The Sugar Season (11 page)

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

S
HORT, SWEET, AND OF HIGH QUALITY

A
FTER 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, reduced 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.

Strangely enough the bottling crew made it into work that day at 6:00 to get an early start on a big order, just before the trees started falling. Few others made it in. George Hodskins had to cut his way to work, stopping with his chainsaw and removing fallen trees from the road. The tapping crew had finished the week before the storm and buttoned up the system, but with the fallen trees and the freezing rain, the mainlines came crashing down, pulling the tubing from the spouts, and other spouts simply popped out of the trunks. Additional workers went into the woods, breaking through the ice with hatchets and cutting the downed trees away before pulling up the mainlines. It was at the end of the week, on Friday, when I came upon Gwen in the woods during a rain, checking tubing and emptying the water from her boots every so often.

The electricity was out for two days, but the sap was running and they went to gather it. On that first day George went to Glenn’s Lot to collect sap in a ten-wheel truck with a 3000-gallon plastic tank in the back, but he had to route around the dairy farm because of the trees straddled across Crane Brook Road. The hill going down to the tank is very steep, but George made it down without problems. Going
back up the hill with a full tank was a different matter. George got partway up but began to slide backward on the ice, his truck turned into a 40,000-pound sled, with the 24,000-pound sap tank leading the way. One of his rear wheels hit a snow bank, which spun him around, facing forward and still going down until he hit a ditch. George walked down to Crane Brook Road, where he could get cell service, and called Kevin, who came with the tractor and pulled him out. George got into the bucket of the tractor with a chain saw, and they went along Crane Brook, cutting downed trees and opening the road.

By the end of that week the sap run let loose, and some monstrous days at the evaporator followed. On Saturday Kevin made 1200 gallons, on Sunday more than a thousand gallons. On Monday 720 gallons, on Tuesday 988 gallons, and on Wednesday, March 16, 1296 gallons. Kevin had his biggest day ever on March 17. He had produced concentrate the night before and drew from a tank of 10,000 gallons of sap at twenty percent sugar. He began boiling early in the morning, and when he used up the concentrate he continued with sap at eight percent. Kevin boiled until ten o’clock that night, until he had made 1736 gallons of syrup. His production for that week after the ice storm was also a record 7,642 gallons.

The 2011 season continued for another three and a half weeks, to a final boil on April 13.

B
USINESS AT THE STORE
was brisk in 2012 during the last week of February, as people hurried to get fully tapped. I saw
Deb Rhoades at the store one afternoon. Deb ran a gardening business and Peter Rhoades was a forester, but they worked together during the sugar season, taking turns boiling at the old sugarhouse that Peter’s grandparents owned. Deb and Peter also tapped their trees together, with Peter drilling the holes and Deb driving the spouts. They owned about 800 acres of woods that they managed not only for maple syrup but also for timber. They worked together at that too, with Peter cutting trees and Deb driving the log skidder. You wouldn’t guess that Deb ran a log skidder; she was a bookish person with the look of a librarian, and she read two or three books a week. Deb and Peter had tapped trees for Bruce in the 1970s, with Deb the only woman on the crew. She remembered the long walks out of the woods at the end of the day as difficult—it wasn’t easy keeping up with the long-legged men—but she tried to never let them know.

Deb told me that they were behind in their tapping work because of squirrel damage. “There’s been an outbreak of squirrels this year,” she said. “They’ve been biting through the lines.” Animal damage was something every producer with tubing had to deal with. Squirrels, coyotes, bears, and porcupines were all known to gnaw into tubing for the taste of the sap or for entertainment. The holes caused leaks in the vacuum system and were not easy to find. Deb and Peter were repairing the holes from squirrel teeth with black electrician’s tape. She told me that normally they bought a single roll of tape each season and didn’t use it all, but this year they had gone through twelve rolls and bought twelve more.

Peter Rhoades and I had gotten to know each other over the past couple of years. When I had asked Bruce to put me
in touch with someone who really knew the trees, he sent me to his old friend. I called Peter after I talked with Deb in the store.

“We haven’t tried to catch any sap yet,” Peter said. He hoped to have their system up and working in a few days. Which meant he would miss the early big sap run. “It’s a nice year to be out in the woods, that’s for sure,” he said. “But I can’t imagine we’re going to have a good sugar season based on my experience. I’ve always found the best sugar seasons come after long, cold winters. I’ve never seen a winter like this one before. There’s certainly the potential for the season to be short.”