Читать книгу Maple Sugaring - David K. Leff - Страница 9

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The Joys of Drudgery

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“IT’S A MADNESS,” Rob Lamothe says of sugaring. “It possesses you.” Laughing heartily and dressed in trademark red suspenders and baseball-style cap, he radiates woodsy, avuncular warmth. Now one of the largest producers in Connecticut with about fifty-six hundred taps, he started in the 1970s making less syrup than I once did. An experimental toolmaker by trade who worked on rocket guidance systems for Hamilton Standard, he’s not only a Pied Piper of maple hobbyists leading curious dabblers to tap backyard trees; he’s a kind of Johnny Appleseed of small-scale commercial sugaring in northwestern Connecticut and beyond, responsible for the creation or expansion of many operations by selling, installing, and repairing equipment, giving freely of his knowledge, and, most important, infecting customers with boundless enthusiasm for sugaring and life.

Sugaring involves lots of hard work, sometimes downright drudgery. In an age where strenuous physical labor is increasingly avoided, making syrup is paradoxically growing in popularity, perhaps because technology makes it easier than it was years ago. Though its intensity is ameliorated somewhat by the season’s brevity, even the ebullient Lamothe gets worn down in January with dawn-to-dusk days of tapping, tubing repairs, and various system upgrades. Once sap begins flowing, his season becomes crazily busy. It’s not only from long hours collecting sap and boiling, but due to forty-five hundred visitors coming through the gambrel-roofed sugarhouse sided with yellow clapboards that he and his family built. Despite exhaustingly long hours, Rob entertains people of all ages and stripes as if they were guests, whether individuals, families, or tour groups. The sudden advent of warmer weather and budding trees late in March or early April is a huge letdown, leading to four weeks of tedious cleanup, equipment repairs, and readying the sugarhouse for next season.

However described, maple people feel tied to something larger than themselves, fueling an enthusiasm transcending the normal aversion to backbreaking toil and making the labor its own reward. Exhausting as the work can be, many sugarmakers find it a refreshing refuge from the typical routines of life. Perhaps this is because, like artists, sugarmakers typically have a day job, at least until they hit it big. Sugaring is a passion, a respite from life as usual, a means of self-expression that makes an increasingly abstract world comprehensible. I’ve heard sugarmakers rhapsodize about connecting to nature, being in touch with earth’s cycles, bonding with their great-grandfathers, finding God, or communing with the past. The exact expression of the sentiment doesn’t matter. Sugaring seems to evoke a kind of spirituality entwined with and manifest through physical work. Producers may measure the success of a season in gallons of syrup, but it’s the process, not the product, that sustains them.

A deeply religious man, Lamothe attends church in Collinsville, just a short walk from my home. When I had a question or problem during my sugaring days, he’d often make a house call after Mass, when his connection to the creator was elevated. On one of those Sunday mornings Lamothe described tapping in the woods on a bitter cold day with a fierce northwest wind. Powdery snow was blowing off the branches as they bent and creaked. Hearing a limb snap, he turned to see penumbral light radiating from behind a tree where it danced and glistened with prismatic colors in the rising sun. All the season’s busy effort seemed collapsed in that instant of serenity and peace. Years later, the moment remains vivid, and emotion catches in his throat as he tries to explain. “I know that God had made that moment. It’s etched in my heart forever.”

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REVERENCE FOR sugar making often takes a secular twist. From nostalgic perceptions of Native Americans, Currier and Ives prints, notions of laconic Yankees spinning yarns in billows of steam, to today’s syrup containers shaped like log cabins, sugaring emanates a romantic mystique. Regardless of today’s interconnected realities, the literature and lore of sugaring have shaped the image of an individualistic, off-the-grid, self-sufficient activity where a deep relationship with the land is paramount. “It is that happiest of combinations, a commercial affair which is also an annual rite, even an act of love,” wrote Dartmouth College English professor Noel Perrin in his elegiac 1972 book, Amateur Sugar Maker.

The ever-ebullient Rob Lamothe

Perrin, who died in 2004 at age seventy-seven, grew up in and around New York City but in 1963 bought a farm in Thetford Center, Vermont. It served as home and writing muse. Here he built an eighty-eight-square-foot sugarhouse near a dirt road roughly a hundred feet from the Pompanoosuc River “in conscious admiration of Henry David Thoreau.” Like his mentor, he vividly records the process of construction and meticulously accounts for costs down to the penny.

Perrin bought a two-by-six Grimm evaporator and made as much as fifty-seven gallons of syrup from 104 taps, some of which he sold to the Globe Corner Bookstore on Boston’s Freedom Trail, where his books were also available. Perhaps no one has rendered sugaring in such straightforward yet poetic terms. We share in his worry that a dirt floor may thaw during a boil, causing his evaporator to tilt and burn, and his pleasure in using a hydrometer, an instrument of science that “makes sense to the eye.” He relates some sugaring history, rails against weather that produces a “deceitful” season, and delights in chickadees, snow fleas, and other natural phenomena. He describes his rural neighbors with affection and humor, from the town selectman and builder who helped install his evaporator to the man from Corinth who collected sap with two horses and a sled.

Capturing in few words the essence of his world for the sophisticated, urbane readers of the New Yorker, where part of the book first appeared, Perrin notes that “gravity and wood are the chief natural resources of a Vermont farm.” Reinforcing long-held attitudes among the public and many small-time sugarmakers, he writes: “When you’re producing a sacred article, you don’t have to maximize your cash return.”

A couple generations before Perrin’s experiment as a gentleman farmer, Scott and Helen Nearing tapped America’s back-to-the-land homesteading vein, stepping out of the mainstream and into a somewhat ascetic life built around sugaring as a self-reliant means to earn a living. Scott was an economist and passionate exponent of country life, labor, peace, and leftist causes. His beliefs cost him a college professorship. Helen was a musician. Both of them strong and preternaturally energetic, they “thumbed their noses at city life” in the heart of the Great Depression and bought a rundown farm “on a side hill of a valley directly facing Stratton Mountain” near Jamaica, Vermont. They did so out of deeply held philosophical yearnings to simplify life, control their livelihood, make contact with nature, and find time for “study, teaching, writing, music and travel.” They grew much of their own food and constructed several stone buildings during two decades on the land. Sugaring, as well as lecturing and writing, were their source of cash. They found that even “novices in maple production can turn their energy and ingenuity into a craft that offers scope for imagination and new ideas, and pays sufficient financial returns to provide a simple, but adequate living.”

By their example and writings, the Nearings became icons of back-to-the-land homesteading and were influential in the 1960s agrarian commune movement. Published in 1950, The Maple Sugar Book: Together with Remarks on Pioneering as a Way of Living in the Twentieth Century probably contains the most comprehensive history of sugaring available, along with instructional advice on making syrup and sugar, a guide to marketing, and recipes. “A life as well as a living” was their passionate call to self-sufficiency and contact with nature. “Anyone who has ever sugared remembers the poesy of it, to the end of his days,” the Nearings wrote lyrically. “When the time of year comes round with sap rising and snow melting, there is an insistent urge to take one’s part in the process—to tap the trees, to gather the sap, to boil out the sweet syrup of the maple.” In such words I find a secular echo of Rob Lamothe’s revelation.

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WHILE THE NEARINGS might be an extreme example, their back-to-the-land gospel resonates with many sugarmakers who hunger for some measure of financial independence entwined with an almost spiritual contact with nature and creation of something tangible and pure. A few years ago I visited Erica Andrews, then at Hurricane Farm in Scotland, Connecticut, a hardscrabble slice of southern New England she cultivated with her husband, Chris. She was dressed in a sweatshirt, work pants, and ski hat beneath which there was a big smile and thick blond braids. Her kids darted around like wood sprites as we talked. Fiercely individualistic, she wanted to live as independently as possible. The farm was named for a hurricane lamp, something the wildest storm can’t extinguish.

Growing up in suburbia and earning a British literature degree with a minor in theater and photography, Erica never expected to be a farmer. Her agricultural odyssey started when she and Chris were dating and he decided he wanted a couple of chickens. Soon they had more chickens, a garden, and were raising turkeys. She was waitressing in a martini lounge at the Mohegan Sun casino, and he was teaching school when their daughter was born in January 2004. At that point, they decided to supplement their income by freezing and canning vegetables, which also enabled Erica to be a stay-at-home mom. In spring, she sugared over an open fire with a couple of chafing dishes resting on concrete blocks, making two gallons the first year and three the second. She started baking breads for sale. Hungry for knowledge, she attended livestock auctions and began buying and selling animals, sold food at farmers’ markets, and made contacts in the agricultural community.

They had been looking for a house for the better part of two years when they bought Hurricane Farm in 2008, a bargain fixer-upper on just a few acres. She termed the place a natural farm, not organic, but said that they lived an organic lifestyle, meaning close to the land. Though her life has now moved on, farming routines worked well for the family at the time. It allowed her long hours with the children, who saw the fruits of hard work and knew where their food came from, she told me when we sat on a picnic table near her sugarhouse while her then six-year-old played in melting snow, occasionally tasting syrup.

A distinctive structure, the sugarhouse featured a cupola-topped gable roof supported by cedar posts and open on all but one side where it was attached to another farm building. Between posts, firewood was stacked, creating temporary walls. “We’re outside people,” she said, “and though sleet and rain make it tough sometimes, we want to enjoy outside weather.” The small, single-pan, foot-and-a-half-by-three-foot evaporator, purchased on credit around the time they bought the house, yielded twelve gallons of syrup in 2009, its first year. They tapped seventy-five trees on their own and neighboring land using tubing fed into five-gallon pails resting on the ground. In addition to syrup and fruits and vegetables, the farm produced eggs, beef, pork, turkeys, sheep, ducks, and rabbits for pets. They ran a meat-based Community Supported Agriculture program and were vendors at the Coventry Farmers’ Market a few towns away, the state’s largest.

Rough around the edges and with evidence of many projects in progress, Hurricane Farm was a throwback by a couple of generations to when rural Connecticut was full of small places that grew a variety of crops sustaining families. “Being as self-sufficient as possible is the heart of my ambition,” Erica said with religious conviction as she opened the firebox and tossed in a few chunks of wood. “It’s what makes me thrive.” I never asked if she’d ever heard of the Nearings, but articulate and energetic, she is among their direct spiritual descendants. The way of the future, she postulated, is for people to do more for themselves on their own land, or buy directly from small local farmers. Sugaring teaches patience and the need to slow down and be aware of the world around you, that things come in their moment. “I feel like I’m dancing with nature,” she said with a wide smile.

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FOR BRUCE GILLILAN of Fletcher, Vermont, sugaring is not only a connection to the land, but a legacy that has long infused family life with meaning, an unbroken chain stretching back generations. Bruce sugars in a country of tiny towns and modest houses set in rolling green hills patched with forest and fields north and just a bit east of Burlington. It’s prime sugaring country where hay is also regularly cut and a few horses or cattle are pastured. J. R. Sloan’s Green Mountain Mainlines, the nation’s largest sugaring operation, using sap from about 130,000 taps, according to Bruce, is headquartered in town, and the roadside welcome sign greeting travelers depicts an old-time sugarhouse.

The first time I pulled into his driveway at the very beginning of April a few years ago, temperatures were climbing toward eighty and the season was ending early, though the high peaks of the Green Mountains not too far distant were still capped with snow. A square-jawed, plainspoken man with penetrating brown eyes, Bruce is a vice president with Leader Evaporator in Swanton, Vermont, a short ride from the Canadian border. You might think that after forty years at the country’s largest maple equipment manufacturer, selling and installing evaporators and troubleshooting sugarhouse problems, he’d have a largely analytical approach to the business. But maple remains deeply personal.

Bruce’s grandfather started sugaring in the early 1900s; his father continued the operation, and Bruce grew up in it. Now his son Bradley, the eldest of four, sugars with him and also works for Leader. Knowing the time and effort that go into the frenetic season, the “guys in the shop think I’m crazy,” he laughed, shaking his head. “But I can’t put a value on the days I spent working beside my dad and the time it gives me with my son.” Bruce and his dad would collect sap together. When partway through, his father would fire the evaporator, and Bruce would finish gathering. When Bradley turned ten, the three of them collected together, and Bruce thought his dad would head to the sugarhouse to light the arch when about halfway done. Instead, he sent Bruce to the sugarhouse so he could keep collecting with his grandson. Bruce chokes up as memories flood back. “I didn’t get it until later,” he said. It’s no surprise the operation is called Gillilan Family Maple.

With Bruce at the controls, I rode the draw bar of a blue tractor as we headed through a meadow, crossed a brook, and entered the woods on a rutted path. “It’s a bit muddy back there,” he warned as we approached a board-and-batten pump house beneath evergreens. “We usually sugar until the tenth or even the fifteenth of the month, but with this weather we’re just about done.” Crisscrossed with blue and black tubing, the maple orchard is punctuated with pine and hemlock and a smattering of oak. Normally he puts out about eight hundred taps, but this year he only had time to set two-thirds of that amount. “The property has potential for twelve hundred, maybe thirteen hundred,” he said with a wave of his hand.

Back in 2010, the sugarhouse was fairly deep in the woods, built of rough vertical boards darkened with age. He told me about an experimental RO—a reverse-osmosis machine—that Bradley built, as we looked over the two-and-a-half-by-ten-foot evaporator sitting on a concrete pad. Bradley is good at tinkering, he said wistfully, something he got from his grandfather. The family’s first sugarhouse was built nearby in 1906 but had to be moved downhill a few hundred yards because a downdraft on a stiff south wind would blow flames out of the firebox door. He and Bradley were thinking about a new one close to the road where they could attract visitors and make it easier for families to stop by.

The woods were filled with ghosts and memories. Bruce pointed to tapped trees that were too small when he began working here with his dad, and lines that were strung by Brad. He showed me where he and his son were thinning out the softwoods, but not too quickly, lest the maples get sun-scald from a sudden increase in light. His dad died in these woods, marking a home site for Bradley. He was crushed by a falling tree. Bruce’s eyes dampened as he showed me the spot.

Returning from the woods, we entered the canning room attached to a gambrel-roofed garage his father had built in 1985 and also used as a workshop. With its knotty-pine walls and gleaming stainless-steel counter, it seemed like a cross between a cozy cabin and a chemistry lab. The walls were filled with blue, red, and yellow ribbons and plaques the family had earned for its syrup. There’s an award to Bruce’s dad from the Franklin County Maplerama for lifetime service. Brad was on the committee that made the decision, and got to present his grandfather’s award. “Dad built the garage,” Bruce said smiling, “and added the canning room later.” They used to can in the garage at the house but had to thoroughly clean after each use because “Mom’s car had to go back in.”

When my wife Mary and I paid Bruce a visit after sugaring season in 2014, he had a bigger tractor, and the roadside sugarhouse had become a reality. He and Bradley had built it into what was once the garage portion of the building where they’d done canning. When we arrived, Bruce was in the process of lining the interior with white-coated metal to provide washable walls. The wood-fired evaporator that Bradley had designed gleamed. Just that morning, Bruce had been testing a new filter press with clear plastic plates that was lighter and less expensive than metal models. It also enabled an operator to observe the syrup as it was processed. Bruce was sure it would catch on among producers.

While we were at the sugarhouse, a few of Bruce’s grandchildren stopped by with his wife and daughter-in-law. Among them were Bradley’s young sons, Xavier and Gavin, both of whom now drill holes, tap in spouts, and hang buckets on their own trees. Regardless of process innovations or the weather, Bruce Gillilan felt good about the future of sugaring.

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THE FIRST THING you notice when stepping into Lyle Merrifield’s sugarhouse in Gorham, Maine, is his collection of antique maple artifacts. Displayed are all manner of spiles and buckets—wooden and metal—syrup jugs, sugar molds, and other tools of the trade, along with quaint images of sugaring. But unlike the objects he so carefully exhibits, the gable-roofed, vertically sided sugarhouse with an ell for a salesroom is fairly new, bright and airy with lots of windows, including a transom over the double doors. A carpenter by trade, Lyle built the place himself, mostly using timber cut and milled on his property.

Golden retriever by his side, the big, gentle man in his thirties, president of the Maine Maple Producers Association, smiled broadly as he joyfully took me through the spacious building immediately behind his home. Enthusiasm rose off him like steam from a raging evaporator. Not from a sugaring family, he had his first taste in kindergarten on a class outing to tap a tree. He remembers it clearly, the bus driver wielding a carpenter’s brace and drilling the hole. A few years later he made some syrup with the Scouts, but not until his early twenties did he really get started.

Lyle lives on the twenty-five acres where he grew up in a now suburbanizing area. It’s a self-described “gentleman’s farm” where he bales hay and raises beef for hamburger, but his passion is maple, even though most of his six to eight hundred taps using vacuum tubing are on neighboring property. He sees advantages to sugaring in thickly settled areas, and tours are a mainstay of his business, with frequent visits by school groups.

Cheerfully entrepreneurial, he gets over four thousand visitors on Maine Maple Sunday weekend and sells, in those two days, over five hundred gallons of syrup, some of which he buys in bulk from other state sugarmakers. Two dozen friends and family members man the farm and serve thousands of maple soft-serve ice cream cups. They go through a hundred pounds of pancake mix, and people wait in line for up to an hour. He sells maple-coated nuts, tubs of maple cream and maple butter, and can’t keep up with the demand for candy. His maple cotton candy is popular, and he graciously gave me a container of the woolly stuff for each for my children.

Like other sugarmakers, Lyle thrives on hard work, being outdoors, contact with friends and family, and experiencing seasonal change. You wouldn’t think of him as a historian, at least not in the tweedy professorial way, but there’s something that fascinates him about maple’s uniquely tangible heritage, which is manifested in the artifacts he keeps on walls and shelves. He might not have generations of sugarmakers in his family like Bruce and Bradley Gillilan, but he feels deeply connected to the larger collective kin of sugarmakers.

Perhaps it comes from his time spent handling carpentry tools, but he’s fascinated by the progress of technology that speaks to past lives—even something as simple as the transition from homemade wooden taps fashioned from hollowed sumac twigs to metal ones of iron, steel, aluminum, and stainless, and then plastic taps in various colors and formulations for use with tubing. Such objects “have a lot to teach about how and why people did things and the way in which they lived,” he told me with reverence in his voice. Not content with mere static displays, he sometimes sets up iron kettles on wooden tripods to demonstrate colonial boiling. He envisions himself on history’s continuum, seeing in his syrup not only the weight and density of sugar, but of time. He’s never alone, even when he’s by himself, he assured me.

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LIKE LYLE, Mike Girard has a large collection of sugaring artifacts that he displays at meetings and in his sugarhouse, home, and business office. He feels a similar connection to a collective sugaring heritage that goes beyond a general sense of history. His part in the continuum of maple culture is deeply personal because he has attached himself to a piece of sloping sugarbush that’s been tapped for over a century and a quarter, by him since 1976. The land is his touchstone. More than ownership, his relation to the land is one of belonging.

Though discouraged by his grandfather who sugared in Quebec, Mike began his maple ventures in 1960 at age eleven after observing some roadside buckets on a trip with his dad. Soon he was tapping on the family dairy farm in Simsbury, Connecticut, using an evaporator his father bought. Eventually the operation grew to six hundred taps. He is an athletic and articulate man with neatly trimmed dark hair who runs a construction company displaying a bulldozer on its logo. You wouldn’t immediately peg him as someone deeply in love with trees and a plot of land for its natural, sustainable values, but sugaring has made it so.

Mike recalls making maple candy instead of doing homework, selling it at recess during fourth and fifth grades, much to the chagrin of his Catholic school nuns. Eventually he built a sugarhouse on the farm, but wanted more than roadside trees. After diligent searching, he bought land and a sugarhouse just about a mile south of Vermont on Number Nine Road in Heath, Massachusetts, a town of about four hundred souls. Although it’s eighty-five miles from his Simsbury home, a trip that gets longer as he gets older, he fell in love with the property and its history of maple production.

The operation was begun by George Brown in 1887, and Mike speaks about it as one might an inheritance. He considers himself a steward, another in a line of several sugarmakers who have tried their luck here with nature and a bit of tinkering talent. Though it has been more than a century since Brown’s horses collected sap, and throughout the years Mike has installed over three and a half miles of vacuum tubing through the woods, he feels a bond with this land and its past that almost makes the differences in technology illusory. The sugarhouse has been rebuilt a couple of times and expanded, but the structure would probably be familiar to Brown despite an oil-fired evaporator and installation of battens over gaps between the old boards so wide “you could throw your hat through.” For decades the woods have been carefully managed for maples, and though storms have wrought sudden and sometimes violent modifications, the place has a purposeful, time-defiant personality formed by years of sugaring. “I suppose there will always need to be changes to keep maple viable,” Mike observed, “but it’s the memories that keep sugaring and the place alive.”

Some memories are bittersweet, such as the closure a couple of years ago of Peters General Store about three hundred yards down the road. For almost a century, they had sold syrup from Mike’s sugarhouse. Other memories bring a smile, such as the two dozen times he won first prize at the Heath Fair, and the other ribbons he’s garnered.

Mike took me through the cupola-topped board-and-batten sugarhouse with its adjacent two-bay woodshed. It holds thirty-three cords no longer needed since the purchase in 2000 of an oil-fired three-and-a-half-by-twelve-foot Darveau “Mystique” evaporator with digital auto draw-off, preheater, and air injection. He describes the machine as looking like “a locomotive that runs nowhere.” The sugaring operation is like a living thing to Mike, and as we stand in the sugarhouse he recalls his predecessors, the evaporators they used, the number of taps they had, and the price they were paid for a gallon of syrup. He knows when the roof was rebuilt and the sugarhouse moved eight feet back from the road. These stories are his patrimony, his sustenance.

Mike remembers every ice storm, tornado, and gypsy moth outbreak that damaged his trees. He knows when each part of the sugar-bush was thinned, and has planted plots of experimental “supersweet” trees from Cornell and the University of Vermont. He started with one thousand taps and went to thirty-five hundred by using trees all over town in partnership with the grandson of Francis Galipo, the man who succeeded Brown in 1929. He worked with the young man from the time the kid was twelve until his untimely death in a snowmobile accident at thirty-two.

Now down to about eight hundred taps, Mike’s son Mikey, who has assisted him for over thirty years, does most of the boiling and sugar-bush work, with Mike as his assistant. Mikey is strong and rangy, sharing his father’s delight in a sugarmaker’s life. He says sugaring frees one’s mind to “think about life and where you’re going.”

Mike Girard may have handed much of the operation over to his son, but he remains embedded in this landscape as much as his predecessors. His presence will be felt as long as there are maple trees here and people to care for them.

Orange Maple Glazed Chicken

Yield: 20 Chicken Wings

INGREDIENTS

1½ cups buttermilk

⅓ cup maple syrup

2 oranges, seeded, peeled, and sectioned

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

20 chicken wings

DIRECTIONS

1. Mix all ingredients except chicken wings in a blender to make a coarse puree.

2. Put wings and puree in a gallon-size plastic bag and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, turning occasionally.

3. Grill wings, periodically basting with the marinade, until they are cooked through, being careful to avoid scorching.

Recipe by Karen Broderick

Maple Parsnips

Yield: variable

INGREDIENTS

Parsnips

Maple syrup

DIRECTIONS

1. Scrub the parsnips until clean.

2. Cut parsnips into pieces. (Homegrown parsnips need not be cored, but store-bought ones tend to have a woody center that may need to be removed.)

3. Steam cubed parsnips until tender, about 10 minutes.

4. Mash and add maple syrup to taste.

This recipe tastes best when you use dark maple syrup! Its more assertive flavor perfectly balances the flavor of the parsnips.

Recipe by Pat Dubos