Danny Graham: Our young forester explores Canada's autumn forests

WE all need a break – even me! We all need a release from the monotony of the daily grind, regardless of how much we might enjoy what we do. Batteries need to be recharged, goals reconsidered and friendships refreshed. I suppose I’m quite lucky in that, should tedium strike, I can flip to some other activity. I can put down the saw and pick up a spade and plant a few trees, or cut some heather – or shear a few sheep! I find this range of activities offers me a balanced and healthy lifestyle and enables me to work seven days a week.

My wife, however, lives a life with much more active ‘downtime’ in which she finishes work in a job with prescribed hours and then has hobbies. Don’t misunderstand me, as I also have hobbies, it’s just that my hobbies include mixing two-stroke fuel for chainsaws, grinding chains and recruiting staff from the local CIU Club bar. 

And so, as with any healthy relationship, there has to be give and take. As our work lives and hobbies seem to be polar opposites, it only makes sense to share some leisure time and so she organised a holiday to Vermont in the USA. There was I, thinking Devon perhaps or even the Lake District ... but Oregon? To say I had to be escorted to Edinburgh Airport in a security van lest I escape is probably a slight exaggeration, but I did notice a tight clasping of the hand all the way! On arrival at the check-in desk I got to see my passport for the first time in over a year. It had been confiscated by my partner for safe keeping, just in case it went missing and I’d be unable to travel. It appeared that every precaution had been covered to enable my safe journey.

It took 22 hours to get to Oregon. What is it about flying these days? Why are there so many delays and cancellations and so much hanging around? Is it really just a plot to make you spend your entire life savings in the in-flight shopping emporia? When you’re used to being on your feet all day and being active, having to spend hours sat in one place isn’t good for the soul. At least not mine! I don’t think the body is designed to undergo long periods of inactivity and after several hours it goes into a state of uneasiness where it wants to expel energy in any way it can (at least mine does). 

Halfway through the flight, the call came from the captain requesting the services of a doctor. Apparently, someone on board was having a heart attack and I’m sure I detected a shared sigh of relief when we all discovered it wasn’t the pilot. It was an elderly gentleman who, once he’d had a few blats from a defibrillator, appeared to make a good recovery. My own restlessness was reaching such a level I considered requesting the services of the defibrillator myself and so I was mightily relieved when we eventually touched down in Vermont, New England, the USA.

READ MORE: Danny Graham: Our young forester locks horns with brother

Our arrival coincided with the tail end of ‘fall’, that hallowed season when all the leaves turn a glorious colour and drop off. Apparently it’s now a tourist attraction, with people coming from all over America to see this incredible spectacle which changes in intensity from day to day. I have since learned that Vermont was plagued with devastating forest fires during the late 1800s and early 1900s and that much of these forests had to be reset. Today they’re referred to as ‘the green mountains of Vermont’. Dense, self-set woodland comprised of yellow birch, American beech, white pine, red maple and the iconic sugar maple (more about that later). 

Somewhat strangely, many Vermont residents from this region have grown to dislike aspects of ‘fall’. They call the people coming to view the spectacle ‘outerstaters’ and these come in such numbers they block the roads so that a journey which might take 30 minutes can take as long as three hours. One local commented: “There’s only one thing worse than an avalanche of snow and that’s a queue of leaf-lookers.”

During the time I was there I didn’t see a lot of wildlife. I saw several chipmunks, which you’d expect, a snake (which made my wife squeal) and had a rather interesting encounter with a large coyote. There’s an old saying in the area which implies that you’ll never run as fast as when you’re being chased by a wild animal. In the late evening I would often poke my head out of the cabin door to listen to the sinister howls of the coyotes in the distant hills. Apparently they’ve decimated the local domestic cat population to the point where no one bothers keeping them as pets anymore. On the basis that cats kill roughly 55 million wild birds a year in the UK alone, maybe this isn’t such a bad thing. 

We spent the bulk of our time staying with relatives and they sensibly had a labrador rather than a cat. She was an old dog who went by the name of Tilly. She was long in the tooth, her vision was failing, as was her hearing, and her gums were receding, but she was a nice-natured animal. As I was usually the last to bed, it became my responsibility to let Tilly into the garden before I turned in. On this particular occasion I slid open the patio doors and made immediate eye contact with a very large male coyote about 20 metres away. By now Tilly was out and I suddenly began to wonder how I was going to protect the dog when all I had in my hand was a half-empty bottle of New England IPA.

The big coyote clocked Tilly and Tilly clocked the big coyote. The two stared at each other like a scene from Gunfight at the OK Corral. A growl started to grow in Tilly’s throat, gently at first, but then it erupted into a violent outburst of snarling and barking.

The years seemed to fall away and she hurled herself (rather arthritically) at this alien intruder. I think it was all a bit of a bluff and can only assume the coyote didn’t fancy being gummed to death, but Tilly’s aggressive display appeared to do the trick and the big old coyote turned tail and disappeared into the night.

Did you know that maple syrup actually comes from the sugar maple tree? I have to confess I didn’t until one morning, while wandering through the woods, I happened to come across an intricate network of plastic pipe cob webbing linking lots of self-set sugar maples, so that the sap drained through gravity down to a collecting point. Such is the importance of maple syrup to the North Americans that Canada even incorporated the maple leaf into its flag in 1965.

From outside, the process looks quite simple. The maple stores starch in its roots through the long, dark winters and, come the spring, the starch is converted to sugar and rises as sap in the tree. Along comes Jonny Appleseed with his electric screwdriver and five-sixteenth drill bit, bores a hole in the tree, taps in his plug and taps the sap down to his ‘sugar shack’ or ‘boiling house’. Maples must be at least 11” in diameter and you’re allowed to drill up to three holes, depending on the size of the tree. During the ‘run’ you can expect up to 10 gallons of sap from each tapping. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. After lots of boiling you have something you can put on your pancakes or sell commercially.

No one really knows just who first utilised the process, but the Native American Indians had been using it for millennia. They collected it in buckets made from birch bark, mixed it with pine resin and used it for waterproofing things, although they also produced the syrup, but more for medicinal purposes. The process was quickly exploited by European settlers for personal consumption. In most households or cafes in Vermont you’ll get offered both cane sugar and maple syrup as a sweetener for your coffee.

After doing a bit of research and discovering the industry in Canada alone is worth some $500 million a year, I decided to enquire a little further about the business. When I asked a few local producers – and there are many – what wholesale prices they got, they all went very quiet on me, as if I was trying to steal something from them. They quickly reassured me the process couldn’t possibly work in Northumberland as the winters aren’t cold enough and any syrup produced would taste more like Bovril.

Bovril maple syrup! Now there’s an idea! I got the distinct feeling they were keen to extinguish any sparks of competition. Clearly there’s money in honey and maple syrup too, but don’t go asking too many questions about the liquid gold from Vermont.