Frosty Backwoods Cabins, with Syrup

A saying was once current in therapy circles: lean into the pain.

As we enter into the coldest stretch of the year, I'd like to recommend a delightful film called Le Goût d'un Pays, which has been offered as part of the Great Northern Festival. The title has been translated as The Essence of a Country. I'm no French-Canadian expert, but to me the title sounds more like "The Flavor of the Land." .

It's a documentary, and its ostensible subject is maple syruping. It follows a number of parties into the back country of Quebec, where they tap their trees, boil down the sap at their sugar shacks, and, while the reduction is taking place, drink Cognac and discuss trees, the thaw, the importance of remaining connected to the back country, and Quebecois separatism.

The operations vary, and so do these backwoods connoisseurs. One involves heavy machinery and  twenty or thirty men, ten thousand trees, lots of plastic tubing, and very little philosophizing, though the tone remains familial. The manager's friends show up two hours later than the hired hands, and the celebratory dinner at the end includes a local three-piece band.

Alongside that major undertaking is another driven by a single family: one man, his girlfriend, and three or four children of unclear pedigree. One segment focuses on a farmer and his wife, who have sold off all their farmland, and are left with only the wooded "back forty" where they tap their trees. We see the old man shedding a heart-felt tear as he contemplates all that he's lost.

What these enterprises share is a connection with the land, and with tradition. They all love their trees, their sap, the camaraderie that the harvest nurtures, and its connections with the past.

A few segments are devoted to a food-writer who discusses maple syrup, as if to remind us how important it is even for the urban masses to maintain their connections to the backcountry.  And there are also some scenes of a very experienced pie-maker putting her dough on the outside of the pie pan. And let's not forget the articulate young man at the café counter who perhaps couldn't tell a maple tree from an oak, but who has plenty of ideas about Quebec, its history, its identity, its future.

For myself, I do not love maple syrup. I like waffles, with syrup and butter and yogurt or sour cream on top. (A few strawberries or blueberries would be a rare but welcome luxury.) We have some genuine syrup from Lutsen in the fridge, also a big jug of a Canadian product we picked up at CostCo that will take us years to run through. It says "Organic Amber A" on the label. But waffles tend to make me sleepy. A few slices of bacon would help.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy listening to these people discuss how syruping enriches their lives, regardless of the enormous time and effort involved—seeing the spigots being inserted, listening to that ping in the bottom of the bucket, watching gallons of watery fluid being poured into huge steaming vats, and later, relishing the thick golden syrup as it's being poured into bottles or cans. I also loved seeing the steam coming out of the syrupers mouths as they philosophized about Quebec and Canada and syrup. 

The film is heavy with nostalgia. And doesn't the license plate of Quebec say "Je me souviens" (I remember)? Remember what?

I remember

That born under the lily (France)

 I grow under the rose (England). 

 By the end of the film, several groups of syrupers have brought out their guitars and started singing.

Alongside these other charms and virtues, the film also gives us ample opportunity to relish the maple forests and back-woods shacks of the protagonists and the joie de vivre they share with their friends. But "protagonists" is a silly word to describe these hard-working, festive, and loving characters. 

It was only later that I learned that several of the individuals portrayed are eminent Québécois. And that's the best way to see the film, I think. It's as if you were watching Pete Seeger, Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, and Robert Bly pick huckleberries while they philosophize about America, but without knowing who they were.

So if you're planning to hunt out a link to the film, read the bios later.

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Gilles Vigneault is a poet, publisher, singer-songwriter, and Quebec nationalist. Two of his songs, "Mon pays" and "Gens du pays", are considered by many to be Quebec's unofficial anthems, and one of the lines from "Mon Pays" has become a proverb in Quebec: "Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays, c'est l'hiver." (My country is not a country, it is winter)

Fred Pellerin is a popular folksinger and storyteller.

Roméo Bouchard studied theology in the 1960s, left the priesthood in 1967 and shortly thereafter published "Two Angry Priests" in collaboration with confrere Charles Lambert. He later became a communications professor at the University of Montreal, managed an organic farm, and cofounded the Union paysanne.

Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, whom we see eating a crepe  at a cafe counter, is the co-spokesperson of the left-wing party Québec solidaire and was elected to the provincial legislative assembly in 2017.