Change after change improves lives - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

The  warmer weather predicted (at last!) for this week probably means an end to maple syrup season, which requires warm days and cold nights for peak production.

 

I’ve done many stories about maple syrup over the years, from large producers like Robinson’s Maple Products of St. Augustine to the Belmore Maple Festival, which began with an effort by citizens of Belmore to maintain their arena at a time when all the arenas were condemned as unsafe back in the 1970s. A local leader suggested collecting maple sap and boiling it to make syrup to raise money. That became the Belmore Maple Syrup Festival, attracting thousands each spring (Thursday, April 9 and Saturday, April 11 this year).

 

One of the interesting stories I saw this year came from a Toronto-area conservation area where they demonstrated the various eras of maple syrup making. Maple syrup was something that European immigrants learned from natives who heated stones in a fire and then dropped them into sap accumulated in a hollowed-out log. It took days to boil the sap down to syrup, and even more to make maple sugar.

 

Inventive Europeans sped up the process by boiling syrup in a huge iron pot hung over a fire. Sap was gathered in pails hung on the sides of trees with wooden spiles, eventually giving over to metal spiles. People used horse-drawn tanks to collect the syrup and draw it to the sugar shanty.

 

Modern methods completely changed the process. A sap pipeline collects sap from all the trees and delivers it to the sugar shanty, saving hundreds of hours of labour. At the shanty, meanwhile, sap is boiled down in shallow trays over fires. From days, as the native syrup makers made syrup, to mere hours, maple syrup remained the same, but the time required to make it has changed so much.

 

In many ways it reminds me about how the inventiveness of humans has changed things. For instance, we live in a farm home, built after pioneers had settled and cleared the land, over 100 years ago. This house must have seemed so modern when people heated with wood. There were originally seven doors in our kitchen to distribute heat from our kitchen stove throughout the house, and vents in the floors of upstairs bedrooms to take the heat upstairs.

 

By the time we bought the house in 1975, previous owners had replaced the wood stove with an electric range in the kitchen and an oil-burning furnace heated the house. We tore up the linoleum kitchen flooring when we discovered it covered maple hardwood flooring, but then we discovered burn marks in the flooring from where hot coals from the stove had burned through the linoleum.

 

Some 40 years later we replaced the furnace entirely, using the heat collected in pipes in the ground to heat the house. Imagine how the pioneers would have been amazed.

 

Looking out our kitchen window we can see the remnants of the windmill which must have seemed miraculous to pioneers when it simplified the job of getting water to animals in the barn (no longer there) and inhabitants of the house. 

 

More than two decades ago our shallow well ran dry before our daughter and first grandchild were due to arrive for a visit. We called in a well driller and soon had a dependable supply from a deep well and the old well was filled in.

 

Yet, our houses are still relatively new compared to many European homes. Jill watches the British television show Escape to the Country, and sees, during tours of old homes, modern men often have to duck to get through low doorways. Yet most of these homes have been modernized to include ensuite bathrooms.

 

The other morning I flipped on the light switch and our bathroom was instantly filled with bright light. I thought of the people who lived 50 years or so ago in this house lighting coal-oil lamps when the light outside failed. When my parents bought a farm north of Lucknow after Dad returned safely from World War II, the first thing they did was put in electricity though they still heated with wood.

 

I can’t imagine what Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, would think today. When we moved here we still had a party line. Today, people carry in their pockets a portable phone which also takes still photos and videos, connects them to the internet through various means and more.

 

And I won’t even touch on the miracle of personal computers on which I write today!

 

I could go on and on. So many of the things we take for granted in modern life aren’t that old - certainly in terms of human existence. The pleasures we enjoy are usually accumulative, one little improvement at a time (look at the many changes in the telephone).

 

We live in such an age of miracles where life has never been better than today - and yet people are always striving - and no doubt succeeding - to make life even better.