Beltane Planting Moon
Back home from the northshore, the 26th annual Woolly retreat. Tom Crane rented a large house on Cascade Beach Road, its backyard sloped down to the gray waters of Lake Superior. A knotty pine interior, very nice, but almost a cliche, held several bedrooms a large open kitchen and an enormous living room with cathedral windows, a floor to ceiling stone fireplace and a loft.
This retreat was different. It was slower, less structured, far less structured and easier. We spent time together as friends, heard each other in small groups and made treks into Grand Marais, Tofte and Lutsen lodge for meals.
On Saturday afternoon we met with a friend of Mark Odegard’s, Tom Peterson, a former DNR official in charge of the Northshore from Two Harbors to the Canadian border and inland several miles. After we talked with him for a a bit, we folded ourselves into three vehicles and drove up the Caribou Trail, to Honeymoon Trail. After a mile or two on the Honeymoon trail, basically a dirt road through unoccupied forest at the top of one of the Sawtooth Mountains, we found Wild Mountain Syrup.
Formerly a maple sugarer in the Taylors Falls area, this guy heard of a plot of a land, 320 acres, filled with sugar and red maples. He drove up, saw it and bought it. He now taps 19,000 trees each year and boils 40 gallons of sap for every one gallon of maple syrup. He houses his operation in buildings which he dismantled from Almelund, Minnesota and moved piece by piece for reassembly. They are square log and plaster constructions from Swedish farms.
Contemporary maple sugaring technology bypasses the iconic pails on the trees in favor of linked runs of blue plastic tubing, possibly as much as 100 miles of it at Wild Mountain Syrup. A vacuum draws the sap out of the trees, down through the tubing where it flows into collecting drums and is then disbursed among concentrating tanks, large, open stainless steel vats.
This day the sap flowed through the tubing and out into the collecting drum like water with a tap turned on high. It gushed out.
Later in the evening we stood around a fire on the shore of Lake Superior and gave to the fire matters we wanted to disperse from our lives. I threw in a piece of birch bark on which I had written, my second phase man. I marked a change on this retreat, a clear and final movement into this new time, this phase whose end only death itself can bring.
Later yet we gathered around a poker table, six of us Scott, Bill, Stefan, Charlie, Mark and myself and played poker. We laughed, bet and had that easy friendship men can have around a card table. An important moment for the Woollies.
We drove back out of the gray and cold of the Northshore, no sun the whole time, to a sunny warm day. Seemed right.
