The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  Robert looks something like the actor Paul Newman, with light blue eyes and sculpted cheekbones, his gray hair swept back, a kind of sweet mystery about him, and some shyness. He smiled with his eyes. After we drove several miles and had taken a fork in the road, with no signs along the way that I could recognize, I said it must be easy to get lost here. Robert looked as though I just didn’t know and told me more about working here as a teenager. He had four horses and took them into the woods, and he hired a feeder to take care of them. Other men used the horses too. They worked twelve-hour days cutting logs and hauling them to the road with the horses. They stayed out here for a week at a time and ate only the food they brought with them.

  Robert told me that the sugarmaker we were about to see had been in the next bed when Robert was in the hospital after his accident in the woods, though Robert hadn’t remembered. One day they met on Baker Pond Road and stopped to talk, and the sugarmaker, whose name is Claude Morissette, told him he had been in the hospital with him. He told Robert he had heard rumors that he didn’t pay enough for syrup. There were many such rumors, Robert said; about eight years ago Bruce traveled to the St. Aurelie camps and a sugarmaker got mad at him about the price he paid for syrup.

  We turned and drove through the woods to his place, and Robert said, “Claude has worked at this sugarbush for thirty-two years and built it up to forty thousand taps. He put all his profits from making sirop back into the business, and now he is making money for the first time. He made sirop with horses and buckets, then a tractor, and now tubing.”

  Claude was happy to see Robert. He showed us around the place, taking us to a tool shed where he kept two very large generators, which provided all their electrical power. We went into the sugarhouse and looked at his big evaporator, six feet wide and sixteen feet long, and we lingered over the map of his sugarbush, with the tubing lines stretching out into three zones in patterns like leaves. Claude showed us his cabin, a rustic but clean and comfortable-looking place, and said his wife stayed there with him during the syrup season. Claude was now putting on a fresh coat of paint. Robert backed the truck up to the storehouse, and with dollies they loaded on forty-eight barrels of syrup. The barrels were heavy, of course, weighing 600 pounds each, and Robert worked up a sweat.

  We returned to the warehouse to unload the syrup. Robert had a full-time man at the warehouse named Bruno Guay, who went about unloading. A woman named Raymonde Lariviere worked recording drum weights and data needed for customs to cross the border. Robert also employed a truck driver who made the trips to Acworth.

  While they worked I looked at the barrels. The warehouse was divided into two sections, and Robert kept Quebec or Federation syrup on one side and Maine syrup on another. Maine syrup was technically US syrup, and Robert inspected that himself before shipping it to New Hampshire. Federation inspectors graded the Quebec syrup. I enjoyed looking at the barrels and reading the names and places where the syrup had been made. They conveyed the breadth of the territory Robert covered and the trust he gained. The largest producer was in the village of Notre-Dame-du-Rosaire near the St. Lawrence—he owned his land, Robert said, and had 165,000 taps. He sent 501 barrels: “Five hundred plus one. He says it was a slow year.” Another sugarmaker had 100,000 taps. One group of sixty-eight stainless-steel barrels from the town of La Frontiere, also near the St. Lawrence, would be shipped to Europe. Robert’s territory extended northward into the Gaspe Peninsula, an eight-hour drive away, a region, I was told, that had opened up to syrup production in the last twenty years with changes in the climate. And Robert’s territory extended into Maine, to the St. Aurelie camps and those along the Golden Road, which ran from the border to Jackman, Maine. Due to Robert’s efforts Bruce was the majority buyer in Somerset County, Maine.

  When they finished unloading we got into the truck again and returned to the St. Aurelie camps. He made different turns this time and followed a road called the Dump Road, passing by camps, some with names, others with numbers, until we came to one with a sign that read, “Nadeau Sugar Camp.” Near the road was a log structure, green and mossy. “That’s an old sugarhouse,” Robert said. Further along appeared an opening and a building that looked like a house except for the tanks alongside and the mainlines running into it.

  It had gray walls and a blue roof, a tall section that was a tank room, and a long single-story section that was the sugarhouse and, at the end, the living quarters. A woman came out to greet us, slender, middle-aged, pretty with reddish hair. Her name was Suzanne Nadeau, and she seemed eager to talk. She showed us inside. The evaporator was dismantled, with the pans removed, and was now serving as a workbench—Suzanne was making droplines, or “chutes,” when we arrived. They talked about the season, which for them was quite good. She showed us the calendar near the evaporator—they started boiling on March 17 and finished on April 28.

  Suzanne said that her husband, Fernand, was in the woods with the tractor, but soon he came rumbling along and we went outside to load barrels. Fernand stayed on the tractor, using the bucket to lift the barrels with chains and a device that clamped on the upper rim of the barrels. Robert attached the chains to the barrels with a helper who followed from the warehouse. Suzanne and I watched, and she talked about their sugarbush.

  Fernand grew up in Quebec, as had Suzanne. He made maple syrup with his father as a boy and then waited until retirement to buy a sugaring business. They lived in the United States for thirty years, in Connecticut, where Fernand worked in construction. Their two sons were born there. One lived in New Hampshire, worked in construction, and took time off to come here during the season. Another son lived in North Carolina, was in the military, and was serving a tour in Iraq. Financing the purchase of this business was difficult because they weren’t buying the land, only the buildings and equipment and the rights to the trees. Fernand mortgaged just about everything they owned to buy this place.

  The sugarbush was a mile square. All the sap ran directly into the sugarhouse. They had put pressure gauges on some of the lines, and these were so useful for checking leaks that they planned to attach them to all the mainlines. During the season Fernand, Suzanne, and a helper checked tubing on snowshoes. They lived here all the time during the sugar season, but this time of year they spent weekends at their lake house south of Montreal. They heated the place with wood that Fernand cut, using the tractor—what was it about a tractor, she asked, that once you had one, you wondered how you ever managed without one? Suzanne liked burning wood and the extravagant heat it supplied. They took firewood with them on their weekend trips and would give a load to Suzanne’s sister this coming weekend.

  I had heard about the Nadeau syrup before. In the Cooler Dave St. Aubin told me he thought the best-tasting syrup came from this region of Maine. He said that the owner of a pancake restaurant came to the Cooler to buy barrels of syrup for his restaurant. He selected eighteen barrels, all but one from this region and the majority from the Nadeau camp.

  In the truck Robert told me that when he first met the Nadeaus they got mad at him because they heard he paid a low price for syrup. He won them over, he said, by giving them a barrel, telling them they could pay eighteen dollars for it or they could have it for free if they sold him their syrup. They may also have been swayed by the fact that Bruce bought the entire crop, including late-season dark commercial grade.

  After lunch Robert and I headed out from the warehouse again, and he said, “You’re really going to see something here.” We stayed in Quebec and drove to a place in St. Zacharie, going a few miles along one of those straight roads until we came to a sign that read, “L’erablier Mario Maheux.” The driveway was lined with pines and then turned into an opening, where I grasped what Robert meant. Before us was a bright yellow sugarhouse, a sizeable building with walls faced with logs. The trim was green, and the metal roof was green too. Next to the big building was a smaller garage on the same design, also banana yellow with green trim and filled with barrels of syrup. Robert backed
up to the garage and began loading.

  Soon up the road in a cloud of dust came Mario Maheux himself in his pickup truck. He jumped out of his truck. Mario was a carpenter, dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt, a hat, and he carried a pencil behind his ear as carpenters do. He came to the garage and spoke in quick French. “Ingles?” he said of this visitor. Robert had been buying syrup from Mario for ten years, but only in the last two years had he gotten seriously into sugarmaking. He had inherited this building from his father, who planned to use it as a sugarhouse bed and breakfast, but that didn’t work out. Mario was now living in the sugarhouse, and for him, Robert said, it was the fulfillment of a dream. After they loaded twenty-eight barrels we went inside for a look.

  Like other places that were both sugarhouse and home, this building was sectioned into two parts. But there was overlap here, that’s the important thing: overlap between the living part and the working part, and that’s where the beauty was. Downstairs at the entrance was a combination dining and living room, with nice furnishings—an oak table with eight chairs, a comfortable couch, an antique hutch, an upright piano in tune. There were rocking chairs and lots of windows. Just above this room on the second floor was a sitting room with leather couches, a television, a divan by the window, and . . . an open trunk full of women’s hats. A woman’s touch, from Mario’s girlfriend, as Robert told me. Both of these rooms, downstairs and upstairs, were paneled in pine, even on the ceilings, which gave them a warm honeyed glow. Upstairs, leading off from the sitting room, was a balcony around an open space from which you could look down upon the evaporator and into the sugarhouse, as though like a theater.

  The character of the sugarhouse part was totally in contrast to the two living rooms. The walls were a brilliant white, and that white ran up the inside of the balconies on the second floor. The evaporator itself was stainless steel and highly polished, which added to this brilliant hue. The stacks on the evaporator rose up through this whiteness and through the knotty pine ceiling. The effect was to channel light from downstairs through the upstairs. It was a cathedral effect, the most magnificent presentation of the core of a sugarhouse I had ever seen, and I could understand why Mario Maheux had come flying up the road to show it to us.

  On the first floor away from the evaporator was a small kitchen with burnished aluminum appliances and a nook with stools for snacking. Near the evaporator were two barber chairs, another clever touch, for kicking back and watching the evaporator, in season or out.

  THE NEXT MORNING Robert said he was going to “take me somewhere,” which I took to mean somewhere good. He asked if I had boots, and I took my hiking boots from my car. When we drove off he said, “I’m going to show you a sugarhouse,” with an expression that indicated he meant it.

  Robert had talked to Bruce that morning again and had been reassured. “Things are good,” Robert said. “Always good.” He smiled as though to say they had their ups and downs. Bruce gave him permission to buy a new scale for $2500 and told Robert he could buy more syrup.

  By now the St. Aurelie camps were feeling like familiar ground, and again I enjoyed the soft June glow of the sunlight coming through the treetops. We rode for eight, maybe ten miles before Robert followed a side road and parked by a pile of firewood. Nearby were two old-fashioned wooden gathering tanks on sled runners. “We’re going up there,” he said, pointing to an overgrown pathway. Soon the path turned muddy. There were lots of moose tracks in the mud. Strands of sagging tubing lines hung between some of trees.

  Then, ahead up a rise, I saw a clearing and some structures. They were made of logs. One building was much larger than the others, and as we got closer I saw smokestacks jutting from the roof.

  “Two old guys, they worked making sirop here,” Robert said. They were brothers, Charles Edourd and Pierre Abbel Larochelle. “They made sirop here from the time they were ten years old, and their father made sirop before them. This place was worked for a hundred years.”

  We climbed up a path to a clearing, a small field with tall grass up to our waists. Along the clearing were some log buildings. The roofs were missing, the metal most likely salvaged. “One of these was a camp,” Robert said. “The other was for horses. He came up here in the summer and cut hay for the horses.”

  The cabin hadn’t been used in a long time. There was another newer cabin made of boards on the other side of the clearing. The old log cabin was for storage, and inside were some parts of sleds. In the other cabin for horses was a small hayloft and an entryway so low to the ground it was more like a burrow. The feeding bins were cribbed where the horses gnawed on them. A cracked leather harness hung from a nail.

  “The men used only horses here, never any machines. They made those logs by hand, with a saw and an axe. They made all the logs for that sugarhouse too. And they made those smokestacks.” The stairway going down into the sugarhouse had rotted out, so we walked around and climbed inside.

  The big logs used to make the base of the sugarhouse were flattening from the weight of the building, helped along by the years of steam. There was a patchy layer of concrete on the floor and buckets lying about. Further evidence of the history Robert meant to convey to me lay just outside the doorway, where a cast-iron cauldron sat, turned over. “That was the way they did it long, long ago,” he said.

  “They made about seven or eight barrels a year, using buckets and, at the end, tubing in some places.” Robert gave a little laugh. “The horses learned to duck under the tubing when they went through the woods to a place where they had buckets.” The horses pulled those gathering tanks we saw at the road.

  “The old men were able to move the barrels of sirop. They were heavy barrels, the old kind that weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds. They moved them out of the sugarhouse and on to the sled. The horses would pull the barrel, that must have weighed close to eight hundred pounds, all the way to the road. I would grade the sirop there.” Robert started buying from them ten years ago, a few years after he started working for Bruce.

  Now I knew, in the way Robert told this story, why he wanted Bruce not to tell him to go slow. He was a buyer, it was his calling, and that work connected him to these people in the deepest ways, to what they loved and the ritual that gave meaning to their lives. Of course he didn’t want to go slow.

  “The sirop was very dark,” Robert said, “C grade, or D grade. They couldn’t make light sirop on those old evaporators.”

  He smiled, remembering. “One time when I began to grade their sirop I asked them how the sirop was. ‘A grade,’ one said. I tested it, found it was C. I tested another barrel and it was C. Barrel after barrel, all C. When I got to the last one I said, ‘Which one is A? I thought you said it would be A.’ They said, ‘You have to give us one!’”

  We walked out along the trail with tracks worn by sleds and hooves. “The men lived in St. Prosper,” he said, which was a village near St. Zacharie. “One drove an old Pontiac, another a beat-up pickup truck. One was married, the other wasn’t. They fought all the time. One checked his watch every minute when he worked.”

  As we walked out he said, “I wish you could have seen them making sirop here.” We stopped by the gathering tanks again, and I opened a lid. Robert pointed to the edge at the opening and said, “Look how it’s worn, where he put his buckets.” Like the threshold over a well-worn doorway.

  We ate lunch, made a brief stop at the warehouse, and then Robert said to me, “I have a surprise for you.” We left in his pickup truck and followed roads in St. Zacharie. We went over a hill with long view of the woods. Robert said, “All these maple trees, as far as you can see, all around here, they are all tapped.”

  I had asked Robert what he did during the sugar season when everyone was boiling, but he hadn’t answered. Now he said, “We’re going to my sugarhouse.” We arrived at a place with a gated fence. “During the sugar season,” Robert said, “I stay here all the time.”

  Here the sugarhouse and the camp were in separate buildings. Robert
told me he bought the land in 1964. A hundred and fifty acres, for $2500. “With five hundred dollars down and a low interest,” he said. “I cleaned the woods and planted maple trees. What used to be fields now have maple trees that are tapped.” He has 4000 taps now.

  We went into the sugarhouse and looked at the equipment. “I have lots of tanks here, in case I can’t be here and the sap mounts up.” Two of the tanks looked like silos.

  The cabin was homey, with many family photographs on the wall. “My five-year-old granddaughter comes here when I make sirop. She just plays, doesn’t work.”

  He said, “This is where I like to be.” Again I perceived the profound connection he had to this culture. When I first came to Quebec to talk to sugarmakers I thought I would see the powerhouse in action, the 100 million pounds manifested in industrial-sized buildings, but what I saw most of all were family sugarhouses, each family having worked diligently over the years to make the dream of sugarmaking, their particular dream, come true.

  We looked at some of the photos of Robert’s family, of his four children and his nine grandchildren. One older photo was of a man riding an ox—Robert’s father, he said. Other people were standing by: maybe they were brothers. His father was doing the work of sugaring, and the ox had been pulling a sled. Robert said he had started sugaring with his father when he was five or six.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON he graded the Nadeau syrup, the forty-eight barrels lined up and waiting. Robert first worked through a couple of barrels of commercial that were made on April 30, two days after the end date on the calendar at the Nadeau’s sugarhouse. These would probably be cleaned and filtered at Bascom’s and sold to process meats. He tasted the best of the Nadeau, which he thought was made on April 25. “It’s smooth, like cream,” he said. That was a good way to describe the feeling of syrup in the mouth.

  Robert was nearing the end of the grading when a syrup producer came in who I will call Jacques. Jacques was a large man with a booming voice, wearing tinted glasses and with a bit of a beard. It didn’t take long to see that Jacques was someone of great feeling and expression, and he reminded me of the actor Gerard Depardieu in that way. Jacques was upset about something, something to do with the Federation.