Blue Highways (54 page)

From Mrs. Ramsbotham: “Tell him Whittier visited us.”

“Whittier, yes. And Robert Frost. Whittier’s poem ‘The Grave by the Lake’ is about Melvin Village.” She recited:

“Where the great lake’s sunny smiles

Dimple round its hundred isles,

And the mountain’s granite ledge

Cleaves the water like a wedge,

Ringed about with smooth, gray stones,

Rest the giant’s mighty bones.”

“Sounds like Whittier.”

She took down a book so I could read the whole poem. “Do you like it better?”

“I like the line, ‘Kindled in that human clod.’”

“Not a Whittier lover! But don’t you see, he expressed that sense of belonging you can feel here? Listen:

But somewhere, for good or ill,

That dark soul is living still;

Somewhere yet that atom’s force

Moves the light-poised universe.

“Whittier must have felt the pull especially strong when he heard about the old Indian giant they found in eighteen eight when they were cutting the river road to the shore. The excavations exposed a large grave with an Indian of tremendous proportions sitting bolt upright in it. No one knew archaeological science then, and diggers could only make fanciful guesses about the man and the significance of the grave. The archaeology we have now is Whittier’s poem. All we know is what a man from another time said about a man from yet another time. Even if the verse falls wrong, the notion is important, I should say.”

From the kitchen: “Have you talked about Robert Frost yet?”

“He lived up on the mountain when his sweetheart spent the summer of eighteen ninety-five with her sister here. Up in the old Ossipee Mountain Park Hotel, the girls were, but Frost was too poor to rent a room, so he worked out an arrangement with Henry Horne. Frost received free lodging in a nearly forsaken house on the mountain in exchange for guarding a large stock of hard cider that old Horne kept in the cellar. Frost wrote a play about his guardianship called, I believe,
The Guardeen,
but I don’t think it’s ever been published.”

Mrs. Ramsbotham brought in a jelly glass of lilies-of-the-valley. “We’ll soon be ready, dear,” she said. “I’m afraid the ladle’s gone off again.”

To me Mrs. Robie said, “If you really want to get the feel of our place, take the road up to the foot of the mountain. To Bald Peak Farm. Talk to my cousin—second cousin in point of fact—Tom Hunter. He’s a sugar-maker and one of the few old-line families still farming their original land. Up there’s the feel. And maybe the end of an era.”

I was at the door when I remembered why I’d come. “Who’s Melvin?”

“Whoever could answer that has been in the grave almost as long as the Indian giant. But we do know, after Lovewell’s War—”

19. Marion Horner Robie in Melvin Village, New Hampshire

“A war called Lovewell?”

“I said we’re a special place. But the history. During the war with the Indians in the seventeen twenties, some settler apparently explored upriver and found a sign or a tree carved with the word
Melvin
. Maybe something left by one of Lovewell’s soldiers. From that word the river took its name. As for Melvin, he had no idea what he was starting. And that’s what I mean by abiding. Things remain even when we think they don’t.”

T
OM
Hunter said Bald Peak in the Ossipee Mountains was not so bald as it was after a forest fire in the early part of the century exposed the granite crown. As trees edged back, the logic in the name “Bald Peak Farm” was less evident; in another generation or two, it was possible only the old residents would understand it. But not probable. “Always’ll be more lightnin’ up there than trees,” Hunter said.

I had found my way through the heavy woods to the farm north of the village and under the peak. Hunter was showing me his sap house where he made maple syrup. Full of pots and outdated calendars, it was across the road of stone fences—walls laid by the first three generations of Hunters—west of the old Hunter farmhouse, and concealed in a grove of big sugar maples; everywhere soft fiddlehead ferns uncurled to the light.

Piled on and around a flatbed trailer hitched to his worn McCormick tractor were fifteen hundred three-gallon galvanized sap buckets, some washed for next spring, others still sticky from this year’s run; in heaps lay washed and unwashed galvanized spiles, the spouts that drain the sap from the tree. Hunter’s father built the sugarhouse in 1922. The building, really just a twenty-foot shed, had a corrugated tin roof and sides of pine shingles weathered to the color of grade-C maple syrup. The white-trimmed jamb and back of the sliding door carried a written history of Hunter syruping operations since 1925, the sap yields penciled in year by year for each of the “orchards”: 1936, 305 buckets; 1924, 226; 1947, 434. The leanest year was 1945 and the best 1965. These were more than historical records—they noted achievements like dates and scores inscribed on an annual tournament trophy. As family albums are to some men, that doorjamb was to Tom Hunter.

His speech was a pronounced upland Yankee. “I’m the fifth generation to sugar on this land. But the sixth generation, all nine of them, come out to help durin’ the season. Even the boy on the old Maine place. The seventh generation is developin’. We’re tappin’ trees my grandparents’ grandparents tapped. We look at it like this: a corn farmer can eat corn from the same fields his great-grandfather planted, but he can’t eat from the same stalk. But an old syrupin’ family eats from the same tree.”

“That’s a long continuity.”

“Even longer. When we cut up an old rock maple at our sawmill, sometimes the saw hits a spout that one of my grandfathers left in the tree by accident and the tree grew over. But more thrillin’ is to cut into Indian sappin’ scars—slashes like big
V
’s or sometimes ’tis a burned-in hole. White men haven’t improved on syrupin’ the Abenaki did. We’ve just speeded it up.”

“I’m surprised you cut your maples for lumber.”

“Lumber? Only if the tree’s goin’ by. There’s no forgiveness for a man who cuts into a healthy sugar bush. We got plenty others to cut—oak, pine, spruce, hemlock, poplar, beech, ash. But we’re cuttin’ just cordwood now. Closed down the commercial lumberin’ end of our mill. Workmen’s compensation, OSHA, FICA—’twasn’t worth the hassle. So we only cut twenty-five cords of wood for the syrupin’ these days. And a little firewood for home.”

“I wouldn’t think you could make a living off maple syrup.”

“Pays the taxes. We have a barge business transportin’ materials and equipment to the islands. And there’s our business excavatin’ with bulldozers and backhoes, and a twenty-five-pad trailer park down on the lake.”

“What about your cattle and fields?”

“Farm just for our own use now. Crop and cattle farmin’ here are about gone. These mountain fields are too small to be economical. But they were more than big enough when I was a boy and had to plow them.”

“You’ve lost land?”

“We’ve added land. But I used to have to plow with oxen or horses.”

“Does all that mean maple syrup doesn’t pay much?”

“It can pay. High-grade syrup’s about twelve dollars a gallon this season, and I’ll gross about five thousand dollars off syrupin’. I’m satisfied with the price. We had a good year. Four-hundred-gallon average this year and last. But two years ago ’twas only two hundred fifty gallons.”

“What changes the yield?”

“Spring weather mostly. You got to have freezin’ nights and warm days to get a good run of sap. But the number of leaves on the crown the year before makes a difference. Age and health of a tree too.”

“In a good run, can you keep ahead of fifteen hundred buckets?”

“Durin’ a top run, we’re all rollin’ up and down the mountains, pullin’ the collection tank full of three hundred gallons of sap. Our sugar orchards go halfway up Bald Peak, so there’s some overflow and spillage. We tried a new method where the sap runs from the trees through plastic tubes to a central collection tank and then gets pumped to the sugarhouse. But you have to keep patrollin’ the lines. We didn’t like it. No matter how you do it, from the tenth of March to the twentieth of April, ’tis awful hectic, and the evaporator’s burnin’ day and night until the frogs begin chirpin’. Then sappin’s finished.”

The evaporator, built in 1930, was an eighteen-foot contraption of plated tin mounted above a long firebox that burned four-foot pine slabs. From a holding tank, the raw, clear sap drained into the upper end of the evaporator pan where it heated to a foamy boil of two hundred nineteen degrees; if the foam began to inhibit evaporation, Hunter would throw in a piece of salt pork or a dollop of milk; the thickening liquid then moved down the pan through numerous little troughs to the strainer and outlet. Once the firebox reached temperature, the sap of two to four percent sugar became syrup of eighty-five percent sugar in about four hours. It is the critical evaporating process that creates the color and flavor of maple syrup and determines the profit. Fancy-grade pure maple, the light-amber premium syrup, brings the best price. Grade A is darker, more pungent, and B darker and more potent yet. It’s a peculiarity of history that the milder tasting grades are the most expensive: in the early days when the primary purpose for maple syrup was to furnish sugar, women didn’t want all their baked goods tasting like maple.

A five-foot-tall chair overlooked the evaporator and the big temperature gauge; whoever sat in it not only determined the profit but also whether the operation would continue—if the fire got too hot and boiled off the sap, it would melt the tin coating and soldered joints of the evaporating pan.

We went outside where Hunter pointed out a big sugar maple (also called a hard rock maple because of the tough wood and the rocky soil it grows in). Many kinds of trees produce syruping sap, but none gives a greater or sweeter flow than the sugar maple. To get his average annual yield of three hundred gallons of syrup takes about twelve thousand gallons of sap from twelve hundred tapped trees.

“A big rock maple like this could take four or five taps. Two men with twelve-volt electric drills and battery packs can tap three hundred holes a day, so our tappin’ takes four or five days. Ours isn’t a real big orchard, but ’tis all sugar maple and all natural. We don’t have any planted groves like a pecan farm.”

“What happens to the tree after you pull the spile?”

“Hole closes over and forms scar tissue. It’s dry forever. Takes twenty-five years before you can even tap next to it. That’s where snowfall helps out. In years when the fall’s heavy, we can tap higher on the trunk. Other years we tap lower. We get snow years and we get mud years. Don’t like either.”

We went back to the road where Bald Peak showed clear.

“Sugarin’s a business to us if you look only at the ledger. But in all other ways, sappin’ season’s the time when the kids come home and my wife cooks for two hours to prepare a meal for eleven of us. We live the life of the old-day Hunters then. I can tell you, the sweet smell of syrup at boil and the cold wind outside and the pine burnin’ in the box—it gets in your blood. I’ll bet you could tap me and get five percent. At the end of it all, we have our sugarin’-off party. Pancakes, waffles, French toast, snowball fights, basketball, and all the maple syrup a waffle can carry. Maple cream too. If there’s something better to eat, I never ate it. Twice-boiled syrup almost to crystallization it is.” Hunter shook his head. “To tell the truth, I could make more money at things other than syrupin’, but I’d be lost in the spring. I’d be out of whack the whole year.”

20. Tom Hunter near Melvin Village, New Hampshire

“You can sell all you make?”

“Haven’t advertised since the Depression. All of our syrup’s spoken for. Got a waitin’ list. Some families been buyin’ from us for forty years. Only change in that time is the jugs—from crocks to tin cans to plastic.”

As we walked up the road, air began whiffling down off Bald Peak and pushing invisible biting midges (“mingies” Hunter called them) downwind. He slapped at them once for every ten of my slaps. “Rain’s comin’ in with that breeze.”