of seeding so far this year. I think it’s important that we farmers take pride in our work, and sometimes the old equipment is what you need to do the best job.”
I put up a bit of film on You Tube of Burt in action. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3YWG4x1sBA
http://picasaweb.google.com/rodcros/PlantingTheCornAtChantlandFarmsCrosby#
I hope neither Bob nor Burt gets a look at our garden before I can trim the rows up with the tiller. This year I suggested that Roz plant the root crops in the grooves left by the disk. They were generally running the right direction, and this saved a lot of tedious measurement and stringing of twine from stakes and such.
Our young friend Roz is a much better seeder than I. Addicted to tools, I can’t resist using this wheel-on-a-stick arrangement my dad tried once and discarded many years ago. It consists of a small aluminum wheel with a box attached with adjustable holes from which the seeds drop as it rotates. Most of my planting efforts result in a dense tangle of growth in the first three feet of the row, then nothing. To compensate I usually start another packet of something at the other end of the row and run back. Squash and melons go in the middle of the garden where there is ample space to spread because of the absence of other seed.
Surprisingly enough, when I look back at photos of gardens past, it seems as though things grow quite well with this system. For a few years the mild winters allowed volunteer growth of tomatoes so dense that they choked the other weeds out. For the indolent gardener the cherry tomato is definitely the weed of choice. Who can fault lush tomatoes growing all over the place?
Anyway, Roz is keen and inexhaustible. She carefully planted individual carrots and beets, using up an amazing amount of garden space with two packets of seeds.
The goal this year is to have orderly rows which can be cultivated well into the season with the 1979 Troy-Bilt ‘Horse’ I found near Peterborough. It’s a smoke-belching monster, but man, can it till! The operator’s manual for the “Horse” runs to 180 pages, including a 40-page section on how to grow a garden. The Garden Way Corporation of Troy, New York at that time took the job seriously. It’s hard to imagine this kind of effort put into a product for sale in a box store today.
The sweet corn in the lower garden refused to sprout this year until I followed Peter Myers’s suggestion and stomped the seeds down into the dry, fluffy soil so that capillary action could draw moisture up from below and allow the corn to germinate. Maybe those two rains helped, as well. The late corn is now well ahead of the early corn.
My big task this summer is mowing around 8000 new seedlings. Jane McCann’s crew popped the pine, tamarack, white oak, shagbark hickory and yellow birch in with a mechanical planter in a single day of work. Another contractor had sprayed herbicide last fall to prepare the rows for the seedlings. Leeds Stewardship Coordinator Martin Streit arranged this project through the Ontario Government’s 50 Million Trees Program, one of Mr. McGuinty’s green initiatives. The program runs for another twelve years, offering installed seedlings to landowners at very advantageous prices.
Donna O’Connor dropped by with a half-bag of white spruce and a few blight-resistant butternuts left over from another Leeds Stewardship project. These 200 trees took me four days to plant with a shovel, though they are all growing nicely now.
I have gotten a lot better with my electric sprayer after a losing some little walnut trees to overspray mishaps last year. Mom or Bet now drives the Ranger and I walk along beside with the wand in one hand and a plastic deflector in the other.
Saturday evening on the way in from a fishing trip I discovered the downside of a spring of landscaping and mowing with a tractor. As I approached my slip in Newboro an untidy patch of weeds lurked in my way. Without much thought I swung the stern of the Springbok in to chew the weeds up and blow them out into the bay. “Clunk.” Just a little clunk, nothing like the “SMASH! SMASH! SMASH!” which comes when I whack a rock with the blade of the bush hog, but it was sufficient. That little deadhead ripped a chunk out of my prop, so I had to haul the boat out for repairs. I must remember in the future not to confuse an outboard motor with a bush hog.
Ice Report Continued: Frost and Little Trees
May 13, 2010
Last Friday a heavy frost blackened the leaves on many of my two-year-old walnut seedlings in a south-facing field. The mature walnuts were in their male flowering phase at that time, and I won’t know until late summer if they will bear this year. Last year a late frost killed the flowers on all but the trees on top of the hill or those sheltered by the house, so the harvest was much lower than expected. To my count this year there have been three frosty days so far in May.
The damaged foliage grows back quickly on older walnut and butternut trees. Some of last year’s seedlings died, though, either from the frost or a clumsy Roundup application.
The cool temperatures have been good for tree planting, though, and the first two weeks in the ground have been pretty good for the new batch of trees. 7700 white pine, shagbark hickory, yellow birch, white oak and tamarack seem to be doing quite well so far.
The Leeds Stewardship Council had a few extra white spruce and a handful of butternut seedlings because of a last-minute cancellation. Strenuous work, planting trees by hand. I have worked up from fifty the first day to 90 yesterday, but I had to take a three-hour break between planting sessions to achieve that number. Old and out of shape, I guess. Another solid day’s work remains. For a retiree that means the rest of the week and part of the weekend. So? The seedlings are comfortably “heeled in” in a shady part of the garden. They’ll wait.
An evening walk along Beverley Creek
April 12, 2010
The sun felt a little warm this afternoon for a few minutes, so I decided today would be a good time to visit the pool below the Old Mill in Delta and see if the shiners were up yet. For those of you not raised along the Rideau, “shiner” is a local name for the black crappie, a delicious panfish which runs in mid-spring below dams and locks.
In my experience the crappie run after the perch have spawned at Delta. No perch were in evidence yet, just bluegills, an occasional rock bass, and a few large smallmouth getting dibs on early spawning beds.
As I worked my way down the broad creek into Beverley Lake Park, my attention wandered to the new plantings along the shore. They’ve really been working on the trees this year. I guess you’d call it a shelter belt along the sod bank: they have little spruces, white cedars, and several different deciduous trees and shrubs in a ten-foot band along much of the creek.
On my return along a new road cut through a trimmed-down soccer field I discovered a very ambitious project: they have moved in about four dozen ten-to-twelve-foot trees with a tractor-mounted planting spade. The builders used these young trees to define a number of new lots for camping on the property and a boulevard which will soon shade the road access. They even mixed in a few spruce with the maple and ash in the planting.
At the end of the playing field I admired the rows of nannyberry and high-bush cranberry. (Those were the two shrubs I could identify.) My cranberries went into soggy soil and aren’t doing as well as these planted on the end of a soccer field. Whoever planned this area obviously knew what he or she was doing.
Over by the Bradford Pavillion I noticed 18 new floating docks, recently constructed. From the new gaps in the cattails along the bank, it looks as though they will be used to create slips for more campers along the creek. That’s the advantage of Beverley Creek as a place to keep a small boat – it’s very well sheltered from wind and waves.
With an abundance of docking on both sides of the creek and ready access to Lower Beverley Lake, Delta must be a great place to keep a small boat. Pontoon boats with upscale outboards seem to be the vessel of choice for waterfront property owners.
As I picked my way down the bank of the creek, I couldn’t help but notice the care and effort both campers and management lavish on this park. The people who live and work here obviously love the place.
The land is dominated by massive trees. Where else can you fish or stroll along a stream with 100’ pines towering above? Go a little further and you are into the crown of the deciduous forest, with oaks at least ninety feet tall meeting overhead. I looked for some time at a young black cherry which has managed to reach the top of the canopy for its share of the sunlight – an area about 4’ by 6’ – but that’s apparently enough for this magnificent young tree.
Almost no one was around at the time of my evening walk, but the place has the look of a well-regulated facility. What struck me most were the signs, or rather their scarcity. One sign seemed to be enough for each rule: “No bikes after dark.” “Scoop after your dog.” Sensible, practical rules to enable a group to live together in reasonable comfort.
The swimming area looks just fine, though of course it had little appeal to me as a fisherman on the prowl. The cottages on the site look highly desirable, and so do many of the trailers, well established on landscaped lots.
As I approached the office I noticed a series of modified farm wagons equipped with wooden railings and school bus seats, ten per vehicle. A sign on one advertised “Wagon Rides, Saturday night.” I wonder where they go and what they use to pull them?
At the time of my visit their leaves were formed but the trilliums hadn’t blossomed yet. By weekend they should be out. On a visit last year we observed that the hills within the park literally turn white when the Ontario’s official flower begins to bloom.
The shiners aren’t running yet at Delta, but it was still a lovely evening along the water. Every time I take this walk I leave for home thinking that the Lower Beverley Lake Park in Delta is the best-kept secret in Eastern Ontario tourism.
What does an early spring mean?
April 4, 2010
On Good Friday Bet and I strolled out the lane and stopped at the deck under the maple tree. The wood was dry and ready, so Bet swept off the winter’s dust and I hauled a set of Adirondack chairs out of storage in the barn. There we were, sitting in a pleasant breeze on a warm day – on the second of April!
I still had sap boiling in the sugar shack, but wild leeks were up in the woods. A large yellow and black butterfly had kept me company that morning as I gathered the last, cloudy sap for a batch of dark syrup. This time it was hard to keep the honey bees out of the evaporator. Spring has come suddenly this year.
Only a pessimist of the highest order can still cling to the old in-like-a-lamb, out-like-a-lion adages about March weather. Last year I kept my snow blower on the tractor well into May, but the expected final storm did not appear.
If he were around today, I wonder if Grandpa Charlie would still wear his winter woolies until the first of June? It would have been a warm day for him on Saturday in the 80 -degree weather.
Early last week Peter Smolker’s tractor started changing the colour of a field of stubble. Bob Chant’s loader and spreader were at work on the large flat behind his barn. Yesterday I transplanted walnut seedlings all morning. Conditions were perfect, so why not?
As I write this on Easter Sunday, I think back to the many times we climbed up to Spy Rock for the sunrise church service with Reverend Mary Simpson. We would spend an hour looking over village, lake and valley, then troop down the steep hill and over to the Presbyterian Church for a pancake breakfast.
The many Easter mornings blend in my memory into a single picture of the scene, but in that image the lake is still frozen solid. There’s a bit of snow on the ground under the bushes as well, though the rocks we stood or sat on were clear. This year there’s no snow, and hardly a cube of ice to be found in the whole Rideau.
Generally an Easter news story about a young man in the river entails heroic rescue or tragic loss. Yesterday the Ottawa Citizen mentioned a teen jumping into the river to retrieve an overthrown football, only to be joined for a swim by his bikini-clad girlfriend. Ah, the bathos of climate change!
If our Arctic ordeal is shrinking to a Pennsylvania-sized inconvenience, then what are the other implications of the decline of winter in Leeds County?
The maple syrup run this year seemed poor, but by Martin and Charlie’s calculations we surpassed last year’s 1 litre-per-tap standard over five weeks. Mind you in two weeks last year we had had enough of smoke, exposure and late nights, so we announced that the run had ended and pulled the taps. This year’s increased production might have as much to do with improved shelter and equipment as actual sap flow. Apparently the experience was rewarding enough for the crew to make plans for another session, though. They left everything clean and ready for an early start next February, but there’ll be some wood to get out and split before then.
Speaking of the sap crew, the guy who cut and split the most firewood, Mark Conboy, has joined the Queen’s Biology Station as assistant manager. With a Master’s in biology and solid mechanical skills, he should be a great addition to the QUBS staff at Chaffey’s Locks. Congratulations, Mark.
On Young’s Hill it has always seemed as if black walnuts could only grow on the south side in the shelter of the maple bush, but in the last couple of years they’ve popped up everywhere the squirrels have planted them. They don’t seem to need the protection of the woods any longer.
Another interesting change has to do with the sudden emergence of a market for hazel nuts as legislators have wisely chased the peanut from North American schools. The company that produces Nutella is begging Canadian farmers to plant vast acreage to help meet the demand. The bushes take only three years to mature, but the problem is the blight that wipes them out. Disease and insect pests may force other nut and fruit production northward as conditions deteriorate in the south because of climate change.
As it gets hotter, the risk of fire increases. A grass fire near Hamilton this week spread into a junk yard and burned through over a hundred wrecked cars as well as the field where it had started. As we worked in the sugar bush in the last couple of weeks we noticed how quickly things dried out, and also the amount of flammable material on the forest floor. Even though it’s only April we must take great care with vehicles and open flames in areas where fuel for a wildfire is available. Check the spark arrestors on your ATVs, lads. You don’t want to burn out your favourite trail.
Five years ago the prospect of a sugar maple on the shore of James Bay was science fiction. With a spring like this one, it doesn’t seem like such a dumb idea. The old philosophical question emerges: If you were an oak with a life expectancy of 400 years, where would you want to grow?
“You have a most civilized place to live.”
March 21, 2010
“You have a most civilized place to live.” Taking into account that he had to stand in the bed of the Ranger with three others and cling to the roll bar as the vehicle lurched through mud holes, and that lunch was a venison burger fried on a corner of the maple syrup arch, I was a little surprised when Dr. Armand Leroi made this comment to Bet and me.
On a brief visit to Kingston, Armand joined Saturday’s crew at the sugar shack along with friend and colleague, Dr. Adam Chippindale of the Queen’s Biology Department. They came to see what had been dragging so many of Adam’s students out of the lab and up Hwy 15 lately. Fourth-year biology students each year get to pick a guest lecturer for their final class. They selected Dr. Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the Imperial College in London, England. His BBC4 science programs* no doubt influenced their choice.
At least those sallow moths in the sap buckets received some high-powered attention on the weekend. For an album click here. Photos:
Earlier in the week Matthew Swift arrived. Matt is a sous chef at Red’s Bistro, a restaurant in the financial district of Toronto, and has a keen interest in new approaches to local foods. He joined friend Don Kerstens, one of the sap crew, to look at the setup and taste our Canada tea.
With a hot fire rolling under the finishing pan, Martin Mallet was in his element tracking the boil until the syrup hit the proper sugar concentration. “The Brix is at 66. It’s time to take it off.” No more endless speculation and arguments: that eBay refractometer was worth the money. Martin and Matt bottled 8 litres of syrup.
Things had gone normally until they took the small pan with the syrup off the arch. Then the three foodies kept gazing at that expanse of bare, hot steel. The urge to cook had struck. In his business Don Kerstens (selectfinefoods.ca) supplies specialized meat cuts to Toronto restaurants. He happened to have some premium pork chops frozen in a cooler. Into the boiling water went the vacuum-packed chops. Too hot? Martin added two pails of cold water so as not to boil them during the defrost.
A wipe of the flat surface with a wet towel and the arch was ready for cooking. Chef Matt seasoned the “pan” by melting the fatty edges of the chops into the steel, producing a black, smooth surface. A little salad oil, and on went the chops. Matt kept feeling them with his finger, turning them frequently. Then he took them off. Martin advanced with his thermometer. “68 degrees F in the middle. They’re not cooked yet.” Unbothered, Matt waited and chatted with me about how to get syrup into the chops without burning them. After a couple of minutes he put the chops back on the stove and finished them. He later told me he likes to let pork chops rest a bit halfway through. Then he poured a bit of syrup onto each, turned them, and used his Swiss army knife to slice them into thin strips on the tray. We ate with our fingers. They were delicious: excellent meat, cooked by an expert, with very little salt and pepper added and a light maple flavour.
Red’s Bistro staff take pride in winning cooking competitions in the Toronto area with innovative entrees and appetizers. I doubt if it will be long before some combination of maple syrup and Berkshire pork makes its way onto the menu in this high-end restaurant.
Next day I tried Matt’s technique to fry a couple of Don’s chops. Even with my limited skills they were quite delightful. Premium pork may well be worth the cost, and the end of a maple syrup arch trumps a gas barbecue as a cooking surface every time.
But the highlight of the week had to be a conversation with four-year-old Liam Chippindale, visiting the farm with his father and brother. He sat down with me and explained in amazing detail how his home’s heating system works. He combined acute observation and anecdote with a fertile imagination to fill in the missing parts, but basically there’s an ice volcano outside which runs water in to provide hot air through a floor register in his room and a wall register in his brother’s. Neat kid. He invited me to his birthday party in thirty days – at an amusement park.
*You can easily find a number of Dr. Armand Leroi’s programs on You Tube: The Evolution of Music, What Makes Us Human, What Darwin Didn’t Know, Aristotle’s Lagoon. Start with What Makes Us Human.
Local foods VS Costco
March 7, 2010
The problem with the whole local foods movement is that when it comes right down to it, consumers are slaves to their training: they resolutely search out the lowest possible price, and the kind of food everyone admits is good for you costs 30 to 40% more, so most people talk one way and then load up their carts at Costco with factory-grown chicken, pork, and imported fruits and vegetables.
This kills the market for local food. Of course it’s hard to feel enthusiastic about a cartload of Costco.
Then there’s the look on the faces of visitors to the sugar shack when they get their first taste of Canada tea, made with boiling sap and a tea bag. First it’s amazement at a new taste they haven’t encountered before. Then they look a bit bewildered: “Why am I so surprised by a new taste? Why does everything in my life taste the same? And this came from a tree?” Off they go to the woods to gather more sap.
Then there’s Christopher and his discovery of black walnuts. This pint-sized hockey player found that if he put his back into it, he could make the walnut press generate the 700 lb. of force it takes to crack the shells and give him access to delicious meats inside. He cracked a lot of nuts once he got the hang of it.
Roz and her friends have often told me that Kingston has a great deal to offer to those who live there, but the one big gap is the lack of a great, wooded park in which to wander. Christopher’s mom came back from gathering sap and enthused: “This is way better than walking around the trails in the Cataraqui Conservation Authority.”
It seems people think differently about prices when they are engaged in acts of tourism. Perhaps it’s because the thought process is longer with a vacation: tourists aspire and dream; they travel; they drink in the experience; they remember it and use it to shape their other experiences and world view. That’s much different from the immediate choice to buy pork chops or the frozen lamb at Costco.
The challenge for local food producers is to take their customers clean away from the cutthroat thought patterns of the supermarket shopper. They need make their products part of an enjoyable and memorable vacation experience to which their customers will want to return, with the price of the food a minor factor.
If individuals become tourists to explore and search for sensations lost through the commodification of modern life, why shouldn’t they find a fresh reality in the countryside? Why shouldn’t they discover the joy of fresh-picked corn, or spend a lazy afternoon under a mulberry tree, eating their fill of the strange, refreshing fruit?
How about a day picking grapes or planting trees, if extreme vacations are your thing?
My son tells me that there are no distances in air travel. The only directions are up, down, and hot.
Tourism involves a journey, but if there are no longer real distances, why can’t the journey be twenty or forty minutes to a vacation destination, instead of across the continent? Why couldn’t a garden plot provide a perfectly valid “other place” to which one’s soul can yearn to escape? Families travel to give their kids experience and understanding of their world, yet how many suburban children have ever milked a cow, planted potatoes, picked raspberries or gathered eggs? No parents would want to deny these experiences to their kids if the facilities were within easy reach.
How many of you remember biting into a fresh carrot which exploded its sweetness on the tongue? I tried a store-bought carrot a week ago and almost cried from disappointment. It was orange. That’s the best thing I can say for it.
40% more for the real thing? Sounds like a bargain — if I have stood in the garden from which it came.
A Very Canadian Day
February 28, 2010
The new snow had all the charm of a wet flannel shirt on a cold day. Mention of cleaning the driveway should bring visions of white, sparkling rooster tails arching to the treetops against an azure sky. What the week actually brought, however, were dull clouds and mud balls and a blower gagging out liquid snow, occasionally punctuated by a blast of gravel. There’s no satisfaction in this.
Charlie and his pals had tapped the woodlot last weekend. Of course the sap didn’t run because it was too early, but they were keen to experiment. Then on Friday it started.
So here I was with buckets overflowing in the woods and the kids coming on Sunday to make syrup. I decided I’d better pack a track around the woodlot so that they could gather with the Ranger. Two hours of work produced little gain. One area of deep slush was impassible for the tractor. Snow that you can’t pack into a road is just no good.
Then three carloads of crew showed up: Charlie, Anneli, Martin, Anne-Claire, Rob, Derek, Brian, Allison and Jeff. The sun came out and the temperature rose. Martin had acquired a large supply of 16 litre shortening pails with lids which he insisted could be installed and removed easily. He planned to gather the sap from the buckets in these containers, put the lids on, and haul them to the shanty in the back of the Ranger. Figuring I’d be soaked from slopping pails before long, I loaded Derek and Anne-Claire onto the Ranger and blasted back the crude trail to deliver the empties. The UV pawed its way over slush which had defeated the tractor. Interesting.
The crew swarmed around the maples, draining buckets into pails at a frightening pace. Where do they get the energy? Martin proved his point that the UV’s bed will hold more sap in pails than in a 50 gallon drum. They loaded them up and turned me around on the trail. Back we went to the shack to try out the new arch Peter Myers had made for us.
Fire-starter Rob laid a work of art in the cavernous firebox and set it alight. Before long the sap began to boil and we retired to the house for the 3 o’clock Gold Medal Hockey Game. We calculated that the optimum time to refill the firebox was every twenty minutes, so stokers alternated throughout the game. The arch worked very well.
Derek commented: “Here we are, boiling maple syrup, eating Tim Horton’s and watching a gold medal hockey game. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more Canadian.” Bet and Mom served a buffet during the third period.
Then the U.S. tied the game with a few seconds left.
I could taste the irony. Disasters travel in threes, right? I didn’t want #3 to be a U.S. victory, but I particularly didn’t want to have to admit that the pan burned dry because the game went into overtime. Out I went to check, and surely enough, the sap was down to ½”, a critical level. We quickly lifted the pan off the fire and returned to the game.
On our way back in to the house, Martin quipped: “If ever there was an appropriate time to let the pan run dry, it would be during overtime in a gold medal game.” But there’s never an appropriate time for that.
Surely enough, with disaster #2 averted, #3 didn’t happen, either. Crosby fired a blind shot at the net and Miller missed it. Canada had won gold.
Anne-Claire: “You couldn’t have scripted a better ending than Crosby getting the winning goal in overtime. When he was a shy teenager, I once served him a steak at The Keg in Halifax.”
Probably we’ll all remember where we were when Crosby fired the shot. We’ll have a hard time avoiding the day’s photos. Many of the crew had cameras along, and the light was good.
The kids may have tapped way too early and the snow was a drag, but we had a great afternoon. I wonder if some of them will come upon these photos in twenty or thirty years and marvel at the youth, vigour and beauty the camera captured in them on this day.
Check out Rob Ewart’s outstanding photos of the day:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rewart/4397837947/in/set-72157623383980467/
the Walnut Diary 