The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  At a sugarhouse in Franklin County, Vermont, sap exposed to sunlight in the tubing lines reached temperatures above 100°.

  They boiled at David Marvin’s sugarhouse on March 19 but then decided to shut down, at least temporarily. Their sap was also like cottage cheese there, in northernmost Vermont, and they too dumped it on the ground. “We’re going to wait and see,” David said when I called, “because we’ve never faced this before.” He added, “Our fellow in Quebec thinks the season is over, that the trees are tired.”

  IT WAS 50° AT BASCOM’S when Kevin took his reading on Monday morning, March 19. The view of the mountains in Vermont was spectacular that morning, with the clear skies and the sunlight striking them from the southeast. The snow on the ski slopes was patchy. The maple trees had that mauve color that seems to hang like a mist when the buds begin to swell. The workers went outside on their morning breaks, where they could see the valleys and take in the sun—it was a gorgeous day, this last day of winter. At the little pond below where they sat, the concupiscent frogs kicked and rippled the water’s edges. The fields were greening up. The air was full of the scent of maple after Kevin began boiling.

  The sap truck ground up the hill and rolled through the parking lot. Only George Hodskins was gathering sap now. The sap was still running fairly well at Cole’s and Ryan’s, two of the colder lots—George said that during a twenty-hour period the trees at Cole’s had produced 4300 gallons of sap from the 5500 taps. The sap was “a little greasy,” George said and would surely make darker syrup.

  I went into the Cooler, usually the happening place this time of year. Day after day in 2011 the trucks had been lined up at the Cooler, twenty or forty or sometimes fifty trucks pulling up to the dock. Not so many this year.

  Dave St. Aubin was finishing some paperwork for a dairy farmer from Westmoreland who brought in two barrels of syrup. Both were commercial grade. He was going to use the money to pay his bill at the store. He said the sap was running at his sugarbush, but he didn’t think he would be boiling on Maple Weekend. “I don’t know why they pushed the date so far back,” he said. “So the people up north will have something, I guess.”

  After the farmer left, Dave said to me, “We’ve been selling more syrup than we’ve been taking in.” He tallied his slips to make sure, and it was true—more barrels were going out than coming in, sold to those sugarmakers who had poor crops and needed syrup for their customers or for Maple Weekend.

  In came another dairy farmer, one of those grizzled old fellows with a perpetual five o’clock shadow and a circumspect look who has put in crazy work hours over the course of his years, though this farmer was retired and “paying capital gains tax,” he said with some disdain. He was from a town eighty miles to the north and was a maple syrup producer, but he hadn’t made enough this year to meet his needs. He sold the syrup from his home—”Right from my kitchen,” he said.

  He told Dave St. Aubin, “I want the lightest syrup you have.” Light syrup was at a premium now. Last year B grade was hard to find. Dave jumped on the forklift, and the farmer walked along behind. I walked with him, through the Middle Cooler and down the ramp into the New Cooler. Dave turned toward a mighty stack of black barrels, four high and four wide. The farmer looked around at the contents of the New Cooler and said, “I’d like to have the interest he pays. I heard he has a credit line of fifteen million dollars.”

  I responded with, “I heard peepers last night.”

  “Well, it’s shut down, then,” he said.

  Dave lowered four barrels from the top of the stack. He opened each one and drew out a sample and put each in a clear container so the man could see it. The syrup, made at Bascom’s, was as light as Chardonnay. Dave offered some to the farmer to taste, but he just shook his head. We walked back to the scales, following Dave, who filled out the paperwork and then loaded the barrels on the farmer’s old truck. “They won’t be going anywhere.” Though actually they would, but slowly—each barrel had 660 pounds of syrup. The farmer left for the store.

  Dave didn’t like the pace of work. “It’s too slow,” he said. “Last year you never could have had just one guy out here.”

  In the store Bruce and the old farmer talked for a while, but when he left, Bruce turned to me and began talking about the price of syrup. “It might be two-sixty,” he said. “And they may keep it at two sixty-five. David Marvin said he would have a price by Wednesday, but he’s backing off.”

  This befuddled me, despite the explanations. If the price was $2.70 a pound last year with an exceptional crop, why would it be $2.65 or $2.60 this year with a poor crop? It seemed wishful thinking on Bruce’s part.

  “With this hot weather, the crop will be off dramatically.”

  “So there won’t be enough supply?

  “No, there should be enough.” Bruce grabbed a piece of paper and drew out the figures—the United States at 20 million pounds, Canada at 90 million, 15 million in carryover from 2011. “So that’s a hundred and twenty-five million, which will cover demand, but barely.” Some people might hoard or hold on to specific grades, he said. The Federation would probably release supply strategically from their surplus. Bruce was considering his own strategies to get producers in New York to release supply—maybe he would buy lots of Canadian and spread it around.

  His was an anxiety of nickels and dimes, multiplied by millions and compounded by supply. That 10 cent difference between $2.60 and $2.70 would mean a difference of a million dollars over the purchase of 10 million pounds of syrup.

  Just before he left the store Bruce said, “I know what’s going on out there today.” The Cooler, he meant. “People are buying drums back.” That must have added to his anxiety, to see syrup floating out the doors, back to producers.

  Another customer came in. Ted Young, who had brought two helpers, was in his seventies and looked very fit, with well-muscled arms in a short-sleeve shirt. Ted said he had owned and run two feed and grain stores in southern New Hampshire “and retired on that.” He sugared on Kearsarge Mountain, in Warner, but with the warm weather had already shut down.

  Ted sugared with tubing on gravity, meaning he didn’t use a vacuum, though now he was considering installing one.

  “I believe there’s something to this global warming,” he said. “If you don’t have vacuum, you’re not going to make it.”

  Down below, in the sugarhouse, Kevin was boiling. A year ago, on March 19, Kevin had also boiled, but the temperature had been between 30° and 42° that day. On March 19 in 2011 only a week had passed since the ice storm. He was on his tenth boil then and would boil twenty times more, for another three and a half weeks.

  The syrup Kevin was producing on this March 19 had that buddy smell. There were a few descriptions for the smell of buddy. Leafy was one. Dirty socks was another.

  I told Kevin that I heard peepers in the pond last night. “That’s usually the sign that it’s over,” he said.

  And so it was, a day later.

  Kevin’s chart read,

  3/19 Clear

  50°–74°

  342.18 B grade

  16,117 Total

  3/20 (Spring Begins)

  50°–73°

  683.55 B grade

  341.45 Commercial

  17,142 Total Gallons

  19

  SUGAR ON SNOW

  AROUND MARCH 19 the extreme southern loop of the jet stream that hung over the western United States broke off and formed a giant eddy that spun slowly eastward across the continent, shepherding a low-pressure area. By the end of the week the heat wave was over, and colder temperatures returned. In places like southern New Hampshire, a new sap run would have begun if the trees hadn’t already started to bud.

  Two years ago David Clark had retapped trees so as to have something to boil on Maple Weekend. In 2011 that wasn’t necessary because the dates were moved ahead to the third weekend in March, and the Clarks had barely gotten underway—that weekend they boiled water because the tree
s shut down during a freeze. In 2012, at the Clark sugarhouse, there was no pretense of a boil, no simmering of water.

  Their season also ended on March 19, their earliest finish ever. A look at their chart showed pauses in other seasons, for a week of cold or rain, but they had previously always started up again. From 1959 until 1998, when the Clarks stopped boiling on March 31, the season had always gone into April.

  Not that 2012 hadn’t been a decent year. David Clark made 987 gallons of syrup on nineteen boils. Not to mean that the spirit wasn’t festive at the Clark sugarhouse that weekend; it was festive and magnanimous. They brought miniature donkeys down from the farm for kids to pet. The inside of the sugarhouse was warm and inviting. Jugs of new syrup were lined up by the counter, bison burgers were on the grill, and bags of maple cotton candy hung from clips like a row of balloons.

  The evaporator was silent and cool, which seemed strange, but you got used to it. Last year, when they boiled water, David fed four-foot logs into the evaporator, and the fire roared while steam billowed through the roof. But that was last year. Now there was a long table, on top of which were baking pans, filled with snow.

  And there was Alvin, wearing another funny hat—this was shaped like a buffalo head, with glass eyes and cute yellow horns. Alvin ladled thickened syrup on snow, making leather aprons. He had toothpicks on hand for anyone who wanted to lift a piece off from the snow. He had a bowl of dill pickles nearby to counter the sweetness, in the French-Canadian way.

  I said to Alvin, “Where did you get that snow?”

  “A gift from above,” he said and laughed.

  I persisted. “Alvin, where did you get the snow?”

  “A gift from God,” he said, with another laugh.

  That was good enough for now. And when you thought about it, isn’t that what snow is, a gift from above? In these places, for these people? For everyone, actually? Snow was water for the plants. Snow was for prosperity and celebration. Snow for fulfillment, and some of that was here, on Maple Weekend.

  “We’ve had about a hundred people come in,” Alvin said. “People from as far away as Connecticut.”

  Someone asked how the sugar on snow was made. “You cook the syrup longer, until it’s two hundred and twenty-four degrees. Then you let it cool. If it’s too hot, it will go right through the snow.”

  He offered some to us. As before, this taffy was fun to chew, with the sudden release of flavor and the quick dissolving. Alvin had made some small maple pecan pies, a specialty of his. He gave us two, and we sat down to eat while visitors crowded around the table. The little cloth horns were sticking up above their heads.

  There sure was a lot to rest the eyes on in the Clark sugarhouse. The chart, of course, the famous chart with the stories of the seasons in red and black. A history in buckets—old wooden ones, new wooden ones, all sorts of metal ones, hanging from the rafters and the walls. Lanterns hanging, too, from the days when they lit the sugarhouse. Yokes for trained oxen, from when they had pulled the sleds. A collection of spouts, from the latest plastic spouts to ancient carved wooden ones as thick as broomsticks. And information, such as how much sap to make a gallon of syrup or photographs for identifying the Asian longhorned beetle. Framed photos, newspaper stories, paintings of sugarhouses. Old-fashioned painted metal syrup containers. A framed collection of fluted sugar molds for individual servings—the label on one was “Ruth Bascom’s Old Sugar Tin Collection,” after Bruce’s mother.

  On a high shelf were etched cups given to the Clarks for winning the Carlisle Award for the best syrup in New Hampshire. They had won it six times between 1976 and 2010. A photo rested nearby of Alvin at age five, dressed in a fur-collared coat and sitting by a flat pan over an open fire on a stone arch.

  Alvin, true to his way, had given the place a homey touch. He put red and white carnations on the picnic tables and potted pansies on the windowsills near the restaurant booths.

  As we sat in one of the booths with our pecan pies Alvin came over to talk, to tell us about a video featuring him and David, when a boy came up and asked, “Do you just put hot syrup on the snow?” Alvin put an arm around his shoulder, bent down and said, “You heat it up to two hundred and twenty-four degrees . . .”

  MAPLE WEEKEND at Bascom’s was a different kind of affair, though it was just as entertaining in its own way. The parking lot was empty when we arrived after leaving the Clark’s, empty except for the big luxury tour bus sitting prominently in the lot, waiting for the special guests. Bascom’s didn’t open their doors on Maple Weekend but instead hosted customers who had been invited by Arnold Coombs. This year’s group included someone who distributed syrup in the Southwest under a private label in Texas, a syrup broker from California, and a broker who sold syrup in Asia and Europe. The East Coast buyer for United Natural Foods had come, someone from Stonewall Kitchen in Maine, the owner of a group of grocery markets in New York City, and a syrup broker who worked out of Amsterdam.

  We went to the store, hoping to find them, thinking we might hear Bruce’s talk, but no one was there. We went to the Cooler, where Greg Minard was tending to someone who bought syrup, but he didn’t know where Bruce and the group were. “It’s slow here,” Greg said, echoing Dave’s comments of a few days ago. “You never could have done this with one person last year.”

  Because the New Building was a part of any tour, we went there and passed by the loaded pallets and thousands of boxes. There was Gold Coast, Coombs Family Farms, and a row of 200-pound tote bags about to go to Boar’s Head.

  We went to the door of the bottling room and looked through the window in the door. Everyone inside was wearing hairnets, including Bruce and Arnold Coombs. I hesitated going in because I felt like I didn’t want to interrupt and because of a look I saw on Arnold’s face. He seemed concerned. I wondered maybe if Bruce had been going on too long. We turned and left.

  I was curious to know whether I was correct about the concern I saw, so I called Arnold on Monday. He had just come from a meeting where they had discussed Maple Weekend. Arnold said that Bruce had been preoccupied that day. He had been on the phone with David Marvin right up to when he was supposed to begin talking. “Bruce batted a thousand before,” Arnold said, meaning in previous weekends. “He batted seven-fifty this time.”

  Arnold said that Bruce and Marvin had been talking about price but also about how to prevent a panic in the event of a shortage. I said that Bruce had been saying that the price of syrup would stay the same as last year or maybe be lower.

  “That’s Bruce’s method,” Arnold said. “He has to keep a game face on. In 2008 they said the price wouldn’t go up, but it did. The farmers will take a nickel more if someone is offering it, and generally they seem to be holding on to their supply. But as of now, nobody knows. Some producers in the north made it through last week and the high temperatures in northern Maine and Quebec. In Franklin County they didn’t. The trees budded out up there.

  “You talk to producers and they say, ‘half a crop.’ You ask, ‘Is it half of a normal crop, or half of last year’s crop, which was a once-in-seventy-years crop?’ We’ll have a better handle on this when the Open House comes along.” The annual Bascom Open House, he meant, held at the end of April. A big party for sugarmakers.

  “As for last weekend and being in the new building,” Arnold said, “it was impressive. Sometimes you have to show them how viable it is to put another jug on the shelf.”

  DURING MAPLE WEEKEND last year I had headed down to Massachusetts on Saturday and worked my way north, continuing on Sunday. We stopped first at the North Hadley Sugar Shack, where people were waiting in line for seats in the pancake restaurant while others gathered around the evaporator, went out to look at the buckets hanging in the woods, or rode on the horse-drawn wagon. We stopped in Deerfield at the Williams Maple Farm, where the business in pancakes was also brisk—and the boiling too: they hung 3000 buckets throughout the town and on trees at Deerfield Academy. We stopped at the Davenport Maple Fa
rm in Shelburne, where there also was a restaurant full of customers and an evaporator running downstairs, and we talked to Russell Davenport, a sugarmaker in his eighties and a friend of Ken Bascom’s; he said he had nominated Ken to be a member of the Hall of Fame. In Vermont the snow was deeper, and we stopped at the Sprague Sugarhouse in Jacksonville, a handcrafted post-and-beam structure, and watched a cool dude, wearing shades, feeding the firebox with four-foot wood, and where we bought some of Mrs. Sprague’s maple cream. And we drove to Brattleboro, to the Robb Family Farm on Ames Hill Road, across from their dairy, where they didn’t use an R.O. because they didn’t believe in using them, where they had just finished a good week at the evaporator, boiling all day on Thursday and making seventeen gallons.

  On Sunday I stopped first at Alvin Clark’s, and he told me they served 300 people the day before, probably because it was so cold. David was boiling water, and Alvin laughed at that idea. I talked to two people who had traveled from Cambridge, a researcher who grew up nearby in Keene and one of his students, a Chinese doctoral candidate, and the researcher said he brought the student there because this was the only thing you can buy in this country that isn’t made in China, to which she smiled and said, “Thank you”—though his ideals were shaken when he learned that the Clarks use an R.O. I headed north and stopped at Hillside Maple in Cornish, where their production was drawn on the boards on the wall—12.5 gallons one day, 14 another. In Plainfield I stopped at the Taylor Brothers Sugarhouse, which had 5000 taps on tubing a few miles away and trucked their sap home. I finished at the Mount Cube Sugarhouse, owned by Peter Thomson, son of the former New Hampshire governor Meldrim Thomson, where they served rolled crepes that you dipped in hot maple syrup—maybe the best treat I saw on my tour. Thomson’s sugarbush was steep and stood just below the Appalachian Trail. He said his father, who had sold his house on Long Island to get away from the crowds, had bought this farm on the agreement that the people who owned it would teach them how to sugar. “I’ve been sugaring for fifty-eight years,” Thomson said. I felt like I covered a lot of ground that weekend while knowing I had visited less than one percent of the sugarhouses hosting visitors.