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Uses of Vine Maple

The day of a fish fry begins with a trip to the woods to cut green vine maple for the fire. My grandpa was not much of a cook. His contribution to a fish fry was a wheelbarrow load of vine maple cut early in the morning while the dew was still on the grass. He also built a fire in the pit where the salmon would roast. Grandpa cut lengths of vine maple two to two and a half feet long, thickness ranging from five inch logs to finger size twigs. vinemapleHe would split the larger logs. In my memory, Grandpa used an ax and a Swedish bow saw to cut fuel for fish fries. He had a bright yellow McCullough chain saw, but I don’t recall him ever using it. After cutting the fuel, Grandpa would start the fire with newspaper, a little kindling, and dry stove wood from the wood shed and later throw on the fresh cut green vine maple. When the fire was going well, sweet and pungent smoke billowing, snow white ashes juxtaposed to black charcoal, flames barely visible in the bright sunlight, responsibility went to the cook, usually my uncle. Grandpa died when I was eight, taking with him, I believe, more secrets about vine maple than I can tell.

Vine maple is harder, denser, and closer grained than big leaf maple, but its trunk does not grow large or straight. There is not much lumber in a vine maple tree. I have seen vine maple grow to a foot in diameter and straight logs ten or twelve feet long but logs like that are exceptions. A typical vine maple trunk is less than six inches in diameter and curves sinuously. Trunks that soar upward twenty feet before branching are common, but they are typically so twisted that you would be lucky to cut straight four foot boards from one of those logs.

I once overheard John Schaefer, who survived treatment in an army hospital ward for pneumonia contracted in the flu pandemic of 1918 and knew something about life in the shadow of Mount Baker, suggest to Dad that he find two curved vine maple logs to replace the worn out runners of a stone boat Dad used for spreading barrels of aged cattle urine over the fields, a nasty job, still nasty but now replaced by more elaborate technology. Dad and John talked it over. Yes, vine maple was the right wood for stone boat runners. It would last forever. But finding two logs with the same curve was too difficult. If I knew what I know now, and had the resources currently at my disposal, I would have proposed that we find one log and rip it down the middle with a chain saw. I could do that. It would have been a perfect solution. But that was fifty years ago and I could not have said that then. Ten years ago, I could have split a vine maple log with a chainsaw, but today, perhaps not.

Vine maple wood is tough, not brittle. When I was a kid, John Schaefer taught us to make bows from vine maple. They were easy to make, find a a nice length of vine maple; a four foot length and three quarter inch diameter would be about right. Cut it green and whittle notches for the string at each end. We used cotton sack tyeing string for bow strings– they wore out quickly, but when we were sacking potatoes to sell in Bellingham every week, replacement strings were always close at hand. For arrows, we used fine-grained first growth cedar. Most were not fletched and had no arrowhead, just a notch for the bow string, although during a period when I was obsessed with Robin Hood, I made a few arrows with chicken feather fletches and arrow heads made from fragments of copper water pipe. The Indians made usually made their bows from yew, like English long bows, but they used vine maple for the bent wood frames of fish and bird nets.

The Indians also wove long thin and tough vine maple wands into baskets for carrying heavy loads like camas roots and clams. My great grandfather wove baskets which he sold in Bellingham in the early days before we had much cleared land and he had to rely on ingenuity instead of farming to buy coffee and pay the property tax. We still have one of his baskets and I think the frame work is made from vine maple wands, although my grandmother said the basket was woven from willow.

Vine maple sap is sweet. One spring, I tried to make maple syrup. I had no luck with big leaf maples, but I gathered a half cup, probably less, of sweet sap from a vine maple by cutting a half dozen vee-shaped gashes in the bark, driving a nail at base of the vee, putting a little wire bail on a tin can and hanging the can on the nail. The sap collected at the base of the vee, ran down the nail and dripped into the can. The sap was clear and colorless as water and tasted distinctly sweet. The sap stopped running before I got more than that half cup, and I did not try to boil the sap down to syrup. My mother was more impressed by the bugs and dirt that collected in the tin can than with the sap, but I drank it and thought it was pretty good, yet I never tried to gather sap again. Still, in the spring, when I think of it, I cut off a vine maple twig with my jack knife and chew on it, sucking out the the sweetness like a farmer chewing on a stalk of sweet grass.

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Salmon Fish Fry

When I look up “fish fry” in the dictionary or in Wikipedia, I don’t find what I expect. The fish at a dictionary fish fry are literally fried. That may be appropriate for points east, but for a northwesterner, it is an appalling prospect. Around Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia, the proper subject matter of a fish fry is salmon baked over a smoky open fire. J. G. Swan’s recipe, that I have placed in the sidebar, which he recorded at Willapa Bay in the mid-nineteeth century, is almost our exact family recipe for salmon and the recipe for a Salish fish frysalmon roast.

Fish fries are high tradition in our family. I remember going to fish fries when I was a preschooler and my cousin, who is even older than I am, remembers fish fries at our great grandparents house. The family has has been holding fish fries since the days when my great-grandfather first arrived in Washington Territory over a hundred years ago.

My cousin held a small fish fry on the farm last weekend. I called it his potlatch and when I think about it, that may be more fitly chosen than when I first thought of it.

I have to take a moment to say a few things about my cousin. He is six years older than I am. We were raised in a family that was close both in proximity and spirit. Time and mortality has spread us out now, but my great grandparents house, my grandparents house, and my cousins houses were all clustered within a mile radius.  Through adolescence, my cousin led our baby boom cohort through life: a drivers license, girl friends, joining the Marines, living away from the family, getting married, my cousin was always the leader. And, I admit, he was my idol. And as an idol, he always had a minute for me, and I reveled in those minutes. Needless to say, my cousin is a special person to me.

The years could have treated my cousin better. A divorce separated him both from his family and the house and acreage into which he poured his soul. Physical ailments have transformed a robust craftsman into a person forced to factor his physical capabilities into every decision. Still, my cousin is a respected man with many friends.

And a generous man. Fisherman friends gave him a salmon. Not just any salmon, but a sleek, fat monarch that would turn the head of any chef on Puget Sound. My cousin works for the Lummi Nation so it could have come from them. That would have been traditional. In our family, all the best salmon all come from the tribe, and last weekend, instead of hoarding that fine fish for himself, my cousin announced a fish fry.

He roasted the perfect salmon over a smoky vine maple fire, inviting a circle of relatives and friends to join in a festival of mutual good will. If you read cook books and the menus of places like Anthony’s and Ivar’s Salmon House, the wood for roasting salmon is alder, but that is not the tradition in my family. We always use green vine maple. Green vine maple smoke is sweet and gives the salmon a sharper tang than alder. Not that alder is inferior, I have enjoyed many meals of alder smoked salmon, but alder is not vine maple, not the flavor of salmon for this tribe of German descended Bostons.

And for some elusive reason, the vine maple smoke, the fat salmon, and the grace of the tribe around the table, made the occasion a potlatch.

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Salmon in Deer Creek

When the salmon were running, my grandfather fished them from Deer Creek with a pitch fork, hauled them home in a wheel barrow, and fed them to the pigs. My dad said they rarely ate salmon from the creek at the table; only when they found one still in good health and intact from its trek up the Nooksack. Even then, they were not nearly as tasty as the beautiful fish the Lummi Indians brought around to trade for potatoes. Deer Creek salmon were all ready to spawn and die. The Lummis had their traditional fishing spots where they caught salmon just right for eating.seagull

At close to twenty dollars a pound for premium salmon, I don’t suppose that anyone is concerned about salmon as pig fodder anymore, but in case you are considering it– don’t feed salmon to hogs too close to slaughter– Dad said salmon fed pork tastes like fish. All this took place long before I was born, and Dad is not around anymore to ask, so the line of reasoning is a little dicey, but I think that from this, we can infer that there was a healthy spring run of salmon on Deer Creek ninety years ago. Grandpa butchered pigs in October and only ever kept one or two sows over winter, so he would not feed salmon in the fall, but he would feed the pigs salmon from a spring run. The run must have been healthy if Grandpa could fill a wheel barrow with a pitch fork.

I thought about salmon in Deer Creek this week because the fall run would be about now. The creek is a half mile north of the farm. We had to cross the Littleton place to get to the creek. The Littletons replaced the previous owner, Doc Hurd. Doc was a horse veterinarian from long before my time. He had the farm to the north of us and the creek ran through his property. The intervening thirty acres between our place and the creek was subdivided a few years ago and now has houses on it and a sappy real estate name, Whisper Ridge, but to me, it is still “Littleton’s” or when I am thinking about old stories, “Doc Hurd’s.”

We watered our stock from water pumped from our well, first pumped by a wind mill, later by electricity. If the wind did not blow enough to keep the stock watered, Dad or Grandpa would have to lead the stock through Doc Hurd’s place to the creek, mutual cooperation that was a matter of course in those days. November can be a lean month for wind in Whatcom county. Sometimes we have a streak of foggy still weather that lasts long enough for the stock to drain a wind mill holding tank. I wonder what the folks in Whisper Ridge would think if I lead a herd of cows through their lawns today?

I have personally only seen one salmon in Deer Creek. That was in the early 60’s when my cousin Dave and I sometimes went back to the creek to fish for trout. I spotted the salmon barely moving on a little gravel shingle. She had deposited her eggs and was about to call it quits. One old salmon girl, doing her duty.

If there was a male salmon around to fertilize her redd (nest of eggs), she might have a few descendants in the creek today. I hope so. The old creek is probably more hospitable to salmon now than back in the days when Doc Hurd owned the place. Back then, Whisper Ridge was all wooded, but the north bank was cleared cow pasture right up to the creek, exposing it to dirty runoff and sunshine.

One year, my cousin and I found the carcass of a dead cow in the creek, nearly completely rotted. When we told Dad about it, he just shook his head. Not our business, but nasty. I hope no one was taking their drinking water from the creek downstream and I imagine it was bad for the salmon. The little ten, fifteen cow dairy herds that used to be everywhere are gone now, and even the big dairies are being replaced with houses, so the run off must be changing. I hope it is better for the salmon.

When my cousin and I fished for trout, we seldom caught anything. Some of the best spots were near a small irrigation pond that filled from a spring that came from the side of the bluff on our side of the stream. The overflow from the pond into the creek was cold spring water, and once in a while one of us caught a barely legal rainbow or dolly varden in the cooler water below the pond. But for the most the creek, the murky water was warm and sluggish all fishing season. The salmon enhancement people have planted trees that can be seen where the Northwest Road crosses the creek and others where the Aldrich Road crosses. They are not even head-high yet, so they have just barely begun begun to cool the water and clear the run off, but they will eventually have a big effect and I believe they may already have improved the water quality.

One of these days, I’ll put my dog on a leash, cut through the houses on Whisper Ridge, and check on the salmon run in Doc Hurd’s creek.