There are two times each year when smoke curls up from the woodlots of southern Michigan.  Once is in late summer when the mint crop is distilled into oil.  It is the other time, however, when maple sap is gathered that smoke is much more often seen and the activity is common across the northern tier of American states.

By definition, a sugar bush is a stand of maple trees, which is maintained for the purpose of producing sugar.  A growing number of rural property owners are getting into it, usually on a very small scale, harking back to one of the basics of their forefathers.

How long has this activity been a part of the American scene?

“No one really knows.” Says a farmer from the Okemos area who has been tapping maples with his family for a number of years.  “But there were sugaring activities in the country before European settlers came to these shores.”

His words seem convincingly born out by an Anishinabe tale my storyteller wife Shirley sometimes shares.  The Anishinabe lived in the Great Lakes Region and this story is attributed to the Ojibwa or Chippewa people.  Very briefly it goes like this:

Gitchee Manitou made things very easy for the people with lots of game and the weather was always good and the maple trees were filled with thick, sweet syrup.  All the people had to do to get the syrup was to break off a twig and collect it as it dripped out.

One day Manaboozho (trickster/hero of the Algonquin) went to see how the people were doing with their fishing, hunting, gathering and working in the fields.  But when he finally found them they were lying on their backs with their mouths open, letting the maple syrup drip into their mouths.  “This will not do,” Manabozho said.  “My people will become fat and lazy if they keep on living this way.”

So Manabozho brought huge baskets of water from the river and poured them into the tops of the maple trees until the water so thinned the syrup that it was only barely sweet to the taste.

“This is how it will be from now on, Manabozha said, so that if you want the sweet syrup you will have to work for it.  You will no longer grow fat and lazy and you will appreciate the maple syrup.  Also, it will only be available at a certain time of year.”

And that’s how it is to this day.

This account, told by Joseph Bruchac, is from his book “Native American Stories.”

I’m told the gathering for syrup is hard work.  Why would anyone want to go out early each morning in the snow and the wet, the mud and darkness?  Because of cabin fever, it’s the first outdoor activity after the long cold winter and people look forward to it.

Now from my farmer friend’s woodlot he can produce nine gallons of syrup per hour from three thousand taps.  Four hundred gallons of water are boiled off during each hour as well, allowing a distinctively sweet aroma to drift downwind from the operation in his shack.

And what’s a tap?  One spile (tap) is driven breast high into each tree twelve inches in diameter or more, two spiles in trees over sixteen inches in diameter, and three in twenty inches or more diameter trees.

This all works at its very best when night temperatures are in the twenties and day temperatures are in the forties, March 15^th to April 15^th in the usual period for sugar bush operations, and when the smoke curls sweetest from the woodlot!