The Sugar Season (18 page)

As for catching up in four or five years, that seemed unlikely. Even if Bruce was correct in saying there had been an increase of a million taps in 2012, that would only put the US tap count at just under 11 million. There were about 45 million taps in Quebec. The United States would have to
increase its tap count by 10 million a year for the next five years in order to equal Quebec.

Marty boiled through that afternoon, sending his syrup to the room with the filter presses, where other workers, concrete workers too, grappled with those machines. Everyone seemed to be in the tenderfoot status, though I had the feeling, just like with that road on top of the mountain, that things would be smooth and workable before long.

People came, watched, talked about sugaring. Some brought beer toward the end of the day. One offered a beer to Kevin, but he didn’t accept. Other workers from Harrison Concrete came by. Some had worked in the woods that day and put up 400 more taps. Some had shoulder-length hair and thick beards, others had hair cut short, but all had powerful physiques. I possessed a built-in respect for concrete workers, having gone to school with a boy whose father owned a cement block factory and who came a few inches within winning the state shot-put championship.

As it grew dark Kathy Harrison arrived with her and Marty’s kids, who were soon running around and sliding on the floor. Kathy’s mother came along with pizza. Kevin Harrison left the scene of the work and went over to join them, not eating but standing near the table.

I walked over to Kevin before I left. I told him I walked on the road and saw the mainlines running between the sugarhouse and the woods three miles away. He said that not many places pumped everything directly into the sugarhouse. I wanted to know about something Marty had said about Kevin and decision making. I wanted to know how he came to the decision to build this sugarhouse, how he agreed to take the leap. Maybe that was too complicated or too personal
a question. His answer was that the decision provided a way to keep people working.

“I would have had to lay off fifteen guys,” Kevin said.

He brought a large scale to his venture, brought an edge, but it seemed to me in that moment his place was like almost any other sugarhouse. The visitors, the friends stopping by, the kids playing, and the family enjoying themselves at the end of the day. I suspected that was part of Kevin’s thinking too.

When I arrived at the hotel in Burlington that night the warmth had held. At 8:00 it was 53°. The next morning it was a degree warmer, at 54° when at 8:00 I left for Johnson and Butternut Mountain. Rare is the night in Vermont in early March when the temperature rises.

12

W
HY BE COMPETITORS WHEN YOU CAN BE COOPERATORS?

W
HEN JAMES MARVIN
went looking for a piece of land capable of sugarmaking in the late 1940s, he settled upon a farm in Johnson, Vermont, a few miles away from downtown, along a back road that coursed uphill to a place called Butternut Mountain. An old farmhouse was part of the property at the base of the hill, but Marvin and his wife didn’t move there. They remained in South Burlington near the University of Vermont, where Marvin was a professor of botany. He didn’t intend to produce maple syrup himself there, only to be a steward of the land.

Not that James Marvin wasn’t occupied with maple syrup production. He had begun conducting research on the biology of the sugar maple tree after joining the faculty at the university in 1936. After a decade of work he was convinced that the university needed its own facility. With another professor and maple researcher, Dr. Fred Taylor, Marvin persuaded the governor, Mortimer Proctor, to buy a farm on a
hillside in the town of Underhill. In 1946 they established the Proctor Maple Farm, later the Proctor Maple Research Center.

James Marvin and Fred Taylor were continuing research that began in Vermont at the beginning of the twentieth century when an important bulletin was published in 1903 based on research by Charles Jones and others. In “The Maple Sap Flow” they revealed, among other things, that the mystery of the sap flow was based on the fluctuation of temperatures between freezing and thawing.

James Marvin also studied maple sap flow, published papers, and became the leading authority of his time. With Fred Taylor they discovered that the higher the sugar content in a tree, the greater the sap volume, and that the sweetest trees are sweetest every year. Marvin and his students closely observed a few select maples as they progressed through each season, taking daily measurements of temperature, internal pressure, sap volume, and sugar content. They spent summers correlating their data and recording it on large charts.

Based on this and other observations, Marvin devised a scientific equation that approached poetry in form and the mystery it conveyed:
The extent of the shock is equivalent to the rate of the flow
. As I stated at the beginning, what this means to me is that the thermodynamic energy of the sun, in the form of light or wind or weather, has a precise corresponding effect on the sap flow. Marvin’s formula had a beautiful symmetry—
the extent of the shock
on one side of the fulcrum “equivalent” and
the rate of the flow
on the other. It seemed to mean that sunlight is equivalent to sap in the maple tree.

Marvin and Taylor also discovered that the maple tree exerted back pressure during the freeze phase and would pull sap back into the tree. This brought bacterial contamination into the taphole, to which the tree responded by sealing the freshly cut wood fibers, and this reduced the sap flow and ultimately brought an end to the run. Marvin came up with the idea that a standing column of liquid of eighteen inches would be enough to prevent backflow of sap into the tree, and so he created the “dropline,” a loop of tubing at the end of the spout filled with sap and functioning as that standing column of water. It was a simple innovation that changed the industry by making tubing more productive than buckets.

James Marvin’s son David was born the year after the Proctor Farm opened. As a boy David often came to the maple farm, spending time by the heater in the shed that served as an office. Fred Taylor kept a jar of jellybeans, and James Marvin had replaced an addiction to tobacco with an addiction to chocolate, which meant the shed was a good place for a kid to be. As was the sugarhouse. They kept a coffee cup near the evaporator and filled it with hot, fresh syrup. The first cup went down easily, the second with some difficulty. David played on the bulldozer his father purchased for the farm and rode on the sled when they went to gather sap from buckets.

David was someone who thought about ways of making money, a trait he felt he may have inherited from his grandfather, who ran a feed and grain store on the docks in Norwalk, Connecticut. At the age of ten he came up with the idea of raising a flock of chickens in the basement of their home, but his parents wouldn’t sign on—maybe that was for
the best, he thought later. He also wanted to make maple syrup of his own and bugged his father so much that James set up a garbage can for David to boil sap in. James wouldn’t allow him to tap the big shade maples in the front yard, out of concern for their health, so David trekked into the woods, for quite a ways, and tapped other maple trees. The next year James went to Leader Evaporator, bought a flat pan with a draw-off spout, and placed it outdoors on cement blocks—a real evaporator! David still owns it.

As college approached he struggled with the question of how to make a contribution to society that was compatible with how he wanted to live. His parents were academics and avid readers, and he thought at first that he should get an academic degree. After two miserable years at the University of Pennsylvania he did what he wanted to do, and enrolled in the forestry school at the University of Vermont. David thought his parents would be disappointed but realized that, like most parents, they wanted their son to be happy. They only worried about his chances of finding a place in his chosen profession.

David had to hold his tongue in forestry school, and sometimes he couldn’t, when encountering the standard practice of clear-cutting forests and reproducing them with hardwoods block by block—the even-management plan, considered to be the best way to get the most fiber per acre. David wasn’t the only student who questioned even-management. The 1960s were a time of change in forestry too, and David’s classmates also believed there were better ways to manage woods. David thought that if you owned a small piece of forest and cut everything, that would be the end of those woods for you, your kids, and your grandkids.
They argued for single tree management, for practicing forestry by assessing trees individually whenever possible.

When David began to practice forestry, working for private clients, the Forest Service silvicultural (the growing of trees) guidelines required even-age management when writing current-use plans to have land appraised according to forestry value. In his first plans David gave a wink to even-age management but actually managed by the individual-tree approach.

Thinking like a forester and a sugarmaker, he grew to believe that maple syrup production was the best possible approach to stewardship of the woods because sugaring was all about single-tree management. As a sugarmaker you could take a piece of land depleted by previous logging operations, designate it as a sugarbush, and the silvicultural guidelines went out the window. You could take timber off the land, but you did it by selecting individual trees. You left the maples, most of them, and you also left nonmaples that were good trees and that you could watch as they developed. Maybe you cut them later, maybe you didn’t, but that wasn’t the goal, only a possibility in a sugarbush.

As a proponent of individual-tree management, David was excited by the idea that when managing a sugarbush you had a much closer relationship with the forest than almost anyone working in the woods, past or present. The settlers came primarily to cut the trees down. As a commercial forester you normally visited a tree two or three times—when you planted it, maybe when you released it, and finally when you marked the tree for cutting, before losing it to a chainsaw. As a maple syrup producer you might visit a tree eight or ten times in a single year. What sugarmakers did
was more akin to agriculture, where you intensely knew fields or animals. For David maple production was a way to farm without working with animals, and importantly, there was a preservation ethic embedded in maple production. You could take a run-down piece of abused forestland and make something of it financially over time with a sugarbush—a sustainable effort with an intimate connection to the trees and land.

David felt that he had inherited more from his father in the way of preservation than in the biology of maple trees. James Marvin established the first Nature Conservancy chapter in Vermont; the first meetings were held in the Marvin kitchen. His father was on the first board of what was called Act 250, a legislative effort to control statewide planning, and which resulted in the statewide billboard ban. James Marvin was one of the founders of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, which recognized that the environmental health of Vermont was also an economic driver. When James left the board after ten years the Vermont Sugarmakers Association elected David to it. He became chair of the VNRC the year James Marvin died, in 1977.

After finishing college David held a job for a few years, working for the Forest Service as a technician. Under the supervision of two scientists, he was the maple specialist in a study of the economics of the maple industry. David traveled and looked closely at the impact of the losses resulting from the blend syrup market, as companies began to add corn syrup and then artificial flavor as they further reduced the presence of maple syrup. He talked to people at General Foods and Quaker Oats, looked at Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butter-worth, and Log Cabin. Blended syrup went from fifteen
percent maple syrup down to two percent. Then one brand came out with all artificial and gained market share. Even at two percent, the blend syrup market was a substantial market for maple syrup producers. He wrote a research report about this devastating time for the industry.

Through his college years he worked at the Proctor Farm, first for free and then on the payroll. For ethical reasons his father wouldn’t hire him, but Fred Taylor did. David boiled and worked in the woods. After college he wanted to make a go of it as a sugarmaker but didn’t have enough money. He saved for three years before leaving his job. James advised against this, saying it was too hard to make money in the maple business (he was right, David would later say). James thought David should stay in the Forest Service, let them pay for a master’s degree, and do sugaring full time in his retirement. By then David was beyond being influenced by that.

He put up tubing and 4000 taps on Butternut Mountain and boiled in the sugarhouse he built on a barn foundation using a chainsaw, making a crop of 990 gallons in 1973. That wasn’t enough to live on, but he made money in other ways in those woods by harvesting timber and cutting firewood. One winter he cut 500 cords—in all a stack of wood three-quarters of a mile long. He sold balsam branches used to weave carpets for graves. He sold brush for making wreaths at $2 a bundle. Occasionally he cut a pickup load of ash, took it to a plant that made hockey sticks, and was paid $200. He sold pulpwood to a company that made cardboard holders used for hot dogs purchased in baseball parks—an opportunity that fell away during a baseball strike and that made him think about the interconnectedness of the economy.