Real Maple Syrup: Part Three

Eastern North American Maples: A Brief Guide To Sugary Goodness

I wanted to cover all the syrup trees in one post, but these fine trees deserve more attention and better pictures than what I can give them.  I've lived around these trees most of my life, and yet I always seem to focus on the pines, spruce, fir, etc.  For now then, a shorter look at the individual maples, starting with a whole post for the top tree:

Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum)

This, without a doubt, is the best tree to draw sap from, by far.  The map included in the last post, in fact, is pretty much biased towards the best terroir for the noble Sugar Maple, to the expense of the other trees.  To be fair, this is a maple almost made to work with the cycles of frost and thaw.  Few others, if indeed truly any, trees germinate at only two degrees above freezing.  That's right, our little friends sprout when it is 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and not much warmer.  This is not to say that they are a true northern tree; while they can handle extreme lows, they do need some decent length of summer heat to truly make it.  They are a species that needs the sun, and also a species that needs the cold, like their frequent companions the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus). 

The range of the noble Acer Saccharum.  Thanks again, USGS!

In pre-colonial times, many moister forested areas in the eastern-central part of North America would have featured a dense canopy of Sugar Maples towered over by White Pines the equal of some of the most amazing giant trees out west.  In the fall, one imagines how amazing the bright orange foliage would have been in contrast with the towering, swaying pines.  Many of the first colonial residents in virgin forest areas left awe-struck accounts.

Oh, did I mention they turn orange?  Sadly I have no pictures to really do it justice...

Taken at Maybury State Park.  Maybury has lots of excellent second-growth beech-maple forest, as well as some of the furthest southern Tamarack swamps.  These are northern extensions into what otherwise starts to turn hot and dry with oak savannas and tallgrass prairie. 

With the exception of the Sassafras (Sassafras Albidum), the other maples, and the sumacs, no tree comes close to sheer brilliance.  One imagines that the First Born and then the colonial arrivals took notice of such brilliance and figured something special must be in the Sugar Maple.  In Vermont, home of the supposed best syrup ever (I will never let it go, Green Mountain guns at my door or otherwise), the spectacular autumn show which makes Bostonians and New Yorkers jam up their expressways in search of colored leaves is pretty much made by mountains of orange trees pocked by smaller concentrations of red and yellow.  The Adirondacks and Opeongo Laurentians (Algonquin), on the other hand, also feature a lot more lakes, somewhat darker skies, and a higher inclusion of northern conifers.  Alright, alright, so Vermont looks nice too.  Anyway, even further south where you get more southerly elements as well as a lot more beech trees in the mix, the noble tree still manages to steal the show. 

Maybury State Park again.  That is the same second-growth beech-maple forest back there, while the front is a reclaimed field turned into a prairie restoration; the soil and tree cover in the immediate area points to a moisture level that would have made most of this still forest.  You can easily see in this picture how Sugar Maples tend to stand out as the dominant species.  I did not make it over to successfully identify the bright yellow foliage.

The First Born probably made the stuff, inspired by the orange leaves, well into Tennessee, as long as the odd winter kept things cold enough, long enough, and provided an appropriate thaw.  Obviously, such winters would not be common at lower elevations, and to this day commercial production of syrup from any tree ceases much farther south than the Great Lakes basin.  That said, the Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, and colonials certainly made syrup along the northern forest extensions along the Appalachians.  Sugar Maple would be the primary choice for such an activity, considering as how most other reliable and tasty maple species such as Silver and Red (next post) tend to be lowland, river loving species.  That said, while the syrup would come from higher than where most people would dwell, and the southern Appalachians have the same problem that the ocean-proximate New England mountains have: maritime influence.  The Smokies, for instance, are temperate rainforests.

Not that Sugar Maple forests are too far off, in some ways, from that sort of lush dampness.  Where the beech trees that so often pair with them start to taper out (Fagus Grandifolia is a tree of vast range, equally at home among the north as it is in Florida and even Mexico), Sugar Maple becomes the dominant tree and starts making the place look really green,

A bit more southern than intended, still at Maybury.  Nevertheless, maples are far more dominant here than beech or most other trees.  The wee plants on the ground are seedlings, the majority of which will die off from lack of light in the next year or so. 

 ...with the exception of heavy leaf litter on the forest floor.  The canopy is thick enough to prevent most light from reaching the forest floor.

Not quite what I was trying to get at (a bit south of what I wanted), but the maples are pretty dominant here.  This was taken in Brighton Recreation Area, one of the most underrated and unmentioned places in Southeastern Michigan in which to get a good look at the native landscape.

In the farther north, the forest then almost looks like something from Ohio or Pennsylvania instead of Laurentian Canada.   

This is about three and a half miles north of Brent, Ontario.  In this moist, loamy environment, the dominating maples cut out competition from the slower growing northern conifers, and in the modern absence of wildfire, never get killed back now and then to let pines get a foothold.

In the future I can probably snap up a shot of what I'm talking about, but these two pictures come close.  The road shot is obviously crowded with underbrush from the extra light.  One can easily see how this species would be very attractive for making syrup, however, as in the ideal situations (see map in previous post), you get what is called a "sugar bush".  This is a naturally provided area with most of the trees being the syrup givers, relatively little underbrush to have to fight through, and the whole thing being remarkably convenient.  I could go on and on about this tree, and I might in the future, but one last item of concern draws us to a close here today: taste.

If you've never had maple syrup, get the hell off your computer and go try some.  If you have, think of the richest, most smooth maple taste you can imagine.  This is syrup and associated products from the Sugar Maple.  In other maples the flavor can sometimes overtake the other delicate features and even the sweetness; not so here.  Everything is perfectly balanced, all the more so if you can get the triple crown of glacially-deposited organic loam, Canadian Shield minerals, and that awesome northern water to make the maple sing with all the voices of heaven.  Needless to say, you don't want the bottle saying "made from x, x, and x in x, x, and x.  I may be biased, but just like in wine, the purity of singular source does not confuse the senses with complications to an already delightful complexity.  Oh, and one more thing that makes it even better?  Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) is usually close at hand in such northern places.  While I would never advocate stripping a birch, which usually scars and kills the poor thing, the First Born, especially the Ojibway and Algonquins, who use the entire tree, still have traditionalists who make cooking vessels out of birch bark (they heat the water with red hot stones).  Trust me when I say that the addition of that birch leeching into the syrup enhances it akin to an oak barrel kissing the grapes in wine.

Real Maple Syrup: Part Two

Moving along in our discovery of one of the most amazing native things ever produced from the continent, maple syrup, we must question why some syrups are naturally superior than others, and the answer lies in something similar to what makes wines different from one another: Terroir.

Terroir is a mystical, magical concept.  Like many French words, it has no powerful English equivalent with which to express its full meaning, but basically it comes down to all the things that make a plant do what a plant does best: react to its environment.  This includes weather and climate, soil, etc.  In the case of Vitis Vinifera, a.k.a. the wine grape, things are obviously extremely complex due to human intervention in cultivating numerous forms down through centuries of loving manipulation.  Various species of maple (and by extension, other possible syrup friendly trees), in contrast, at least our North American trees, have not nearly been selectively bred to the same extent that wine grapes have.  That said, we do have a small assortment of species to choose from in the syrup game, and also said, we find that nature is remarkable in that has long produced variations within species without our help.  In part, this is because terroir has affected our leafy friends in such a way that trees are likely to have some small variations in form and resulting taste even when sampled from neighboring areas.  A Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) from central Tennessee would find itself facing a rather brutal winter if it were to find itself suddenly in Quebec, to say nothing of what the same shock would be like for a Red Maple (Acer Rubrum), a far more generally adaptable species, suddenly finding itself no longer in the swamps of Southern Florida but among the shorelines of the Ottawa River.

This sort of stuff gets commercial tree growers in trouble quite a bit, especially where more tender temperate ornamental trees like the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis) are concerned.  One of the most obvious differences in terroir felt by a nursery grown tree from the South and imported into Le Nord would be the new and strange frigid winter that the tree would find itself trying to be hardy to.  Likewise, the tree would find that Le Nord is not nearly as hot in the summer as it was back South, to say nothing of how much less humid and rainy!  Finally, it would also find that the soil was so very, very different from what it grew up in.  I could go on and on about terroir, or Phytogeography, which is pretty much what the core of this blog is about, but...

The maples!

Most maples are creatures of the forest, and thus are very fond of mixed-light conditions and moisture, moisture, and more moisture.  With the exception of the aloof, adaptable, and mysterious Box Elder (Acer Negundo), none of our temperate eastern maples are courageous enough to venture far into the drier prairie lands, and the Red Maple will not even make it very far into the eastern prairies of Illinois or Indiana, being completely afraid to face the possibility of drought combined with fire, which is another reason why I probably found even the thought of central Illinois syrup to be funny (to be fair, Sugar Maples and Black Maples are apparently made of tougher stuff and can indeed be found in forested patches there).  Sure, the maples can be planted further afield from their comfortable natural ranges, but they might not produce enough starch in their roots to make syrup production viable.  Syrup production in most places was not the best in the March of 2013, owing to the colossal hot, drought-heavy summer that was 2012.  The brunt of that disaster was felt in the True Midwest, but trees were sufficiently stressed in all but northern New England.  Rocky, sandy, well-drained northern Ontario and neighboring western Quebec and northern Michigan baked and dried to a crisp.  Massive forest fires made life even more difficult.

That year, Vermont won the award.

Thankfully, most of the time the inland north does better.  Why?  A little thing called maritime, or oceanic influence.

The most powerful maritime climates in the world are usually envisioned as being temperate western Europe, the Pacific Northwest, etc., but a typical cold January day even in chilly Nova Scotia is decidedly more moderate of a chill than one would find farther inland, even New Brunswick and Maine. Champlain and friends discovered this first hand when their colony of Saint Croix was established in a very chilly position, and soon made way to the other side of the Bay of Fundy where they established the roots of future Acadia in what is now Nova Scotia.  Saint Croix was on the "inland" side of the bay, gaining no benefit from the prevailing westerlies which would skim the mostly unfrozen waters, pick up moisture, and moderate the winter chill.  Still, even Saint Croix is much more mild than places further inland, such as the St. Lawrence valley.  The ocean, westerlies or not, is like a giant road block for intense continental chill.  New England, as a result, is a tropical paradise compared to neighboring Quebec and upstate New York.

That said, the same can be noted for upstate New York in comparison to Michigan and southern Ontario, and then Michigan in comparison to Wisconsin.  The Great Lakes, you see, have a small amount of maritime influence of their own.

Public domain, see the original at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap041130.html.

The above picture features a north western wind, but the overall effect remains the same: downwind of the lakes one gets moderated temperatures and a ton of moisture.  In the summer, this sometimes has a reverse effect of creating something like a coastal California marine layer, wherein the water and shoreline areas are under heavy cloud while inland the place is delightfully sunny.  In any event, even smaller bodies of water can influence climate, with an unfrozen Lake St. Clair providing small scale changes to the local climate.  The larger lakes, though, are truly things of raw climactic power.  Superior creates its own weather systems!  Well, she does until she manages to largely freeze over.  The lake effect runs to a screeching halt once the bodies get a coat of ice.  A total coat is rare for all but Erie, but enough of the surface area gets frozen in places like Georgian Bay, western Superior, and the Straits of Mackinac, that winter does come and the true maritime influence disappears.  The result for the local terroir in places like northern Michigan, the Adirondacks, and the Opeongo Hills section (Algonquin highlands) of the Laurentian Mountains is the best of both worlds; New England meets Boreal.

Like in the deserts of the western United States and Canada and northern Mexico, elevation rise is the second factor in enhancing this climate soup.  As air rises on the Porcupine, Adirondack, or Laurentian mountains or onto the Mio Plateau, all of which are significant rises above the surrounding lowlands (a change of at least a thousand feet in many places), it cools if even ever so slightly, and dumps out moisture.  In each of these locations, a slight rain-shadow is even created.  The most noticeable of these is in the central Ottawa valley of Ontario, where Jack-Pine savannas and cacti can be found.  Like in the desert sky-islands out west, the Opeongo portion of the Laurentian mountains contrast this scenery with moist spruce-hardwood forests, replete with maritime expectations like Red Spruce (Picea Rubens) and Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis), well west of their happy Appalachian strongholds.  Then of course there are the maples, benefiting both from the same moisture, and the final ingredient of terroir: recycled life and powerful organic soil (and on the Mio plateau and in the Laurentians, glacially deposited sand an loam to assist in drainage).  Powerful for trees, anyway.  Farming never took off in any of these mountain lands, confined instead to nearby clay belts in the surrounding lowlands.  The end result is a logging paradise, and more so, a maple syrup dream, the moisture of the Appalachians with the winters of the interior (sorry Vermont, you are just close enough to oceanic protection to make the slight difference for the pickiest syrup-enthusiast), perfect for feeding a tree and then keeping the food locked away from pesky winter thaws.  When that sap starts to run, it really runs.

In review, the best sort of syrup (and remember, that local soil can make you even pickier) comes from here:

And yes, x does indeed mark the spot of syrup in its Platonic form, but that is just my opinion regarding the finest terroir.  What can I say?  Those Canadian Shield minerals are just amazing.  Next post, we will start looking at individual trees, and we will cap off with individual products.  And before I get any letter-bombs sent to me from the Green Mountain state, Vermont syrup is fine.  Honest. 

Real Maple Syrup: Part One

While I was out today, dearest mother, who is thoroughly Canadian to the core, insisted that she simply could not live without maple syrup.  I agree, to a point.  I personally cannot do without a supply of good maple syrup.  Naturally, I looked at what was available, and naturally, it was from northern New England.  This is not to be unexpected, as maple syrup has been an ongoing concern among the Green Mountain folk for some time, ever since the earliest settlers to New England noticed the first born making it through the winter a bit better because of it.  That said, the first born a bit further north taught some other trans-Atlantic arrivals a thing or two about the miracle sap of the maple tree.  The French arrived on the scene even earlier than the first residents of second born Massachusetts, and believe me, Canada is far more savage in the winter time than anything coastal New England has to offer.  In the words of Samuel de Champlain, "there are six months of winter here". 

Therein lies a key truth about maple sugar production.  The whole journey begins with the sap of the tree being liberated from its arboreal prison, a process which happens only when the holy elixir flows.  For this to happen, the tree must become aware that its dormant period of winter rest is coming to an end, and starch stored in the roots then rises in order to get the tree back up and running.  The next part is the real trick, namely that things need to get cold again at night so the whole process is not rushed by the tree.  A slight increase in temperature over freezing during the day is enough to make the tree run more of that delightful root energy back higher into the crown.  Obviously, to get any sort of sap at all, the maple tapper is best off being in an area where such conditions are likely to happen on a regular basis.  Theoretically, any maple that will produce sap that can make for decent tasting sugar can be used, as long as the tree enters and exits dormancy; maple syrup has been made with some success down into the higher elevations of Georgia.  Funks from central Illinois near Bloomington has been producing "sirup" since the 1840's.  In a moment of sheer snobbery, I regret to say that I declined to make a visit while en route to Springfield.  To be fair, I was shocked to see any sort of a sugar bush in the heart of the eastern tallgrass prairie in hot, humid, flat Illinois.  I have since had the opportunity to try some of their creation, and it is pretty decent, considering the unfair conditions they have to deal with in terms of what may jokingly be called a spring thaw. 

Look at that, see, I'm already ranting. 

Anyway, as with so many other agricultural things, syrup can, and indeed does, vary based on a number of conditions.  While few would argue that differences between syrups are as noticeable and pronounced as those between wines, the truth is that an Illinois sirup made from a Black Maple (Acer Nigrum) will be noticeably different from a New Brunswick syrup made from Red Maple (Acer Rubrum).  Some people, such as your author, can also tell the difference between a Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) syrup produced in Lapeer, Michigan and the same produced in Mason, Michigan, places with relatively similar climates and even soil conditions.  Maybe I'm picky and imagining things, but one imagines that trees with such huge ranges and such varying growing conditions would be not without variations in sap taste, let alone general botanical characteristics.  Mr. and Mrs. Red Maple, after all, can be found everywhere from tropical Southern Florida to windswept and rainy Newfoundland:

Thanks, USGS!

Next post, we shall explore the wonderful world of things maple in terms of climate, weather, and all that stuff that happens up in the sky.  (And yes, Vermont syrup is fine, and yes, I will tell you all about how wonderful if inferior it is, etc.  And no, Everglades syrup is not a real thing).

The Mystery Holiday, Where People Got Drunk Last Night (Times Square), And 2014

New Year's eve and day have always been something of a mystery to me.  Many people, even those who don't overly imbibe the night before, expect to get the day off, and are often quite surprised that even essential services and stores remain functional and open for business.  Maybe the day is seen as a time of "me" in contrast to the function of Christmas, which in North America seemingly serves a two-fold function to the secular public as a time of family obligations and a time to spend deeply into debt in order to satisfy supposed needs of gift recipients.  The whole exhausting affair might in fact give purpose to the night of selfish excess which provides for cheap entertainment; large bar tabs can otherwise be forgotten in the suds.  In the rest of the Gregorian calendar observing world, people do in fact celebrate, but in North America, more so in the United States, Mexico City, and urban Canada, people get downright crazy.  No other place in the world gets more insane than Times Square.

Clutter, shadows, and isolation among the bustling heart of a city...  Insanity as urban art.

I could write a rather lengthy post about the history, glitz, glamor, shame, etc. that is involved in this meeting of roads in Midtown Manhattan, and I actually have written about the statue of a Roman Catholic priest which is the unnoticed centerpiece of the northern part of the square.  Really, though, that is easy information to find, and this is one of those instances where the description simply pales in comparison to the experience of exposing the senses to it in person.  No photos of it really do the place justice; it pretty much glows.

Its amazing what standing just a few feet closer into the scene with the same camera on the same settings can do to this classic picture scene.  The signs all seemed to have gone off at the same time, the construction is hidden by passing cars, and even the metal plates on the road seem to light up.  This angle is, of course, looking south towards One Times Square.

It glows almost as good if not better than Vegas, perhaps even more so.  Vegas exists to purposefully take your money without any regret, surface of otherwise.  Tourist New York, on the other hand, exists to take you and your wallet on a ride that you both seem to, above all else, enjoy, and not merely for the purpose of spending.  That said, even while you can be entertained here just by people watching and taking in the sights, all those signs, especially the big ones front and center on One Times Square pretty much exist to get you to spend something.  They want you to eat, drink, and take in a show.  They even want you to know that the police and around to make sure your experience is as unmolested as possible.

Which leads us into the second bit of our post, and away from the relatively quiet February scenes photographed above.  It seems that last night, much like last year in general, people were gathering to protest and break the silence about what they view to be ignorance.  Apparently more protests against racial discrimination and police brutality were set to take place last night in Times Square, but there were so many people there to simply party, revel, and lose themselves in the moment that nothing significant ever got underway.  The protestors could not even make it to the party, and Times Square did its usual job of distracting everyone from the reality of what was happening in the rest of the country.  2014 has largely been like that, though, perhaps more than any other year before it. 

The 24 news cycle and the ebb and flow of internet trends have largely ensured that people really don't think about things like government spending and corruption, international incidents, disease outbreaks, and even, well, joy over things that have gone right.  Times Square is a reminder that our society often gets bombarded by all sorts of information, is driven towards pleasure, and has a very short term memory.  Times Square is a lovely place in some ways, but one that is extremely artificial.  It is very purpose driven towards an intoxicating excitement that in the end is all too ephemeral.  In many ways and for many people, such was the experience of 2014 in North America. 

The Historical Importance Of An Invisible Creek

The brief summer of 2014 which followed the brutal winter of 2013-14 gave your author every reason in the world to be out enjoying the bounty of nature and not wanting to stare at a screen or gather hordes of photos together in an attempt to make sense out of the North American experience.  Well, winter is upon us once again and he finds himself indoors a lot more, even while he takes in the chilly air with confidence that he lives in Michigan and not northern Manitoba.  I've been doing a lot of reading lately, as well as a lot of listening.  The United States is currently in the midst of some of the most bitterly divided political warfare that it has seen in some time, Mexico is busy trying to deal with the fact that perhaps helping PRI regain entrenchment has done little to support growth in the country, to say nothing of stem the tide of violence from the drug cartels, and Canada sleeps above all this in some false sense of superiority.  Some jump into the fray completely ignorant of history and reason and foretell of the apocalypse; others claim they are on intimate terms with both the past and the cause of righteousness and yet present to the public rather obvious revisionist viewpoints of who said what in some document, religious or otherwise, made by a court hundreds of years ago, perhaps not even from our shores. 

Life goes on.  Freedom is maintained enough that most in North America, and yes, including Mexico, individuals can choose to tear away the veil of ignorance and find out the facts behind the truths in our larger story.  That's what this blog is about, my own journey to discovery about our story here in North America, and not just about great people or events or even transitory concepts.  Instead, I take a look at even the small things.  My latest read seems to be taking me for a ride down that particular path; Sarah Vowell has been entertaining and informing me about how taking a look at the small things can help one understand how the bigger picture fits together.  Better put by a really good friend, she takes a look a reality through the perspective of one within the fishbowl.  After all, this is why those who study history and geography even bother to look at details even when the facts are largely laid out in plain sight for them; happenings like revolutions are a bit more complex than the slogans which ignite the passions which drive them.  Sometimes we need to tear down the sacred statues and become iconoclasts in order to prevent such revolutions from turning away from said passions and into the realm of pure legalistic precedent.  Alright, so maybe I have also been reading some of that iconoclast Gore Vidal.  The thing is, I'm back to share some more of what I have found.

And what better little thing to then bring to attention than this charming little discovery:

Does not look like much, does it?  I am sure that most people would never recognize it as anything other than a slight depression in the ground which for some reason was bridged rather than filled and paved like the rest of the surrounding city.  In reality, this is what remains of Dock creek, a small tidal creek that perhaps served as the mark for where William Penn decided to center his capital city of Philadelphia.  The "dry water feature" rests buried in a lovely park behind Carpenters Hall, meeting place of the first Continental Congress ,and, as such, another relic of the city's past that gets largely ignored by the visiting public in favor of bigger, grander things like Independence Hall.  Today, aside from the depression in the ground, the only thing that lets the walker know that anything different was ever here is a plaque set up by the National Park Service.  The plaque lets people know that this center of the famous seat of American political birth was full of not only the gassy overtures of politicians, but also plain, simple swamp gas.  Much like inheritor Washington and predecessor London, this first capital of the United States was a rather wet and marshy affair that has otherwise transformed and been paved over.

Of course, the modern face of Philadelphia tends to look a lot more like this:

Chestnut street at 4th, looking west.

And, as expected, this:

Passyunk and 10th, turning south onto 10th.

She started out as the last grasp of the Atlantic's dominance against the fall line.  This is what makes this little creek so interesting, really.  Philadelphia, you see, is unlike many other cities in that it falls not soundly with the "North", is definitely not part of the "South" either, and while hardly on the ocean and farther away from salt water than even Washington, is definitely more coastal than inland.  Many houses here have gardens that feature a magnolia alongside a spruce, fitting for a city that can be buried by snow in the odd winter and yet experience a summer every bit as unpalatable as any given city further south.  In essence, we have a city that had a noticeably longer growing season than what could be offered by New England and the Hudson valley, thus suitable for plantations, yet not idealistically part of a colony founded otherwise for the sake of individual liberty (in contrast to Jamestown) in which the good land could be used for families of farmer-workers.  We thus have a city founded not in consideration to proximity to the coast and thus the broader market, and yet not so far removed from it as to be deaf to the siren song of international commerce. 

Here we have a city founded on the principles of religious tolerance and a degree of personal liberty that also had an increasing number of African slaves imported into it in the mid-eighteenth century.  Proudest son of the city, Benjamin Franklin, otherwise later noted to be something of an abolitionist, did not actually free his slaves until after the Revolution.  As the creek was covered over, so too was slavery, and the city and her history were simultaneously whitewashed; the colonial federal style look was abandoned for a lot of marble even as Pennsylvania passed the first abolition act in the United States in 1780.  The creek gives us two lessons: not everything is as simple as it seems, and nothing on this earth is immutable.  So, let's take a stroll further up the creek...

North America Exterior: St. Thomas

Remember that harsh and cruel winter some of us living in, say, the vast majority of northern and central North America just went through?  Well it seems that your blogger was caught up in the house looking longingly at the outdoor world covered beneath so much snow that he up and ran outside the moment he saw the first signs of warmth rise to shoo away that mean polar persistent air mass.  April came to show us that our continent is brutally extreme when it comes to seasonal temperature shifts, and all of a sudden the southern Great Lakes were blessed with numbers like 70 rather than numbers like -12 which had been recorded only weeks before in mid-March.  I had intended to write a post about our Caribbean south lawn... er... water feature, but instead found myself playing in the dirt and writing for other blogs.  Have no fear, I came back, found that people were still reading this crazy thing, and decided to make a promised visit to a sample island in the Caribbean, namely St. Thomas.

Now yes, you might have noticed that while St. Thomas is indeed an overseas possession of the United States, you probably also noticed that it is far removed from anything resembling the 50 united colonies back on the mainland.  For starters, she does not even sit on the North American plate, but on the neighboring Caribbean plate.  Her culture is distinctly different, her time zone is a very un-continental/maritime Canadian Atlantic time, and she is way, way more tropical than even the toastiest parts of deep Texas and passably more tropical than rainy Southern Florida.  There is a distinct lack of big box stores here, frost and snow are imaginary concepts, and the island was pretty much still the sunniest and warmest part of Denmark (international version) until a 100 years ago; even Puerto Rico can claim closer heritage with the rest of the United States through colonial Spanish roots.  The island is and was hardly a resort masquerading as a country, however, as it became a going concern when the Danish discovered that using African slaves to ship sugar and rum around the world was profitable, a mercantile heritage which later transformed itself into a breeding ground for tourists and the jewelry industry. 

This has a lot to do with the lay of the land.  St. Thomas is a small place, all of maybe 15 miles across at the most, and quite a lot of it is vertical in nature.  She has beaches, but she also has cliffs and steep descents to the shoreline and is surrounded by incredible coral reefs.  Those looking for broad, level expanses of sand covered over by hundreds of Coconut Palms are probably actually imagining the coral islands of Grand Cayman, Cozumel, or the Bahamas.  That is not to say that the place is far from a dream tropical resort paradise, as the climate manages to stay pleasantly in the 80's with plentiful sunshine and sea breezes a majority of the time.  The backdrop of the vertical nature of the place certainly also adds to the postcard image:

That said, it also presents the average farmer with a bit more blessing than the coral islands.  The soil here is just a little bit more amiable to the ways of the plow, and while slaves made life lucrative for Danish plantation owners, the island was certainly under cultivation.  These days, a simple glance at the satellite map can show that the opposite has largely taken hold; much of the undeveloped landscape has returned to some semblance of the monsoonal forests and possibly savannas which covered much of the Virgin Islands.  Simply put, there is not a whole lot of room for the island's residents to keep the economy going on a subsistence basis or through the use and extraction of natural resources.  In contrast, continued links to the United States have allowed the island to look beyond immediate concerns through an expanded economy, much like the islands always have, at least since the triangular trade got the first bonds set in place.  True, the culture and government was Danish, but the economy surely passed a fair amount of trade to the much more proximate Americans.  Here, as on St. Croix, what does survive in the man-made world of previous eras does not look to far off from, say, a narrow street in colonial Philadelphia, Williamsburg, or Charleston.  The overhanging gables might seem a bit more New Denmark than New England, but then again New England is a far cry from the Carolinas. 

Back to natural things, the island is definitely not what one would call a rainforest, and gets about as much rainfall each year as we do here in Great Lakes country.  That said, despite the presence of cacti and the like, she is also hardly a desert, but something more like a wonderful place which is not too hot, not too dry, not too wet.  Much of what has started to re-vegetate consists largely of tropical forests with deciduous (in the dry season) trees:

This probably made the place very attractive, even to those with money primarily the goal of founding a colony.  Especially in Virgin Islands National Park on neighboring St. John, ruins of many Danish plantations can be found among the recovering vegetation.  Much like the colonial policy of taming the wilderness that took place in the Thirteen Colonies, the Danish colonial pattern was one of using as much of the land to full agricultural potential as possible, and so very little pre-settlement landscape remains in plain view.  That said, while the landscape of much of the Caribbean has been very much turned into an anthropomorphized ecosystem, small bits and pieces of the tropical wonderland that the first Spanish adventurers and colonists made their way to over 500 years ago can be found for those who come here not to shop but to find a place far away, yet ever more abundant with familiar mangroves, Coccothrinax palms of relation to those in the Everglades and Keys, yuccas, and Spanish Moss.  Then too one can find reminders of a world very much similar to that of the ante-bellum United States, albeit a bit further south, a world forever changed from when the First Born once lived here, who like the First Born peoples of the South, cannot really say much... like the original landscape they are long since gone. 

Expanding The Horizon

American Voyages is dedicated to the exploration of North America, which I have thus far defined as being anything a part of our continental plate and landmass, as well as attachments such as the parts of California not on our plate.  Under this definition, I also include Cuba and the Bahamas, which have at least enough common features in fauna, flora, and history to be considered North American.  Where do I draw the line elsewhere, however?  Do I exclude Guatemala and Belize simply because they have more in common with the rest of Central America than they do with Mexico?  Do I refuse to talk about any of the Caribbean, especially when it does have a significant link to our continent?  In general, I started up this blog to show people what they have in their backyard (and as a secondary goal, to dispel myths about Mexico), and the thought of getting just a bit more tropical than what Oaxaca or southern Florida has to offer starts to look more like promoting knowledge about what people have in mind for their next vacation.

Ah, but there are people who live and have lived on the many islands beyond the reach of Floridian or Yucatan beaches.  The history of the three major North American nations is very much connected to what was going on in the Caribbean.  Many of the colonials there set up domestic, semi-representative governments just like the colonials in the North American mainland did.  Alexander Hamilton, along with a great many other British colonists living in the "West Indies", either lived in the Thirteen Colonies/United States or had involvement in trade between the various colonies and Britain.  Much of this trade involved the movement of rum, sugar, spices, and the "commodity" needed to make it all possible, slaves.  In this regard some of those distant islands were not too distant in culture and climate from some of the American South.  Barbados, for one, is very keen on reminding people that much of their population was once in the supplicant position in this culture. 

Many American ports would also bear a bit of a visible connection with distant islands.  New Orleans and Charleston have in many ways seemed more connected with the life of the tropical mariner and chic associations with motherlands back in Europe.  Florida, of course, had for the longest time been the meeting place of the Spanish Caribbean with mainland North America, and still largely is, particularly in Miami.  In return, Cuba has always seemed like another world from the rest of the Caribbean, even after American cultural connections were shut down once Castro took power.  From another angle, Cuba and Mexico have often expressed love and affinity with one another, as if sitting at another table focused on one another and no one else in some grand Latin American ballroom.  The Caymans Bahamas, and Turks and Caicos these days find themselves being sent similar love letters from fellow Commonwealth member Canada; the banks and financial concerns on the islands certainly reflect this budding, if unconsummated relationship.  The story gets more fascinating further south.  So why not shake off the last of the winter blues and visit some of those lands across the Straits of Florida?  Our first destination will be St. Thomas of the U.S. Virgin Islands.