Authors: Douglas Whynott
The Sugar Season
The Sugar Season
ALSO BY DOUGLAS WHYNOTT
A Country Practice: Scenes from the Veterinary Life
A Unit of Water, a Unit of Time: Joel White’s Last Boat
Giant Bluefin
Following the Bloom: Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers
Copyright © 2014 by Douglas Whynott
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR JAY NEUGEBOREN
CONTENTS
1
The Extent of the Shock Is Equivalent to the Rate of the Flow
2
The Public Still Thinks We’re Doing It in the Mythic Way
3
Earliest Boil Ever
4
Straight At It and All Out
5
The First Full-Time Sugarmaker
6
A Gallon Every 22 Seconds
7
A Sugarhouse Full of Sound and Everybody Coming Around
8
Short, Sweet, and of High Quality
9
Here for the History
10
The Sugar Machine
11
You Need a Mountain
12
Why Be Competitors When You Can Be Cooperators?
13
The Forecast
14
Aren’t You Afraid, Mr. Bureau?
15
The Sugar Camps of St. Aurelie
16
The Route of the Sugarmakers
17
Seasons of Change
18
Summer in March
19
Sugar on Snow
20
Most of Maine Is Downstairs
Epilogue
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Am I not a sugar maple man, then? Boil down the sweet sap which the spring causes to flow within you. Stop not at syrup—go on to sugar, though you present the world with but a single crystal.
—Henry David Thoreau
It is certain that every farmer having one hundred acres of sugar maple land, in a state of ordinary American improvement (that is, one third covered with judicious reserves of wood and timber, and two thirds cleared for the culture of grass and grain), can make one thousand pounds of sugar with only his necessary farming and kitchen utensils, if his family consists of a man, a woman and a child of ten years, including himself.
—Coxe Turner, 1794, from Helen and Scott Nearing,
The Maple Sugar Book
T
HE EXTENT OF THE SHOCK IS EQUIVALENT TO THE RATE OF THE FLOW
T
HOUGH IT WAS JANUARY
and well ahead of the time when sap normally runs in the maple trees in New Hampshire and Vermont, the weather was warm and the trees were beginning to stir. When I was in Boston during that last week of January in 2012 the temperature was 54°. Students were wearing T-shirts on the Boston Common, and a friend told me that when she had some trees cut in her yard, the sap was running. I knew I had to get over to Bascom’s to see if it was running there.
Some meteorologists were saying there had been three Novembers, starting with the one in November, followed by two more in December and January. The fall of 2011 in the northeastern United States had been one of the warmest in in history, and January was the tenth consecutive month with above-normal temperatures. There were surprising temperature readings throughout the North, such as in
Minot, North Dakota, where the temperature got up to 61° on January 5.
The question, of course, was whether February would be a fourth November. This seemed possible on February 1, when a heat wave passed through the Northeast and temperatures got into the sixties. The cause was two opposing weather fronts, one spinning clockwise to the west and a Bermuda front off the coast spinning counterclockwise, working together like paddle wheels to pull up a current of warm air from the south. The heat brought on a thaw and awakened maple trees, causing the earliest sap flow that all the maple syrup producers I talked to had ever experienced. Those who tapped their trees early enough got their first maple syrup crop of the 2012 sugar season.
I went to Bascom’s Maple Farm on February 1. I drove up a hill called Sugar House Road, passing by a row of ancient maple trees that line that road next to a hay field, next to lines of tubing in the woods and the house that Ken Bascom built and that Bruce Bascom grew up in. I came to a stop in the parking lot in front of the sugarhouse. Bascom’s was a quiet place now, and nothing like it would be in a few weeks—or maybe sooner—when steam would be blasting up through the roof in a column four feet wide and the scent of maple would fill the air.
Anyone going to that place experiences the soul-stirring views. Bascom’s stands near the top of a landform called Mount Kingsbury, in Acworth, New Hampshire. They are 1400 feet above sea level, not all that high up compared to other mountains, but the perch is quite high relative to the surrounding landscape. The Connecticut River, four miles to the west, is 200 feet above sea level, and so from Mount
Kingsbury and where Bascom’s stands are views of fifty miles, halfway across Vermont to the Green Mountains, to some of the ski slopes and as far as Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. Someone who worked for Bruce Bascom said that Bruce had never left this mountain, which was both true and untrue. Bruce left it many times, but you could say his heart never left it, and he had set out after college to save this farm and had once said to me, “Why should I go anywhere when I can be here?” He also said, “I have seen a lot of sugarhouses, and I think this one is the best.”
Sugarhouses are located in some of the most beautiful places. They sit by groves of maple trees, sugar orchards some people call them or, more commonly, sugarbushes. Maples are among the most magnificent trees on earth, in a plant form long known as the giver of life. We know this ever so truly now, in that trees extract carbon from the air and produce oxygen. I, for one, love to go into the forest and breathe the cool oxygenated air. Maple trees process carbon during photosynthesis, making carbohydrates that they later convert to sugar when the warm weather comes and the sap begins to flow. The wood of the sugar maple, also called rock maple, is extremely hard and produces those striations called bird’s eye maple and tiger maple. During the time when the sap runs, the maple tree produces gas internally, which pressurizes the tree and aids in the sap flow—the maple is one of those rare trees that have air inside. And maple trees produce that soft green light in the summer season. Of course they most famously blaze spectacularly in the fall. Sugarhouses are there, by these places, by these trees. Sugarhouses help define those landscapes and the cultures built around them.
In the minds of most people, those who know something about maple syrup and its production, a sugarhouse is a cottage-sized building with a smokestack for a wood fire and a cupola or some other sort of opening for venting steam. The sugarhouse sits alongside a road, maybe an unpaved country road. There is a woodpile outside and maybe buckets hanging on trees nearby. Possibly there is a horse, maybe a draft horse used to pull a wagon and gather maple sap. Snow covers the ground, a fire is burning, and the sugarhouse door is open. There is syrup ready to be sampled.
I have wondered if there is the equivalent of the sugarhouse in any other form of agriculture. Apple orchards have their farm stands, and I know of some orchards where farm stands have grown into stores or where, in the fall, many people come to pick apples. But any other agricultures with the architectures of sugarhouses? Everyone who makes maple syrup has some form of sugarhouse. Bruce Bascom said that within an hour’s drive of his place in southwestern New Hampshire there are a thousand sugarhouses. He claims there are 20,000 maple sugarmakers in the United States, so if you subtract those who make syrup on a small scale in their kitchens or in backyards, there may be 15,000 sugarhouses in the United States. And many more in Canada, where much more syrup is made.