The Sugar Season (33 page)

When Erwin Gingerich finished his call he joined two other Amish men standing nearby. His father and brother, I found out. I walked over and introduced myself and said I had seen his barrels, that I had even tasted from a bunch of them when Dave St. Aubin showed me what it was like to work as a grader. I hadn’t been that sugared out since I was a kid after Halloween.

The first thing Gingerish said about the season was, “The earliest tappers got the syrup.” He partnered with his father and two brothers. They sugared and bought syrup to sell to Bruce. They didn’t tap until February 3 because they were busy. “We do construction the rest of the year,” he said. “Buildings of all sizes, from the ground up.”

Erwin said, “We buy from about two hundred producers. Some are very small, only about ten gallons. Others are larger—one who has fifty-two hundred taps only produced thirteen hundred gallons this year because he tapped too late.”

He said the Ohio crop was uneven. “I can’t say if we had a good year because of the variations, according to tapping.” Because of that, Gingerich had sent only two trailer loads to Bascom’s this year, compared to the five he sent in 2011. Part of the reason, Erwin thought, was that people were thinking they would wait and see how the market played out. Another of Bruce’s agents, Michael Parker, who sugared on the New York side of Lake Champlain, managed to eke out an additional load by telling his producers about the revived season and the possible big crop in Quebec and Maine.

Bruce had come back inside the building and was headed our way.

“The biggest buyer in Ohio,” he said as he passed by. Pleasure seemed to rise up through Erwin.

He offered to give me one of his business cards, but he didn’t have any on hand, so we walked outside to his truck to find one. It was quite a large truck, one of those crew cab models with a backseat. He opened the back door, and there was Erwin’s wife, with a long skirt and wearing a bonnet, crocheting something. Erwin found a card and handed it to me. I didn’t mention the truck, and I didn’t want him to think I was judging him. He was a businessman, a smaller version of Bruce. For me just then the more pressing question was what I had seen inside.

“You’re Amish,” I said. “And you have a cell phone.”

“We’re more advanced,” Erwin answered. He seemed to consider telling me more but didn’t get into it. Too much to explain, I thought.

I had to leave. Bruce and Sam and David were getting into the car along with Steve Anderson, a packer from Michigan. I trotted up the road. But then I heard Erwin call to me. He was running behind and came up to me. “If you ever get out to Ohio, I could show you a couple of sugarhouses,” he said.

I wish I could say that I made it out there. I hoped to. I bet I would have enjoyed it—and learned something too.

E
ARLIER IN APRIL
Bruce had been saying the US crop would be down by about 15 million pounds. “Fifteen million, that’s three hundred and seventy-five fewer tractor loads than last year. Forty-five thousand less drums.” His prediction was that the US crop would be 18 million pounds. “Mark my words. It will be within two million pounds of that.”

The outlook was much better in Canada, especially in the Beauce region of Quebec. The heat wave was followed by a
freeze, and then the sap ran hard. By the second week of April the word was that Quebec sugarmakers had produced a pound and a quarter to a pound and a half of syrup per tap. That wasn’t much compared to the US output, only a little more than a pint, “but when you multiply a pound and a half times fifty million taps you’ve got seventy-five million pounds,” Bruce said. In Maine, according to Robert, they surpassed two pounds per tap. Not only that, Robert said, but the color had changed, going from dark to light, which seemed backward. “They’ve gone from D to Double A,” said Bruce.

At Bascom’s the local trade continued slowly through April. Bruce continued to think people were holding on to see whether there was a shortage and a price spike. But he also believed that in the fall many producers would be buying from him. Dave St. Aubin said they already were. “Some days twenty trucks come in to buy syrup,” he said.

Bruce was in the store one afternoon when a sugarmaker from Vermont came in, a man named Doug Rose. He owned the Green Mountain Sugarhouse in Ludlow, near the Okemo Ski Area. Bruce asked how his crop turned out.

Doug was in his sixties, a jovial, gray-bearded man. “Sixty-five percent of normal,” he said. “My wife says it’s fifty percent of a bumper crop and one hundred percent of a bad crop.” He laughed at this.

Bruce told him that the US crop was probably half of last year’s. But some places did well, he said, such as the southern regions that took advantage of early seasons. “Pennsylvania, southern New York, Ohio all did good,” he said.

He was sending some of that syrup west. “Ohio shipped to New Hampshire, so we can ship it to Michigan.” Michigan had one of the worst crops, and Wisconsin looked to be even worse. Bruce was shipping to Wisconsin too.

“In Vermont almost everybody’s made enough for retail,” which meant there wasn’t a lot left for bulk sales. And the syrup from Vermont was dark. “Haven King called and said there is no light syrup anywhere.” King was a buyer for Maple Grove. “And a lot of it is buddy.” This was another big question about the season: there were reports of a lot of buddy syrup that couldn’t be used for pancakes.

“This is a pretty bad season, one in ten.”

“I don’t think we’ll have another bad season,” Rose said.

“Bankers think this might be good. That it will slow down the irrational exuberance.” The expansion, he meant.

“My season was heavily affected by the poor skiing this year,” Rose said. His sugarhouse was located north of the ski area on Okemo Mountain, along a main travel route in Vermont. “Those cars stop by my place on their way to and from the mountain. Not much of that this year.”

After Rose finished in the store I followed him outside. “I’ve known Bruce for thirty years,” he said. “I knew him when he was doing Saltash. Lost his shirt on that. Then he came back and made it here.” Doug raised a hand toward the spread of buildings.

“He’s a workaholic, you know. He never takes a vacation. You would never see him on a boat somewhere.”

“That’s unlikely.”

“No one knows more than Bruce about the maple syrup industry. If you gave him three weeks, just three weeks, he could tell you where every bit of syrup is in the whole country, everywhere.”

I
N EARLY APRIL
Bruce again asked if I had seen the sugar machine lately. They were doing a test run, he said, and a consultant would be operating the machine. They had already made a batch that was hard as a rock, and they had to break it up and dig it out.

We went into the building and climbed to the third story, where a group of people were assembled: Joe James, of course, and Kevin Bascom and his son Greg. A technician had come from Maine for the day to monitor the gaskets. An electrician was there. And the consultant, Howard Phykitt, an expert in pharmaceutical manufacturing and in this machine. When Bruce arrived they opened up the top hatch and pulled it back. The rank smell of overheated syrup rose into the air and, when you got close, burned the nose.

Joe dug out a bunch of maple sugar and put it in paper cups. The sugar was like dough at first. “Wait until it’s cooled,” Phykitt said. He was looking pale, and the electrician worried that he was dehydrated and needed water, but Phykitt didn’t seem to care—he was determined to make the machine work successfully. With this new batch of sugar, he said to Bruce, who was on the ladder looking inside, “Not a good first run, but a good second run.” Phykitt said they should take some of this batch to David, who was in his office and didn’t think the sugar machine was going to work.

When the sugar cooled and dried a little more it began to act like fresh brown sugar. “It’s a good color,” Phykitt said. “The same color as maple syrup.” Bruce, along with everyone else in the room, was sampling the sugar, pulling off pieces and chewing.

“Lunch,” the electrician said.

Bruce chewed some and turned thoughtful.

Kevin had gotten on the ladder and was looking inside. Bruce whispered to me, “Kevin has a mechanical mind. This is a big puzzle to him. He’ll understand this machine throughout.”

Joe took the sugar and put it into the refrigerator to see how it performed after more rapid cooling. Most importantly, Joe also was getting to know this new machine and taking notes. With the old machine he had done a lot of listening, and he had been trying to listen to this machine. One time some of the others saw him put his ear up against the machine. They laughed and told him he no longer needed to do that. But Joe intended to keep listening. He missed using his nose. “I can’t smell it,” he said. “It’s all closed up.”

Joe returned a few minutes later with pieces of maple sugar on a tray. They were almost like hard candy. Everybody started working on them. Bruce grabbed a piece the size of a hatchet head and broke off a piece with his teeth. He chewed and took on that thoughtful look again.

“Good,” he said through a mouthful of sugar.

Outside he was liking what he saw. The day helped boost his optimism—the trees were greening and the scent of the dairy farm was drifting up the hill. Buoyed, maybe even on a sugar high, he said of the sugar machine, “Most people could not do this. You have to be fearless to do something like this.”

B
RUCE SCHEDULED HIS
spring Open House for the weekend after the Vermont Maple Festival. It was meant to provide a final statement on the season.

Bascom’s was the ideal place for a party, with its hilltop site, isolated location, and views that made you think big.
Sugarmakers came from Maine and Quebec, from New York and, in some years, even Ohio. Some brought and sold syrup before taking in the events of the day.

Leader had one of their big evaporators set up in the parking lot, throwing off steam, while folks gathered around to watch and ask questions. Bruce and David had scheduled a range of classes, and in parts of the warehouse, amid stacks of tubing and used equipment, experts talked about vacuum, reverse osmosis, sap hydraulics, the selling of sap, and the lighter topics such as making candy. Employees were moved over to the New Building to serve food, which, of course, was free to anyone who wanted it. Tables were spread out where pallets had been yesterday or in aisles among racks of packed syrup. Woodsmen wandered around everywhere.

I began the day with Alvin Clark while Steve Childs, a maple specialist from Cornell, talked about making maple confections and selling them at fairs. Childs covered cotton candy, maple candy, maple cream, maple marshmallows, maple nuts, maple cheesecake, maple ice cream, and we kept getting up for samples with each demonstration. By the time he finished I too was thinking of how I could sell all things maple or even open a café themed only for maple, as it was all so delicious and inspiring—and not a pancake to be seen.

Bruce was wandering about that day—he was the host, greeting the special arrivals and very important people. When Carole Rouleau appeared, dressed as though for a night out, with her companion, Silvie, who I had once seen at Bureau’s inspecting syrup with her hair up in silver blond ringlets, Bruce practically bowed to them before he led them away to the New Cooler and showed them the tanks, the
touch screen, the rotary fillers, the sugar machine, and the barrels in the basement.