The trouble did not end once the harness was on. I was getting hammered, again, by my own hubris. I had ridden horses all my life, spent most of my adolescence talking or reading or thinking about them. I assumed all those skills and all that knowledge could be seamlessly transferred, that I would just switch from being a rider to being a teamster, from up on top to down behind. The way I looked at it, Mark had the farming experience and I had the horse experience, so we were a package, and there was no reason we couldn’t jump right in and do it, zero to sixty the first season. As we plotted out our vegetable fields at the end of that first winter, we planned forty-inch spacing between our rows—an incidental detail, except that, once we’d committed to it, we would be forcing ourselves to rely only on horsepower for the whole season, since the tractor wheels would not fit between rows with such a spacing.
When Mark asked me if I thought we could do it, I said yes, but I felt a shiver of misgiving. Already I’d had some minor mishaps. I’d forgotten to attach a line to the outside of Sam’s bit once, traveled like that all the way through the barnyard, and discovered it only when I couldn’t get him to turn to step over the tongue of the wagon. Another time, I’d backed the harnessed horses out of their stalls, and, while I was pulling on my gloves to drive them out of the barn, I watched helplessly as Silver swung his big butt around until he was nose-to-nose with a freaked-out Sam, who began backing toward me. In this configuration, my lines were useless, and it was only luck that got me to the horses’ heads in time, to bring them back into alignment before they’d torn up their mouths or entangled themselves in lines and scared themselves silly. We added a chain, after that, that hooked the horses’ rear ends together loosely at the hip, a safety measure we should have been using from the beginning.
Once they were hitched, I found the team more excitable than they’d been when I’d driven them at Gary’s. On cold mornings, Sam would pull so hard at his bit that my arms were exhausted, and, when we stopped to load something into a wagon, I had a hard time getting them to calm down and stand still. At the time I blamed it on adjustment to their new home, but now I know it was only my own inexperience, and a series of mistakes that I made—some big, stupid ones, but mostly subtle errors in judgment—that made the horses lose trust in me, a little bit each time we went out. They began to suspect that I was not fit to be in charge, and, frankly, so did I. What I should have done then was stop trying to do work with them and apprentice myself to an experienced teamster for a year or two, but at the time, that seemed out of the question. We were out of money, and we were committed to growing food for the season that was just around the corner. And so I faked it, and hoped for the best.
I had been hitching every day since the horses arrived, to move wood or loads of hay, to haul manure, any job I could think of to gain experience before the growing season started. I studied the way the horses moved, their likes and dislikes, their working personalities. Sam was the overachiever, up on the bit, head high, always trying to stay a few inches ahead of Silver. I hitched Sam to a wagon to haul our trash to the dump, and as soon as we hit the road he picked up his feet and arched his neck, as though he were in a parade. I think the image he held of himself was light and quick and proud—an Arabian, or a Thoroughbred, anything but a narrow-chested, old workhorse. But he was dutiful and willing, no matter how humble the work. Silver was the burly one, Sam’s opposite. He was thickly muscled, with the neck of a steroid-addled linebacker, and he was a bit of a laggard. If I was not careful to hold Sam back and urge Silver on, Silver would drop farther and farther behind until his side of the evener rested against the cart, leaving his tug chains slack, letting Sam pull the whole load. His favorite pace was a doleful walk, but he could pull the weight of the world when he wanted to. The first time I saw him do it, we’d hitched to an old wagon to bring a load of split firewood out of the woods. It was wet, and the loaded wagon got bogged down in a patch of half-frozen mud, sinking almost to the axles. I’d been driving the team only a few weeks, and I didn’t know yet how much they could pull. This, I was about to learn, was Silver’s area of expertise, the kind of work he was made for. He flicked an ear back, listening, and when I asked them to pull I saw Silver gather those gorgeous muscles of his and throw his formidable shoulders into the collar, focused, digging in, pushing off until the wagon rocked clear of the mud. We did not have to unstack that load, or any other as long as Silver was with us.
The day after the jumper was finished the weather turned too cold for sugaring. There was fresh snow on the ground, and it was clear and sunny, and the horses were feeling particularly spry. They fidgeted while Mark and I hitched them to a splintery wagon we’d pulled out of the weeds and rehabilitated, and when we set off down the farm road they picked up their feet and tossed their heads. We were traveling to the middle of the farm to pick up a load of mulch hay from where it had been stacked for several years, under the roof of a large metal barn. I sat on the deck of the wagon, and it whizzed along in its track, around the west barn, to a flat, high place that overlooked the field we’d named Long Pasture. The road turned down a hill and ran along a low, frozen swamp stamped with deer tracks, and then into a fifty-acre field.
The barn that held the hay was open on both ends, and its metal sides were coming loose, flapping in a gusty wind. I drove the team inside and stayed on the wagon, holding the lines, while Mark hefted the bales onto the deck and stacked them. The noise of the flapping metal made the horses antsy, and I wasn’t paying attention to Mark’s stack until it was already five tiers high. I wasn’t sure they could pull that much weight up the big hill on the way home. “Only one way to find out!” Mark said as he started another tier. In most of my relationships, I’d considered myself the risk taker, the one who wanted to do more, stay out later, order another round. It occurred to me that the man I was supposed to be marrying was accustomed to finding his edge by falling off of it, catching it by a fingernail, and clawing his way back up.
It was a mile back to the barns, and Mark rode on top of the stack, twelve feet off the ground. I was driving the horses from the front of the wagon, where he’d built me a little nook out of bales. The stack towered behind me. On the flat, frozen ground, Sam and Silver handled the load easily, but when we reached the hill, they quickened their pace. They wanted to take it at a trot, to build up momentum and make the pull a little easier. The ground was slippery and I should have insisted on the walk, but I didn’t know any better, so I let them trot, and they picked up steam. Halfway up the hill we hit a pothole, and I felt the stack yaw behind me, and I heard a hoot from Mark, way up over my head. I looked behind me and saw the stack careening from side to side. In glancing backward I’d taken my attention away from the horses, and they’d grabbed the opportunity to increase the pace, Sam at a tight little canter now, and Silver trotting like a maniac. One more bump on the path and the whole stack of bales went over, Mark with it. I whoaed the horses, who couldn’t figure out why they’d been so suddenly relieved of their load. Silver swung his head around and stared, and Sam stood, ears pinned, looking anxious, and it was very quiet. I was not sure if Mark was under the hay or in the ditch, dead or gravely injured, and then I heard him laughing from the other side of the pile, and he popped up, covered in snow, and Silver bobbed his head as though he were in on the joke.
Sugar bush. Even the words are pretty and sweet. From up on the hill, through the bare trees, I could see each field and pasture framed by its hedgerow, all the way to the lake a mile away. The farmhouse was the warm color of Jersey cream against the blue-white snow, all its rough edges smoothed, like an aging beauty flattered by candlelight. Inside the sugar bush the snow muted the rustle of beech leaves and the clink of the harnesses and our voices, and standing still with the horses I felt like an interloper in nature’s bedroom.
The sun was warm, but the snow was deep and heavy, and the horses labored to break a trail, their weight shifted to their back ends, forelegs reaching high. They still had their winter c
oats, and they were soon soaked with sweat. When we broke through drifts the snow came up and over the front of the jumper to where I sat, like waves over the prow of a ship. The jumper was stacked with buckets and their tops, and a box of thin metal spiles.
Making a sugar bush is a process of elimination. Over years and generations the ash and pine and birch are logged out, leaving a monopoly on sunlight and nutrients for the sugar maples. Unrestricted, the trunks of the old trees grow so big you can’t wrap your arms halfway around them, and the tops spread and unfold into the open, elegant, vaselike shapes that children draw when they draw trees in kindergarten. The Springs, who had owned the farm until the 1980s, were the last family to use these woods, and they’d made a good road that cut the sugar bush in half, north to south, and another that ran uphill, east to west, forming a long-armed cross. There was a rougher road that curved between the arms of the cross, through the southeast quadrant, where the population of maples was thickest and the slope steepest. Five years earlier, the sugar bush had been ravaged by a monumental ice storm that had crippled the North Country for a week. Some of the maples had been snapped off at the top or stripped of their biggest limbs. Mark and I had spent a few afternoons clearing logs from the roads, nipping back errant branches so the horses could pass without getting whipped in the eye. Mark was so geeky about trees that when he was young he collected leaves and twigs, labeled them, and put them in photo albums. He had tagged the maples with bright pink ribbon, pointing out their opposite branching, each limb and branch and twig mirrored by a twin, a trait shared, he said, only by ash and dogwood; the bark of the younger sugar maples was the smooth gray of elephant skin, thickened into overlapping scales on the older ones.
Mark struggled from tree to tree through drifts to his knees. He drilled a five-sixteenths-inch hole into the tree, angled up just slightly, so that the sap would drip out. Then he hammered a small metal spile into the hole, which was already wet with sap. He hung a bucket on the spile and topped it with a little tin roof. We made our way along the main road like that, Mark running up and down the hill to the jumper for more buckets and spiles while the horses and I struggled to break a trail. The loop of rough road in the sugar bush’s southeast corner was deeply drifted, and we decided not to chance it.
By the time half the trees were tapped, steam was rising from the horses’ backs, and they were blowing hard. Silver’s mood turned petulant, no matter that the humans were working at least as hard as he was. By afternoon we were finished, with 170 buckets hung, but Silver had gone on strike—ears pinned flat against his big bullet head, one back hoof flashing back to kick at the tug chains—and had to be coaxed even to pull the jumper downhill, toward home.
Maple sap is mostly water, with a sugar content that averages around 4 percent. It takes about forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, and all that water must be driven off drop by drop in the form of steam. Between here and there was a lot of firewood. Mark and I put the horses up in their stalls, blankets over their wet backs, and attacked the woodpile, smashing log after log of seasoned ash into kindling-like pieces until the pile toppled over on itself and we dragged ourselves to bed, worn-out. The weather radio was the last sound I heard, predicting a hard-frozen night followed by a warm, sunny day. The next morning we ran up the hill to check the nearest open-crown tree and found it running hard, not with the expected drip-drip-drip but with an actual trickle.
By afternoon the buckets on the best trees were three-quarters full, and we strapped the sap tank to the jumper and set out for the sugar bush. Silver was rested and full of corn, resigned to the work now, sensing purpose. Up on the hill, Mark followed yesterday’s tracks from tree to tree and came waddling back, a full five-gallon bucket in each hand. He tipped the buckets into the tank on the jumper, which was fitted with a filter. Later in the season, when the weather stayed warm, the sap in the buckets would be a dirty yellow, full of dead bugs and moths, drawn to its fatal sweetness. But the first run was clear and clean as springwater. Mark stopped to hold a big bucket to his mouth and drink awkwardly, the sap running down his cheeks and under his sweater and around the back of his neck. I handed him the lines and jumped off my place on the sled and plunged my mouth directly into a full bucket. Whole poems could be written about the taste of the first run’s sap, icy and sweet and redolent of wood.
Three hours later, we came back down the hill with a full tank of sap. We bucketed it into a 250-gallon stainless-steel holding tank that we’d scavenged from a defunct dairy and hung from the rafters of the pavilion with chain.
There’s nothing complicated about making syrup from sap. All you have to do is keep boiling. The sap becomes more and more concentrated until the sugar content reaches 66 percent, and that’s syrup. Anyone with a pan and a fire can do it. But to make things go faster, and to handle 250 gallons at once, you do need some special equipment.
The evaporator has two main parts: the arch, where the fire goes, and the pan, which sits on top and holds the boiling sap. Our arch is six feet long and two feet wide. The pan is made of stainless steel and has a fluted bottom, to increase the surface area that’s in contact with the fire and speed up evaporation. It is fitted with a series of floats and valves, so that cool sap is constantly flowing into the pan to replace the water that is driven off as steam. The inside of the pan is baffled so that the boiling sap flows from the back of the pan to the front, growing thicker and more concentrated as it comes. When it reaches the front of the pan, it can be let into a separate section called the finishing pan, where it is closely monitored. When the thermometer in the finishing pan reads seven degrees higher than the boiling temperature of water, you have syrup. You can double-check with a hydrometer, which measures its density. There is not much room for error. If your syrup is too thin, it will sour. If you let it get too thick, it will crystallize in its jars. After you draw off the finished syrup, you pour it through a thick feltlike filter, to remove the gritty mineral substance called sugar sand, which tastes terrible and clouds the syrup.
It was a perfect week for sugaring. Every night, the temperature dipped down well below freezing, and the days warmed into the thirties. We harnessed the horses at noon and made the rounds. By the end of the week the snow was almost gone, and we moved the tank from the jumper to a wagon.
I liked running the evaporator. Mark was busy nailing together wooden flats to start our seeds, so it was quiet, solitary work that started two hours before dawn. I had never been a morning person in the city, but on the farm I’d learned to love being outdoors before light. I felt like I was sharing some kind of secret with the unhuman things around me, the birds not yet stirring in the trees, the mud quiet on the ground. I carried provisions to keep up my strength: a French press of ground espresso beans, to be brewed not with water but with boiling sap for an electrifying drink that had to be sipped in small quantities; also, a dozen eggs and a shaker of salt. Thomas LaFountain had taught me to drop the eggs one by one into the finishing pan, where they would crack with heat and the thickening sap would seep into the cracks and darken and sweeten the hard-boiled eggs, which are fished out with a long spoon and peeled and eaten hot with a heavy sprinkling of salt. I took a plate of pickles, too, an antidote in case I accidentally overdosed on sweet.
Humming, I adjusted the valves on the evaporator and cleared the ashes from the firebox. I arranged balls of newspaper and the day’s first pieces of kindling, and I had turned to find a match when suddenly a bird rushed out of the firebox, flying so close to my face I felt the air from its wingbeats against my cheek. I saw a flash of black wing and heard one alarmed chirp and it was gone. “Lucky bird!” I yelled after it and put a match to the paper.
The heat builds fast, and in two or three minutes steam was rising from the pan full of sap, a sweet mist. In another few minutes, the surface began to convulse, and the steam was a solid column, too much for the hole in the roof. The steam spilled along the rafters, filling the space under the roof, creating thick c
louds that condensed on the beams and by sunup began to drip on my head.
At last, I’d found something on the farm that I was a natural at. In the house, Mark was always complaining that I made too much fire. He did have a point. I had burned holes in the woodstove’s thick steel interior, and I once made a room so hot that a candle on the shelf near the stove wilted. Mark is never cold, and he would fret over my profligate use of firewood and sit pointedly as far from the stove as possible, stripped down to a T-shirt. If I was comfortable, he was sweating. As a matter of compromise, I’d learned some restraint in the house, but the whole point of the evaporator is to run it the way I like it, like a freaking inferno. I stoked it every few minutes with thin, long pieces of wood that burned like chopsticks. The fronts of my thighs were soon stinging and pink.
I fell into an absorbing rhythm. Stoke the fire. Skim any dirty foam from the top of the pan. When it gets too foamy, like a pot of oatmeal about to boil over, add a sliver of lard and the foam disappears. Check the level of sap in the pan. Check the thermometer in the finishing pan. Stoke. Skim. Once you have a fire going you can’t leave the evaporator, even for a moment. If you run out of sap or a valve gets stuck and the pan boils dry, the flames will eat through the thin metal and destroy your expensive equipment. I’ve never seen this happen, but I have been warned. Just before noon the level of sap in the storage tank was getting low. I stopped stoking the fire and let it die down. Four gallons of new syrup were safe in quart jars, not a bad morning’s work.
The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love Page 12