The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  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.

  BUSINESS 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.”

  BRUCE WAS DEFINITELY showing an optimistic side when I saw him at the store on the last Saturday in February. He was wearing his boots, his wool jacket, his frayed khakis, and a playful smile. Throughout the morning he kept asking customers about their crops as soon as they passed through the doorway. “Fifteen percent of the crop in February,” he kept saying that morning. Kevin had hit fifteen percent on Thursday, February 23, and the amount was written on a whiteboard near the cash register.

  “Three thousand, seven hundred, and thirty-five gallons—fifteen percent of crop,” Bruce said to another arrival. Though his announcement tended to bring silence because the Bascom figures were so out of whack with everyone else that it was impossible to make sense of them. It was like saying, “I jumped thirty-two feet high but can really jump ninety-six.”

  There was further reason for optimism, due to the inch of snow that had fallen the night before.

  “A little bit of winter,” Bruce said.

  Aside from the weather, Bruce was puzzling over a possible syrup deal that morning. He said he was two months long, but because the season was beginning, he thought maybe he could afford to be one month long, and could therefore unload some of his supply. Bruce had been talking with Maple Grove about a deal for multiple truckloads. Maple Grove churned through huge amounts of syrup. Bruce didn’t expect much of a profit, but that wasn’t the point. He wanted a fresh credit line and a chance to acquire new producers. But the deal would be a gamble. If he sold his inventory and the 2012 season turned out to be a poor one, he might be in a bind.

  “I have to decide,” Bruce said.

  “When?”

  “When they call.” He laughed.

  Of course there would always be Canadian syrup to fall back on if the US crop was short. Bruce had many barrels from Quebec in his Cooler and thousands to come in the next months from his numerous suppliers there. One of the risks in that option was that Canadian syrup was tending to be more expensive, with the Federation price and the fluctuating exchange rate.

  “Federation” referred to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, the agricultural union that controlled production and marketing of maple syrup in that province. The people of Quebec were passionate about the production of maple syrup, and the cultural tradition was as rich if not more so than that in the United States. The Federation had more than 7000 members in 2012. Quebec produced ninety percent of the Canadian crop and about eighty percent of the world crop—five times the production of the United States in 2010. In doing so, the Federation controlled the world market and also set the world price. It had stabilized an industry that often had wild swings in production and price due to the vagaries of winters. Bruce himself admitted that he and the industry had benefited from Federation policies, and he was deeply involved in that organization as a registered buyer in Quebec. But Bruce had also enjoyed speculating during the wild swings in price of past years, and he, like many others, was a critic of the Federation pricing structure, which, he claimed, was out of touch with the marketplace.

  Bruce did what he often did when he started talking about the price differential and when I took on a confounded look: he grabbed a piece of paper and started scribbling. And as usual, wh
en he finished, he crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash, as though it were secret information.

  He wrote down the Federation price per pound, which would be $2.89 in 2012, per the Federation’s recent announcement. Below that figure he wrote the cost for transportation and procurement, 12 cents a pound, which raised the total price to $3.01. At eleven pounds to the gallon, that meant a bulk price of $33.11 a gallon, which Bruce thought way too steep. To this figure Bruce factored in the exchange rate—at that moment the US dollar was worth 99 cents to the Canadian dollar. That brought the price to $3.05 per pound, Bruce said, which put the bulk price per gallon at $33.55, which was excessively high.

  “The time to act is now,” Bruce said. He tossed the paper and walked away to help a customer.

  Because of the early sap runs, producers were arriving with barrels of syrup to sell to Bruce. This was encouraging even though it seemed far too early in the season. One producer drove from New York with a trailer loaded with barrels. He stopped in at the Cooler, got weighed and graded, then came to the store with a receipt that brought a $9000 check. Liz wrote it out while Bruce talked with the producer, who said, “I started tapping on January twenty-seven. I’ve never done that before.”

  Two other customers arrived, who had also driven from upstate New York. Bruce greeted one with, “How much have you made?”

  “About five hundred gallons,” he said. He was tall and bearded, wearing a hooded sweatshirt.

  “That’s about fifteen percent of crop, right?”

  “Yeah,” he answered. Bruce introduced us in his usual way. He told him, “You should talk to this guy,” meaning me. “He’s a writer, you might end up in a book.”

  He was from Glen Falls, New York, near the Vermont line, and he managed the sugaring operation for the other man he came with and who was now buying equipment. I asked what he thought of the weather as of late.

  He told me he worked in construction and had been outdoors doing roofing. “It’s the first winter ever I didn’t have to wear long johns,” he said. “We’ve been working in short sleeves.”

  I asked about his expectations of the season.

  He smiled a little, and with an air of authority said, “It will be short, sweet, and of high quality.”

  Everyone seemed to be talking about the weather that morning. Bruce overheard me talking about it, and in a quieter moment made a comment.

  “Maple producers are a bunch of worrywarts, you know that, right? This is the time of the year when they worry about the weather. They are like corn growers, saying that the crop is lost two or three times in a single year.”

  9

  HERE FOR THE HISTORY

  THE FIRST TIME I saw Peter Rhoades at work in his sugarhouse was an afternoon in March, in the 2010 season, after we checked tubing. A bear had passed some time making holes in the lines at the uppermost reach of the system, and we found the leaks by listening for the hissing sounds. We came down through the woods, the yellow bright light on the branch tips, the sky a deep New Hampshire blue. We walked down through the field toward his grandfather’s house, where his Aunt Margaret now lived, along the soft snow. Then we went to get his tractor, a 1947 Farmall, and we gathered sap, first from barrels and then from a steel tank, a milk tank. The tank was overflowing, due to a sudden run, so Peter called George at Bascom’s to tell him he should make a pickup.

  Peter’s grandson, who was named after him and who they called Petey, went with us to gather sap and then back to the sugarhouse, staying there until he left to go to Aunt Margaret’s just before dark. Peter fired up the evaporator for the first time in 2010.

  The Rhoades’s sugarhouse was about thirty feet from a brook that ran hard in the spring and trickled in the summer. It was close enough so they could wash equipment in it. The sugarhouse sat up against a bank into which a stonewall had been built—probably in the 1870s, Peter thought, after evaporating pans came into use. The placement against the bank allowed them to back a truck or tractor—in the old days a sled or a wagon—up to a sap tank that was on a level above the evaporator so the sap could easily flow down to the pan. There are still, after all the years, indentations in the ground in front of the sugarhouse from when the horses, before them the oxen, came down the hill and looped back around to the road. Where the narrow road to the sugarhouse joined the road that ran from Aunt Margaret’s to Peter’s mother’s house was a parking space, a 6000-gallon tank, and a shed that housed a vacuum pump and wiring. They were at the bottom of a ravine, and you would never find this place unless you knew exactly how to get there.

  The sugarhouse itself is made of castaway boards and timbers. The support beams by the door are notched barn beams that were in a dance pavilion in Alstead before they came to the sugarhouse “and had probably been somewhere else before that,” Peter said. There aren’t many straight lines in the place. There had been fires there, roofs repaired—so many repairs that not much remained from the original structure. “It’s like George Washington’s axe,” Peter said, “with three new heads and five new handles.” There is a small window that looks out onto the brook. The door, made of plywood and braced with timber slabs, has old-fashioned metal latches that flip up to the touch and clink and that were part of the original structure. Inside is a bench along one wall and under the window. It is the only place to sit and where, at the end of the window, Peter and Deb filter their syrup and pour it into containers.

  At the end, near the firebox door of the evaporator, they stack wood, mostly pine and hemlock because it’s a good use for those woods and because they burn fast and hot. Peter keeps two piles in a field up the road, tall and narrow stacks, nine feet high and thirty feet long, that Peter props up with poles so the wood can catch the wind and sunlight and be dry to burn.

  On the far side from the window, and by far I mean eight feet away, is a short set of stairs going up to the sap tanks. It’s a good place to get away from the heat of the evaporator; Petey liked to climb up there.

  In the center of the room is the evaporator, a Grimm model manufactured in the late 1930s, a duplicate of the Grimm Peter’s grandfather bought in the late 1930s. It is a traditional wood-fired model, three feet wide and ten feet long, with a seven-foot fluted flue pan and a three-foot finishing pan, through which the syrup travels on the gradient path until it’s drawn off through a pipe and valve outside the pan near the firebox doors.

  Peter said of the sugarhouse, “It’s totally inefficient, but as long as the building doesn’t fall down, we’ll use it. We’re here because of the history.”

  He described how it looks during the boiling time, at night: “When you walk up that road, and it’s totally dark and cold, and then you see the light through the planks, and come in here and it’s all rosy and warm.” He spoke those words, and I hoped to see that someday.

  Like so many sugarhouses, for that brief period of the year it is a social place. Peter talked about how, when he’s boiling, friends will drop by to get some syrup or just to watch the boil. “It’s the time for seeing each other and for catching up.”

  It was the same when Peter’s grandmother boiled there. “She boiled for her generation,” Peter said. And when he was in school, walking down the road toward home after school, he would stop in to see her, with his sisters, during the sugar season.

  Peter lit the fire in the evaporator as the sky was growing dark.

  “There,” he said, “off and running.” Petey left to stay with Aunt Margaret until his mother picked him up. The room filled with steam that hung in the air. Steam flowed out of the vents in the roof, floated down the rooflines, and disappeared. Drops condensed on the ceiling and dripped on our heads. A couple from Walpole came by to talk to Peter; they had just built a sugarhouse. I left and walked down the dark road by the brook to my car.

  I RETURNED ON the weekend with my wife. Peter and Deb were just starting the fire when we arrived. Soon it was roaring, and the sap was frothing.

  The season was underway throughout the r
egion. On the way over, driving to Peter and Deb’s, we had passed sugarhouses and seen the smoke trails coming from their stacks.

  Peter and Deb usually tapped in late February and began boiling at the beginning of March, give or take a few days, depending on the flow. Good runs tended to come around the third week of March, Peter had observed. “For years and years the best run was always between March twenty-three and twenty-five,” he said, especially after rainy nights. Usually they boiled into the first week of April or a little longer.

  From their 5000-tap operation that yielded about 70,000 to 80,000 gallons of sap, the Rhoades kept about 5000 gallons to make syrup, boiling by the traditional method. They didn’t use a reverse-osmosis machine, which meant longer boils. They made about one hundred gallons a year, sold it to friends and family, shipped some by mail, or sold it to those customers who visited the sugarhouse. There was a group of those, loyal customers, who came by specifically to taste the syrup right after it was made and leave with some still hot in the container. After this day we would become one of those.

  Peter and Deb took turns stoking the fire, keeping it as hot as they could. They said they had different methods of tending the fire, and Peter did seem to jab and stoke the wood more often with the stick they used than Deb did. But the procedure was the same, basically: feed wood to the fire from the pile nearby and keep it blazing.

  While he worked Peter talked about the sugarhouse and its iterations. The room was rebuilt in 1947; there was a fire on the roof, and they used the sugarhouse for a few years before repairing it.

  When Peter’s grandmother boiled there was no floor. “She would put down some boards,” Peter said. “Sometimes the brook would overflow, and a rivulet would come right through our sugarhouse.”

  “Peter’s grandmother was a tiny woman,” Deb said. “Really tiny.”

  “Yeah, but she climbed Mount Monadnock at eighty. She worked every day of her life,” Peter said.