The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  The next day—there they were again, picking rocks—Ken asked Bruce how things went at the bank. After Bruce described the outcome Ken told him to send a thank-you note and ask for another appointment.

  The next time the bankers showed a different regard. They asked how Bruce’s grandfather was doing. They told him that the people who came back a second time were the ones they approved for loans. Though Bruce didn’t figure out until later that his father made a call, he did sense the opportunity of the moment and doubled his request, asking for $10,000, and was approved.

  Bruce then, with help from a cousin and Peter Rhoades, assembled a tubing system that was the largest in New Hampshire. For a while at Bascom’s, buckets and tubing coexisted, but gradually the buckets diminished and would only be seen around the sugarhouse for the benefit of visitors. By 1975 Bruce increased the tap count to 23,000 and made nearly 7300 gallons of syrup. In 1978 they were at 30,000 taps and made 12,200 gallons. They were the largest producers not only in New Hampshire but perhaps in New England.

  Still bent on proving himself and wanting to branch out, Bruce joined two other sugarmakers and bought an operation in Vermont called Saltash, and set up a sugarbush on a mountainside. He drove there regularly, along with his cousin Kevin, and they worked up the sugarbush and the tubing lines—they had large pipes running down the hill. Bruce would later call this “my first big mistake.” The mountain had strange freezing patterns and stayed too cold. For two summers in a row caterpillars defoliated the trees.

  With plastic tubing and reverse osmosis the industry had changed, but not a lot changed between father and son. They fought and fought some more, and they had shouting matches every morning before work. Outside, the workers would wait. They joked that the guy who won would come out and tell them what to do for the day. One said, “Why should we come in at seven-thirty when they always fight until eight? Why not just come in at eight?”

  When Ken went into the maple business full time, he had Bob Coombs as a mentor, but Ken didn’t model his own enterprise on that of Bob Coombs. He continued to be a farmer and focus on production of syrup and hay and firewood. He did, however, tell Bruce that he should model the business on the one Coombs developed, with all of its facets that included production, equipment, and bulk buying. Bruce termed this as “multiple complementary businesses going simultaneously,” with all the pizzazz of a biz-school grad.

  Ken raised Bruce’s salary to $125 a week toward the end of the 1970s. In 1979 they drew up a formal partnership agreement by which Ken would sell the business to Bruce in 1989, under a financing arrangement with interest.

  Until then Ken was in charge, but a kind of division of labor developed. Outside of the sugar season Ken ran the haying operation, making about 30,000 bales per year and selling the hay primarily to horse owners. Ken’s focus was on production, but Bruce’s was increasingly on profit. An older man who ran a maple company told Bruce he should get into the business of buying bulk syrup. Bruce followed his advice. He immediately liked the sport of it, of borrowing money and seeing how he could do trading syrup. They didn’t yet have an office in the sugarhouse, so in the first years Bruce traded on the phone in his kitchen. He was still battling a stutter, and he made heavy use of that phone, walking and talking at the end of a cord. He walked and talked so much that he wore a semicircular path through the linoleum.

  Behind the sugarhouse they erected a new structure, a building they called the Cooler. At the doorway was a ramp for unloading barrels. Inside was a platform scale. The concrete walls were insulated to keep the air-conditioned room cool and prevent syrup from fermenting. Kevin named this place “Bruce’s Playroom.” In the fields cutting and gathering hay, the joke among the workers was, “Bruce is on the phone.”

  Ken yelled at Bruce if he left lights on, but he liked hearing the war stories about buying and selling syrup. Ken was a risk taker himself—selling his cows had been a huge risk. Stories like the time when Bruce wrote a check for $700,000 to buy loads of syrup in Maine without the money in his account to cover it, and then having to hustle to the bank to convince them to honor the check until he made the deposit. Bruce made some good deals—sometimes he made more money in one day than he made in an entire year on the farm payroll. He turned his profits over to Ken, who used the money to make improvements. When, in the 1980s, the farm grossed a million dollars for the first time, Ken was shocked. It made him realize that the farm was going in a new direction.

  The sugar parties flourished in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, as the kids passed through their teenage years and when their friends came to work in the sugarhouse. Ruth was responsible for arranging for tour buses to come to Bascom’s and to the Clark sugarhouse next door. The buses came primarily from Hartford, Connecticut, filled with French-Canadian families displaced during the Depression and with fond memories of sugaring time in their homeland. Ken ran ads to attract them. The Bascom girls served sugar on snow, Ruth made maple candy and pecan pies, and sometimes Ken made butternut fudge from the butternut trees that grew there, from a recipe that was his alone. The steam whistle blew, and the guests tried the hot syrup and poured it on the doughboys. They watched the work and talked with Ken at the evaporator as he explained the process of making syrup, how the trees would run, just how much sap it took to make a gallon, how the syrup was graded according to color, and the other lore of syrup making.

  When Bruce, Judy, and Nancy went to college they returned on weekends to help with the sugar parties, and Bruce was there on a daily basis after college. But as the industry began changing, and with Bruce in the forefront, putting up tubing and retiring buckets, so did the sugar parties change. Customers began asking why the buckets were no longer on the trees. And why all the tubing, which didn’t look appealing at all. At the evaporator Ken heard them talking. They wanted pancakes. But the parties were a weekend operation. A pancake restaurant was not part of the plan.

  The girls had always worked without pay as part of the family effort to run the farm. But as Judy Bascom said, “The women’s movement had come along, and we were feeling that we needed to get paid. We didn’t want to work for free anymore.” Ruth knew the girls weren’t going to stay on the farm. They took paying jobs and filled in at the parties when they could. For a few years Judy traveled by bus to get to the parties, and Bruce paid for her fare and her labor.

  But another contrary development occurred. Though some visitors were disappointed to see plastic tubing, others came to learn about it. “Some customers came not to buy syrup,” Judy remembered, “but to buy tubing and learn how to use it. A lot of little people wanted to get close to nature. Bruce said he would show them how. He wasn’t going to tell them not to do it or that they couldn’t make money at it. Years later some of them would have a big sugarbush.”

  That’s how the equipment business started. Bruce sold tubing and even ran a tubing company for a while. He bought old evaporators and flat pans from sugarmakers and sold them at the farm. When he heard that Bob Coombs was selling his share of stock in the Leader Evaporator Company, Bruce lobbied hard to buy it. Leader had only a dozen shareholders. For Bruce the point of buying the shares was not so much to own the stock but to have access to information about the industry. The information was worth more than the stock, Bruce thought. Ken agreed, and Bruce became a part owner of the major evaporator company in the United States.

  At the end of the 1980s Bruce went on a land-buying spree that had most everyone around him worried. The first piece he bought was the Cole’s Lot, fifteen miles away but with a promising stand of maples. Part of the reason for buying land was to have collateral for loans—”You can buy a whole lot of syrup with a piece of land,” he said. But the major reason was that large properties around the farm came up for sale, and at the same time. Bruce bought as many as he could. He bought the Westney property, a beautiful piece of land rising to a high hill with the best views in Acworth. To convince the bank of the property’s worth he asked Peter Rhoades to
draw up a timber assessment accounting for all the trees and their values, with a plan to harvest timber while the maple grew in for future syrup production. The bankers had planned to turn Bruce down, but Bruce drove with them to the top of the hill, and Peter spread out his color-coded assessment on the hood of the car while Bruce orated his plan with the long views behind him. He bought the Moody Lot that abutted Westney’s and later purchased a block of three other farms that ran down the hill and abutted his Uncle Glenn’s property. Glenn’s dairy farm was then owned by his son Harvey, who had operated the farm for thirty-five years. When Harvey retired in 1990 Bruce bought the dairy farm too.

  He alarmed his more pragmatic family members, and alarmed his bankers, especially when he borrowed money under his father’s name because he knew the bank wouldn’t lend him more money for land. They put Bruce into that special category of borrowers who received quarterly reviews. By way of retribution they gave him a short-term loan of seven years, expecting he wouldn’t be able to pay it off, but Bruce paid the loan on time. In a relatively short period of time Bruce expanded the 280 acres his father owned to 2400 acres, an area, he said, “about a mile and a half wide and three miles long.” He put most of the land under a conservation easement so that it would remain in agricultural use.

  Ken had borrowed money and taken his own risks, but the way Bruce was leveraging himself unnerved him, and he decided to retire. Though Ken kept working. As Bruce said, “He retired to a forty-five-hour workweek.” At times Ken worked with Liz in the mailroom, packaging up orders for syrup or equipment, though they rarely talked. According to Liz, she had only three conversations with Ken the entire time she knew him. At times Ken found the changes at the sugarhouse hard to accept, what with the movement to a corporate structure. At times he felt unwelcome there.

  Another reason for Ken’s departure was that in 1989 Ruth was diagnosed with cancer. She died in 1990. It was too soon, Bruce thought, and just as he was making the business successful.

  In 1997 Ken Bascom was inducted into the Maple Hall of Fame in Croghan, New York. When Bruce was inducted in 2010 they formed one of three father-and-son pairs. When Bruce spoke at the induction he said he was happy to join his father. Privately Bruce said that his father was his major influence, that almost everything he did at the farm was in some way related to what he learned from Ken. They had fought, yes, every day, “But it was all forgotten the next day.”

  And of course Bruce had proved what he had set out to do.

  Bruce’s younger brother Brad felt somewhat similarly. Fourteen years younger than Bruce, Brad had a different kind of relationship with his father. Ken also set Brad’s schedule and had him working seven days a week in the haying operation during high school and college. But Brad had fond memories of the time he spent with Ken, quiet times talking, and handing him wrenches while he worked on a machine or farm implement.

  “I think of Bascom Maple Farms as something Ken Bascom built up,” Brad said to me. “Eric had a one-room sugarhouse shack. My father was a farmer and an innovator. He engineered steam pipes, and he brought in the reverse-osmosis machines early on. He was a workaholic. Bruce was whispering in his ear, but Ken had control of the business in the 1970s. It was quite a scene then. You drove up the hill, and there was a hundred cords of wood. A wood-fired steam boiler, enormous with the sound of humming pipes, and the stack and the blower. A sugarhouse full of sound and everybody coming around. It was a romantic place to come to.”

  After Brad graduated from college he worked away from the farm for a few years. After Ken retired, Brad asked Bruce about the possibility of joining the farm as a partner. Bruce refused. He said he had just gotten out of a partnership with his father and didn’t want to get into another one. Anyone who knew him could understand that but also wonder how things might have been, especially when Bruce began searching for the answer as to how the farm would run without him.

  After Ruth died Ken turned to writing poetry. In a poem titled “The Old Timer,” he wrote of her absence and the changes at the sugarhouse.

  Of course she did not mean to go. God knows I wish it were not so!

  But was naught that I could do and now I must go on.

  It’s memories and restlessness that get me up at four, I guess,

  But nonetheless it lets me see the hopefulness of dawn. . .

  . . . Somewhat sadly I recall the sturdy horses, tanks and pails.

  Knee-deep in snow in early March we’d tap

  and drive the horses out to open woodland trails

  and back and forth would go the teams bringing in the sap.

  I’ve done it all. The tapping, then collecting, aching legs,

  all well recalled. Cutting, hauling, stacking wood,

  the firing, boiling, the packing of the crop in bottle, jugs and kegs.

  The “boys” now have it easier, the sweat removed, that is good.

  Gradually I’d made the changes. Wood to oil, high pressured steam,

  collecting tubes in networks many acres wide,

  reverse osmosis bought to cope with our ever growing stream,

  automatic filters and mechanized canners, all we took in stride.

  The little one-room house my sugar-maker father made

  was enlarged five different times and now unrecognized.

  The sales room, the warehoused goods, now bring annual parade

  of sugar-makers come to get their inventory of supplies.

  My second cup of coffee down, I put boots on and out I go

  to check on how it’s going, what needs attention, if so, how.

  The “boys” will have it all in hand I know,

  for, as you see, I am the “Old Timer” now.

  Ken married again. In 2005, when he took his wife to the hospital, the doctor noticed that Ken was sweating profusely and examined him. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Near the end, in and out of consciousness, his brother Paul asked Ken what it had been like to work with Bruce.

  “Have you ever been on a runaway horse?”

  “He meant it in a good way,” Bruce said years later. He liked the runaway horse comparison.

  Bruce had never been able to speak in public, even up to the time of Ken’s death. But that changed, and a few years later, in 2010, for the first time Bruce sat on a panel at Leader Evaporator in Swanton, Vermont. The other panelist was David Marvin, of Butternut Mountain Farms. The panel was arranged by bankers from Yankee Farm Credit, who wanted to know how to lend to sugarmakers. The industry had changed, and bankers were now willing to lend to the maple industry. Bruce joked about the day, saying, “I’m in the big time now.” And I think he meant it too.

  8

  SHORT, SWEET, AND OF HIGH QUALITY

  AFTER THE BIG RUN in February the temperatures dropped and the trees shut down for most of the next ten days. Kevin made only one boil during that time and only two boils until March 8, when another run began, what would be the most unusual run sugarmakers had ever seen.

  When that first big run ended on February 24, when Kevin had produced 4018 gallons for the year, he was well ahead of his 2011 output for that same date. As of February 24, 2011, Kevin had produced only 648 gallons on a single boil. That didn’t mean he was expressing a great deal of certainty about the 2012 season. When we stood in front of the production chart near the evaporator and looked at the season of 2012 so far, with the early boils, he just shook his head as though to say, “One never knows.”

  All sugarmakers kept some sort of records of their production, whether on scraps of paper or markings on the wall as I saw at one sugarhouse or the kind of complex and richly detailed narrative of the years as on the chart at Bascom’s. Kevin kept the chart. Most prominent were two oversized daily calendars, one with the previous season and the other, ongoing, detailing the current season. Each day he recorded temperatures, notes about the weather, and the production of syrup in grade and pounds to the decimal point. Below those calendars were several years of daily records, reduce
d to single sheets of paper. Taking up half of this bulletin board was a set of bar graphs that recorded the history of production at Bascom’s going back to 1954. In that year Ken Bascom hung 3900 buckets and made 825 gallons of syrup. He had a much better year a decade later in 1964 before making the leap as a full-time maple producer, with 6900 buckets and 2090 gallons.

  In the year 2000, when I first learned that Bascom’s was the largest producer in New Hampshire, they made 11,212 gallons on 35,000 taps. The next winter of 2001 was a very unusual one—eight feet of snow in February, and the workers had to go into the woods to dig snow from under the mainlines. They made only 4695 gallons that year. Toward the end of the decade came the boom years, after vamping up the R.O. system and switching to the use of new and clean spouts every year. In 2008, 22,500 gallons on 56,800 taps. In 2009, 23,916 gallons on 60,800 taps. In 2010, despite the warm winter, 22,540 gallons on 64,804 taps.

  The 2011 season got a late start because of cold weather and an ice storm. In 2011 Kevin made his second boil of the season on March 6, a Sunday, but that night it began to rain heavily, and though the temperature stayed above freezing for most of the night, it plummeted toward morning and the rain began to freeze on the trees, coating the branches and everything else with ice—every blade of grass in the fields and every pine needle on the white pines. It was beautiful and calamitous. When the storm was over I walked through the woods and caught a strong scent of pine, then saw a small tree stripped of its needles, which were lying on the ground encased in ice like pendants. On that Monday morning and through the next day the trees around Bascom’s were snapping with a sound like gunshot. On Monday morning I went over to have a look and had to drive under a massive white pine that fell on the road and stretched the power lines down with it.