So I just recently read Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond and it inspired me to reenact the Native American's discovery of maple syrup. I'm not a reeanactor by nature, but who doesn't love a good middle ages fair or civil war reenactment. But this would be different. I would research all my facts rigorously. I would be alone in my woods with a 7/16" spade bit, buckets and taps (unfortunately made in China). But I can rest assured that there wouldn't be any lead in those galvanized taps because the Chinese manufacturers really adhere to strict standards. Also, I hear they punish their workers for any infraction on these US standards by taking away their binkies, teddy bears and sending them to bed without their dinner. After all it was China that first brought the art of tapping trees to the Native Americans during the 7th century AD. The Chinese did not discover the syrup, but drank the life blood of trees straight for increased sexual performance. My spade bit was mounted in a Dewalt cordless. It's a little known fact that the birth of the cordless drill occurred amongst the natives in the Northeast during the mid 10th century. The name Dewalt is actually a derivative of the Chinook word De-Walt, meaning "Dewalt". Before the invention, they tapped their trees by placing the bit in a birch branch and twisting by hand.
Now to make my reenactment more authentic it was important to not know which trees would yield the sweetest sap. It is very temporal centric of us to say "Dah, everyone knows its a maple tree that you tap for syrup." But recently we have found evidence that carbon dates as late as 1100 AD that some tribes insisted on tapping willow trees. It appears that although the sweetness wasn't as strong, it did have slight hallucinogenic properties. Any way, I set out to place four holes in three trees. The first was a rather large maple or sinzibuck (sinzibuckwud is the Algonquin word for maple syrup, so wud must be syrup and sinzibuk obviously must be maple). It started weeping sap immediately. I decided this was a good sign, so I would drill again. The next two trees I tapped still haven't leaked anything and its been a week. Some of you might say that I am a dumbass for tapping an oak. But remember that I am not a dumbass but an experiential historian and that I tapped these non-maples on purpose. This is the only true way to experience the fear and disappointment that our Algonquin ancestors must have felt when they first set out to make sinzibukwud. They did not have the Discovery channel or the World Wide Web to show them how to produce sinzibukwud. They had only their Chinese taps, cordless drills, and their natural instincts and intellect to sweeten the day.
About Me
- Country Sister
- Country Sister homesteads on 15 acres in rural coastal Maine with her two children and husband. When she is not mucking stalls, pulling weeds and trimming hooves, you can find her awe stricken by two amazing children, madly in love with a brilliant and tireless husband, teaching piano, playing gigs, solving legal matters, moving mountians of laundry, improving her triathlon swim time and savoring every moment of this intensely amazing vibrant life.
2 comments:
If only the Native Americans had had the bountiful beer tree once found in the bountiful German highlands. Perhaps then they could have progressed faster than the Europeans and have come to conquer them. Alas, distant cousins of the Easter Islanders cut down the last beer tree in the late 13th century BCE. This forced the local inhabitants to invest so much energy in working out a way to create beer from other materials, that their descendants have been predisposed toward frenetic ingenuity ever since.
That's the ticket Plum. Writing these alternate histories are fun. I hope someday that an anthropologists find these alternate histories instead of the real ones. Thanks for reading and posting. BTW, I liked reading your Cross Country journal.
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