First Gather

I arrived home at 3-ish yesterday afternoon, strung out from the juxtaposed sensations of hurtling through the sky and the physical stagnation necessitated by air travel. Leaving the small bubble of my life is always shocking; one could forget (as I do) what has happened to wide swaths of America’s landscape, and particularly those swaths extending from our urban centers. Traveling for dozens of miles past a seemingly endless array of convenience stores, fast food franchises, chain hotels, and shopping centers, the traffic an equally endless flow of color, sound, and smell is not something I experience very often.

I can never help but wonder what used to exist in these places, what sort of plants and animals have been displaced by our need for discount electronics, premium unleaded, and 99-cent cheeseburgers. And I cannot help but believe that over time the body and mind eventually become if not immune, than at least inured to this landscape of endless commerce and concrete until one no longer thinks about what might once have lived in these places. And if no one thinks of such things, no one cares of such things, and no one is forced to confront one’s own role in the tragedy unfolding just beyond their windshield. Or perhaps it’s just that one no longer sees any hope for one’s own survival outside the teeming mess of it all. To some extent or another, we’re all complicit. We’re all dependent.

Enough of that. It was good to pull back down our driveway, which is still covered in snow and ice, though finally thawing a bit under the high sun. Within a half-dozen minutes of exiting the car, I’d shucked my one set of presentable other-world clothes and donned my usual shit-stained garb and had embarked on evening chores which, in my excitement to be sprung free of vehicular travel, I began approximately two hours earlier that normal. But this was good, for it allowed me to finish by four, which furthermore allowed me a solid hour-and-a-half of bucking and splitting firewood before dinner. Three minutes in, and I was down to a tee shirt. Given the still abundant snow-pack, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, but spring has begun in earnest.

This morning, I gathered the season’s first sap, pulling the utility sled down Melvin’s field to the big maples that define our shared boundary. Our little sugaring operation is an absurdity, really: We hang about 65 buckets, and the most productive trees are more than a quarter mile away, necessitating the hauling of hundreds upon hundreds of gallons of sap across the sags and hummocks of Melvin’s hay field. This year will be more challenging than usual, given the snowpack, and if I’m to be entirely honest, there comes a point every sugaring season – generally when I’ve slipped and fallen while pulling 150-pounds worth of sap and am powerless to halt the sled or cart (precisely which depends on how much snow is on the ground) as it slides backward under it’s own power, retreating across all those precious inches of effort I’ve just expended – when I seriously question the wisdom of it all.

But this morning I did not slip, and the sun felt good on my face, and Rye walked behind me, keeping an eye on the full buckets in the sled in case they began to lean. And though I guess it was sort of hard, and though we’d gathered only enough sap for a pint, maybe a pint-and-a-half of syrup, and though the whole process had taken more time that I felt as if I could spare, and certainly more time that anyone could reasonably consider worth expending on a pint of syrup, never mind that we still had to actually make the stuff, the memory of pavement and speed and all the things that don’t exist anymore was still thick in my head.

You know what? I was grateful for that. I really was. Because it reminded me of what’s really absurd, and I’m pretty sure it’s not my son and me, trudging across a Vermont hayfield on a morning in early April, the muscles in my shoulders pulled taut by the weight of sap and sled, little beads of sweat rising on my forehead.

And then Rye started pushing on the back of the sled, and we really made some ground.