Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [130]
“This’ll at least double your flows,” Bill says. “People think it’s sucking the sap from the trees, but that’s not really right. What makes the sap flow usually is a pressure differential between the tree’s interior and the open air, made by the shift from warm to cold and back to warm again. The sap just wants to go where there’s less pressure, so we lower the pressure with the vacuum. Each tree, individually, is just drip . . . drip . . . drip. But look here—you couldn’t get more flow than that with a water nozzle opened wide up.”
The system does mask the character of the individual trees, with those giving eight gallons a day pouring into the same lines as the poor ones that should probably be thinned out. And Bill loves the look of buckets hanging on trees; losing that is probably his biggest regret about putting in the lines. Still, if you try to imagine running three thousand buckets back to the car from maybe twenty-one hundred trees scattered all over the Connecticut countryside, it’s easy to see why he put in the system. Of course, the lines don’t eliminate work; just stringing them was a major undertaking in itself. Now they need regular flushing with boiling water. Squirrels and fisher cats (like minks on steroids, Bill says) will gnaw through for the sap, sending him and Amy out to bind and splice and fix it all.
“When the temperature’s in the twenties at night, we all celebrate,” he says. “Then it hits the forties the next day, and, man, you’ve got a gusher going. It gets so we can’t keep up, running back and forth to the holding tanks with the truck. It gets real hectic around here around tapping, and once the flow starts, it’s usually a good eighteen- or twenty-hour day. But you can’t cry about it—if you’ve got a good run going, you can make twenty thousand dollars’ worth of syrup in a day, enough to carry you through all the down months. There’s no tomorrow during a good run; you just have to be ready to go.”
Erik and I are staying at a bed-and-breakfast, a 1740s farmhouse with a long hill behind it. The owners let us use their toboggan. Erik is new to snow; after his first run, he tosses handful after handful into the air. “I throw it up to see it sparkle!” he yells. “To celebrate!” I throw a handful; it sprinkles over his face. “How do you get it so high?”
In his Autobiography, Twain wrote that he didn’t fear annihilation; before he was born, he’d spent all of eternity in that condition. That’s an overwhelming but oddly comforting thought—trying to remember the years before you were born is like a Zen koan. But it’s sad to think that Twain often went further, not only coming to terms with his mortality but seeing in it a great blessing; in one agonizing passage, he declared that he would not restore a single friend or family member to life. “The most precious of all gifts,” he declared, “that which makes all other gifts mean and poor,” is that of death. He’d sustained terrible losses; they must have been made more unbearable by his rich memory, by a life spent looking back and back and back.
Still, I’m selfish enough to want the joyful Twain, the vibrant Twain, smoking his cigar and munching on boiled eggs in a stagecoach descending through the mountains or feeling “sweet to all the world” as he feasted on fresh milk and berries. I’m selfish enough to want the Twain a friend watched chasing driftwood beside a river—throwing up his hands ecstatically, yelling when the wood went over the falls—and who later said he hadn’t been so excited in three months. I’m selfish enough to wish that