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maybe ten feet between each trunk. Bill thinks they were planted as part of a farmstead, possibly that of one Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton. Knowlton was the founder of Knowlton’s Rangers, the precursor to the U.S. Army’s intelligence service; he fought at Bunker Hill and died on September 16, 1776, at the Battle of Harlem Heights (his son survived the fight). Probably Knowlton never got to enjoy his trees, either for their sugar or merely as grand ornaments along the lane. But we can enjoy them now, over two hundred years later, on a snowy March morning. And if Knowlton sugared, his scar wood might still be here in the old, wild maples, not to be exposed until the trees fall and are cut open. Then someone might see his old auger holes in cross section, buried under more than two hundred new rings of growth.

In 1832 the appropriately named Ethan Greenwood wrote to the New England Farmer, asking, “Why should men delay to plant all sorts of good trees because they may not live to see them fully grown? What can a man do better on the face of the earth than to cultivate and beautify it? While ever ready to depart, the lover of beautiful trees should act as though he expected to live a thousand years.” Greenwood understood the wonder and generosity of planting trees, the way it both concedes mortality and comforts. But tending is beautiful and creative in its own way. If Bill owned this land, he’d tend the sugar bush, trimming back the understory and the weaker maples to give the best trees more light. Trees on open ground would crown lower and wider than those crowded in the forest, spreading up to eighty feet across. The light would touch more leaves, the trees make more sap, the sap perhaps run sweeter.

All Bill can do now is gather from the trees as they stand; he drills two inches into the nearest trunk. When he clears the wood, the hole wells with sap—it reminds me of sticking a finger into wet sand, the depression quickly filling with ocean water. As sap streaks from the hole, Bill hammers in a blue plastic spile, tapping just hard enough to create a good seal; the sap flows down the attached clear plastic line, dropping with tiny thumps into the bottom of a white bucket. He lets us do the next few. I drill, then Erik taps in the spiles, almost shuddering with excitement as sap fills the lines.

It’s beautiful. And it’s fun—but that’s because most of the work was done last week. At its height, sugaring is no more restful than any harvest. Tapping, cleaning, prepping, hauling, boiling—the urgent rhythms are more reminiscent of a fisherman hauling nets of schooling sardines than the quiet roadside stands you see in a Vermont autumn. What you see then is a sugar maker’s dormant period; the trees have made their summer starch and are yellowing, reddening, readying to sleep.

It’s all very benign; what we’re doing isn’t really much different from what the Iroquois or Algonquin would have done, cutting into the sapwood and letting a container fill. Even the switch to plastic buckets by everyone but hobbyists and Mennonites has something to recommend it, since lead can leach into sap from traditional galvanized pails. The path from stone ax, sap guide, and mocuck to power drill, plastic line, and bucket is a simple and direct one.

But our next stop, farther up the mountain, is something different. Beyond an ice-edged brook crossed by a single board, a spiderweb of black and white tubing winds from the back of a simple wooden shack and out of sight into the woods. Bill and Amy have hundreds of miles of line, all suspended four feet off the forest floor; most of their taps drain through the lines and into the shack’s vacuum system, one of the major innovations in modern sugaring.

It’s not that warm a day, maybe forty degrees at most, and last night it was in the single digits—exactly the kind of frustrating combination that freezes sap solid in the trees, without enough daytime heat to thaw it and let it flow. Still, the sap seems to want to run. Gravity alone has filled the long tubes—hundreds of yards in some cases—so