Maple Syrup Time
Searching for hope on crises that feel impossibly big to change
On a hillside in Tully New York, Nate and Cristy Williams convert thousands of gallons of sap into syrup each year. They also produce maple’s most important missing ingredient.
Last March when I pedaled my bicycle through fifty miles of snow to search for that ingredient, I was also looking for something that often feels even harder to find. I was searching for hope on a crisis that feels too impossibly big for any one person to make a difference.
Anyone who’s ever walked, skied, or bicycled for hours in the snow knows the feeling of entering a crack in history — surrounded by landscapes that could have been painted a century ago. In the Finger Lakes where I live, white-coated fields and forest hills are punctuated by the polka dots of red barns and white farmhouses sending woodsmoke into the air. Rolling through the landscape on two wheels beneath several layers of wool, it’s easy to imagine a world without cars, the Internet, or fast food. If this feeling were a timezone, I would call it Maple Syrup Time.
The Tully Valley offers the kind of views that make Central New York an endless painting so beautiful you would call it kitsch. Just a few miles south of the Erie Canalway Trail near Syracuse, winding roads follow the Onondaga creek along forests and farmhouses, through the Onondaga Nation, and into Onondaga Lake.
Beneath the snow are fields. Beneath the fields are fertile soils. And at the southern end of the valley, under the clay and sand and shale is a void.
Next time you eat a piece of bread or bake a cake, take a look at the empty spaces that make it so light and moist. Those voids are produced with the help of baking soda, a compound that reacts inside the dough to create bubbles of gas much faster than yeast. In the 19th century, bicarbonate of soda was also being used to make glass, soap, and wool. So when Belgian chemist Ernest Solvay met an engineer from Syracuse with a tip on deposits of brine and lime, they decided to start a mine along the Erie Canal to meet the demand.
As my wheels crunched over the snow on Solvay Road, I thought about the century of brine mining that hollowed out the land beneath me in the southern Tully Valley. Starting in 1890, the Solvay Process Company injected water into the bedrock 1200 feet below. This water dissolved rock salt buried in the floor of Paleozoic oceans, removing over 96 million tons of sodium chloride over 90 years from the valley’s southern end.
Alongside industrial pollution the company deposited downstream, Solvay engineers recorded patterns of subsidence starting in the 1930s: sinkholes the size of football fields, hundreds of cracks in hillsides above the brine fields, and a general reduction in land-surface elevation of 40–70 feet in and near the sinkholes. Geoscientists cannot conclusively say how much the mining contributed to catastrophic cracks and land subsidence, but the mine closed in the early 1960s, and the western brine field closed in the 1980s due to the high costs and concerns about the environmental damage.
When the US Geological Survey investigated bedrock fractures a foot or more wide and 30 feet deep near the Tully brine fields in 2006, they noticed something remarkable: a network of maple roots connected both sides of the broken earth.
One maple germinated in the center of the crack in 1927 just as it broke open. For the next seventy-nine years as the rift widened, the soil around the tree’s roots fell away, leaving the tree to grow across the chasm below. No tree can hold together a fractured land, but roots can still support life by drawing water and nutrients across the divide.
If you follow Onondaga Creek upstream from the brine fields and past a series of waterfalls, you will reach Woodmancy, a winding forest road that hugs the hills a mile west and seven hundred feet above the old mine. These hills are covered in a forest of maples. Below ground, the trees share bonds of roots that hold the topsoil firm. Above ground, they are knit into a network that converges only in winter and disappears each spring: bright blue tubes that lead to the farm I cycled six hours in the snow to see: Dutch Hill Maple.
Walking into Nate and Cristy’s sugar house is not unlike entering a historic chapel, if chapels were covered in steel siding painted green.
The atrium is a shop, its shelves full of relics in the church of sugar: syrup bottles, granulated sweetener, maple butter, t-shirts, recipe collections, candies, and coloring books for the kids. One table displays individually-packaged maple macarons almost like museum exhibits in cubes of clear plastic. To the left, a spectrum of maple bottles draws the eye like a stained glass window to the space beyond: a long, two-story section with vaulted rafters and polished concrete floors lined with barrels of distilled water. At the center of this open space, a gleaming steel evaporator over twenty feet long fills the room with sweet smells that ascend into the winter sky.
Nate Williams (Left) looks after equipment at Dutch Hill Maple
Tending the evaporator was Nate Williams, who builds school sports fields in the summer and switches to maple every winter. After he moved to Syracuse, his father’s annual ritual of boiling sap in the Finger Lakes was the magnet that kept him coming back. Nate and his wife Cristy started tapping trees on Dutch Hill in 2015 then purchased more land across the creek. They now tap 8,500 maples, using a system of sensors, pumps, and filters to convert roughly a hundred thousand gallons of sap (in a good year) into maple syrup.
Maple farming is a partnership of reciprocity between forests and families if they care for each other through the generations. Nate’s father, now in his seventies, still taps over a thousand trees himself. He revisits each tree at least twice a year to set up the taps then take them down again before bacteria can form in warmer weather.
Nate is halfway through the maple farmer’s litany of sugar-making when he says something I hadn’t heard in my month of visiting farms: “the trees give us something else we can’t get any other way: pure, distilled water.” With the farm so close to Tully’s brine fields, even a well that reached the depths of the hill would only yield a slurry of sulfur. So Dutch Hill Maple treasures a gift from the trees, a missing ingredient that other farmers steam or pour away: the water in the sap.
Pete Seeger’s classic song “Maple Syrup Time” is bio-chemically correct that tree sap is roughly 97% water. Maple trees use osmosis to draw water from rain and snow through their roots to distribute sugar to where it’s needed. If you have ever gulped energy drink on a hot day, you understand that our bodies use water to transport sugar. That’s why I fill my bottles with a mix of water, maple syrup, and electrolytes to fuel my long winter rides.
But maple technology has advanced since Seeger wrote the song. Farmers no longer boil all the water away. At Dutch Hill, Nate shows me the reverse osmosis filters that separate sugar from sap. At one end, the resulting almost-syrup flows into the evaporator for a final finishing boil. At the other end emerges pure, distilled water. Other farms in New York have started to market “tree-filtered water” as an alternative to spring water. At Dutch Hill Maple, this purified sap is the farm’s main source of water, on land with no viable aquifer.
On my ride home through a landscape glistening with fresh snow, I re-enter the realm of Maple Syrup Time and think of Seeger’s line “As in life or revolution, rarely is there a quick solution.” That’s been true for the Tully Valley too.
In the forty years since the mine closed, investigations and lawsuits have forced the company and the state to spend nearly a billion dollars cleaning Onondaga Lake downstream. The cleanup has reduced the lake’s level of mercury, among other chemistry in the sediments. In time, the fish may become safe to eat again. Just last year, governor Hochul announced that a thousand acres of Honeywell land will be granted back to the Onondaga Nation, who see the creek as sacred. Geologists report that the bedrock fractures above the brine fields have stabilized, though they can’t promise what the future holds. And the forest continues to grow.
If you ever need to shelter from the snow in the town of Tully south of Syracuse near the old Honeywell mine, park your bike at the porch of the Bloomin Cup Cafe and ask for a Toasted Maple latte. The baristas will proudly explain that the Dutch Hill Maple syrup is from forests nearby, with a level of adoration reserved only for treats that locals truly enjoy.
What does hope taste like to you? The Toasted Maple is a multi-layered wonder, with a thick froth from the smoky sweetness of fresh maple syrup. But the liquid I’ll most remember from my visit is a barrel of fresh water on a hill stitched together by the roots of maple trees, the gift of a forest that outlasted the mine that broke the land.
I am grateful to the geologists who provided expert advice and fact-checking on the chemistry and geology of the Tully Valley area. Thank you!
