Tapped Pt 3

When I get close, I can see that the pails are mostly on. That's the best part.

All around the spigots there are stains from wasted sap that has bled out and onto the ground.

A wound spilling out. Wasting away for no purpose. I have done a terrible thing.

I check the pails that remained fast and they do have some collected.
A cup or so in a few and three or four cups in others.
The first one, the one I did with the most care, has a couple of liters.
I reset a couple of pails. I return my collection to the sugar shack.

The stains on the trees are bright as flags of blood in my eyes
I drive past on my way to the radio station.
On the tree nearest the road, the sap is running so heavily it trickles
like the beginning of a mountain stream.

I have done a terrible thing.

***

Lincoln Manning runs Two Eagle Automotive which is next door to The Eagle 107.7 FM - Your First Nation Radio Station.

Lincoln has tapped trees and made his own Maple Syrup in the past. I tell him that I am looking for a plastic spigot of some kind that would be large enough to fit into the holes I bored into the trees. He smiles and steps out from behind his counter and walks to a shelf. He hold up an white spigot. He says that he sold a few for the very same purpose.

Lincoln does a fair business with the farmers, builders, fixers and general do-it-your-selfers from the non-Native communities in the area. They like the location and selection. They love the tax free for all business model.

I buy one that is the closest size I can approximate.

We talk some and when I ask if he thinks it will work, he smiles that smile that wishes you well and you can never tell.

***

After work, I stand at the tree with the white plumbing spigot in my hand. I see myself pushing and twisting and screwing with force this white plastic spigot threaded to dig and scrape into place. Plastic thread cut into hard maple. There is no way that is happening. It'll just make things worse.

Why did I make so many holes? What the hell were you thinking?
You have to be so right, right now.
Look at that. All of those trees. Those old trees.

I don't know if anyone else is seeing that. Nobody is saying anything.

Two weeks of this. Will it start to run faster.

I keep getting some though. I might be ready to boil this time tomorrow.

***

Science has not configured an accepted theory on why sap runs. It has to do with the extremes of temperature in spring in this part of Turtle Island. It has to be below freezing overnight and warm during the day.

The mechanics are agreed upon although there is no why. There are no leafs on the trees. Why does the tree require sugar and nutrients from the earth to be carried from top to bottom? What is it feeding.
Although it is the sugar that our bodies require, it is the minerals and other nutrients that are contained within Maple Syrup make it the true Superfood.


54 beneficial compounds in Maple Syrup

***

Tapped Pt 1

The trees had not been tapped for over 50 years. I had never done it. No one had done it where I grew up. There was no such thing as tapping trees in Northern Manitoba and anywhere else in Manitoba as far as I knew.

I had visited a Sugar bush to buy Maple syrup a few times since I moved to southwestern Ontario but never toured the bush itself. I don’t know why the sugar sap ran here and not elsewhere. I had never given it a thought. After I had seen my first black squirrel, I learned not to be surprised on the hemispheric shifts in flora and fauna from where I was from and my new home in the southernmost part of Canada.

   

25 years pass. The idea floats here and there. Talked about, mentioned in passing and forgotten. I can’t say for sure how it found a foothold. From where, what or whom came the inspiration. Maybe it was a dream or something other whispering in my ear at night.

Someone helped to nudge the notion along through the ether and into this world. All I know is that one day I knew that I was going to do it and I set about converting idea into action - dream into reality.

I ask my in-laws, the elders in the family, for direction. My father in law shows me the trees he had planted with his grandmother when he was a little boy. 

Five beautiful hard sugar maples that by his estimation must be around 70 years old, his mother had tapped those trees but he had never done it on his own. My mother in law, as well, remembers tapping trees as a child but had never done it when she grew up.

My wife told me she can remember being a little girl looking up at her grandmother as she went about tapping the trees. She remembers her grandmother’s kitchen filled with steam as the final water was boiled from the sugar and she remembers her grandmother holding out a spoon with a touch of liquid magic for her tongue.

That was the last memory.

***

I begin my research online, watching videos on youtube and tracking which one I felt was most helpful. When my in-laws are visiting one day I show them and they smile at the memories. “It looks simple enough,” I say. And they smile at that.

I visit a local sugar bush and ask if they have spiles, the metal funnel shaped spigots that you tap into the tree to drain the sap into the buckets. “We have plenty sitting in a bucket in a storage shed. We don’t do it like that anymore, these days we all use plastic tubing,” he says.

The modern sugar bush is no longer a group of trees with individual spiles and buckets.  The trees are tapped with plastic spigots that are connected to a series of tubes that run the sap from a number of trees and drain into a barrel. Some have it so automated that it drains into the barrel, into a filter, then right into a boiler that drips out syrup.

I am only going to tap a couple of trees, I tell him. I buy a dozen spigots, hooks, buckets and covers for 20 bucks. I am pretty sure that we both feel that we kind of ripped off the other guy.

When I get back, I share that I have the tools to get started. The next big part is to be sure that I have the right bit for the hand drill to make the holes for the spile.

My father in law takes that task, he asks me to leave a spile with him and he will figure it out. He’s a carpenter, I’m a writer and I am happy to have him figure that out. 

He calls me up about an hour later. He shows me a block of wood with a spigot sitting snugly inside. He has it marked with a piece of tape. “You have to go this deep, but no further,” he tells me. He is serious about this.

My father in law who is jovial at the best and worst of times is serious about business when it comes to his trade as a carpenter and as one who has lived much of his life dependent of Mother Earth to provide, he is serious about harvesting.

I take my granddaughter with me and we go to tap the first tree. I offer tobacco to the tree and to the Creator. I begin to crank the drill and the bit moves easily through the bark and the first layer of flesh but I struggle when I enter the meat of the tree. They don’t call it hard Maple for nothing.

I pause, reset my feet and hands and then begin to crank again. I wobble a bit but I keep going until I hit my mark.The clear liquid begins to leak out the hole. Excellent.

I take the spigot and I tap, tap, tap and then I see a drop of liquid come out the end. That’s it. I put the hook on the spigot and hang up my pail. We hear the tinny plink as the first lonely drop hits the bottom of the pail.

I look at my granddaughter and say, “looks like we are in business, my girl.” She beams her big warm smile.

We do it three more times, two spigots on two trees in total. I am getting weaker as I go along and truth be told, I start to hurry. The last couple holes require more stopping, more resetting of the feet and hands. When I tap these spigots in, they don’t fit snugly.

I know right away that this is going to be a problem. My only comfort is that I don’t know what I’m doing right so there’s a chance, that I don’t know what I am doing wrong.

As I prepare the report for my wife, I realize that I have just made a partnership with the trees and I have no idea what that means and how long it will last. For some reason I thought that I could give it a go, see what happened and if it didn’t work out; I could just stop.

I tell my partner, “I’ve just started a ceremony in which I don’t know what will happen and I don’t know how or when it will end. As soon as I put my tobacco down and put holes in those trees, I made a commitment to honor that ceremony until the sap is finished running. I didn’t realize that until it was done.”

I don’t sleep well. I’m bothered by the fact that the last two holes I drilled were obviously too big, the early spring weather echoes my unease.  The winds blow hard and steady all night long.

Tapped Part 2

I was wrong about the Lone Ranger

A little while ago I tweeted the cover of Rolling Stone magazine featuring Johnny Depp in Tonto costume and make and words like "Johnny Depp strikes a "I can crap out Native American stereotypes as easy as this" kind of thing. It was funny enough, but it was mostly bitter.

I had seen the commercials for Lone Ranger . I thought the movie looked horrible. In the sense that every movie looks horrible these days. Things are blowing up and flying at you from this future or that past and everything in between. All in stimuli crushing 3D.

Lone Ranger seemed to be another in a line of Depp Films that for me includes all the Pirate sequels, Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows that left me cold. Yet, the box office success for these films other than Shadows have been astronomical.

I was trying to remember the last time I had enjoyed Depp in a performance. It would have to be Sleepy Hollow, if you don't include Rango. He is one of the great actors of this generation and I no longer anticipated any of his work. I watched some of all of his recent films and it is not for me although I am looking pretty harshly at Tim Burton who also lost me after Sleepy.

Then I read about Depp getting paid $65 million for some of these films, maybe more and it just seems crazy. I thought if Young Depp could travel to the future would he kill Old Depp. I asked myself the same question a few years back when I was working in Ottawa, I didn't work out well for me.

Then there was The Tonto thing. The talking Tonto thing. The monotone monosyllabic Tonto thing. Where you got the feeling that the Lone Ranger considered Tonto only slightly more intelligent than Silver.

What is Tonto? It is not a Native American trope although we like to see it that way. He is the stereotypical other who helps the White protagonist for no other reason other than he is White. A dynamic which appears over and over again in American and Canadian popular culture.

He is also Native American and through a history that began with a radio show and continued onto movie newsreels, comic books, television and film; Tonto has become the single most enduring fictional Native American character in history.

Why would Depp who claims Native American ancestry, who directed a Native American themed film "The Brave" in his debut as a director and who starred in one of the most critically acclaimed films of recent years with a Native American theme "Dead Man" take this job?

Why in the world would Depp take on the most stereotypical Native American characters in all of popular culture? Why? Why? Oh, yeah. $65 million dollars.

So, I wasn't going to see it. I was going to mock the movie in advance and that was it. But, I did see it with only minor protests. My family was visiting from out West we had planned to see a comedy but all films were sold out. It was cheap Tuesday. The only film available was Lone Ranger. "All right, I will go. And I promise not to complain loudly, yell at the screen or laugh inappropriately as dramatic scenes that are not working".

The film reset the Tonto character as someone who is outside of his own world. He doesn't' have a tribe. He grew up alone obsessed by both vengeance and guilt. He isn't a Sidekick. He is someone into whose story the Lone Ranger enters.

Depp may be mugging to the camera and eating scenery like the shark in Jaws but in the Native American history of the clown and the Trickster it is absolutely what the performance requires. When an actor goes over the top it is often labelled a Vanity performance and when you take producer credit the whole film become a Vanity Project. There is are scenes early in the film that blow that notion up and ones that caused a bigger audience response that any of the special effects.

Armie Hammer the actor playing the Lone Ranger cuts an imposing 6' 4". Depp is not Hollywood short, but he is regular people short. Those scenes where he is walking side by side with Hammer sometimes with the camera shooting them from above. He looks really, really short. In one scene Tonto is referred to a "crazy little Indian".

This is not how it is done in Hollywood. No one calls Tom Cruise short.

Height has always been the greatest special effect ever created by Hollywood. It's like he's saying how can you trust Hollywood to tell you history when the whole thing is smoke a mirrors.

When the film starts to drift into Native American fantasy and a character is revealed to be a cannibalistic Windigo you wonder once again if the stereotypes of old Hollywood are creeping into the film. Spoiler alert, it turns out that some people are just evil.

It is all splash and entertainment and it is all of little consequence. Yet, the speech that matters, the most heartfelt oration of the movie comes from Chief Ten Bears, played by Saginaw Grant. There is no Tonto speak from the Native American actors. It is the most real thing in the film. It is a completely authentic and exists uniquely in the landscape of contemporary cinema.

If Depp's star power and all the smoke and mirrors in Hollywood can get you to hear that speech that that is the only thing that matters. That is not vanity, that is the heart and soul that still exists in one of Hollywood's biggest stars. '