Adjusting

On the northern shore of Lake Huron on the Canadian side rests the largest fresh-water island in the world: Manitoulin. And on this island grumbled the orneriest old salt who "Ever retired from water to land."

On his own fishing boat, Bill McPhearson was Captain, First Mate, Crew, Cabin Boy, Net Setter, Net Hauler, Anchor Boy, Dock Boy, Navigator, and Owner, all in one. Consequently, he did everything perfectly -- at least according to him. But when the setting, hauling, and boat-handling became burdensome, he had to surrender and settle inland.

Bill was not unaccustomed to land. Reluctantly he putted around his ten-acre plot weeding the garden, cutting, hauling, and splitting wood to keep the old range going. Not all was bad: he enjoyed going to town to sell eggs and chat with the locals. But he did this only from necessity, for his sole, true love was the water: he and Lake Huron were one.

When Bill retired he couldn't stay on the land for long. Occasionally he went to the wharf and helped the nephew of his neighbor, Keith Larson, with his boat. So for the first two years of his retirement he spent much of his days on or close to the water. But as his strength wavered, he couldn't help much with the nets swollen with Lake Trout and Whitefish so he made himself useful by running the motor, mending nets, and adding the knowledge he'd gained from decades in the commercial fishing trade.

At seventy-eight, his health lessened noticeably. Now he found he spent more time on the land than on the lake. Once a solitary perfectionist used to considerable physical exertion, now he was landlocked, chained to the solid, immovable earth, relatively inactive, in a house. Moreover, there were all those people around him, andall the time. He changed from a soft-spoken worker to a grumbling observer.

His wife of nearly sixty years thought one way to ease the tension was to install a telephone. Since Mildred at The Corners had taken on the task of operating the switchboard, Hazel could talk to her or any of the neighbors with ease, so maybe husband Bill could while away some time swapping fishing and sea stories with his friends. But it didn't work out. To the old fisherman the phone was only a nuisance. He called it a squawk

box. It was busy exactly when he wanted to use it either by some confounded woman gabbing about canned tomatoes or by some grandchild bored by the last soap opera.

The last time anyone saw the phone was when salty Grandpa tried to call Hank Gowan to check on his catch and Dot Beringer was squawking away with Ethel Danieison about some tom-foolery having to do with a prom dress or the like. That was too much. So he ripped it off the wall, threw it through the screen door, and proceeded to kick it around the entire perimeter of his cursed, in-land, ten-acre prison.

His neighbors weren't altogether surprised: they'd heard him bellow orders to the members of the extended family that sprawled throughout the ten-bedroom house: sons, daughters, grandkids, nephews, nieces, an in-law or two, and more than one cat. The house was a menagerie of people, but also of architectural styles. Each time a branch of the family decided to establish roots, it added a bedroom, so in time a red section jutted here, a green addition blossomed there, and on the south side sprang an apartment whose wall boasted thirty feet of double-insulated glass. But until the phone incident, Bill's outbreak had only been potential.

During those two-to-three years of transition from watered self-employment to land-slave, the neighbors felt increasingly sorry for Hazel. They wanted to communicate their sympathy and knew she did too; they just didn't know how to deal with the grumbling, landlocked fisherman.

Now, late Winter on Manitoulin was the time the Maple sap ran. When the great tree's fingers rise to meet the warming sun and the feet wade in now-thawing water, when the geese first return and the sugar snow dominates the North. When the minus-twenty nights left and the days sparkled into the plus thirties and even forties, that was when the farmers fled the winter-bound houses and went about the year's first out-door labor. A labor of pure love, a love that yielded a supply of the liquid gold, their home-harvested Maple syrup. This would be the time to get crabby Bill out of the house.

Now, Tom Larson had fished Lake Huron just like his friend, so the two could talk. But unlike Bill, Tom had planned for his landlocked life. He kept a small boat to putt around in so he was on the water whenever he wanted. When the ice set in, he found things to keep busy. He spent two hours a day splitting wood in the shed he'd insulated well enough that he could even remove his wool overcoat in sub-zero weather.

In the Spring, he worked in the Sugar Bush, Summers in the garden,

and Autumns found him back cutting cordwood, the very wood he would spend the cold months sitting by as the logs crackled in the fireplace. But he spent his wood lot hours with the primary purpose of preparing for the great Spring sap run. And as he watched the logs snap and crackle in the fireplace, he would think of boiling the fifty gallon drums-full of sap down to one perfect gallon of liquid gold.

Everyone in Poplar believed that the work kept Tom Larson downright jovial, while Bill, without any purpose but to bemoan having lost the sea, only grumbled. So when Tom asked Bill if he wanted to talk fishing and that turned to the sugar run, Bill McPhearson was hooked, gaffed, and hauled in as naturally and effortlessly as any Manitoulin Whitefish.

Bill and Tom worked well together: they were both used to physical labor and being silent. True, the four-foot Birch and Beech logs weren't fish, but handling them help make the long days and nights it took to produce the loved syrup enjoyable.

This year the work entailed more than usual because Tom was building a new sugar. The two also had to scrape the cement-solid carbon off the eight-foot evaporating pans. And because the spiles and pails were in bad shape, Tom and Bill spent an entire day going to Sudbury replacing the old equipment. They also put four new fifty-gallon drums in Tom's pickup, drums that would hold the sap they gathered from the shiny, galvanized pails. They also got new tires for the wagon to haul the tanks, for the snow in the sugar bush had compressed, melted, and sublimated enough that the big sled would not have to be used.

Once things were set, the two retired fishermen did what all the farmers with sugar bushes do in March. Tom drilled the holes in the pock-scarred trees, Maples that had been bled of its sap for over twenty years. Bill followed with a bucket of spiles which he pounded into the holes. Tom then hung a pail onto the hook that dangled from the funnel-shaped spile, carefully putting a metal lid over the top; they didn't want rain to fall into the sap diluting it; they also wanted to attract as few moths as possible.

The work was both invigorating and tiring. Being the first full chore of the year, they found themselves frequently sitting on the end of the wagon drinking green tea from their thermoses and nibbling at Cadbury chocolate bars. They tapped four hundred trees that Spring and were tired when they parked the old Massey-Furgeson tractor next to the brand new sugar shack. While the sap slowly dripped into the pails, they readied the fire base under the two evaporating pans by walling a pit with old bricks. Tom

opened the topnotch in the shed's roof to ensure the water vapor would escape. He was proud of the shed he and his friend had made, while Bill was happy just to be out of the house and doing something -- anything. That was the last night the two slept in a bed in a house for three weeks.

The second morning the men woke to a perfect, sap-gathering day: it had reached twenty-eight degrees overnight and was now thirty-two. The day promised to be in the high thirties, ideal for the sap to run down the phloem of the grand Maple trunks. Bill was at Tom's place by seven in the morning, sitting on the wagon next to the four new drums. He bounced slowly from tree to tree emptying the full-to-overflowing pails, bucket by bucket, into the drums. Tom putted to the sugar shack where the two filled the evaporators with the fresh sap. They poured the remainder into the awaiting barrels that sat close to the fire stalls.

Then they performed a back-woods ritual: they let out soft ah-ha's as they lit the awaiting birch bark . The black smoke rose, flowing up the pipe at the end of the stalls, huffing into the crisp, blue sky. The two smiled, knowing their vigil had begun. After piling the Tom-split logs strategically so they wouldn't smother the bark-kindling beginning, and confident the fire was roaring, the two men assumed their positions on the tractor and wagon and returned to the bush.

They emptied the tree-hanging pails into the drums, dumped the contents into the barrels at the shack, refilled the evaporator, carefully stirred so the sap wouldn't burn, stoked the fire with new logs, then returned to the woods. They did this for three weeks. Except at night when the sap didn't run or when the liquid in the evaporators had thickened enough to remove to a second, smaller finishing pan. Then they refined the boiling-off process by filtering the product to remove any ashes and sediment.

The operation was crude compared to the big syrup operations that used propane under highly controlled conditions. But the men of Manitoulin, like so many rural families of the Canadian and American Northeast, had been making syrup this way for so long that their end-product was every bit as pure and delicious as produced by the most sophisticated equipment. To the locals it was better since they had made it.

When the syrup from the finishing pan had reached the proper specific gravity so its viscosity was just what Tom and Bill wanted, they poured the golden liquid into a ten-gallon milk pail. They placed the can in the far corner of the shed so it had absolutely now way of getting upset. That can

held treasure as great as the jewels of any lordly king.

And so the two worked, taking turns stoking the fire at night, sleeping on cots near enough to keep warm, a quiet team that gathered sap, poured, stirred, and transferred to finishing pan and milk can. It was a grand and glorious time for the ex-fishermen as well as the members of the McPhearson house who had a reprieve from Grandpa Bill's eternal grumbling.

Halfway through the run the sky clouded over. Nights held at near-forty. It sprinkled. All bad signs for syrup makers. And the snow thawed to only patches on the forest floor when the full run-off began. Nature responded to the nights and days of near-thirty by increasing the flow of sap, but she shortened the season. The take was poor. Usually Tom Larson ended with two, ten-gallon milk cans of syrup: this year he could cart home only one.

But the men weren't discouraged. Theywereseasoned fishermen conditioned by undulating good and lesser catches. To them, the process was more important than the final outcome. They rejoiced when in the woods, hearing Chickadees, returning Seagulls, the wind whistling through the trees, stoking the fire, finishing the syrup, sleeping in the hand-made sugar shack, just as they had when on the water. Then it was not the catch that counted but the waves splashing against the boat, hauling the nets, throwing fish into bins, filleting trout, watching the sun rise over the rippled surface of the Great Lake. Whether on lake or land, they were part of the whole.

Only this light can an outsider understand what happened to Bill McPhearson and Tom Larson. When the trees had refused to yield any more sap, the two made their last round with the Massey-Furgeson. This time without the fifty-gallon drums and not to gather sap but to collect spiles, pails, and lids. Tom and Bill carefully washed each part in the run-off creek behind the shack. As the equipment dried in the Spring-warming sun, they doused the fire. They washed the evaporator pans thoroughly, scraping off the accumulated carbon. After tipping the large, rectangular pans upside down, they folded the cots, rolled the bedding, and readied the place for nest year's run. This year had not been great, but the time spent in the bush had compensated for it. And they did have ten gallons of pure, thick, golden, delicious Maple syrup to show for it.

Tom Larson had bought the can at a dairy farm auction a mile north of Poplar. It had held the products of over a decade of sap runs. Now the

two workers carried it by the double-handles, carefully placing it outside the shed. Since the snow had melted completely and all water had run off the land, Tom easily backed up the old Massey-Furgeson. But the wagon was long so he couldn't see exactly where the end was in relation to the shed. Or the pail.

The two heard a tink. Then a thud. Then the flow of liquid.

Tom and Bill stared at the pail as the golden liquid, the result of three works of long, hard work glazed the ground. Every drop was lost.

An expert in psychology would have been fascinated surmising what reactions the two workers might have. Would Mr. Larson fold into a blubbering pool of tears? Would Mr. McPhearson throw a temper tantrum like his wall-ripped telephone show? But neither happened. Instead, the two ex-fishermen simply stared blankly at the ground.

Then Tom bent over, stuck his index finger into the viscous syrup, and licked. Bill did the same. Then Tom said, "Not much of it, but it was a good batch."

Bill responded just as evenly, "Yeah, nothing wrong with that," and both smiled at each other.

When Bill McPhearson returned to the sprawling house over-filled with relatives he didn't grumble. Everyone was relieved. It was good that the land-locked ex-fisherman had gotten out and worked. There was therapy that Spring. And to Bill's amazement it hadn't happened on the water.