The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  After she set the spout Gwen pulled from a fitting a looped eighteen-inch length of tubing, called a dropline, and attached it to the spout. Immediately sap flowed out of the maple and into the tube.

  “It’s really running,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” Gwen answered. “And the vacuum pumps haven’t even been turned on. There are three thousand gallons in the tank at the sugarhouse now.”

  She stood casually with the drill in her hand, bit pointing upward, and said she had been working for four days. She was alone here, and three other tappers were on the northern side of Ken’s Lot. She said, “It’s good ground for tapping, especially compared to last year.” The snow had been deep and frozen then. “They put me on level ground the first few days so I could get my legs in shape. I’m in better shape this year anyway because I’ve been playing hockey and shearing a lot of sheep.”

  Gwen was tall and slender, with greenish eyes and a splash of freckles on her cheeks. She wore black snow pants and a light jacket, a wool hat, and work boots. She was light on her feet and moved easily and quickly through the woods. Her father, a well-known shearer in New Hampshire and Vermont, had taught her the trade of shearing sheep. He was a schoolteacher; Gwen had attended a private preparatory school and then the University of New Hampshire, but she left after a year to shear sheep, going to New Zealand. When Gwen’s father died in 2010 she had inherited his flock of more than a hundred animals. It was a good inheritance, a legacy, but an expensive one at first; during the winter of 2011 Gwen spent $500 a month feeding his flock. She couldn’t let any of them go at first. She also inherited his work—“I’m saying yes to everything,” she said then.

  She liked the outdoors, obviously. For the last five years Gwen had been living in a tent on her mother’s property, close enough to find refuge in her mother’s house now and then. She was planning to build a house on her own land, and had put together a small sawmill to make the lumber, but the project was delayed with new fortunes. “A lot has been going on,” she said when I asked about the house.

  I followed her from tree to tree as she drilled holes and drove spouts, and in all of them the sap leapt into the tubing lines. The trees were “shocked,” to use one of the scientific terms, by the sunlight and the current of warm air passing through New England. There was a formula to describe this principle, developed by a maple researcher at the University of Vermont, a poetic line that went, “The extent of the shock is equivalent to the rate of the flow.” I assumed that meant that the thermodynamic energy of the sun resulted in an equivalent amount of sap flowing in and from the tree. Or, more simply, it seemed that sunlight and sap were intimately related in this realm of life.

  Gwen worked her way down the slope at Ken’s Lot until she reached a section another worker had already tapped. She then moved northward, over to another section of trees. There was more shade in these woods and more snow. We walked along a road once used for gathering, back when they used horses at Bascom’s. We climbed over a sizeable stonewall that followed the uneven and steep slope, a wall almost completely intact after two centuries, from the days when they raised sheep in these hills during the first economic boom in New England and a time when this land was almost completely cleared of trees.

  On the north side in the shaded woods we were soon walking entirely on snow that had been in place since October after the big storm. Gwen found a block of tubing and followed the lines. She drilled a hole and set a spout, but this time the sap didn’t run out of the tree. The same was true for the next spout, and then another.

  “These trees are frozen,” she said. From the perspective of a maple syrup producer in New Hampshire on February first, that was probably a good thing.

  2

  THE PUBLIC STILL THINKS WE’RE DOING IT IN THE MYTHIC WAY

  I HAD TALKED TO Bruce Bascom for the first time after learning about an insect found in Worcester, Massachusetts, an invasive species called the Asian longhorned beetle (ALB). The ALB had moved from packing crates into trees in the city. It would attack any leafy tree but had a preference for maples, and I had heard that it loved sugar maples. There was a quarantine, and 20,000 trees were destroyed. The alarm was obvious—what would happen if the ALB got into the northern maple regions? How would the maple syrup industry be affected? Or the fall foliage?

  We had moved to New Hampshire so my wife could begin a new career as a teacher, and her third-grade class visited a maple sugarhouse every spring. The trips were part of the social studies curriculum, part of an effort to learn about local economic culture. The sugarhouse they visited was on a dairy farm, so they had the opportunity to learn about that too. The kids gathered at picnic tables in the sugarhouse and sampled the new syrup, poured over ice cream. It was a special time of the year for them as well as for the community. My wife and I began to visit other sugarhouses on weekends, and this became a spring ritual for us.

  The maple sugaring season, or rather, the sap flow, also meant the end of winter. Anyone who has lived in northern New England knows that the winters are long and sometimes harsh. My wife noticed that red-winged blackbirds arrived on our hill between March 6 and March 9 every year, calling out their koo-ree even when there was ice on the pond. At about the same time the sap buckets went up on the trees. Another thing I noticed along the roads was that the sunlight coming through the tubing lines would glisten through the sap inside. This became the earliest sign of spring, this indication that liquid was moving underground and through the trees.

  Fortunately the ALB can fly only short distances and so migrates slowly. The quarantine seems to have prevented its movement outside of the zone around Worcester. Not that there isn’t concern. When I went to Bascom’s for the first time and met Bruce, we talked about the ALB, and Bruce pointed out some identification cards there for the taking. But he talked about much more and at length, and he showed such a passion for the history, lore, and culture of making maple syrup that I wanted to keep listening.

  Bruce gave me his short talk on the history of the maple syrup industry in the United States. It peaked around the time of the Civil War, when maple syrup was associated with the abolitionist movement. “No sugar made by slaves,” went the slogan. Sugarmakers actually made sugar then, dry or partially wet. For most families in those regions maple sugar was the primary sweetener. After the war, when the tariff on white sugar was reduced, dry maple sugar could no longer compete broadly in the marketplace. Still, at the time of the US centennial in 1876 there were 154 “sugar places” in the town of Acworth, which produced 214,000 pounds of dry maple sugar. In the early 1900s Bruce’s grandfather and his brother held “buy days,” when they collected dry maple sugar from other farmers and carried it by horse and wagon to the train station on the other side of the Connecticut River in Bellows Falls, Vermont. Gradually the industry went into decline as the prices fell. Some farmers liquidated their sugar orchards, selling their trees to mills that specialized in rock maple wood. A hurricane in 1938 destroyed many remaining maple groves. By the 1960s, when Bruce was a teenager, the industry had fallen to ten percent of what it had been a century before. But in the 1960s plastic tubing began to be used in maple orchards. Some sugarmakers would never use it, would never suck sap out of their trees, but plastic tubing saved the industry, Bruce said, and made possible a new level of pure maple syrup production.

  When we talked that first time, standing in the store, Bruce said something he would repeat: “There is more to the maple industry than people realize.” I wondered whether he was talking to me because of some deep feelings for the industry—it was easy to see he had them. The month was February 2010, and they had just started tapping trees. On the spur of the moment I asked if I could watch. Bruce said, “Show up and see what happens.”

  A FEW MONTHS LATER Bruce was inducted into the Maple Hall of Fame—yes, there is such a thing—at the American Maple Museum, in Croghan, New York. The ceremony is held each year in May after the season is over and when the equipment has been
put away, and it was held during a pageant for the Maple Queen of New York—yes, there is such a young woman—who goes to agricultural fairs around the state. Bruce’s sales manager, Arnold Coombs, introduced him to the audience. Arnold told of how, when Bruce was in college, his mother pleaded with him not to come back to the farm and to get a job at a corporation instead. Arnold said, “If only she could see you now.” He said that in his reading about successful people, they all shared the characteristic of intense curiosity, and Bruce had that. Arnold said that when he was in the business of trading syrup on the bulk market, he and Bruce met every year to work out terms and signed their contract on a napkin. Arnold talked about the equipment store, said it was the “Walmart of maple equipment stores,” and this brought a few laughs.

  I kept returning to Bascom’s, following the crew as they tapped, watching them clean up after storms and as they checked tubing during the sugar season. I was happy to tag along—it provided me with a reason to get out into the woods. I followed the 2010 season, which started off strong during late February but then suddenly turned warm. I talked often with Bruce and occasionally went places with him, mostly to the area of northern Vermont that has the richest maple culture in the United States.

  I soon realized that the equipment store at Bascom’s served the function of a normal sugarhouse, in that people came and socialized. I saw that Saturdays, when Bruce worked in the store, was the best time to talk and to meet other sugarmakers.

  Customers with large sugarbushes would come to buy barrels or tanks, fittings for tubing or pumps, spouts or containers, or any of the many other esoteric items. Bruce would sometimes greet them jocularly by way of introducing them to me. One Saturday he called out, “Here’s someone with a big sugarbush!” That was Dan Crocker of Sidelands Sugarbush in Westminster, Vermont. Crocker was well known for his expertise and his manic energy and for his evaporation system that ran on reclaimed vegetable oil and smelled like a hamburger joint. “My trees are really good,” Crocker said. And they were, as I later saw when I went to his well-groomed orchard with Bruce. “Everything goes straight into my sugarhouse. I don’t have to do any gathering. My woods are clean.” Crocker had 25,000 taps. He and Bruce talked about “syrup fever,” an affliction that caused people to invest large sums in their operations. It was a deadly disease, they said. You needed to have a good job in order to support it.

  “Hey, you should meet this guy!” Bruce said on another day. “His parents have a trailer they take to the fairs where they make maple cotton candy!” Then a shy, bearded sugarmaker told me with pride that his father and mother had started the business by erecting a sugarhouse on a trailer, from which they sold maple products—syrup, maple candy, ice cream, and that special fair food, cotton candy.

  Late one morning on another Saturday a man arrived from New Jersey, driving a Toyota Prius, happy with his gas mileage and cranked up from his five-hour drive. He lived in the central part of the state near Princeton, he said, and had planted his maple trees in rows like an apple orchard.

  “They’ll be ready to tap in forty years,” Bruce said. “You’ll be dead by then.” He told him the trees should be sixty feet apart and the rows should be staggered. The man hadn’t done that, but he was going to feed and irrigate the trees and expected they would yield before forty years. He had bought some “super-sweet” clones from a company in New York, trees that promised to produce sap with a sugar content of up to eight percent. He sugared with 120 taps and made about thirty gallons of syrup. “My season starts in January and I’m done by March,” he said. His thirty gallons weren’t enough to supply his farm store so he drove to Bascom’s to buy a set of five five-gallon containers at a price of $990. Out of this man’s earshot Bruce said, “He’ll hardly make a profit, driving all the way up here.” But the man thought he would—“I sell it for seven dollars a half-pint, twenty-eight dollars a quart. That’s a hundred and twenty-eight dollars a gallon.” He stood to triple his money, far more than enough to pay for his gas. Off he went, enthusiastic maple farmer, back in New Jersey by late afternoon.

  A couple came in from Farmington, Maine, after a four-hour drive, to buy an evaporating pan. They had made some syrup on their kitchen stove the year before. Now they were going to increase to fifty taps, string some tubing, and boil nights after work using their new three-foot-by-four-foot pan. Bruce talked them through the whole process, showing them what tubing to buy and what fittings to use and explaining drop lines and how they work. He showed them how to use a hydrometer to measure sugar content. He estimated their production possibilities—fifty taps at one quart of syrup per tap could amount to twelve and a half gallons. “That’s more than we can use,” the man said. Bruce followed with a story—he knew a couple who made syrup for their family, but after the kids grew up they had too much on their hands. “So they sold it to me,” Bruce said. He spent an hour with them—if this was the Walmart of maple equipment stores, then this couple was getting the attention of Mr. Walton himself. Bruce even carried the evaporating pan to their car.

  Another time I met Bruce as he was coming out of the store with a scrap of paper in his hand. He was on the way to the warehouse to find a sap intake valve for a customer in Pennsylvania. That customer was an Amishman, Bruce said, not able to have a telephone, so he had gone to his neighbor’s to call him. As we walked to the warehouse he told me tubing sales were brisk. “Half the tubing sales are made in February. People in this business forget there are twelve months in the year and that you can plan ahead. The average person who comes into this store . . . actually they are not the average kind of person. They tend to be self-employed. Someone who has four thousand taps and wants to have a small business. Someone who wants a little pain in his life.”

  At the doorway Bruce came upon a man who may have been in that category. He had some coils of tubing in the back of his car. He was young, blond, goateed. “Do you work here?” he asked Bruce. “Yes, I work here. They even give me a hat for this.” The young man said he paid for 500 feet of tubing but only received 400. Bruce leaned into the car, read the labels, and saw that one roll had 300 feet, another 200. “My bad,” the customer said. Bruce went into the warehouse with his paper, but I stayed and talked for a few minutes. He was from Randolph, Vermont. He and his father owned a sugarbush with a few hundred taps. They were using buckets but would now switch to tubing. They had been making a few gallons a year but were hoping for much more.

  On another Saturday I heard Bruce say to an older retired man in the doorway, “Do you want me to look at your rig?” They went to the warehouse, the part where used equipment was stored, most of it taken in on trade. Some of the evaporators were relics, such as the old gargantuan King Company model, with dollar signs on the firebox doors—the idea was that when the fire got hot enough the dollar signs glowed, which meant you were making money. This customer, from Westmoreland, a town a few miles south on the Connecticut River, had brought in a worn-out evaporator with a firebox made of a steel barrel. He had been using it for forty years. An evaporator pan fit on top of the barrel, and on the pan was a metal box with a spout for preheating sap. The barrel was rusted through. Bruce helped lift the evaporator from the man’s truck, and they wheeled it into the warehouse on a dolly. A process of bargaining began. The old unit would leak, Bruce said. To me he remarked, “I told him I’d give him fifty bucks for the pan but more if he brought the whole unit in.”

  The old man said, “Saves me from having to take it to the dump.”

  I said to him, “That’s not a good bargaining position.”

  Bruce looked it over, thought about it some more, and said, “A hundred and twenty bucks. If I can get a hundred and thirty for it I’ll break even.” The man looked surprised and said, “Okay.”

  In the store the old man told me he sugared to make about fifteen gallons of syrup and gave it away. His wife told him he was working for nothing, but he figured that the gifts were a form of money. Now he put his $120 toward a brand-new evapor
ator, a “Half-Pint,” made by Leader Evaporator. Their beginning model, it would handle fifty taps and boil four gallons of sap per hour. Because it retailed for about $1000 and Bruce was a major shareholder in Leader, with a premium discount, both sides were pleased with this deal.

  Finally, one Saturday near the end of 2010 I was in the store and looking at a large painting, something Bruce picked up at an auction. It was a scene of sugaring from a century or maybe a half-century ago: a grove of mature maples, a mountain in the background, wooden buckets on the tree, a team of oxen pulling a sled, someone pouring sap into a gathering tank, someone else carrying buckets with a shoulder yoke.

  “The public out there still thinks we’re doing it in the mythic way with oxen and buckets,” Bruce said. “We can’t put a picture of tubing and vacuum on that jug of syrup.” It was true. Not many people knew about tubing and vacuum, reverse-osmosis machines, or steam-powered evaporators of the kind Bascom’s used. Or about the scale on which Bruce was operating.

  Bruce mentioned a company that I will call Gold Coast, a hip grocery chain that makes a practice of not revealing the source of their supply, all of which has the Gold Coast label.

  “The order came through,” he said.

  I knew that the Gold Coast order was a big deal for Bascom’s. Bruce said the bottling crew was working on this Saturday, filling the initial order in preparation for shipment. He asked if I wanted to see the work.