The Sugar Season (17 page)

Marty worked for Harrison Concrete, but for now he was running the evaporator. The timing of the sugar season was perfect for him because concrete work was slow in the changeover from ice to mud. Marty was thirty or so, of average height and build, with large, thick hands. I asked him how all this came to be.

“We’re Vermonters,” he said. “We’re all into this sugaring a little bit. I used to gather buckets with a guy down the road when I was a kid, but that’s a little different.”

He said there were lots of visitors. “From everywhere, even from Canada. They see the big red roof from Route 7, figure it’s a sugarhouse, and decide to go see it.” US Route 7 was two miles away across a valley.

“We’re a typical Vermont sugarhouse,” he said, “with an edge.”

I took “edge” to mean what Bruce talked about, that they went at this pursuit all out, right from the beginning.

“Edge” may have also meant Franklin County, Vermont. Franklin County, in the uppermost northwestern part of the state, produced a third of the Vermont maple syrup crop and ten percent of the maple syrup crop in the entire United States. In Franklin Country were several sugarhouses with tap counts equal to or greater than Bascom’s. On one road that ran from Fletcher to Fairfield, I had been told, there were more than 500,000 taps among the many sugarhouses,
with names such as J. R. Sloan, who boiled from more than 90,000 taps, Matt and Rex Gillian, the Minors, the Sweets (could you ask for a better name?), Rick Mayotte, Gary Corey (who also made tubing installations), Geoff Corey, four Branon families (a family with a long history of sugarmaking), six Howrigan families (sugarmakers in their sixth generation), the Tiffany brothers, the Dubie family, the Ryan brothers, and the Boisenaults. All were over 10,000 taps and several were over 50,000. Georgia Mountain was the newest entry into the Franklin County pantheon.

The Harrisons owned a sizeable section of Georgia Mountain and had used it primarily for hunting. Over the past few years, since the price of maple syrup had gone up, people were telling Kevin Harrison that he should think about getting into maple. He decided to investigate. Kevin, Marty, and Rick walked through the woods in the fall of 2010 and brought sugarmakers along. They toured sugarhouses and asked questions. One common theme, they noticed, was that everyone talked about adding on.

Marty told me, “Kevin said, ‘If we do it, we’re not going to add on.’ Kevin looked at the figures and decided to go ahead. Kevin makes decisions and we stand by them. He’s made a lot of good decisions.”

They walked the woods, did further planning. In April they poured the foundation for the building, 100 feet long and 50 feet wide. They hired a sugarmaker and logger named Doug Edwards to thin the woods and supervise the tubing installation. They strung mainlines and tubing for 23,000 taps. Doug Edwards told me that the cost of installing tubing was $15 to $20 per tap, including mainlines, which meant a cost during this phase of $345,000, at the low end.
They put a similar amount into the sugarhouse and hired a plumber, Nick Lemieux, to oversee the pumps and lines.

“Last April it was just a little goat path,” Marty said.

Marty took me to what he called the tank room, where I climbed a ladder to a platform and where I saw the evidence of what you could do if you had a concrete company at your disposal. Below were six tanks for storing sap or concentrate, each tank with a capacity of 9000 gallons. They looked like small swimming pools. “The first thing we did,” Marty said. “All built in-house, with our mechanics. Like potable water tanks.”

He told me they built another set of tanks just like these on a hill three miles away, where Kevin Harrison owned another 300 acres of maple woods. “Some of the best maples I’ve ever seen,” Marty said. They built a hunting cabin above the tanks. They ran a set of mainlines over Georgia Mountain, up and over a 500-foot incline, and would use high-powered pumps to pull the sap from those faraway woods to this sugarhouse. That was sugaring with an edge, for sure.

M
ARTY WAS WAITING
for some technicians to arrive from the CDL company to adjust his evaporator, so I went outside to have a look around. It was noon by then, and the temperature was 57°, so warm that I felt I had to take a walk up the road into the sugarbush.

Though no one ever told me this, it seemed that there was something iconic or heroic about owning a mountain or even working on one to make maple syrup. At least it felt that way when I was at Bascom’s or later walked on David Marvin’s mountain and when, on a tour of sugarhouses a year ago, the
bus driver stopped so that a young sugarmaker could tell the tale of the mountain he was leasing and had thinned, that he was stringing with tubing and at the bottom of which he would build a new sugarhouse. Maybe it was just my regard of mountains, which I thought had a story within themselves, with their ascents, peaks, and descents, but there seemed to be a kind of special status for the sugarmakers who inhabited mountains. It was like you needed a mountain to do it up right.

The sugarbush on Georgia Mountain was brand new, and clean, as they say, but to my untrained eye it seemed just a little overmanaged. All the ground seemed to have been worked, and the trees that had been removed were plucked from the ground by a mechanical harvester—it was like a haircut too close to the skin, in a way. But I could see the plan. The young maples were mostly in the four- to six-inch category in diameter. The other trees had been removed to give them room to grow. When I had watched George Hodskins at Bascom’s remove hemlock trees from a new lot so as to reduce shade, he told me he was “punching holes in the sky.” It was a bold term. Peter Rhoades used the standard forestry term, saying he was “releasing” trees—I loved this term, in the idea that you made some room above and the chosen trees shot up to inhabit it, filling the space with their crowns. The term had the concept of dignity, of ascension. These woods, I could see, would soon have ferns covering the ground, and the green light of the leaves would be shining down upon them.

The road curved up the mountain and passed by a beaver pond, an open and untended space. I wondered about the beaver, whose options seemed to have been limited severely. I walked by a high point on the trail, to a rocky knob that
had been blasted and crushed to make the road, which was a mile and half long and a flat, workable surface. Roads are everywhere, but what a thing it seemed to make this road so quickly, as an accessory to the woods.

Coming down the mountain on the western slope I caught a glimpse of Lake Champlain, a faraway silver sliver of water. The sun was shining, it was a beautiful day and easy to forget it was winter. The temperature had hit 60°, and I took off my jacket.

T
HE FLOW WAS UNDERWAY
, and the sap was gushing from the mainlines into the pump room. Doug Edwards arrived and took a reading of the sap—the sugar content was at 2.3 percent, a very good level.

Doug Edwards was a burly, bearded man, a professional logger and sugarmaker with 43,000 taps of his own and about to increase by a few thousand more. He was at the sugarhouse to advise and help out as needed.

Kevin Harrison arrived soon after Edwards. They referred to Kevin as the brains of the operation. He had a small office up on the second floor with a window that looked out over the sugarhouse floor, but Kevin stood near the evaporator and by the R.O. room and watched things closely that afternoon. He was wearing a heavy jacket and a baseball hat and had a dark beard. Kevin was a quiet man, even shy, I thought. Clearly he had concerns about the weather on this day, with the temperature at twenty degrees above average. Adding to his concern was the new weather forecast, calling for an entire week of 60° weather.

He and Doug Edwards stood together talking about this.

“I usually have thirty boils a year,” Doug said.

“How many have you made this year?”

“Five. If it gets into the fifties next week it could slow things down.”

“I’m going on a ten-year average. I can take a bad year this year. Just don’t give me two bad years in a row.”

Of course Doug had nothing of that sort to give. All he could offer was advice and information. Marty had also made five boils, the first on February 2 during that heat wave and the last on March 3, four days ago.

Two men arrived from the CDL company. One I noticed was Daniel Lalanne, one of the owners of CDL and a French Canadian. CDL is a Canadian company. Bruce had introduced me to Lalanne on one of his trips north when we stopped at the equipment companies. Bruce thought of CDL as an aggressive company on the move.

Georgia Mountain Maples had bought the top-model evaporator produced by CDL, the “Tornade” (the French word for tornado), which ran for about $60,000 with all the bells and whistles, Lalanne soon told me.

Marty was having some problems with the oil burner. The technician opened a front panel, worked for a few minutes making adjustments, and then, with a whoosh, the Tornade shuddered into being. Lalanne and the technician went into the pump room to confer on the equipment there. They stayed for a couple of hours, going back and forth from the pump room to the evaporator.

I waited for the opportunity to talk to Lalanne because I wanted to know his thoughts on the expansion of the US industry. Bruce talked about it often, how in this new era the
production on the American side of the border was growing. Actually that was why I was here on this day: Georgia Mountain Maples was a premier example of the expansion. People with money getting into the maple business.

When I saw Lalanne standing alone away from the evaporator, I walked over and reintroduced myself. Almost immediately we began talking about the Federation. You couldn’t talk about American expansion for long without talking about the Federation, and you couldn’t talk about the Federation without talking about the surplus, the Global Strategic Reserve.

The Global Strategic Reserve was more commonly called simply “the surplus,” which was a supply kept in reserve in case of a shortage. The surplus had been established in 2002 by vote of the Quebec producers who were members of the Federation. At the same time a provision called “sales agency” was established, after which all bulk sales of Quebec syrup were channeled through the Federation. By 2004 the Global Strategic Reserve had grown to be as large as an entire year’s crop, and the Federation established production quotas for its members. These measures were controversial and brought on a difficult time—plainclothes policemen attended Federation meetings, leaders received threats, and the president’s sugarhouse was burned down. The leadership assured its members they were being visionary for making the changes, and this proved true after four consecutive poor crops between 2005 and 2008 due to prolonged winters. Prices went from $2.50 to as much as $4.25 a pound, and in US stores there was a twenty-five percent loss of shelf space—for every four quarts on the shelves there were now three. The Federation surplus, depleted during that
time, prevented much greater losses. Arnold Coombs was still working in 2012 to put that fourth quart back on the shelf.

“The Americans have the best of both worlds,” Lalanne said. “They get the Federation price and no production limits. I think the Americans should support the surplus. But that will never happen. The Federation has thirty-something million pounds in storage now. It’s protecting the industry if there’s a shortage.”

I mentioned a prediction Bruce had made, that with continuing increase on the American side, by the end of the decade the US crop would be 50 million pounds, half the production of Quebec.

Lalanne’s prediction went way beyond Bruce’s. “I see the US out-producing Canada in five to six years,” he said. It sounded so outrageous that I stepped back to get a better look at him.

He had warnings about rapid US growth. “I think the expansion will continue for at least another four or five years, but eventually there will be a bad year. It won’t be like this forever. I tell all the sugarmakers: be able to live with two-dollar syrup.”

The best of both worlds, Lalanne said. One thing that seemed ironic was that the Federation, with its price support and surplus, brought the stability that allowed Kevin Harrison to place a fairly safe bet on Georgia Mountain Maples.