RI Nature ~ Outdoors
Sap Season
Maple sugaring has started here in the north country. It’s an odd process, if you think about it. For a handful of weeks that usually starts in late February and ends before taxes are due, people collect water from trees and cook it. Drive any road, and you’re likely to see farmers walking their sap lines, trucks carrying tanks full of sap to be boiled down for syrup, and steam billowing from sugar shacks around the clock.
It all begins when the sap starts to run — that is, when the nutrient-rich liquid travels up from the roots of the maple sugar tree, following pathways behind the bark of the tree. This happens when the temperature rises above freezing. The best sugaring conditions, though, require a set of opposites: warm, sunny days, to make the sap run well; and nights below freezing, to keep it sweet.
A couple of years ago, we decided to join the fun. Our “sugarbush” is pretty small for a sugaring operation — just six trees along our road. We bought old-fashioned metal buckets with the peaked-roof lids and a dozen taps. Last weekend, Ursula and Virgil walked the trees with Jim. They stopped before each tree and took turns cranking a hand drill with a 5/16-inch drill bit through the warm bark. In went a metal tap, and within seconds, sap dripped out the end of the spout.
We don’t keep track of how much sap we collect. It might be as much as 40 gallons. If we boiled that amount down for syrup, we’d get about one gallon of syrup. But we don’t bother with a boiling operation. We’re happy to support our local maple syrup producers. What’s priceless is sap, which you can’t buy in any store.
So we drink sap water. We lift out frozen disks of skim ice when we check the buckets in the morning and drink the extra-sweet water straight from the buckets. We boil it for sweet tea. We send it in with the kids’ lunches. (A neighbor of ours boils hot dogs in sap and considers it one of life’s delicacies, but she’s from Ohio.) Sap keeps for only a day or two before it turns.
Maple-sugaring time is equally brief, a moment of balance between the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Sap, the clear ambrosia that arrives when everything else turns muddy, is a sweet distillation of a short, sweet season.
Learn more
"How Sweet It Is: Making Your Own Maple Syrup" (AMC Outdoors, January/February 2007)
Photo: Eva tasting the promise of spring. Photo by Tiffany Calcutt.
“Great Kids, Great Outdoors” is an AMC Outdoors blog, written by Kristen Laine.
Office of Livability within DOT’s Federal Highway Administration
TRANSPORTATION: Lawmakers to examine Obama’s ‘livability’ efforts
Josh Voorhees, E&E reporter
President Obama’s “livability” initiative will be under the microscope this week as two congressional panels hear from federal and state officials about transportation planning and land use.
The House Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Subcommittee will meet Wednesday to take a closer look at the livability portion of the president’s fiscal 2011 budget request. On Thursday, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will discuss how the federal Transportation Department partners with state and local transportation agencies in the decision-making process.
Obama is asking for more than $500 million for his effort to help state and local governments make more sustainable transportation investments. In addition to the funding request, Obama has also pledged to recast the nation’s overall transportation strategy to focus more heavily on such efforts and has created an interagency partnership between DOT, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and U.S. EPA to work on the issue. DOT took its first major livability action earlier this year when it rewrote selection criteria for transit projects to emphasize reduced carbon emissions and increased economic development.
A handful of key lawmakers who will play prominent roles in crafting the next highway bill have embraced the overall livability effort. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar’s (D-Minn.) bill would create an Office of Livability within DOT’s Federal Highway Administration to “establish a focal point within FHWA to advance environmentally sustainable modes of transportation, including transit, walking and bicycling.”
EPW Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) only recently began work on her version of the next major highway bill, but she has backed the overall livability effort and has said her bill will be based heavily on Oberstar’s.
Still, the livability effort has drawn its share of critics, mostly from conservatives who have expressed concern over federal involvement in state and regional land-use decisions. In a Newsweek column last May, conservative George Will called LaHood the “Secretary of Behavior Modification” and said the effort was an attack on Americans’ right to chose where they live and how they travel.
“[L]ong before climate change became another excuse for disparaging America’s ‘automobile culture,’ many liberal intellectuals were bothered by the automobile,” Will wrote. “It subverted their agenda of expanding government — meaning their supervision of other people’s lives.”
LaHood provided critics with further ammunition that month. Responding to a question about whether the livability effort was an attempt to “coerce” Americans out of their cars, LaHood said, “about everything we do around here is government intrusion in people’s lives.”
Lawmakers representing mostly rural districts or states have also expressed concern that the livability initiative — as well as other DOT efforts — focuses to much on urban areas. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) quizzed DOT officials about the program last week (E&E Daily, March 5).
John Porcari, DOT’s deputy secretary, attempted to calm Begich and Thune’s fears, telling them that rural areas stand to benefit just as much as large cities do from the administration’s plans.
“It’s clear that livability really applies to rural areas as much as it does anywhere else,” Porcari said, adding that one of the initiative’s goals was a return “to the quality of life that many of us enjoy in small towns.”
Countdown is on for nonrunners training for the St. Pat's 5K
Bristol club scores heavy haul in annual contest
National Bike Summit – Google Announces Bike Routing
Yesterday was the first day of the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC. For those who haven’t heard yet,
The League of American Bicyclists is proud to be the forum for Google to announce what all bike riders have been waiting for – Grab Your Bike and Go with Google Maps. Google is announcing at the Opening Plenary Session at the National Bike Summit that they are adding biking directions in the U.S. to Google Maps.
According to Google this has been the most requested addition to Google Maps. This new feature includes: step-by-step bicycling directions; bike trails outlined directly on the map; and a new “Bicycling” layer that indicates bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly roads.
You can visit http://maps.google.com/biking to try out this new feature. As with all things Google, the biking directions for Google Maps is currently in Beta, but this doesn’t mean it’s not full featured!
Manufacturer seeks quirky teams to sponsor
Catching "brown bonefish" on the fly
Boy Struck in Swansea
A Boston Herald article is reporting that a boy was struck while riding his bike along Bark Street in Swansea around 3pm this afternoon. The boy was rushed to Hasbro. No additional information has yet to be released.
UPDATE: a WPRI article has now released word that an eyewitness saw the boy dart out onto the road in front of the car.
Our thoughts go out to the the boy, his parents, and the driver of the automobile. Yet another incident between a bicycle and automobile in our “local” area.
Training? Here's sites to map it, log it, grouse about it
Kids' Day of fishing coming to Addieville East Farm
Cod bite perks up between gales
Stemming the tide of childhood obesity
Video: Working out to stay in shape, working part-time & looking for more
Failure of the Forge Pond Dam in Freetown is a Wake Up Call for Dam Owners
Last week, the Forge Pond dam on the Assonet River in Freetown came close to collapsing. The 300 year old dam is one of the most unsafe dams in Massachusetts and has been a target for removal for at least a decade. This dam was a chronic issue for the Office of Dam Safety, and the owner ignored fines and orders to fix or remove the dam. The owner died last year, leaving a derelict dam in the hands of state and local officials. While Dam Safety had removed the gates and lowered the pond, someone continued to plug up the dam and the pond reimpounded, spilling over and eroding the structure.
Most of the dam will now be removed by the state, creating a river channel that will allow fish passage. The dam directly downstream had the same owner and is also in extremely poor condition. We hope to work with the town to have that dam removed as well. Options for the first dam on the river also need to be explored, since the Assonet River is habitat for rainbow smelt - a protected species that is in decline. These fish spawn at the head of the tide on gravel stream bottoms. Dam removal will also open up this river for other migratory fish such as river herring and American eel.
Dams across the state are living on borrowed time, and many of our communities are at risk. These dams were built decades to centuries ago and many of them, perhaps most, no longer serve the function that they were built to provide. Closing our eyes to the problem doesn't make it disappear. The most cost-effective, permanent way for communities to solve the problems of unsafe dams is to remove them.
This near disaster comes less than five years after the failure of the Whittenton Pond dam in Taunton forced the evacuation of the downtown during a 2005 storm. That wake up call led to a state-wide review of dams in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island and much more aggressive enforcement by both dam safety programs. The states are doing their part of the job. This latest incident at Forge Pond highlights the need for dam owners to take personal responsibility and recognize their own liability.
Affected by a Recall, Try a Bike!
Are you one of the many people plagued by the recent automobile recalls? Plagued by stories about sudden acceleration and failing brakes, the press is reminding us how danger it can be to drive an automobile. A recent segment on NPR discusses the current Toyota recalls and the fact that, while the mechanical and electrical difficulties with the car are not to be ignored,
studies show that the vehicle itself is almost never the sole cause of the accident. Drivers, on the other hand, are wholly to blame most of the time.
One of the panelists, Leonard Evans is a physicist, a former employee of GM and author of the book Traffic Safety. He believes that
the whole history of U.S. traffic safety has been one focusing on the vehicle, one of the least important factors that affects traffic safety.
Evans says his review of the data show that in the decade ending in 2008, about 22,000 people were killed in vehicles made by Toyota or Lexus. All these people were killed because of factors that had absolutely nothing to do with any vehicle defect.
Why isn’t the American public up in arms about the loss of life caused by daily traffic accidents? Why doesn’t the American public react seriously when a person takes another person’s life with their car? Where is the outrage people?
For those drivers who are affected by one of the recent recalls, may I suggest looking at a bicycle or other alternative mode of transportation. You might be surprised and actually find that you enjoy getting around without your car. Yes, there are recalls that affect bicycles, but I have yet to be in a situation where my legs simply refused to stop pedaling or I couldn’t find some way to safely stop my bicycle.
