Rolling On One

When we had the house inspected, the inspector told us we needed to put a fire door between the garage and the cellar. It’s required by building code and by insurance companies. The idea is that the fuel in a car (and other things that are likely to be in a garage, like a power lawn mower or chain saw) is a fire hazard, and if a fire starts out there you want to keep it out of the rest of the house.

It’s been on our mind. We made many phone calls to the Home Depot in Auburn and the new one in Windham and asked people in those stores and in the Lowe’s in Windham. Did we need to order door in a custom size, or was the rough opening big enough? Would it fit on top of the car, or did we need to rent a truck from the store? Joel had a wonderful time tearing down the casing around the doorway where the fire door had to go (what an opportunity! To be allowed to tear someone else’s house apart!) to make the rough opening big enough for the door. He and I set out to Auburn one night early in the winter but turned around because the fog looked too thick to want to drive that far. A week ago Matt and I finally went to the Home Depot in Windham and found a fire door. When the two of us picked it up, I really didn’t feel that I was holding up fifty pounds. The car roof rack is rated for 100 pounds. We bought the door, figured it could come home on top of the car, and had room in the back for a Weber grill.

Joel and I put the door up on Sunday. I won’t say there was nothing to it, but it was really not at all hard. Doors nowadays come with frames, already installed on hinges. I think it used to be very tricky to get hinges lined up properly, exactly vertical. If they weren’t perfect the door would always try to swing one way or another, or not close properly and need to be planed down a little on the top or bottom, or just bind on the hinges. These pre-hung doors still need to be installed with the hinges directly above and below each other, but you can adjust the unit as a whole rather than having to measure the hinge locations correctly the first time. The darn thing is up now:

It could use a casing on either side — but so could another door in the cellar. This is a major accomplishment! Thanks, Matt and Joel!

On Saturday (4/15) we went to the Denmark Sheepfest. It’s a small-scale event, as you would expect in as small a town as Denmark, Maine. The feeling was very different from the Gore Place sheep shearing event we went to last year. That one is more, “Well, Gore Place has a few sheep, and they have to be shorn, so we may as well make a big deal of it so city kids who never see a sheep can learn something.” The Denmark event is, “A lot of people around here have sheep to be shorn, so if we get together and publicize it, we can have some fun and maybe pull a few tourists in.” People seemed to be pitching in cleaning (“skirting”) the edges of the fleece; girl scouts or 4-H kids were selling food; and trucks with a couple of sheep in them were pulling up and driving off all the time.

I watched several sheep being shorn, start to finish. It was pretty surprising. First, the wool isn’t the same color all the way down. White sheep, I guess so, but the ones getting their haircuts while I was watching happened to be brown on the outside. That’s just bleached out from the sun. The wool might be black, grey, or even white when you looked at the fleece from the skin side. Or all of the above on the same animal. One of the sheep had mostly grey wool (from the skin side) but there was one area, where someone said the sheep had once been injured, that was dark black. I wondered if black sheep turn grey when they get older, like people’s hair. I don’t know. Secondly, a sheep is a lot smaller when it’s shorn than when it has its winter coat of wool on. It’s almost like the difference between a chicken with and without feathers. It’s not just the way it looks, either. The fleeces were weighing in around eight to eleven pounds. The sheep were probably not more than eighty pounds, and some more like forty. That’s eight to fifteen percent wool! With all the difference in size between the wooly and shorn animal, I admired the shearer’s ability to keep track of where the animal, as opposed to the wool, was.

Inside the Denmark Arts Center were vendors. As a crafts sale vendor myself, I’d say inside were a few more vendors than the space could really hold. I would have spent an hour more there looking around if we hadn’t been with Jared, David, Rachael, Millie, and Joel. As it was I got to say hello to Linda Whiting of Pinestar Yarns, Julia’s dyeing workshop leader; learn how to use a triangle frame loom (but I haven’t made one yet. Maybe next weekend? Probably not that soon) and buy two hanks of yarn:

This is from Montana, hand painted, bulky three-ply yarn. I’m thinking a hat on number 11s or 13s. It felt funny to buy yarn from Montana in Maine. At least it starts with M. But I couldn’t resist the color and feel.

This is more or less local, from Foss Mountain Farm in New Hampshire. The alpacas were there in Denmark, looking exceptionally cute and friendly. The first couple of yards of this will be just right, in color, weight, and fiber content, for a repair to the sweater that Charley got in Peru. After that, I don’t know. Maybe a scarf.

Millie, Joel, David, Rachael, and Jared were up in Casco with us last weekend. I’m not sure what I have of Jared after his baby picture in a pre-blog journal entry. Now, at 2 years and a couple of months, he gleefully says “cheese!” all by himself and mugs for a camera whenever one is pointed in his direction.

On April 8 Matt and I took our mountain bikes out for (what seems to me in my out-of-shape state as) a good long ride.

Back in the winter Joel and I had started out to get a fire door for the cellar on a very foggy evening. The map showed what looked like a dirt road, North Pine Hill Road, leading from Heath Road down to route 11. I started down it. A couple of hundred yards down it, if that far, it became obvious that it wasn’t much of a road, more of a four-wheel-drive vehicle trail maybe, probably blocked by fallen trees, certainly not where we wanted to drive on a foggy night when we didn’t know the road. Ever since then I’ve wanted to check it out by mountain bicycle.

The other name for mountain bike is “all-terrain bike”. What North Pine Hill Road is is terrain. It’s mostly a snowmobile trail, judging from the signs from the snowmobile club that we saw along it. It’s big rocks, steep hills (fortunately mostly downhill from where we were!), and mud puddles. I was huffing and puffing and calling for Matt to stop and wait every few minutes.

Halfway along the road there was a flooded area to the right. Logs and brush were piled up along the edge of the road. It was a beaver dam, right there along the road! We didn’t see a beaver lodge, but in the woods just past the dam was a six-inch-diameter stump that looked freshly gnawed.

I didn’t bring a camera, and I’m not sorry; it would have been too easy to fall and destroy it. Pictures would have been nice, though.

The trail came out first at someone’s driveway, then at a paved road that led down to downtown Webb’s Mills.

As you drive through Webb’s Mills on route 11 it looks like a wide place in the road. There are actually a couple of businesses, a community center, and a little park with a gazebo there.

We left our bikes outside the Webb’s Mills Variety Store and went in to look for a snack. The previous owners of our house had said that store made good pizza. We each had a slice, discussed the road we had come down with the people behind the counter, and felt much refreshed.

The store had a sign that looked like a serious threat to careless parents:

“Unattended children will be given an espresso and a puppy.”

On the way back from walking up Mayberry Highlands road (and George Hannon road, and back down Mayberry Highlands road) we saw a little bird with white on the sides of its tail. When it landed facing towards us we saw very fine streaking on the top part of the breast. We thought “vesper sparrow”, because that’s all we could think of (other than junco, which this wasn’t) that general size and shape with white outer tail feathers. The picture in the book matched what we saw. Though we used to think we saw them the first year we were birding, we found out that they’re pretty scarce, and I can’t remember ever having had a good look at one. So maybe that was a life bird.

I went to work by bicycle on Monday and today. Monday was of course the first workday after daylight saving time started, when it would be good daylight when it was time to come home. Rain was predicted for Tuesday. Actually, it was raining very lightly when I went home Monday. All I have to say is, 1) boy, am I out of shape and 2) it was easier making the left turns than I was afraid it would be. I do have a rearview mirror, and the roads are wide enough that cars can pass me on the right when I’m getting set up for the left turns, so it’s not bad.

Two weekends ago (was it? whatever.) Anne and Matt rented a couple of DVDs in Cambridge and brought them up to Casco. We watched Good Night and Good Luck on Friday and Crash on Saturday.

I’m just a little too young (!) to remember the McCarthy era as such. I do remember my parents being very concerned about it. We didn’t own a television set in those days, but my parents were able to borrow one from my father’s work (he worked for Sylvania Electric, which made TVs. Back in those days, there were American companies making consumer electronics).

As I was saying, my parents borrowed a television set from Sylvania specifically to watch the Army-McCarthy hearings, which showed up just at the end of Good Night and Good Luck. They, and in particular Welch’s question, “Have you no shame, sir?”, really led to the end of the McCarthy witch hunts. There was still the House Un-American Activities Committee for many years later, but the worst was over when McCarthy was censured. As far as I could tell, the movie was a fair recap of how things were in the early ’50s. By the way, Roy Cohn, the villain of Angels in America, was McCarthy’s right-hand man.

Which brings me to Crash. I’m still thinking about it almost three weeks later, which is a sign of a good movie. What I liked best was that the characters were so hard to characterize. Almost every significant character in the movie had moments of being likeable and moments of being despicable. When you can see the good points of carjackers (was carjacker #1 the only person who acted with real integrity? could be), you figure a movie is getting past cookie-cutter personalities and into some of the real complexity of human beings.

I didn’t resume reading Everything is Illuminated as I had planned.

We had heard two separate stories by Shalom Auslander on “This American Life” on NPR which I liked. I checked on Amazon after hearing the second. His book Beware of God was out in hardback and was due out in paperback on March 28. On my way to work on March 28 I stopped in at the New England Mobile Book Fair. The book wasn’t filed alphabetically in the publisher’s section, but it was on a display at the end of the row.

It’s a small book, with largish print, not much reading matter for the money, but very thought-provoking. I’m not sure who I’d recommend it to. I think you have to be Jewish to understand or appreciate most of it, and somewhat knowledgable about Jewish culture and literature at that. But if you’re Jewish and not pretty skeptical, you’re likely to be offended by a lot of it. Does the name Elisha ben Abuya mean anything to you? The fellow more frequently known as “Acher”, Hebrew for “the other guy” because his former colleagues were so upset by a brilliant student’s rejection of all their teachings that they wouldn’t say his name? This is a book he could have gotten into. For instance (and maybe for the most extreme example), what would happen if someone found an ancient text of the Bible, undoubtedly authentic and older than any other known text, that was identical to other texts except for an additional first paragraph: “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.”? Hint: You don’t want to be the guy who found it. This is very funny and very serious stuff, and I love it.

The sign we had seen advertising Maine Maple Sunday was at Harvest Hill Farms farm stand on Route 11. We had stopped there just as they were closing the first time we drove home through Gray, just in time to get some delicious maple hard candy. Their farm is up Megquier Hill Road in Poland. It’s just a few miles from where we were, and we wanted to check it out.

It’s a much bigger farmstead than Sweet William’s, with fields, sheep & llamas (and I think that’s a steer in front of the sheep and llamas – obligatory sheep photo for knitters), chickens, and old apple trees.

They have a 3000 gallon per year syrup operation that hasn’t done as much this year as they’d like to. The road past the farm is lined with maples with galvanized iron sap buckets hanging from them, and a magnificent view over Tripp Pond.

They were set up with a big tent, hayrides, their own pancake breakfast, and live music — a string band which allowed me to get a good close look at a dobro in action. Hey! This guy on the left front is playing the guitar left-handed. I hadn’t even noticed until now. We got some more of those hard candies and some soft maple sugar candies, and tasted maple fudge, delicious but more caloric than I need.

So in summation, if you want to learn about maple sugaring, you can see more of that at Sweet William’s. If you have kids who haven’t spent enough time on a farm, they can see more animals at Megquier Hill, if you don’t mind a little walk down to the festivities.

Either way you can get all the maple syrup you want. And there are probably another twenty places to go elsewhere in Maine next Maple Sunday.

Say! This page on the Cornell web site looks as if it has all the links you’ll ever want about maple sugaring.

Maine Maple Sunday is a regular event on the fourth Sunday of March, which is usually at the peak of the maple sap run. Besides pancake breakfasts sponsored by every organization that has the energy to do them, maple sugar farmers around the state set up tours of their operation and try to attract the public to sample their goods. It’s a chance for the farmers to sell syrup at retail, too, before they have to find a middleman to take it at a lower price. Of course that means the public gets to buy it at a better price than it will be at farm stands or, heaven forbid, supermarkets.

The only open sugarhouse we found in Casco proper was just down the road from the Webb’s Mills community center, off route 11, well marked with hand-painted signs. The family who had left the pancake breakfast right behind us pulled their car up and parked right behind ours where people seemed to be parking for the sugarhouse. This is parking along the side of the road, not to get in the ditch, right? No parking lot in the picture. Not sure how much farther down the road we have to walk to get there, but it seems to be where people are parking.

Down the driveway was a table where someone was just trying to get a count of visitors by having each person take a penny from a bowl and drop it into a jug.

Down the hill from there was the crowd, around the sugar house.

Serious maple syrup making always deserves a building of its own. It takes 40 to 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. That means you have to boil away 39 to 49 gallons of water to make one gallon of syrup. That makes a lot of steam — see the water vapor coming out the cupola of the sugar house? That’s why a sugar house always has a cupola like that. Sure you can boil sap on your kitchen stove, but you’ll have to have all the windows open, and even so you’ll probably steam the wallpaper off the walls before you’re done.

We went in —

The last time we were in a real sugar house was probably 20 years ago. There was a big pan for sap heated by a wood fire. This one has a nice shiny four-year-old oil-fired boiler with electronic controls.

I liked the detail of the maple leaf on the end of a tenon in the roof truss

All that boiled-off water is going out the open cupola.

Here’s an old syrup boiler, atop a wood stove made from an old oil drum. Just like in the song “More Wood” that the Short Sisters sing.

He took an oil drum, and welded
some piping from the septic tank,
and fore and aft he cut a draft
and then he made a damper crank
with an old broom from the back room
and painted it fire-engine red
and said, “Now watch it consume
your wood …”

That thing that looks like a tank of helium to the left? A tank of helium. There’s face painting and helium balloons and animal twisty balloons going on here. It’s a whole party!

If this isn’t Sweet William himself, it should be. (Angelenos, this is a warm March day in Maine, temperature in the 40s. He’s dressed for the weather as befits someone who has spent a lot of time outdoors here over the past month.) He’s explaining the whole maple business to the grownups. On the table are old and new spouts that go in the tapped trees, plastic tubing and connectors, an old-style sap bucket, and tools for tapping trees, from an old hand-operated brace and bit through a gasoline-powered drill to a cordless electric drill. He also had a cross-section of tree that had been tapped, to show us how the tree heals over old tap holes.

Some things he said:

He’ll be able to tell you if it was a good season or not at the end of the season. He likes to make 500 gallons of syrup in a season. As of this morning he had made 265, 15 in one good day. In previous years people have said, “There was lots of snow this year, it’ll be a good year for sap” and it was a terrible year, or “It was too warm this winter, it’ll be a poor year for sap” and it was a good year. So he doesn’t try to predict.

Vermont is still the leading state in the US for maple syrup, ahead of Maine by about a ratio of 4 to 3. (Could it have been 400,000 gallons for Vermont to 300,000 for Maine? maybe) The Province of Quebec is way way ahead, though. His new boiler comes from Quebec.

He uses a vacuum system to pull the sap along the tubing. You can’t suck sap out of a tree, but you can encourage the sap to come along.

Trees need light to produce the sugar over the summer. He thins out his sugarbush so the trees aren’t too close together. It’s just like weeding a garden, except he does it with a chainsaw rather than a hoe.

Here’s a close-up of that table. On the far left is an old metal tap. It gets hammered into the hole you’ve just drilled into the tree, and the bucket hangs right on it. There’s a newer white plastic tap with a molded-on hook for a bucket. Then you get to current technology, all those black plastic fittings for the tubing.

OK, folks, walk down that way to see where we collect the sap.

There’s a modern tap in a tree, connected by plastic tubing to a vacuum line and a main collecting tube. Blue seems to be the standard color; at least, now that we know, we’re seeing those blue lines in the woods every now and then.

In another building is the vacuum system, a 300-gallon tub for collecting the sap, and a pump for pumping the sap up to the sugarhouse. They have 1600 sugar maples tapped.There are two collection chambers; when one fills up, the vacuum switches to the other and the first drains into the tub.

The guy who was talking at this part of the tour (no picture) said that mapling was a disease. Sweet William had crossed over to stage six, at which point it was terminal, with the installation of the vacuum system. Now he was talking about a reverse osmosis system, which gets him to stage 7.

I don’t think I had ever seen the sap just as it comes from the tree. It’s almost clear, just a little cloudy.

Back up the hill at the sugarhouse, you could taste samples of what you can do with maple syrup: cook baked beans in it, serve it over vanilla ice cream (donated by Ben & Jerry’s, thank you!), dip fried dough in it. People who make their own maple syrup use it a lot more freely than those of us who have to pay nine dollars a quart or more.

There was a sales table where you could buy syrup in plastic jugs, from a pint to a gallon, or in glass bottles with a picture painted on the front, suitable for gifts. Also maple-syrup glazed popcorn. Here’s the funniest application, I think, and you’re not going to find it anywhere but at a Maple Sunday open house: maple cotton candy! Yes, fans, that lint on her vest is pure maple sugar lint.