The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  Ken Bascom boiled for more than forty years, and when he retired Kevin took over. Ken might boil on the weekends when visitors came by, but Kevin put in the long hours. “I used to boil sixteen hours a day,” he said. “I used to be here at nine o’clock every night. Eventually we had two shifts. I would boil in the morning and through the day and someone would replace me at night.” During the night shift Kevin was usually at the R.O., concentrating sap for the next day’s boil.

  Some sugarmakers run sap through an R.O. and concentrate it to eight percent and take it no further, content to boil off ten gallons of water to make their syrup. Other sugarmakers, those like Kevin, take the sap to higher concentrations. They run the sap through the R.O. a second time and possibly bring it to twelve percent. Or, if they have reverse-osmosis machines with a higher number of membranes like Kevin has, they bring the concentrate up to eighteen or twenty percent on that second pass. At a concentration of twenty percent, the sugarmaker only has to boil off three and a third gallons of water.

  Using an evaporator with high-pressure steam like the one at Bascom’s, where the temperature in the steam pipes reaches 350°, and with highly concentrated sap, it takes only a pint of oil to make a gallon of syrup. The four gallons of oil that produced one gallon of syrup during Ken Bascom’s time can produce thirty-two gallons of syrup in the system Kevin runs.

  Because of the power of high-pressure steam, Bascom’s is able to use an evaporator half the size they would need otherwise. Their processing has followed a path of reduction in step with their improvements. With sap at twelve percent, Kevin can fill a 55-gallon drum every half hour. With sap at twenty percent, he fills a drum every twenty minutes. That is 55 gallons of syrup produced in only twenty minutes. That is 2.75 gallons per minute—a gallon about every twenty-two seconds.

  The membranes in an R.O., membranes that are fine enough for water to pass through but not as easy for sugar molecules, require a lot of care and attention. Kevin cleans his at least once a day, using the permeate separated from the sap.

  Before raw sap ever reaches the membranes, it is filtered several times. From the storage tanks behind the sugarhouse the raw sap first passes through a filter of diatomaceous earth (fossilized remains of diatoms, often used in swimming pool filters) that removes large particles. The sap passes through a bag filter, then through a prefilter attached to the R.O. Using a pair of reverse-osmosis units on the first pass, Kevin processes 8000 gallons per hour, bringing it to a concentration of eight percent.

  He then routes the sap outdoors to a storage tank where it cools. Kevin usually makes the final concentrate at night. The sap is filtered again, passing through a bag filter and then a cartridge filter before passing it through the membranes on the R.O. Kevin slows down the flow rate, and the sap emerges at eighteen to twenty percent.

  In the morning he starts up the evaporator again, charging it with steam from the boilers in the basement. He moves the concentrate through a preheating unit, a box above the evaporator that the escaping steam from below heats—a “steam-away” this is called. The sap then enters the evaporator near the boiling point. Less than a minute later it’s maple syrup.

  7

  A SUGARHOUSE FULL OF SOUND AND EVERYBODY COMING AROUND

  ON THE SOUTHERN WALL of his new sugarhouse Ken Bascom attached two wooden signs shaped like maple leafs. On one he wrote, “Happiness Lodge Maple Products,” and on another that overlapped the first he wrote, “Ruth and Ken Bascom.” In 1967 he put up four smaller leafs, one for each of his kids.

  Ruth Bascom took a photo of her family in front of the signs that year. Ken stood in front of the Happiness Lodge sign, leaving space so his wife’s name and his could be seen. Standing proudly, he is forty-two years old but seems like he could be much older. Bruce stands next to him, the same height, a hand raised to touch the leaf with his name—his is the largest leaf and the one that is the highest up. In jeans worn at the knee, a wool jacket, and a wool cap, Bruce stands straight and lean—he has the look of a farm boy who has done a lot of work, the kind of kid who drives a tractor at a young age. Nancy is beside him, in a crouch, below her leaf, the third one down. She is a tomboy and Bruce’s shadow; she will spend the summer stacking hay bales with him even though she weighs only seventy pounds. Brad, at two years old, stands with his head below his leaf, the smallest and furthest down on the wall. At the end of the line, standing below her leaf, is Judy, nearly as tall as Bruce and not a tomboy; Judy likes working at the sugar parties, making the doughboys, collecting the snow, eating a leftover doughboy or piece of sugar-on-snow, and having a little fun with the other kids when the day in the sugarhouse is over. The parties give her a family feeling she enjoys.

  The departure from dairy farming to full-time maple also meant a profound change for Bruce. Previously he had fed the cows, helped with the milking, taken care of the new calves, and worked in the fields. Bruce was driving a tractor from the time he could reach the pedals, from about the age of twelve. The daily chores of the farm were also Bruce’s daily chores. When his father went into the maple business full time Bruce thought that he too might make a living from maple someday, though he didn’t say much about it.

  Bruce had difficulty saying much at all, in that he had a severe stutter. Bruce said that his stutter defined the early part of his life, that he confronted it every day and in every interaction. For someone with relentless verbal energy, a stutter like his was the worst of impediments. His classes at school, especially his English classes, were an exercise in torture. He was permitted to drop the mandatory French class. One classmate remembers Bruce as the red-faced kid with a stutter who gained a whole lot of confidence in college, though Bruce said the stutter wasn’t about confidence at all. The strain was hard on the father-and-son relationship—Ken would stand in front of Bruce waiting for him to get the words out and sometimes walk away before he did. This was, of course, hard for his mother to see. Ruth took him to the medical center associated with Dartmouth College for therapy, and Bruce was given exercises to help him to speak. One was simply to relax and breathe. Bruce’s sisters knew not to bother him when he was doing his exercises in his room. He memorized limericks and made some up: “There once was a man from Seattle, who had a beard that would rattle. He eventually found, when the time came around, with his beard he could call in the cattle.” He could still recite them.

  Bruce had a precocious talent for business and for driving. His sisters remember him driving at ten, but Bruce thinks it was closer to twelve. He was twelve when he started an apple cider business after he saw an ad for a cider press. Ken lent him the $25 to buy it, taking cider in payment. He gave Bruce a motor to run the press and took cider payment for that as well. In the fall, when the apples ripened, Bruce and the girls would get into the family car—he was twelve, Judy ten, and Nancy eight—to drive to abandoned orchards and find rogue trees to gather apples. They pressed, filtered, and bottled the cider in the dairy barn. They found customers by phone calls and by knocking on doors, though Bruce’s sisters did that work because Bruce couldn’t talk on the phone or knock on anyone’s door. He sold the cider for 75 cents a gallon, sometimes carrying it to school on the bus to pass to his customers’ children. He was clever enough to offer Judy and Nancy a 10-cent commission on the empty jugs, which ensured a steady supply. Bruce kept up the cider business into high school, accumulating a $600 savings account.

  Driving a car at ten, a tractor at twelve, and running the evaporator at about the age of ten could be hazardous. Bruce’s way of saying this was, “I wasn’t an inexpensive kid.” He destroyed a couple of trucks, and he tipped over the tractor, almost severely injuring his leg. Ken built a stand for Bruce so that he could see into the evaporating pan. A couple of times he let the sap get too low in the pan, which scorched and opened up leaks. Ken lectured him at high volume, repaired the pan with hacksaw blades and epoxy, and, after the season, bought a new one. When it came time for Bruce to take the test for his driver’s license, K
en sent him to Keene alone in the farm pickup, saying there was no point in wasting an afternoon. When the registry officer asked Bruce what he would do if he failed the test, Bruce answered that he would probably just drive home.

  Bascom family vacations were usually spent at maple meetings. If the meeting was in, say, central New York, Ken got everyone up at 3:00 in the morning, loaded up the car, and drove until they reached Binghamton or Syracuse or Croghan, talking maple all the way. Bruce remembered loving it. At the meeting Bruce would absorb as much as he could, but in his memory he was the boy standing in the shadows, unable to get out a complete sentence.

  Ken set the schedules for his kids. They worked on the farm after school and on weekends. None could play sports because they were a waste of time. Each child played in the school band because Ken believed that art had value in a child’s development. Once they started they weren’t allowed to quit. Bruce played drums.

  When the time came to tap the trees the family worked in the woods, except for Ruth. They started at 7:30 in the morning and worked until dark, with a tiered level of responsibility. Ken drilled the holes while another older worker might set the spouts. Bruce hung the buckets, and Judy and Nancy put on the lids. This meant slogging through the snow all day. Back at home at night they stood by the heating registers trying to warm their feet.

  As Bruce grew older, Ken scheduled the tapping around the school vacations in mid-February, even though that was early to begin tapping trees. School kids were an important part of Ken’s labor force, as was true for many sugarmakers with thousands of buckets. By normal standards, a producer would employ one worker for every 500 buckets, which meant Ken would have twelve to fourteen people working for him, but it was more like two or three men and a group of kids. When the flow began Bruce brought friends home from school to earn a little money emptying buckets. The memory of this time was one of Bruce’s favorites—the skilled old men Ken hired to tap and drive spouts, the sight of the tractors pointed toward the woods, he and his friends arriving after school. The boys running to empty the buckets, trying to impress the older men, wearing themselves out after three hours.

  I think it is difficult to comprehend the frenetic anxiety of someone who made most of his year’s wages in those six weeks of the sap run and who had to get the supply to fill his regular accounts. Sometimes, when help wasn’t available and the crew was undermanned, the work fell upon Bruce. Ken had him up at 5:30 on some days and in the woods by 6:00, and kept Bruce out gathering until after dark, only to have him up again at 5:30 the next morning. Slogging through snow, carrying heavy buckets that sometimes spilled on legs and into boots or doused the gloves on freezing March days. Such was the life of the son of the first full-time sugarmaker. But as Peter Rhoades, who was one of those boys, said when I asked if this was especially hard work, “We always worked hard, it was just a part of our lives.”

  When the season was over, Bruce cut wood, those 200 cords, alongside his father. Ken Bascom was producing about 20,000 bales of hay each summer, and later as many as 30,000 bales. They would load hay all day and into the night and then deliver it the next morning. Making hay, like making syrup, is a burst activity. On some days Ken delivered syrup packed in jugs to his customers at retail stores, gift shops, and farm stands in New Hampshire and Vermont. He made his deliveries in what they called “the boat,” the poor man’s pickup truck, a secondhand station wagon loaded to the limit of its suspension system. Ken and Ruth sold syrup from their house too.

  In those years, when his maple crop wasn’t enough to fill his accounts, Ken drove to Quebec and bought a few barrels of bulk syrup to make up the difference. Sometimes it was cheaper to buy Canadian than to produce it at home. Ken wasn’t the only one doing this. Large distribution companies in the United States took advantage of the cheap supply of Canadian syrup, companies like Maple Grove, American Maple, and, eventually, Springtree in Brattleboro, Vermont, which supplied large grocery chains and helped develop national markets. Bruce rode with Ken on some of these trips to Canada.

  Bruce attended the University of New Hampshire. His grades were poor at first, especially in freshman English, which was another exercise in torture. He took two forestry courses along with Peter Rhoades and thought about going into forestry, but he finally decided on the business school. Bruce got As in most of his business courses.

  During the sugar season he went home on weekends. Ken was still using buckets, but Bruce was thinking a lot about tubing. Tubing was the way of the future. Operations with buckets depended on cheap labor, and he knew all about that. Bruce saw tubing as the economic replacement for the dependence upon cheap family labor. The quality of tubing had improved since Ken Bascom had tried it in the mid-1960s. As part of a research effort Bruce visited two maple farms in New Hampshire that had converted to tubing. During his spring vacation in his sophomore year Bruce traveled to Ontario and worked in a state-of-the-art tubing operation owned by the sugarmaker Dennis Nolet.

  Bruce met his wife the same way his father met his, at a square dance at UNH. Her name was Liz Parker. She was a year ahead of him and studying history. Liz seemed everything that meant sophisticated to Bruce. Her family lived near Washington, DC, and her father was an educator with the US Agency for International Development. During her primary school years Liz lived in Vietnam and Thailand. Bruce was smitten and feeling like he could do just about anything.

  Bruce brought Liz home to Acworth. Liz woke up early and went to the kitchen. Ken was there, waiting, she thought, and had all sorts of questions for her. Bruce worked in the fields that day, picking up rocks that had worked their way to the surface during the winter freeze. Picking rocks, with the bending and lifting, was the least desirable job on the farm. The wet rocks also tore up gloves and hands. But picking up rocks happened to be a time when Ken and Bruce talked to each other. On this day Bruce asked about some money he had lent to Ken, the $600 he saved from his cider business. Ken had been having financial difficulty. Later Bruce would see that his father was getting close to bankruptcy despite working eighty hours a week.

  Ken asked what Bruce wanted it for, saying he didn’t have that kind of money. “I want to buy an engagement ring,” Bruce said.

  Ruth was thrilled with the news. Two days later Ken gave Bruce a check for the full amount, plus interest compounded for the duration of the loan.

  “Always with interest, that was his way.”

  During Bruce’s senior year at UNH he took a course in entrepreneurial management, in which each student had to devise a business project. There were many interesting projects in the class, and each student made a presentation. Bruce had his usual difficulty making his, which was a design for a maple sugaring operation with 25,000 taps feeding into a central evaporation plant. There was a lot of interest among his classmates and some skepticism. They were New Hampshire kids, and they knew about maple. Some called it the “flubbing tubing project.”

  Ruth assumed that when Bruce went into the business school that he would eventually get a job with a corporation. Despite some evidence to the contrary, with Bruce’s work in the sugarhouse and the trip to Ontario, she did not expect him to return to the farm and hoped he wouldn’t. The economics of farming were too difficult, as was the relationship between father and son. When she realized during his senior year that he intended to work with Ken, she wrote a letter asking him to get a job with a corporation. When he didn’t respond she drove to Durham, got a room, stayed for two days, and took Bruce out to dinner. At the restaurant she pleaded with him not to return to the farm. Get a job with IBM, she said.

  For Ruth, farm life was a shock at times. Money was scarce. Ken was one not to spend on consumer goods or vacations, only on farm improvements. There was one car, but often it was being used to make deliveries, and so days passed without leaving the farm. Ruth could have put her education to use in the maple business and been a great asset, but Ken was too difficult to work for and she couldn’t be part of the business. Eventually Rut
h got a job off the farm, working for the 4-H organization and later for the school district.

  Many farm wives had a list of things for their daughters to avoid or not learn how to do. Some would say, “Don’t learn how to tap trees, because you’ll end up out in the woods in the winter.” Ruth’s list for Judy and Nancy was

  1. Don’t learn how to drive a tractor.

  2. Don’t learn how to milk a cow.

  3. Don’t marry a farmer.

  The wedding took place the weekend after Bruce’s graduation from the University of New Hampshire. They scheduled it for that weekend because there were three other Bascom weddings that June. They held it at the church in Acworth, the one that sat high on a hill with a tall steeple. Eric Bascom Sr. officiated, just as he had for Ken and Ruth. A Bascom uncle played the organ. Peter Rhoades was the best man. Peter’s wife, Deb, was a maid of honor.

  The new couple honeymooned in Bar Harbor, Maine. The weather brought clouds and rain, and after a few days Bruce thought it a good idea to cut the honeymoon short and return to the farm. Ruth was so annoyed that she wouldn’t speak to him. Ken punished him by making him pick rocks the next day.

  When Bruce and Liz moved into the stone house Ken set his salary at $75 a week. To be fair, he gave himself a salary of $75 too.

  Bruce wanted to prove that he could do it better than his father, but he first had to prove he was capable. One thing he was now able to do was knock on doors. Bruce went to his neighbors and arranged to rent enough trees for 12,000 taps and paid rent of 10 cents per tap. He sold the sap to Ken, not thinking that he would overwhelm the evaporation system and keep Ken up all night boiling.

  Bruce made an appointment at the farm credit bank to ask for a loan of $5000 to buy tubing and equipment. He took the project paper from his entrepreneurial course along, the one describing a 25,000-tap operation, the flubbing tubing project, and showed it to the bankers. They had heard about tubing but thought it would never be profitable.