Sugar Moon
By Ken Bora

Allow me to introduce myself, My name is Kenneth Bora and I am a Vermont Sugarmaker. My father Niles is a sugarmaker and his father Oliver was a sugarmaker. We have his old 2ft by 4ft flat pan hanging in the back of our sugarhouse along with many other artifacts of Vermont's agricultural past. The tradition goes back farther than that. I am of French Canadian decent and history tells us about the conquest and colonization of this continent by the Europeans. The Spanish slaughtered the native people, the English pushed them away, and the French embraced them. This said the French Canadians were the first of the European settlers that made sugar. While many of the early French settlers came to trade furs and convert souls those who attempted to live of the land quickly found themselves mimicking native ways. The soil and climate forced them to grow the same crops and hunt the same game the natives had come to depend on. Moose, Deer, porcupine, rabbit and beaver were the mainstay meats; Turkey, partridge and waterfowl were there poultry; corn, oats, beans, peas and barley served as staple starches; maple sugar was there sweetener. The average land concession for the French settler was 80 acres, of that two-thirds was commonly left as woodlot with maple trees carefully spared the axe to provide "sirop" and "sucre de e`rable". In preserving the sugar trees the French were a century ahead of the British colonist who settled the south. Along with maize and tobacco, maple sugar had its origin in native hands. The varied tribes of Quebec, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan all knew of this art. Where ever the white settler came in contact with the native people in a region where the maple tree grew they found sugar being made. This is how the white man learned the process. In a British Royal Society paper from 1685: "The savages of Canada, in the time that the sap rises in the Maple, make an incision in the tree by which it runs out and after they have evaporated eight pounds of the liquor, there remains one pound as sweet. The savages have practiced this longer than any now living among them can remember". Yet the tradition goes back farther than that. The French settlers who are in my own Maple family tree not only embraced the native people but married them and like many other Vermonters of French Canadian decent the native American people as well as the French European people make up my own history. The problem with the history of a people without a written language is that oral history quickly turns into mythology. The origins of sugaring in the northeast woods goes so far back into prehistory that by the time the first Europeans arrived with quill pens and foolscap, oil paints and canvas, to begin the written and illustrated history of this land, the natives could only say that maple sugar came from a time so long ago that its origins had been lost in the misty beginnings of the ancient tribes.

In place of fact, however, a myth about maple sugar has astonishing universality among the tribes of the northeast, in which the creator had at first made life altogether too easy for his people, like the garden of Eden in Christian belief, filling the maple trees with a thick sweet syrup that flowed year-round. (Much, in fact, as the denizens of urban America still believe it runs today.) According to legend, one day the mischief making Glooskap (variously known from tribe to tribe as Gluscabi, Kulo`scap, Manabozo, Odziho`zo or Djoka`besh) happens along and finds his village empty. The cooking fires are dead. The gardens are overgrown with weeds. Glooskap finally discovers his people in their maple grove, and there they lie- men, woman, children and dogs -eyes closed, letting the delectable syrup drip into their contented mouths. Having special powers, which he occasionally misuses, Glooskap brings fresh water from the lake in a birch bark bucket and rising above the trees fills them until the syrup runs thin and fast. Then he calls out in a very loud voice, awakening the people from their sugar induced sloth "Rise up People, the trees are no longer filled with the maple syrup the Creator gave you! Now there is only watery sap and it will soon run dry. You will have to hunt and fish and tend your gardens. The sap will run again, but only at the end of winter when game is scarce and the lake is still frozen and no crops grow. Then you can gather it in birch bark vessels like mine. You will have to gather firewood and heat round stones from the river and drop them into the sap to make it boil. It will turn into syrup but not for a long time. You will no longer be fat and lazy. You will once again appreciate this maple syrup that the Creator gave to you. This is how it is going to be", says Glookskap. And that as the native storytellers still say, is how it is for all of us to this very day. Although Yankee ingenuity may be a cliché, we have come a long way from Glooskap's method.

Almost immediately the French settler traded/introduced metal cookware to the process replacing the bark-boiling container. It was placed on the fire instead of hot rocks being put in the sap. Wooden buckets replaced the hewn sap caching troughs. The Shakers, renowned for their woodworking skills turned out white pine buckets by the thousands. Syrup is now the primary product of the sugar maker but in ancient times it was impossible to keep and except for what was consumed at the time of boiling and very shortly after, the entire crop was made into cake sugar which was easily stored in a food cache near camp, or grain sugar made by stirring the cooling syrup. We now have a true Maple industry with commercial evaporators fired by wood or oil. Plastic pipeline runs from tree to tree replacing buckets and new this year the smallest spout ever made allowing the sugar maker to do less damage to the tree with the smallest hole drilled ever. We are stewards of the forest protecting the Maple tree as we would our children from disease, misuse, over tapping, malnutrition and parasites.

As far as we have come, we still are the same as Glooskap's people. On this cold February day after I finish typing this in the comfort of a modern home on a personal computer I will go to the woods. I am getting ready to tap (the act of putting a hole in the tree). The forest is very quiet this time of year. As I work in the solitude of the snow covered forest with the sound of the woodpecker the loudest noise and the tracks of Deer, Turkey, rabbit and my own dogs the only think marring the blanket of snow I am reminded that the full moon in September is the harvest moon. The full moon in November is the Hunters moon. But the full moon in March in Vermont and throughout the northeast is the Sugar Moon, My favorite of all. As I labor I can feel the watchful eye of Glooskap and all the countless sugar makers before me looking down on me and a connection to the past that is not just about making syrup, but carrying on a tradition deeper in me than I could ever hope to describe with the written word. To the ancestors of mine who have walked these same forests from the time the glaciers last retreated I proudly say, I am a Vermont sugarmaker!

Ken Bora

(Email address furnished by Ken's request.)

The Bora's in front of their sugar house, with their three dogs.