The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  He also told him, “Syrup finds the money.”

  In the early 1980s Bruce negotiated with a syrup-marketing company in Brattleboro—the Springtree Company it was called, named after the tree of spring. Springtree was successfully developing markets in the big discount supermarkets, selling B grade syrup, much of it Canadian. Bruce arranged to buy $100,000 worth of syrup from Mr. Bureau and made a deal to sell it to Springtree, adding a 10 cents per pound commission. He did this on borrowed money, of course. After the sale Bruce paid off his loan and increased his credit line. Six months later he made another deal with Springtree, this time buying $300,000 worth from Mr. Bureau, again delivering it to Springtree with his 10 cent commission on top. He turned his $30,000 over to his father, who used the money to improve the farm. Things were looking good, Bruce thought. He made another deal, this time for $500,000.

  Six months later Bruce asked the bank for a million dollars, and made another deal with Mr. Bureau and the Springtree Company. This time the gross profit was a hundred thousand dollars. The net profit was quite a bit less, after taxes, and warehousing, after deductions for things such as leaking drums, and “things that go bang in the night.”

  When Bruce visited Mr. Bureau and saw barrels of syrup stacked in his warehouse he thought that the syrup was his. But that was not true. Bruce’s syrup was actually sitting at farms in Quebec, and Mr. Bureau had not paid for it yet. Bruce later figured out that Mr. Bureau was borrowing a certain amount of money and multiplying it out on futures contracts—making deals for syrup he didn’t yet actually own, sometimes putting deposits down on it, sometimes paying interest on the syrup. He made promises on two fronts—to pay the farmers when the syrup was sold and to deliver syrup to buyers like Bruce Bascom. “He’d buy twenty-five, and then sell one hundred twenty-five,” Bruce said.

  Bruce began to play a version of the futures game that he learned from Mr. Bureau. He borrowed a million dollars, but contracted for two million dollars worth of syrup, and then he delivered it successfully—for a $200,000 profit. He then thought, why not try for three million? He succeeded again. Bruce ran the numbers up even further until he was selling Springtree $5,000,000 worth of syrup on only a million dollar loan.

  “I was overselling by a factor of several hundred percent to Springtree on syrup I didn’t own. I would get a contract, then drive to Quebec and get another contract with Mr. Bureau.”

  During this time Bruce was also working on the farm, cutting wood and making hay and syrup for $185 a week.

  “By the sixth or seventh year I got pretty greedy. I was multiplying it even further.” Then along came a poor crop year, and syrup became hard to find. “The price went up in the fall, and I still had to deliver syrup to Springtree.” Because of the shortage and the price increase, Bruce had to pay Mr. Bureau more for the syrup than he expected.

  “In December of that year I had many, many truckloads of syrup going to Brattleboro on which I was losing twenty to forty thousand dollars per load, truckload after truckload.”

  You play with fire, Bruce said, and sometimes you get burned. He figured he lost ten years’ worth of income. He took mortgages to pay for the syrup, using the farm as collateral—essentially he was gambling with the farm. Fortunately for Bruce, two good crop years followed, and he was able to pay off the mortgages fairly quickly. “But I lost my nerve for being out there on the edge.” Ken Bascom took the losses philosophically. He didn’t ask Bruce to tell him specifically how much money he lost. Instead he asked if the experience cost more than a college education. Much more, Bruce said. “He said to me, ‘Then you must have learned a lot more too.’”

  OF TRADING SYRUP on the bulk market, Bruce said with some bravado, “You have to know what you’re doing. This is not for the faint of heart.”

  Mr. Bureau was still trading syrup, even at the age of eighty, even with a serious heart condition. I remember that when I first met Real Bureau, on a visit to Canada with Bruce, he trailed along behind us, over to his warehouse, where we watched inspectors from the Federation grade his syrup. After the walk across the street he stood catching his breath, and when I looked at him he shook his head and tapped at his heart. When I visited again a year later on my own to speak with him and his office manager, Carole Rouleau, who translated for us, we cut the interview short so Mr. Bureau could report to the service that monitored his condition. Yet he was still selling, and sometimes still cleaning Bruce’s clock. “He’s our brain,” Carole Rouleau said, and then told me, with an ironic smile, “We tell him to hang in there until we reach retirement age.”

  Bruce had another story about Mr. Bureau, one that got at his methods and, I suppose, his heart.

  The story took place in the early 1990s. There was a lot of syrup around. Mr. Bureau borrowed money from the banks and leveraged it out. He had barrels of syrup piled up at his warehouse, in the driveway at his house, and in his three-car garage. He had barrels stacked around his swimming pool.

  Mr. Bureau visited Bruce in August and tried to sell him syrup, but Bruce said he had too much already. Bureau tried again in October. Bruce told him he could buy it more cheaply elsewhere, that he didn’t need it.

  “Around about November, December, the banks started to get really nervous. They thought Mr. Bureau was going to go bankrupt, and there was a lot of turmoil. The banks wanted his wife to sign over the homestead rights for security, but she refused to do it. They were married for thirty years, but they had a big blowout and she left. They never got divorced, but she went to Sherbrooke, and he’s been single ever since then because of that.”

  In January Bruce began to run out of syrup. He drove to Quebec to talk to Mr. Bureau, and offered what he was paying other producers, knowing it was below what Mr. Bureau paid for his syrup, knowing he would be taking a loss. Mr. Bureau refused to sell.

  “Then I needed several truckloads of syrup, so I called back. By now it was late January. Mr. Bureau had been carrying this syrup all year and paying interest on it. I told him I would take the syrup now, but he told me the price had gone up again because of costs. He’s hanging by his fingernails, his wife had left him, and he had the gall to up the price on me. It ticked me off, and I didn’t buy anything.”

  In Acworth Ken Bascom made calls looking for syrup, and Bruce made calls, but they couldn’t find syrup in Quebec or anywhere else. “Two weeks later I called him again, and he upped the price again. I drove up there and we talked about it, and I tried to get him to come down. While I was standing there I could see them loading syrup to go out to competitors.”

  Bureau had raised his price four times. “So what did I do? I bought six truckloads. One month before the season was to start, and he ended up selling millions of dollars of inventory that he had all year at a very substantial profit.”

  It was as the man said. Syrup finds the money.

  A few years later Bruce talked to Mr. Bureau about what happened that season. “He said to me, ‘Speculating on any product like maple syrup, it’s mostly in a person’s mind. You’ve either got the ability to hold on, or you don’t. My wife didn’t know how to handle the risk and was afraid.’

  “I said to him, ‘Aren’t you afraid, Mr. Bureau?’ He told me, ‘If you’re going to stay in this business and buy syrup and speculate on contracts, you’ve got to know when you’re right and when you’re not right. You’ve got to know how to play the game,’ he said.”

  15

  THE SUGAR CAMPS OF ST. AURELIE

  ON MARCH 13 a new ten-day forecast called for even higher temperatures throughout the northern states and Canadian provinces. The forecast now predicted temperatures in the midseventies, with nights above freezing until at least March 22. Temperatures were already twenty degrees above normal. They were thirty-five degrees above normal in the Midwest. The Weather Channel was reporting sixty new high-temperature records nationwide, with dozens more to be broken. Bill Karins, weatherman for MSNBC, began his report on Morning Joe on March 13 with, “What a beautiful fore
cast. And it continues for a week!”

  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The forecast for Acworth on March 13 called for a more subdued 35° to 55°. Often Kevin’s readings were below the forecast because of their perch on Mount Kingsbury, but not on this day. At Bascom’s it was 45° the morning of March 13 and reached 63° in the afternoon. March 13 also happened to be Town Meeting Day in New Hampshire, which had once been the day to begin tapping trees.

  On March 13 Kevin had another big day at the evaporator, making 1428 gallons of syrup. His total reached 11,850 gallons, about half of last year’s crop. He was well ahead of the 2011 production going by the calendar, but Kevin wasn’t optimistic at all. “I’ll be surprised if we make any on Monday,” he said, which would be March 19. That would be his earliest finish ever, following his earliest start ever.

  That morning, when Kevin was boiling, Bruce came out of the office once again, again pulling a hairnet over his head. Bruce tended to wear his like a bathing cap; Kevin wore his under his baseball hat. I tried for the beret look, but it was almost impossible to make the hairnet look anything less than comical. “I hate to admit this,” Bruce said, “but the Federation is looking pretty smart right now. I would say this is going to be the worst crop in twenty or thirty years. And the syrup is all dark.”

  He said he was glad he didn’t sell those loads of syrup to Maple Grove.

  He had just finished a morning of phone calls. He talked to Guy Bolduc, of Bolduc Products in St. Victor, Quebec, in the Beauce. Bolduc ran a tier-two company and sold syrup to some of the big chains in the United States. “Guy wanted me to tell him about the syrup crop. I said to him, ‘Do you want it straight, or do you think I’ll give you the runaround?’ He said to me, ‘I think you’ll give me both, Bruce.’” He laughed at this—Bruce often told me that buyers never tell the whole truth to each other. But Bruce heard some good news. “He said there’s two feet of snow in St. Victor and St. Evariste. The Canadians are producing now. They made a lot of syrup in a few days. They can produce a year’s crop in a week’s time up there.”

  Robert Poirier also called from St. Zacharie, Quebec. Robert said the season had taken off in the St. Aurelie camps and along the Golden Road in Maine, just over the border. “They produced a lot of syrup last week. With the warm weather the roads are getting muddy and the big trucks will get stuck up there. Soon they won’t be able to get in or out. Some of the producers want to sell now.

  “Maine will make a lot, but I will have to pay the Federation price, or close to it. I’ve got sixty trailer loads there now. Fifty percent of my capital is already consumed.” Sixty trailer truckloads represented about $7.5 million worth of syrup at the bulk price.

  Bruce took another look at the chart before he left for lunch. “We’ll be done by next Wednesday.” His prediction was two days beyond Kevin’s, for a finish on March 21.

  I HAD BEEN to St. Zacharie to visit Robert Poirier nine months ago in June of 2011. At that time Robert was picking up syrup in Quebec and Maine and shipping it to New Hampshire.

  St. Zacharie is eighty miles southeast of Quebec City and ten miles from the US border. The landscape around St. Zacharie is mostly forested, with far fewer fields than the prime agricultural regions further west and south of Montreal. The terrain is made up of long rolling hills and deep valleys. The primary roads are straight, and someone cresting over one hill can see miles ahead as the road sweeps down through a trough and maybe a village and then climbs up the next hill—the land resembles long sound waves with low frequencies. Heavily loaded timber trucks barrel down those hills like roller coasters, and speed limits seem only a suggestion. St. Zacharie has a touch of the desolation of the upper latitudes. The scant apple trees bloom in June, and the fruit never really ripens. “It’s always winter here,” one syrup producer told me.

  Before the recession and collapse of the housing market a few years ago, the lumber industry was booming. Bruce often talked about the logging and lumber trucks backed up three deep all day long at the single traffic light in St. Zacharie. Since then the population of St. Zacharie had dropped from 2200 to 1900 because of logging but also because the jeans factory closed and the work moved to Asia. The building where the factory was housed is now rented by Bruce Bascom.

  Robert Poirier came late in life to the maple syrup game, but he was a quick study and had the proper beginnings. Robert started working in the woods early. He was one of twenty-three children. His parents could multiply but not fully provide, so at the age of eight Robert and a brother went to live at the farm of an aunt and uncle. Robert talked about getting 10 cents a day for working in the hay fields. He quit school at fifteen, and at seventeen he was working full time as a logger, making two dollars a day cutting pulpwood in the timberlands of Maine.

  Robert did logging around Mount Katahdin for ten years and later ran his own logging company. He might have still been in that business had not a tree fallen too close and a limb hit him in the head. He walked out of the woods with his face covered with blood and drove himself to the hospital. After he recovered Robert looked for other work, finding a part-time job as an assistant for someone who was buying maple syrup for Bruce Bascom. When Robert realized that the man was embezzling syrup, he told Bruce about it. Bruce fired the man and asked Robert to take his place.

  Robert was about to find a true calling. He had taught himself to speak English and had a fine memory for the right details. When Bruce talked about Robert he would say that of the 150 syrup producers Robert dealt with in Maine and Quebec, he not only remembered their names but also the names of their children and grandchildren. Visiting the sugar camps and talking to the producers, the sucrier, he gradually assembled a large buying base. Robert’s workdays went all by memory, regarding the places he would go and the numbers of barrels he would find there. In 2011, when he turned sixty-nine, Robert told me he would work until his memory gave out. Bruce felt replacing Robert would be impossible and hoped he would work another twenty years.

  Bruce described Robert’s temperament as hot and cold, which meant that he could get upset. Although Bruce was one to push up Robert’s mental temperature. In 2010, on my first trip with Bruce into Quebec, we spent a day visiting important people in the maple syrup business, partly so Sam Bascom, Bruce’s nephew, could meet them. We stopped at a Maple Grove facility, dropped in on Real Bureau, visited Guy Bolduc, toured a CDL evaporator factory, and stopped last of all at the warehouse in St. Zacharie. Robert met us first thing in the morning at a restaurant, and Bruce immediately needled Robert, telling him, with a smile, that he wanted Robert to “go slow” with his buying. Robert didn’t say anything in response, but he grew quiet. A couple of times more that day Bruce mentioned that Robert should go slow.

  The final time was when we were in the warehouse standing near the tall stacks of barrels. Robert had bought 1.7 million pounds of syrup by then, at a price in the neighborhood of $4.5 million. He told me when I rode with him that his goal was to buy 2.1 million pounds, or about 191,000 gallons. In the warehouse they talked about the producers who had sent syrup, but then once again Bruce said, as we all heard, “Robert needs to go slow.” Robert went hot: “Bruce! You always tell me to go slow, but then you always tell me you don’t have enough sirop!” Sirop, the French word—Robert pronounced it melodically as sear-rope, making a trill on the Rs.

  In 2011 I returned to Quebec on my own, making two trips that June to talk with Robert and collect syrup with him. Robert’s workday began early, at 4:30, when he rose to do paperwork, and he was usually at the warehouse by 6:30. I arrived at 7:30, thinking I was early. When I remarked about the length of Robert’s workday he said, “It’s good for Bruce.”

  Robert’s feelings were tending toward the hot side again on this day. He had talked to Bruce and said to me, “I ask Bruce if he wants me to buy this sirop, and he says yes, but he keeps saying go slow. These people want their money. If I don’t buy their sirop, someone else will. I told Bruce, I won’t have to deal with
this next year.” But I had the feeling he would.

  Robert used a ten-wheel delivery truck to gather syrup. We soon left for Maine, for the St. Aurelie camps. St Aurelie is actually a town in Quebec, and the border crossing is there, but the area of the camps takes the same name. They are along the Baker Pond Road in timberlands in Somerset County, Maine. As we sat at the border crossing, waiting for the guard to check my passport, Robert told me about when he worked here cutting pulpwood—not maples, they were sugaring in these woods then, but softwood, conifers. “In 1959, when I worked at this place, there were one hundred and fifty cars lined up on Monday mornings, with four to five hundred people waiting to cross the border and go work in the woods.”

  People have made maple syrup in these woods for more than a hundred years. They were making syrup then on the Quebec side too, but these lands were used by people who didn’t have access to woods on the Quebec side and so ventured across the border. They established camps and then passed them, along with the leases from the timber companies for use of the land and trees, on to their families.

  Baker Pond Road was well maintained but unpaved. On days when it rained they closed the road to keep the big trucks from breaking it up. “I never broke up the road,” Robert said. Moose tracks were along the road. We passed trashed-up open sites with piles of logs and went by sugar camps, some with several buildings. There were pump-houses and the webs of mainlines and tubing. The sugarbushes were all well groomed, all with the soft green shine of maple leaves on a clean understory.

  As we passed a sugarbush Robert said, “That’s a small one, only twenty-five thousand taps.” Of another he said, “That has eighty-thousand taps.” I asked how many sugar camps were along this road. Robert said, “I can tell you,” and began counting, whispering to himself.

  “Thirty-five,” he said.