As a kid in the Finger Lakes, I helped my family make maple syrup. We had about 20 large, beautiful maple trees along the county road we lived on, and the second spring we lived there, my mother got the bright idea to tap them. That meant my dad tapped them, my sister and I collected the sap, and my mother boiled the sap on the kitchen’s electric stove. After burning out all four stove elements and watching the wallpaper peel off, she decided to take a different approach. The second year my father still tapped, my sister and I still collected sap. But my brother, who just returned from a stint in the Air Force, got to boil the sap on a fireplace in the yard. I think we ended up with a couple of gallons of smokey yet delicious syrup for our efforts.

Fast forward 50 years, and Phyliss and I thought we’d try it ourselves. With memories of the burned-out elements and peeling wallpaper, I knew a couple of things NOT to do. We tapped 40 trees, hung plastic milk jugs and collected the sap in five-gallon buckets that we hauled with a sled. We boiled on a cinder block fireplace in the yard and made seven gallons of the same smokey syrup as I did in my childhood.

In 2013 we built a sugar shack, tapped 200 trees, and ran tubing down the slopes of Dewey Mountain to our 275-gallon tote that was on a trailer at the bottom of the mountain. The next year we tapped out (both literally and figuratively) the trees with 400 taps. Five years later I ran the tubing a half mile under two roads and one driveway, through four different property owners, directly to the sugar shack. No more trucking sap.

People are impressed with my 400 hundred taps until I tell them about Cornell’s Uihlein Sugar Maple Field Station in Lake Placid’s 5,000 taps, or South Meadow Farm’s 10,000 taps. They’re really impressed when I tell them about the Forest Farmers up near Lyon Mountain’s nearly 200,000 taps. The Forest Farmers make over 1,000 gallons of syrup an hour. That’s probably more than I’ll make in my lifetime. On a good year, my sap, along with contributions from three or four other ambitious folks, produces close to 90 gallons of syrup.

Jack Drury bottling syrup at the Mark Twain sugar shack. (Provided photo — Jack Drury)

Since I grew up in farm country, I know the risks of farming well. I admire farmers’ hard work but never wanted to be one. Weirdly now I am … sort of.

This is the first year I’ve asked myself how many more years I’m going to do this. I love snowy winters, but this year slogging around the slopes of Dewey Mountain in snowshoes, through two feet of snow to tap trees, got very old very fast. People think making syrup is hard, but they’re wrong. The hardest parts are cutting firewood, hiking up and down the slopes, tapping trees and maintaining the sap lines.

Once the trees are tapped and the sap lines are set, all I have to do is wait for the sap to get through the lines to my sugar shack on the shore of Lower Saranac Lake. Our sugarbush is on the northwest slopes of Dewey Mountain. What does that mean? It means that the snow melts later, the sap lines thaw out later, and the sap arrives later than at my fellow sap collectors’. For example, this season Walt Linck, whose lines face south, had 300 gallons of sap before I had one drop. Finally, when things thawed out on the north slopes, I left him out in the cold. I just had to trust the weather.

To be a semi-serious maple producer, you had better be a problem solver as well, because new problems arise daily. This year, the first problem was my vacuum pump died. The pump helps suck the sap the half mile from the sugarbush to the sugar shack. It took me a while to figure out the gearbox had a stripped gear. I tried ordering a new gearbox from the manufacturer, but was informed that it would take four weeks for the part to be shipped from Japan. The maple season would be over by then, so I searched eBay and thought I found a replacement. It had the same part number. But though I got the right motor, I got the wrong gearbox.

The sap was flowing, and I was worried it wouldn’t make it to the shack. There was more than a 100-foot elevation drop, but I was worried that the few spots where the sap line went uphill would have prevented it from getting to the shack. I shouldn’t have. The Romans had it figured out when they built the aqueducts. They made the water go uphill by creating an inverted siphon. In my case, unbeknownst to me, it occurred naturally. One morning after a sleepless night worrying that the sap wasn’t going to make it to the shack because of my broken pump, I entered the shack to find my 275-gallon tote overflowing. I had never collected that much sap in such a short period of time. So much for needing the pump. But watching that liquid gold spilling onto the ground was like when my high school girlfriend broke up with me … heartbreaking.

The results of a day’s work. (Provided photo — Jack Drury)

It’s been a long, hard maple season, but I’m not complaining. When I was just starting out, I traveled around to different maple producers and pestered them with questions. Without exception, they were patient, friendly and helpful. One old guy near Norwood (Old guy? He was probably younger than I am now) emphasized one thing: “You’re going to find making syrup an incredibly enjoyable social experience.” I pondered that for a nano-second. Social experience wasn’t on my list of reasons for making maple syrup. But he was right. Strangers find us on Google maps, and we get to meet people from the Netherlands to New Zealand. Then I have my sap collecting colleagues like Christian Wissler and his BOCES students, Josh Trombley, and the aforementioned Walt Linck, who bring me thousands of gallons of sap. It allows me to make nearly twice as much syrup and besides that, provides the additional social experience the old timer told me about.

In addition to those guys, there are the additional regulars who stop by in the early evening with a bottle of bourbon or rum and a bag of ice. Phyliss provides some orange slices, and I provide the maple syrup, and while we solve the world’s problems, we learn what friendship is all about.