The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  Ken’s brother, Eric Bascom Jr., also wrote about this work in an article in the Keene Sentinel, looking back at the year of 1942 during the Second World War: “The sap spouts are those tubular tin pegs and tap into holes in the trees. Usually Kenneth drills the holes. Rodney sets and spouts and I, the beast of burden, follow with a stack of metal buckets, at least one for every tree. Last year when we tapped, the snow was up to our hips. This year it’s only up to our knees.”

  Price controls were in place during the war, and maple syrup was set at a price of $3.30 a gallon. “Even so, Dad’s expanding,” Eric wrote. “If the war ever ends, the price will go up. Last year we tapped maybe 1,200 trees. This year he plans to tap 2,000.”

  To Eric, their sugarhouse seemed like a “clipper ship with crowded sails plowing.” There were other vessels on those seas, and he could see steam rising, “from my uncle’s shack, and Roy Clark’s. We have plumes from Gerard and Chester Mason’s in the hollow, and in the southwest, Uncle Cal’s and old Fred Green’s. There are literally hundreds of small producers around us who love the tradition and supply their own kitchens and a few village stores.”

  He described the long days gathering sap:

  Each of us has a pair of 16-quart gathering pails. The sides taper in at the top, with a flared rim that allows emptying a 12-quart bucket with minimum spillage. We stumble up and down banks and trek from tree to tree to sled. The steel gathering tank holds three hundred gallons, but the tank is full before we’re halfway through the section. We’ll have to return to get the rest and that’s too bad because, as we head for home, the horses think they’re done for the day. They’re pulling 2,400 pounds of sap, all uphill, yet we’re at the sugarhouse in short order. This load and the rest will keep dad boiling half the night. It is a night and day operation that blots out everything else. When we get back to the barn we’ll have nothing to do except rub down the horses, milk the cows, clean the stables and feed the stock.

  In 1942 the Bascoms made 600 gallons of syrup, doubling the previous year’s crop. That meant a return of about $2000, which seemed like a very large sum to the twelve-year-old boy, as he told his father.

  “About half of which is due to the bank,” his father had answered.

  AFTER HIGH SCHOOL Ken Bascom served in the Army, stationed in Italy for eighteen months, until the war ended. He then attended the agricultural college at the University of New Hampshire, completing the two-year program. Ken considered staying to complete the four-year program but thought the final two years would be more theoretical than practical. He wanted to begin working on the farm, and by then he was married.

  Ken met Ruth Baker during the summer of 1947 at a square dance in Acworth. She had come from Massachusetts to visit some relatives. At the dance the Bascom brothers announced their presence by stomping their feet all at once, something they may have learned when they lived in Canterbury near the Shaker colony. Ruth was impressed, and also impressed with the ambition of the young farmer. They were in many ways a compatible couple. She had attended Houghton College and studied business and also studied religion at the Providence Bible Institute. The wedding was held in Massachusetts, with all of Ken’s siblings taking part and with Eric officiating.

  In 1950 Ken bought the farm from his father for $25,000. As planned, with their children full grown, Eric and Elida returned to the ministry. That same year Ken and Ruth built a new house, 800 feet away from the stone house and on the opposite side of the sugarhouse. Glenn Bascom sawed out the lumber at his mill. Friends and family helped raise the building. Ken named the place “Happiness Lodge.” In November Bruce was born.

  A photograph from 1956 speaks to the name Ken Bascom gave to his home and to his maple syrup business and sugarhouse—a Sunday morning breakfast scene, with Ruth wearing a red dress, ladling syrup over a pan of baked French toast. Ken, wearing a white shirt and dress pants with his hair combed back, leans over the table to cut portions for the kids. Bruce, almost six years old, is sitting on the chair with his legs drawn under him, anticipation on his face. Judy, age four, waits politely. Nancy, a toddler, pulls at the tablecloth and tries to climb up on the table. This too seems to be among the best America has to offer—their own maple syrup, their eggs, their milk, their Sunday—and Ruth, in her amusement, seems to know completely.

  By then the Bascoms had hosted the sugar parties for more than half a decade, and they kept improving upon them. They were building a mailing list that would reach a thousand names for the parties and for mail-order business. Their brochure for 1957 listed syrup at $5.75 per gallon and $1.75 per quart. As the kids grew older, they began to help at the parties. They could gather snow in baking pans for sugar on snow. They could help make maple candy and maple cream. They could wipe the syrup off the tablecloths. They could gather sap.

  Ken had a serious accident in 1958 while working in the woods, when he cut down a tree and a heavy limb hit him on the forehead. His brother Rodney found him lying unconscious, his face blackened. At the hospital his pain was so intense that Ken asked someone to bring him a gun, half-joking—they realized that if he could joke about, it he would probably be okay. Eric Sr. and Uncle Glenn boiled that year, while brother Rodney managed the farm. Ken and Rodney were working in partnership, managing two farms, but they weren’t making much of a profit. Then, in one of those moments that changes everything, Ken neglected to thank Rodney for doing all of the work while he healed, and Rodney took offense. It didn’t help that the year before when they were gathering sap Ken forgot to tell Rodney that his wife was in labor, with Kevin. Rodney moved his family to Concord and worked on a dairy farm, then at the farm at the University of New Hampshire. He created a sugarbush in the town of Nottingham.

  Ken was back in full force the next year in 1959. He tore down the sugarhouse his father built and constructed a new one on the same site, with a concrete floor. The building looked like a barn, or even a house, but with doors in the roof that opened to vent out maple steam. He painted the building brown with yellow trim and red doors. At one end of the building Ken erected a sizeable smoke stack, thirty feet tall and thirty inches in diameter. He bought a used steam boiler from a laundry near Lake Winnipesaukee and converted it to be heated by wood. Steam at 325° could bring sap to a boil almost instantly. Ken engineered the plumbing of the steam system himself. The steam pipes sat within an evaporating pan four feet wide and ten feet long. He built the sugarhouse large enough to hold fifty visitors and made ten picnic tables to seat them. For the parties they covered the tables with red-checkered tablecloths, according to tradition.

  Ken was constantly thinking about ways to improve the systems and increase the capacity of the sugarhouse to accommodate more taps. By 1965 he had added a second evaporator, this one oil-fired with a five-foot by ten-foot pan. It was highly state of the art for its time, this pair of evaporators working in sequence, with the oil-fired unit doing the first part of the boil and the wood-fired steam evaporator finishing off the syrup. The system doubled his production per hour. For a touch of fun, Ken rigged up a steam whistle that he blew when the syrup was ready to be poured, and that could be heard miles away. The guests, wandering around looking at the buckets, taking in the view, knew when to come to sample the new syrup.

  The decision Ken made to leave dairy farming and go into maple production did not come easily. Where Ken lived, no one had done it before even though the region around Acworth was the most productive in New Hampshire. But Ken knew someone who succeeded full time in the maple business, Bob Coombs, in Jamaica, Vermont. Not only was Coombs running a large syrup production operation with more than 20,000 buckets, he was selling equipment as well. Coombs also bought syrup from other producers, with many loyal suppliers who would sell only to him spread out through New England and upstate New York. He packed syrup for stores and sold it wholesale on the bulk market. Coombs had two trucks running routes throughout New England. His son Arnold began making deliveries as a teenager, driving to pick up barrels of bulk syru
p in New York when he was only sixteen.

  Ken had seen that the future in dairying had limitations. He had also come to a point where he didn’t want to work with animals anymore. He wanted to work with trees. Ken sold his horses first of all, the workhorses that pulled a wagon with a sap tank. He butchered his chickens and hung them from the clotheslines to drain. That was part of life on the farm. When Ken butchered a cow occasionally, he did the killing in the barn but cut the meat on the kitchen table. The work left saw marks on the table, but later they bought a new one. In Ken’s mind his dairy cows were his meal ticket, and he had developed the herd his father started those years ago to a prime condition. He sold them in October 1964. A month later, as though to mark the new era, Ruth gave birth to their fourth child, Bradford.

  There was another reason for the change. Ken Bascom was an athlete when it came to the work of farming. He would have made the national team if there were one. Ken worked seventy to eighty hours a week, six days a week, with a half-day off on Sunday for church except during sap season, and there were few who could keep up with him. But Ken expected others to keep up, including the tenant farmers who lived in the stone house. Ken fired anyone who didn’t measure up. He fired workers who smoked because he didn’t want to pay for cigarette breaks. He was in that generation of farmers who yelled a lot. In that year before he sold his cows, five tenant families moved on and off the farm.

  “Because he expected them to work eighty hours a week just like he did,” Bruce said. “My father’s main problem was that he couldn’t manage help. He was a tyrant to work for.”

  Of course, no one worked more for him than Bruce did.

  6

  A GALLON EVERY 22 SECONDS

  KEVIN MADE HIS SECOND BOIL of 2012 on February 10. It would have been his earliest boil ever, except for the one the week before on February 3. On February 10 Kevin made 451 gallons of syrup, bringing the total for 2012 to 617 gallons. On February 10 the temperatures at Bascom’s went from 25° in the morning to 41° in the afternoon. The tapping crew of four people worked all that day, finishing Putnam’s Lot, raising their total tap count to 33,700.

  Two days later, on February 12, the temperature was 6° in the morning, getting up to only 12° in the afternoon, and the sap run halted for four days.

  Nevertheless some meteorologists were describing this as “the non-winter of 2012.” Partly this was because of a lack of snow—there was a snow drought. Going into the last winter Kevin plowed the parking lot and Sugar House Road sixteen times by January 1. But this year he had plowed only four times going into February, and that included when he plowed after the big snowstorm in October. Meteorologists claimed that the cause of the drought and the warm weather was due to an unusual positioning of the jet stream, which had looped far to the north in North America and, conversely, far to the south in Europe. Because the jet stream acts as a boundary for weather fronts, warm air spread northward in the United States and Canada while polar air moved southward through Europe. During those two days when a heat wave passed through New England on February 1 and 2, bringing temperatures in the 40s and 50s, temperatures in the Ukraine dropped to –28° Fahrenheit.

  On Thursday, February 16, the temperatures ranged from 29° to 42°, starting a new sap run. Kevin Bascom boiled for the third time the next day on February 17, his third Friday in a row, and made 621 gallons. He boiled again on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, bringing the total production for 2012 to 2362 gallons. On Monday it turned cold again and the trees shut down for two days.

  On Wednesday morning there was a half-inch of snow, followed by a warm afternoon in the midforties, and that triggered a sizeable run. Kevin boiled for seven hours the next day, making a whopping 1373 gallons, which only a few years ago would have been a record day. It only got up to 38° that day, which put a brake on the sap run. Kevin’s boil the next day, on Friday, February 24, produced a modest 283 gallons of syrup. His total production then stood at 4018 gallons.

  Some sugarmakers called this period from February 16 to February 24 “the big run.” Some said they had missed it. But another much bigger run was about to come.

  Because of the early start of the season, the tapping crew completed their work near the end of the big run. As of February 23 there were 63,865 taps feeding into the Bascom sugarhouse.

  YOU COULD TELL that Kevin was boiling when you arrived at the parking lot and saw the broad column of steam shooting through the sugarhouse roof. That steam was scented with maple, and as soon as I got out of the car and stood in the open air I encountered the sweet smell. I liked this idea of standing in a maple-scented mist at the top of a mountain.

  Inside the sugarhouse Kevin was at the evaporator. Kevin is slight of build, quiet of voice, but he was running a high-powered, finely tuned machine, with its rows of steam pipes, pulsing hoses, fervid boiling and the fans throwing off sap steam, the water condensing and dripping, the syrup flowing out, and the reverse-osmosis machines in an adjacent room whirring at a high-tech pitch. I tried talking to Kevin at the evaporator, but there always was too much noise, and his voice was too soft to follow over the kaleidoscopic sound. But at intervals, twenty-five feet away in another room by the filter presses as he poured syrup from a hose into a fifty-five-gallon drum, you could hear Kevin talk. He was experiencing the pleasure of the harvest there.

  I said to him once, “Some people work all year to get two hundred gallons. It’s like you’re flying the Concorde and they are in little Cessnas.”

  “It’s like flying the Concorde with one person,” he said with a burry laugh.

  BOILING HAD COME a long way over the last 400 years. Native Americans boiled sap in hollowed-out logs, into which they placed hot rocks—they made great quantities of sugar this way. European settlers used iron kettles, a single kettle to which they added fresh sap to the thickening, blackening syrup. Sometimes they used two or three kettles heated over an open fire, with sugar solutions of different stages in each kettle. In the mid-1800s sugarmakers began to use flat pans, rectangular and as much as six feet long, boiling the sap over a stone or brick fireplace—an arch, this fireplace was called. Remnants of those stone or brick arches can be found in the woods today, sometimes even in places where maples no longer stand.

  In the latter part of the nineteenth century modern evaporators were developed, with metal fireboxes, also called arches, with two pans on top. One pan was for rapid boiling, the other for finishing syrup. Eventually the boiling pan developed so as to be fluted with deep troughs so as to have more surface area to transmit heat. As the sap boiled and thickened, it was transferred from the flue pan to the syrup pan.

  In the syrup pan the thickening syrup moved along by means of a density gradient, the peculiar principle in which thinner syrup pushed thicker syrup ahead. At the final stage, when the syrup was at a density of two-thirds sugar, it was then “taken off,” strained, and filtered.

  The fuel for the fire was wood. Generally a sugarmaker could produce a few gallons of syrup per hour, depending on the size of the evaporator, the sugar content of the sap, the properties of the wood, and the skill and effort of the person feeding the fire.

  A researcher at the University of Vermont devised a formula known as the “Rule of 86” to determine how many gallons of sap needed to be boiled to make a gallon of maple syrup. The principle was mysterious and simple: if the sap was at one percent sugar content, it took 86 gallons to make a gallon of syrup. But by doubling the sugar content to two percent, the work on the other end was essentially halved, now taking 43 gallons of sap at two percent sugar content to make a gallon of syrup. I found it interesting to multiply the work out—a crop of 1000 gallons of syrup made from two percent sap (often the normal content) would require the boiling of 43,000 gallons of sap. The Bascom crop of about 24,000 gallons would necessitate the boiling of 1,032,000 gallons of sap. Though what they do is actually processing.

  When Kevin Bascom came to work on the farm in 1979 Bascom’s had about 30,000 taps on
tubing. Bruce had been developing the system for six years. Ken Bascom was well ahead of most sugarmakers because he was boiling by using steam in pipes under high pressure. By 1979 Ken had added to his sugarhouse two oil-fired evaporators that did the bulk of the boiling, feeding reduced sap to the steam-powered evaporator that then finished syrup quickly.

  The cost of making syrup increased suddenly during the fuel crisis of 1973 and 1974, when the price of oil quadrupled. Ken had used oil because it was relatively inexpensive and reduced the labor of cutting wood. At that time Ken was burning about four gallons of oil to make a gallon of syrup. That cost was feasible when oil was 25 to 40 cents a gallon, but not at $1.60.

  The fuel crisis intensified efforts to make the evaporation process more efficient. As it happened, around 1974 the first reverse-osmosis machines became available for maple syrup production. Reverse-osmosis machines are essentially desalinization machines working, as their name implies, in a reverse way. Rather than save the fresh water and discard the salty brine as they do at sea, maple syrup producers discard the pure water—or permeate, as they call it—and use the sugar solution, the concentrate, for syrup.

  The possibilities of reverse osmosis were irresistible to sugarmakers who were making a business of producing maple syrup. When a producer could concentrate maple sap at two percent sugar to eight percent by running it through an R.O., as they call them, he would have to boil only about ten gallons of water rather than forty-three. The syrup that cost the equivalent of four gallons of oil to produce would now only require one gallon of oil, with sap at eight percent sugar. The Bascoms added their first R.O. machine in 1977.