Brushing my teeth with birch sap

Brushing my Teeth with Birch Sap

Where do you get your drinking water from?

As a child of the water-rich Great Lakes State, this wasn’t something I was forced to ponder very often.  Water simply appeared.  At restaurants, it was placed along with silverware. In my kitchen, I turned a silver knob like a princess and out it cascaded into my glass.

Michigan: We've got water.

In college, I fell into a righteous enragement over the issue of bottled water.  Something was fishy about a system where a multi-national corporation (cough cough, Nestle, world’s 53^rd largest corporation) was allowed to drain the aquifers of Mecosta and Osceola County Michigan, take the captured water across state lines (to bypass drinking water standards), bottle in it petroleum product (17 million barrels of oil are used in the production of water bottles each year), use more energy to transport and distribute the water (it takes 3 times the amount of water to produce a bottle as it does to fill it) and sell it for 1,000 times the cost of tap water (aka, the way it was) to the profit of large, foreign companies. 

Studying water in Thailand

Spending my junior year in Thailand I got an actual taste of what happens when public resources are privatized.  When companies take over the market, the incentive for maintaining safe drinking water as a public resource evaporates.

Something to be grateful for

After all this confusion, living in a dry cabin in Alaska finally set me straight.  In summer I haul water in buckets in a wheelbarrow and catch it from the rain.  In winter I chop clear cuts of ice and melt buckets of snow.  Clean water is the reward for keeping an ecosystem in balance.  Clean water is something to be grateful for.   

Birch sap season

Goldstream creek in the spring: you don't want to drink that :)

All of this set me up perfectly to deeply appreciate birch sap season in Alaska.  During breakup the creek water is especially unpalatable and the swamped trails are especially unfriendly to hauling heavy containers.  Luckily, this is the time of year when water flows from trees!  Birch trees that is.  This year David showed me how to hollow out a small branch and make a tap to share in the tree’s harvest of sap. 

We drilled small holes and tapped in our flute-like tubes gently with a hammer and soon there were fountains of sap dripping steadily into tied-on buckets.  Putting in the taps was a delightful experience.  I tried to catch the first few drops with my tongue like a child catching snowflakes.  Birch sap contains only 1 percent sugar, and tastes like a more natural form of Gatorade.  It is famous for its vitamin C content, minerals, and detoxification qualities.  I also like it to counter-act seasonal allergies associated with birch pollen.  Straight from the tree, it is what my mom calls “perfectly cool,” like a martini.  Early in the morning, the buckets are topped with flakey shave-ice.  We fed it to friends as dessert with a splash of cranberry juice.

Savoring the Sweet

this is more or less what our trees look like, with less green around birch season

We set up five taps around our yard and with sunny days, each tree was soon producing up to 4 gallons a day.  We had more sap than we could handle!  While David was off hunting beaver, I tried my best to start boiling it down.  I filled the biggest pot I could find and stayed up all night feeding a fire that barely affected the sap but turned the cabin into a sauna.  Luckily, the front yard is covered with wood scraps from w winter of heating with wood, so picking up pieces for my fire was like spring cleaning.  Nonetheless, boiling down sap is a big job.  For just one gallon of syrup, you need 100 gallons of sap.  I came home from work the next day to discover that David had unwittingly bathed in my “syrup!”  The results were more soft than sticky. 

Without a freezer, distillery, or ample time to tend fires all day, I decided to delight in birch sap in its season and leave it at that.    It would have to be a limited edition commodity this year, and we enjoyed it all the more.  We cooked beaver meat in sap, we washed dishes in sap, we brushed our teeth with sap (counterintuitive, but delightful) we even gave the dogs their own birch sap cocktails.   Of all the ways I get water, there is nothing better than drinking it straight from a tree.

PS- my enjoyment of birch season was so "in the moment" that I forgot to take pictures!  Thanks to the internet for these ones I borrowed.