The Sugar Season

by Douglas Whynott

  In 2012 I decided to stay close to home and went to the Clark sugarhouse on both days of Maple Weekend. Last year you had to go inside the sugarhouse to get warm. This year the forsythias were blooming and the daffodils were up. This Sunday was like a day in late April.

  People did come, though, and they did enjoy themselves. Alvin was wearing his funny buffalo hat again, and fresh pans of snow were on the table. I heard someone ask Alvin where he found the snow.

  “A gift from above,” he said.

  A group arrived, a family with some guests visiting from Japan, and the kids were all over that sugar on snow.

  We watched from a picnic table, and at one point Alvin came to talk to us. He had a pan of sugar on snow in his hands. Kathy picked up a piece and said she liked eating the snow as much as the sugar. “It’s clean snow, no animals have walked on it or anything,” Alvin said, with a big laugh.

  The sugarhouse had emptied out by midafternoon when a contingent of Bascoms walked in. Among them was Harvey Bascom, who was Glenn Bascom’s son. He came with his wife, two daughters, and a son-in-law. Harvey had a birthday last week, turning ninety. They held a party for him at the church in Alstead, and a lot of people came out, Harvey told us when he sat at the picnic table with us. Alvin was extra-attentive to Harvey, making sure he had enough sugar on snow and a sample of syrup and enough coffee.

  I said something to Harvey about how youthful he looked. He seemed a picture of health and happiness, clear eyed, with white hair and smooth skin.

  “Not a wrinkle on his face,” said his daughter Marcia. Harvey gave a little smile and twirled a piece of sugar on snow on a toothpick before popping it into his mouth. I had to wonder—could sugar on snow be the secret of long life? Or maybe it was the approach one took to eating it.

  My first meeting with Harvey Bascom had been clumsy on my part. I had read a book written by Eric Bascom, the minister and Ken Bascom’s brother, titled, Up Where the Old House Burned Down. When I met Harvey I suddenly recognized who he was and blurted out, “You’re that boy! The one who went to live with a relative after your mother died, before the fire.”

  Harvey looked taken aback. “Well, I guess so,” he said. With quickening embarrassment I remembered that he was a real person. Fortunately he forgot my error and now sat happily at the picnic table with some sugar on snow and hot coffee, enjoying his hour in a sugarhouse.

  Harvey had owned the dairy farm that Bruce now leased out. His daughters lived in houses nearby. One of Bruce’s sisters told me that Harvey’s household was always a happy place where there was always a lot of food and a place people liked to visit. Harvey later told me that even a skunk used to visit for food, entering through the cat door, making his way to the kitchen, eating from the cat dish, and then making his way out again without much bother.

  Glenn Bascom was sixteen years old when he came home from Kimball Union Academy for Christmas break. He had been attending that school to become a minister. Though Glenn didn’t know it, he was carrying the measles and soon infected his entire family. The results were disastrous. His mother first died, then his father, then a sister. Glenn was the oldest, Eric the second oldest, and both were minors, so the ownership of the farm was put into question and an uncle appointed as guardian. He wanted to sell the farm and divide the proceeds among the remaining children, but Glenn and Eric wanted to keep and manage it. There was some contention, and another guardian was appointed, Alvin Clark’s grandfather, Edwin Clark. He helped the boys run the farm and also get a mortgage.

  Glenn didn’t become a minister, though his brother Eric did. Glenn married and had five children. Harvey was born in 1922. When he was three years old his mother died of pneumonia. As winter approached, Glenn placed his children with relatives and friends. Harvey stayed with the Clarks for a while and then moved to Keene and lived with an aunt. Because of this, there were, fortunately, no children in the farmhouse that cold February night when it caught fire. Glenn started throwing things out the window. Neighbors came running. They let the animals out of the barn and threw the oats, their feed, into the snow.

  For two weeks Glenn Bascom lived with the Clarks. Then he moved into an uninhabited farmhouse nearby, the house where Harvey now lived.

  His brother Eric bought the farm up above on the hill not long after. Glenn became a potato farmer and made some syrup in the spring. As he grew older he worked for Ken Bascom, tapping trees and gathering sap. Sometimes he shared in the boiling—he did most of the boiling that year in 1958 when Ken Bascom was in the hospital with a fractured skull. Glenn was one of those old-timers who Bruce and his schoolmates tried to impress by gathering sap furiously after school. Glenn was a quiet man, very religious, a pacifist. He lived to be ninety-nine years old.

  While we sat at the picnic table and sipped coffee and sampled some syrup, I talked to Harvey’s daughter, Marcia Oster. She worked as a church organist. Marcia and her husband lived in a house they built on the site where the farm burned down. I said something about the sugar parties that were held at Bascom’s and that this one at the Clark’s today must have been something like those then. I asked if she remembered those parties and the sugar on snow.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I used to work there, serving. It was so busy, lots of people there. The doughboys.” She smiled.

  “I wish it was still like that.”

  ON THE MONDAY AFTER Maple Weekend David Marvin came out with a price of $2.80 for Double-A light syrup.

  “My concern was that the crop was up last year,” David said. “I couldn’t see why in a short crop we should stay the same or go down. Bruce will match that, as will others.” He was right.

  “It took a little nervous energy. It’s a big decision. Don’t think I take it lightly. If the others don’t come up, the syrup will come to me.” He laughed at that.

  After this announcement Bruce said, “I was at two-seventy, two-seventy-five. He came out with a higher price and I had to raise mine to keep my suppliers. He forced the price up, and I had to capitulate.

  “He’s smart,” Bruce said. “He bumped up the top grade, Double A. But Double A won’t be one percent of what I buy. Dark Amber is at two-seventy.”

  Which meant that for Bruce, the price was not going up from last year. Not on the American side.

  “There’s been a hard freeze up north,” he said. “They could make a lot of syrup yet. Robert Poirier says they will have two and a half pounds per tap in Maine, but they won’t say so. They never have a good year up there.”

  Finally Bruce said, “I’m not too panicked. The more I can get out of Maine, the less panicked I’ll be.”

  He was ready for it to arrive. “I’ve cleaned out a hole in my basement. I’ve got the biggest hole in a warehouse in the United States. Maine could produce a lot of syrup,” he repeated.

  Then he said, “I sound like an optimist.”

  20

  MOST OF MAINE IS DOWNSTAIRS

  BRUCE SAID OTHER PEOPLE were panicking too early, but in April he was buying all the syrup he could find—or, rather, all the US syrup he could find. He told Robert to go into Maine and buy everything he could. Robert was at the gates at St. Aurelie every morning by 6:00 and left each night just before the gates closed, taking out two trailer loads a day. He was sending a trailer load to Acworth every day, his driver making the seven-hour trip in the early morning, unloading, and making the return trip that same day, sleeping in his truck along the way.

  His refrain during these weeks was, “By June there will be no bulk syrup anywhere,” with the variations being July, October, or three weeks.

  Bruce spent between $3 and 4 million over a two-week period in April, making deposits to his agents in New York and Ohio—sending checks for $250,000 to one, $150,000 to another, $80,000 here, another $250,000 there.

  I met one of these agents at the end of April, at the Vermont Maple Festival in Swanton, when I spent a day traveling around with Bruce. Being with Bruce Bascom at the maple festivals was by far t
he best way to take in those events. He schmoozed, chatted, cajoled like he did at the store, and he plainly enjoyed just taking in the sights, such as watching and talking about a line of evaporators, different models all steaming at once outdoors, each with an attendant, as we did that day at the CDL plant. After a while I left him and went inside for coffee, and I was standing in the store when I saw on the far side of the room an Amishman pacing in an aisle with a cell phone to his ear. An Amishman with a cell phone, and I thought, hmm. I recognized him as Erwin Gingerich, from Middletown, Ohio. I had seen Erwin’s barrels in the coolers at Bascom’s. His barrels kind of called attention to themselves—they were the oddest and most mismatched collection, with beer kegs, metal cylinders used for soft drinks, plastic forty-gallon drums, battered steel drums, just about anything you could put bulk syrup in. I had also seen Erwin a few months ago at the maple conference in Verona, New York. Bruce invited me, telling me I had to see Verona, that it was a huge event, and it was—1000 attendees, by Bruce’s count. In a hotel lobby I stood by while Bruce and Gingerich talked. He was thirtyish, dressed in the standard Amish fashion—dark pants, blue shirt, black vest, a brim hat, wearing a beard—and his wife stood behind him, wearing a long skirt and a bonnet.

  And there he was, pacing, and I wondered if I could talk to him. The Amish producers interested me, as their way applied to making maple syrup, and there were often many of them at these events, especially at the Vermont Maple Festival. I had talked to another Amishman, Henry Brennaman, a few times and visited him in Salisbury, Pennsylvania, spending an afternoon at his kitchen table. Henry sent a lot of syrup to Bruce, buying much of it from his Amish neighbors. He didn’t have electricity at his home, or a car—he drove a team of horses, but his wife, Rhota, told me Henry was an erratic driver even of horses, that he got distracted too often. Best to get distracted behind the reins than behind the wheel, I thought. Henry said in general it was the way of the Amish not to accept technology, but there was always the question of how much, it seemed, and how to negotiate the edges. Henry ran his bottling machine with an air compressor that used diesel fuel, not electricity, and he kept a telephone in a box by his store; for this he had been reprimanded by his pastor, Bruce told me. Henry arranged for rides to events like the Vermont Maple Festival—transportation was a problem, always it seemed, unless by horse and wagon. They were separatists and didn’t believe in accepting money from the government: Henry was a foreman for one of the Amish construction crews with a couple hundred men that would build a barn in a day and put all the money they made into a fund for health care. I had watched a video, on my laptop of course, at Henry’s kitchen table, of Henry leading a construction crew and building a barn, of Henry sighting the uprights with a spirit level. Rhota watched too, she hadn’t seen it yet. The Amish could seem peculiar to an outsider, and I knew that I could seem peculiar to them—to them, I was one of “the English.” But despite the differences you had to contemplate their choices about technology, their role as citizens of the world—the carbon footprint of an Amish man, of an Amish family, was very small, like a squirrel track. There was something about their way of living, especially from the perspective of 2012, that seemed very right.

  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.

  EARLIER 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 Ha
mpshire, 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.”