Twain's Feast (35 page)

With all the built-in checks on growing organically—labor costs, lack of processing facilities, the relative inefficiency of dry harvest—the good news is that organic berries command around three times the price of conventional fruit. That’s especially important since cranberries are one crop where organic yields simply can’t compete with conventional. The Keeses feel great when they get sixty barrels of Early Blacks per acre, while conventional growers get up to two hundred. Still, it’s worth remembering that the Keeses are doing way better than
anybody
was in 1900, when the national average hovered around fifteen. Sanding, mechanical harvest, and near-religious weeding give them a yield that old-time growers would have killed for; coupled with the premium many are willing to pay for their product, it’s been enough to keep them going for nearly twenty years.

The Keeses’ converted garage has fishing rods in the rafters, a dartboard, an old iron stove, a pool table covered with plywood to create a workspace—and a pair of cranberry separators from the 1930s. Made of beautiful, polished wood, the separators consist of a series of downward-angled shelves; good, ripe cranberries are hard enough to bounce off all seven and onto a conveyor belt for packaging, while soft fruit slips down below to be discarded. The bounce method, the story goes, was invented by a New Jersey grower known—appropriately—as Peg Leg John Webb; Peg Leg John evidently tired of carrying cranberries down stairs for packing and so started simply rolling them down the stairs. Today it’s the last step before the berries go into half-pound packs for individual shipments all over the country.

Though what Robert and Kristine do here is enormously appealing, there are clearly at least a few things that might stop more growers from converting to organic. There’s the price of weeding, which would be astronomical on larger bogs (though “larger” here is relative—the average grower for the dominant Ocean Spray cooperative has less than twenty acres of bogs, compared to the Keeses’ six), and there aren’t ever going to be enough woofers to go around. There are the much lower yields, which must be unnerving for a conventional grower to accept. And, most important, there’s the fact that the entire cranberry distribution system is structured toward selling conventional fruit. Between weeding, dry harvesting, and selling all the product, organic farming is just much more work.

But, tempting as it might be to lionize organic agriculture, when I talk to Hilary Sandler, project manager of integrated pest management at the Cranberry Station research center, she immediately explodes my clean mental dichotomy. Before 1983, it’s true, growers would simply spray broad-band pesticides, wiping out all insect life. Most sprayed based on the calendar instead of observation, applying their chemicals without regard for what was actually happening in the bogs. And that’s a hard habit to break; as Kristine put it, some third-generation growers “get real nervous when May fifteenth comes around and they’re not putting anything on the crop.”

But spraying by the calendar is exactly what integrated pest management, or IPM, is designed to stop. “Ultimately, it’s a philosophy,” Hilary says. “The idea is to consider both the environmental and social effects of what we’re doing.” The most important part of that philosophy is probably the willingness to absorb a certain amount of loss, to give up the idea that everything has to be controlled from the start. Instead of trying to destroy all pests before they can do any damage at all to vines or fruit, IPM growers spray only after a given pest rises above a certain level. They monitor their bogs rigorously, doing periodic “sweep sets” with muslin nets and counting the pests to determine when it’s time to apply an insecticide. And when they do spray, the chemicals are far more targeted than what Hilary calls the old sledgehammers of malathion and parathion, meant to kill everything that so much as thought of crawling across a cranberry vine.

Considering the social effects of farming, Hilary says, is more important as the suburbs spread. “You have people moving out by the bogs because it’s beautiful, then realizing that they didn’t know much about the reality of living beside a working farm.” Massachusetts is the nation’s third most densely populated state. And all that surrounding, supporting woodland is powerfully attractive to developers, its sandy soil being as well suited for septic systems as it is for cranberry vines (A. D. Makepeace, the biggest cranberry grower in the world, has begun developing housing on some of its land—Hilary says it’s now just a company, rather than a cranberry-growing company).

So though in my perfect world I’d love for all cranberries to be grown organically, the reality is that in southern Massachusetts the choice may not be between organic and conventional cranberry farming, but rather between housing developments and any cranberry farming at all. It’s not that cranberries would ever disappear from the country entirely; Wisconsin, unconstrained by small, irregular, ex-bog-iron bogs, is now the nation’s largest producer. But it’s a crop with deep historical and cultural roots in Massachusetts. Cranberry bogs aren’t just something worth keeping—they’re something worth keeping
here.
And, I realize, it doesn’t much matter to me how that’s done, especially given the strides IPM growers have made in reducing their chemical loads.

Talking to Hilary is frankly not very different from talking to Kristine; both obviously care deeply about the land and how best to care for it. What separates them is more the old question of purity versus pragmatism—do you effect better change by living the ideal or by trying to move the greatest number of people in a good direction? On the latter point, IPM has been hugely successful, with more than 80 percent of conventional growers giving up the old calendar-spraying system.

The Keeses have been successful, too; they’re a model for others who want to farm with as small an environmental footprint as possible. What’s more, the methods of pest and weed control developed by organic growers like them help to make IPM possible—there is, Hilary says, a constant and ongoing dialogue. But successful or not, it’s a wearing, wearying life; Robert and Kristine are thinking of putting their land on the market.

As a boy, Twain often went hunting with his cousins and his Uncle John, stalking squirrels, geese, and deer in the forests and prairies beyond the farm. Perhaps their favorite quarry were the wild turkeys that gathered at dawn in great flocks; Quarles, Twain later remembered, imitated a turkey call “by sucking the air through the leg bone of a turkey which had previously answered a call like that and lived only just long enough to regret it.”

He himself wasn’t nearly as wily a hunter. Once, lugging a massive shotgun, he followed an “ostensibly lame turkey over a considerable part of the United States” because he “believed in her and could not think she would deceive a mere boy, and one who was trusting her and considering her honest.” Having lured him miles from her brood, she flew off into the woods.

Twain was humiliated—and lost—but as he searched for his uncle and cousins, he came across an abandoned log cabin. The old, weedy garden was full of perfectly ripe tomatoes. “I ate them ravenously,” he wrote, “though I had never liked them before. Not more than two or three times since have I tasted anything that was so delicious as those tomatoes.” He gorged until even the sight of a tomato was too much for him; still, he had the turkey to thank for what he remembered as “one of the best meals that there in my life-days I have eaten.”

Twain hunted wild turkey and came back with tomatoes; he went into the woods and found a garden. Writing his menu, he’d make a show of wanting all his favorite foods assembled from the corners of the United States. But if that angel could actually appear with steak and biscuits, with roast turkey and Tahoe trout and New Orleans croakers, each might lose something essential—the inborn qualities that fixed them on the land, and in Twain’s life and memory. Sometimes it’s good not to get exactly what you want, whenever you want it; sometimes it’s better to be open to what a season has to offer, to celebrate what’s already there.

 

 

 

 

 

T
O HAVE TO GIVE UP YOUR HOME,” Twain wrote in 1875 to his friend David Gray, “is only next in hardship to having to give up your babies.” Gray, deep in debt, was being forced to sell his home, and Twain was painfully sympathetic. “Ten days ago I had a great tree cut down,” he wrote, “which stood within five steps of the house, because I thought it was dead; & it turned out that it was all perfectly sound except one big branch near the top. A stranger would not think we had not trees enough, still; but I find myself keeping away from the windows on that side because that stump is such a reproach to me. That maple was
part of our home
, you see; & it is gone.”

It was an awful loss; Twain’s love of maples and their sugar was as old as he was. Thinking back to his childhood days on John Quarles’s farm, he could still see “the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires.” He could remember “the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it, and how to arrange the troughs and the delivery tubes, and how to boil down the juice, and how to hook the sugar after it is made, also how much better hooked sugar tastes than any that is honestly come by, let bigots say what they will.”

Maples are long-lived trees; Twain’s might have been centuries old. Sugar maples were an integral part of the New England woods that once covered his Connecticut land and which had stunned early settlers from wood-hungry England. In England most old-growth forests had been cut down as early as the thirteenth century; when crossing the Atlantic, many settlers reported smelling the forests of New England before they could see the shore. “Here is good living for those who love good Fires,” one wrote.

But even people who saw trees primarily as firewood, construction material, or an impediment to farming were astonished by sugar maples. Maples were grand, their canopies a hundred feet high; their seeds had wings, spreading on the wind. Their autumn foliage was among New England’s most spectacular, ranging from a burning red to what seemed liquid gold. Sometimes their seedlings sprouted thickly between burned trunks (New England’s forests as much shaped by Native American burning as the prairies and western mountains); larger trees had healed gashes from stone axes, signs of earlier sugaring seasons. Even today it’s possible—if only barely—that New England sugar makers still tap the same trees the Plymouth settlers did, drilling their holes beside the buried scars of axes and augers.

It’s amazing to think that maple syrup, which seems so intensely domestic and originates in one of the homiest of trees, remains a largely wild food. The trees can be planted, of course. But it takes some forty years for a tree to grow big enough to tap; actually planting a maple is an act almost entirely for the future, like a brandy maker distilling spirits that he knows won’t mature until after he dies. Most makers rely on the wild groves—some with hundreds or thousands of trees—known as sugar bushes. Tending a wild sugar bush by clearing out underbrush and thinning trees to let in air and light means entering into a quiet, centuries-long conversation. It means continuing phrases begun before the Revolution, and tasting sugar from trees once reached only on horseback.

Given how long it takes to make, it seems right that of all the foods of Twain’s feast, maple syrup is the one that lasts longest. In a sense it’s as much a seasonal food as asparagus, or butter beans, or anything on the menu; making it requires the delicate ebb and flow of frosts and thaws, the hesitant, stop-and-start beginning of spring in New England. But once boiled down to its sweet, unmistakable core, syrup has enough sugar to deter bacteria; sealed in glass, it can keep for years. Maple syrup can travel slowly. It lasts.

I can’t be judicious when I praise maple syrup: my love for syrup is pure. All three of my sisters prefer artificial syrup, but on this score my sisters—intelligent, down-to-earth native New Englanders—are insane. My own devotion was cemented early, when I watched sap boil in my Connecticut nursery school’s modest sugarhouse, waiting in the steamy wooden lean-to as the ladle passed between small hands. We’d spent the morning walking through the snow from tree to tree, emptying the metal pails into big plastic buckets and ferrying them back to the modest, waist-high iron evaporator. When I finally took a sip, it was one of those straight-to-the-brain-stem experiences, a perfect blend of flavor and place and moment that I’ll have for the rest of my life. To a four-year-old, it was magic: the trees whose leaves we’d collected in fall, whose limbs were still bare and frosted—those trees gave us
this
?

I’m lucky. Those early memories are of a food that’s still plentiful, that travels easily and well. But I can’t deny the poignancy of thinking of that morning, and of my eagerness as I waited for a taste. Syrup is a food of childhood kitchens. It’s a food of the sugar moon—the first full moon of April or May, when the Iroquois danced in thankfulness for what the forest gave. It’s a food of the year’s turning. Making it takes readiness, and care, but most of all it takes steady observation—understanding the pulse of one small piece of the world, as the years roll on and on.