Cherry Sap

Recipes written by trees

One of several new species of insects found incased in amber, a kind of fossilized historical moment. I found this when I was looking into gall wasps.

From pine tree resin, amber.

          From fury, hail.

From acacia’s sap, the bond.

          From raindrops, frogs.

Linda Bierds from Metamorphosis: 1680

This almost spring night I am writing this letter to Joy Bridy who I hope has been wandering the woods in search of the glittering resins of fruit trees which are maybe flowering now in the Appalachian Foothills where she is investigating sustainable ceramics and waiting “patiently as a rock” for my response to her questions about fruit-tree binders.

Time and Place

It was around this time of year, between the seasons, that I drove ten hours straight north with my friend Eamon. Well, it wouldn’t have been quite ten hours, but he started telling this tale about a Pelikan case found completely covered in barnacles washed up on a beach in France. The same case that his dad packed all of what was left of his mid-life crisis into before getting in a small boat to sail the world. A quest which ended in one of those lashing-rain-and-50-foot-waves helicopter rescues that you see in movies, with his dad and the rescuer all roped up above a stormy Atlantic into which he was forced to drop his case to save his life. Meeting the French seaside farmer who found the case two years later would be the next chapter, and by this time we were crossing a bridge onto a coal blackened landscape called Goat Island which is the gateway island to our destination island.

An Adventure

I loved the feeling of just driving and getting lost in Eamon’s story which was as slow and fractal as a good story should be, and I loved the feeling of adventure in driving north. My idea for the adventure was that I would meet my friend Anong Beam and some of her friends and we would have a lye-making party with a big bonfire in the deep snow of this magical island that we were driving to. Lye is made from rainwater slowly trickled through a layer of white ashes from trees like pear or apple that absorb a lot of potassium. When the ashy water moves slowly through a lattice of dry grasses, multiple times, over days, the potassium in the ashes is intensified to form caustic crystals called lye, and when added back into water, is good for scrubbing sinks, making soap, explosives, and is a key ingredient for a few of my more elaborate ink recipes. Anong is a paint-maker who shares my interest in materials research and Eamon is one of my favourite photographers of the almost un-photographable and I was picturing a weekend of fire and water, ashes, and snow.

The Recursive Island

Manitoulin is home to the world’s largest natural island that is on a lake that is on an island that itself is on a lake. Did you follow that? its called a recursive island and its a geology of concentric lakes inside islands inside lakes that forms a kind of dream landscape that would make Christopher Noland jealous. Driving into M'Chigeeng First Nation where Anong has her studio, even the stop signs were both ordinary and like nothing I had ever known. “You are not in Canada anymore,” Anong told me, noting the Ojibwe street signs. We were standing in front of a huge communal oven fuelled by maple firewood full of ashes from recent syrup-making and she skimmed some of the softest velvety white ashes from the top for my plastic bucket. I started to tell her how I make lye and my idea for the party. In my community, Anong said there is a last name that refers to the grey-white ash of the maple tree used to make useful water of the fire that you call lye and we use for everything from preparing deer skins to processing corn and cleaning. This silenced me into a kind of knowledge that really should be always on my mind. What I know about natural chemistry comes from Youtube videos and a couple of decades of foraging, the material understanding of first nations of what I call my country is a bio-chemistry born of getting through the winter as a community, lye-making in M'Chigeeng comes from an ancestral knowledge. It’s a knowledge as lived in as a last name. Anong, who introduced me to painting technique for skateboards that involves about 12 cans of spray paint and an oil barrel would probably laugh at my attempts to explain myself in this letter. But she did wake me up in a way they I needed and keep needing.

Anong didn’t say it, but she probably wasn’t going to set up a party in her community for me and my photographer friend to experiment with lye just so I could complete my adventure. She did, however, hand me a scoop of ashes and send me back to the other end of the island where her business partner Ruta, a lichen loving, artist-witch was building a radio-tower/women-only strip club in her backyard and who let me collect dry grasses and snow from the base of the half-completed tower. I still have the remains of those ashes percolating in my backyard in a bucket, and Ruta has become a good friend and my supplier of certain impossible to find herbs. But maybe most importantly, Anong helped me to help myself to think about trees in a way that I want to share with Joy (and whoever else is reading this).

What I learned from Anong about trees

Anong Beam makes paint from the limestone that is becoming marble that is particular to Manitoulin island, she has a strong sense of place and has built a non-toxic ecological business, but she doesn’t mess around with the kind of changing and fading colour that I like to play with. She is an artist and artisan who uses chemistry to make paints that are long-lasting and predictable. So its not like I became a natural inkmaker or I suddenly became a friend of the trees because of Anong. But I have come to understand not from reading or talking, but from watching in practice how the maple tree pulls sugary water hundreds of feet into the air in that equinox moment in the forest. I got to see that the wood of a fallen maple makes a powerful fire to re-intensity that sap into maple syrup and saw that the black ashes of the burnt maple could be ground down into a sparkling galaxial carbon black paint. I saw the way the metals from the soil were purified in the wood and re-purified by fire into white ashes turned into that useful fire-made water we call lye. And in all of this I saw that a tree is not just an ink factory but a kind of ink alchemist: transforming itself through intensification and re-combination, time, and magic. The tree does the work. The tree writes the recipe…