There were few signs of spring in the Rosenberg Center attic on a February afternoon, in 2020, working a caretaking shift. Midwinter air passed in through the window panes in the loose boards of the old barn, and the grey of the sky outside came with it — resting in the corners of the dim room and in the colors of the galvanized metal buckets and aluminum spiles, which cluttered the floor. We were preparing the tools for maple sugaring, which marks the first rite of spring in Hopkins Forest, and across New England – the first harvest of the year, which comes before the snow has even gone, often before the beginning of daylight savings time.
It is those last days of winter, when the daytime temperatures climb towards the forties before freezing again at night, that provide the perfect conditions for sap to flow. The freezing and thawing builds up pressure in the maple trees and sap, a dilute sugar water, is drawn up from the roots towards the tree’s leaves. Tapped and boiled to a concentration of 66 percent sugar, sap becomes syrup. As we drilled taps into the ancient maples in Hopkins, hung buckets, split wood down into slivers to power the boiler, the first warm days approached. So much rests upon springtime, especially in Williamstown. I remember the sheer pleasure of the forest filled with the sounds of melting snow and birdsong, sounds joined by the chorus of sap dripping into buckets; the best thing of all about sugaring, though, is the deep amber smell of woodsmoke and maple, dirty and sweet, that rises from the sugarhouse into the air.
That spring was my first spent maple sugaring, but I grew up in New England and carried to the forest a reverence for the maple creemee, maple on oatmeal and pancakes. I had spent a summer farming, and in the walk-in fridge where we kept all the harvested veggies, there was always a gallon of milk topped off with a generous pour of syrup: maple milk, the best cure I could imagine for late summer heat. Even while I came to the forest knowing of its magic, ask any caretaker and they will tell you sugaring is one of the best parts of the job. There is little as pleasurable as being out to catch those first warm days when the sap begins to run — walking with the Wednesday crew up Northwest Hill Road, maples sheltering us with thin shadows cast from their bare arms, the sun singing on all the running snow.
The early spring of 2020, now a collective memory or darkness, was shaping up to be an incredible maple season. Some afternoons we would drive up with the truck to collect sap, and find the buckets overflowing, waterfalling their sap over their fronts and into the dirt below. When I moved home in mid March, I brought with me a little 8 oz. jug of forest syrup which stayed in my pantry towards the coming of summer — savored on oatmeal and cherished in yogurt — a reminder of work interrupted, sap left unboiled and a season of caretaking come to an early end.
Of course the maples have a perfect knowledge of their own season, and their own cycle, and their own healing. Neither the pandemic nor the lack of student caretakers stopped the coming of spring. But, removed from the forest last March, the absence of the caretakers still caused an interruption, pausing a relationship with the trees even as they continued. Robin Wall Kimmerer, speaking of maple sugaring in Braiding Sweetgrass, writes that indigenous teaching instructs that while “one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us…it is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness” (p. 69). I am a remote student this semester, and although living in the Berkshires, I’m not working in the forest.
One Saturday in late April, I hiked up Mt. Prospect off the side of Greylock. Driving from the valley that holds Williamstown, everywhere buds were opening in yellow and green. In and out of clouds and wind, the sun stroked all the colors into a current of spring, running in the gullies alongside the road, in the tiny blossoming leaves. On the top of Prospect, though, there was snow on the ground and the trees were bare, stony. I looked across the valley, where Williamstown rested like a puddle of springtime green, towards the Taconics. The color green was pushing up from the valley, pulled like sap along the bare grey hills. There is peace in knowing that these natural cycles are going forward when so much else has not, but that also tells only half the story. For me caretaking is about meeting the other half, practicing investment and gratitude, and never assuming inevitability. Even though, this whole year, nothing has truly been on hold, I have high hopes for yet another season, and one where I might be able to come closer to the maples and the caretakers that I left so long ago.
— Gavin McGough, Williams ’22
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