The Sugar Season (13 page)

Peter and Deb took turns stoking the fire, keeping it as hot as they could. They said they had different methods of tending the fire, and Peter did seem to jab and stoke the wood more often with the stick they used than Deb did. But the procedure was the same, basically: feed wood to the fire from the pile nearby and keep it blazing.

While he worked Peter talked about the sugarhouse and its iterations. The room was rebuilt in 1947; there was a fire on the roof, and they used the sugarhouse for a few years before repairing it.

When Peter’s grandmother boiled there was no floor. “She would put down some boards,” Peter said. “Sometimes the brook would overflow, and a rivulet would come right through our sugarhouse.”

“Peter’s grandmother was a tiny woman,” Deb said. “Really tiny.”

“Yeah, but she climbed Mount Monadnock at eighty. She worked every day of her life,” Peter said.

Peter talked about how, when his grandmother made syrup, she determined when it was finished by taking a temperature reading—syrup boils at a higher temperature than water. “She would measure by degrees, pour it out into a tin, and put a drop of the syrup on top of the tin. That would be how she could tell the color of the syrup.”

It was so elemental, this—fire and water, wood and tree sap, steam and smoke. That had to be part of the appeal, this atavistic act of boiling over a wood fire for hours. Deb checked the syrup at the front of the pan now and then with a hydrometer, to measure density, and with a thermometer. Peter checked by lifting the syrup with a scoop and watching how it sheeted off the edges. He watched the bubbles to see how they held together—when they seemed to stick to one another the syrup was getting close.

As I watched I said something about the King Lot and the trees, what a fine few hours I had experienced there. A couple of weeks ago I went along with Peter and Deb while they tapped trees. We walked through a dark glade of hemlocks to what looked like a clearing but was actually a stand of maples—a sugar orchard Peter called it, the first time I had heard that term. The King Lot covered twelve acres and ran down toward the brook near the sugarhouse. The trees were like tall columns, eighty to ninety feet high, and they were 150 to 200 hundred years old, Peter thought. In recent years the trees hadn’t been used for sap production. Peter managed them for timber, which was why they were so tall and straight—”Long, straight stems with high crowns,” he said, “which is what you want for timber.” During the syrup shortage in 2008, when payment for sap went from 21 to 32 cents a gallon, Peter cleared the underbrush and strung tubing,
and so returned the trees to their use of 50 to 100 years ago. I kept looking up at them. “This is one of our favorites,” he said. “It’s nice to look up at the blue sky above them when the leaves are out.” Peter thought that people don’t look up at the crowns of the trees often enough when they are in the woods. They worked through the morning, and on the way back Peter pointed out a foundation for an arch that was used to make syrup in this sugar orchard before the time of evaporators and sugarhouses. He said he knew of at least a dozen other arches nearby. They valued the history in their woods. They hoped someone in their family would be interested in taking them over someday. Not just in owning them, but in continuing the tradition.

At the King Lot Peter said, “We hope that the grandkids come along with enough interest to take over when we’re too weak to come out here.”

“Petey seems to be very interested now,” Deb said. “He wants to come down here all the time, to the sugarhouse.”

Peter talked about how when he was a boy he thought he would be a dairy farmer, but it became clear by the time he was ten that dairying wasn’t the best choice. He decided in his teens to go into forestry. Now he was a forester for several towns around here, had a private clientele and this, the sugaring operations at the center of a sizeable managed forest, with its various orchards named according to the previous owners.

“After I finished college, when I was back here at home and spent a day in the woods, I would come home and talk to my dad and granddad about what I did that day, and they knew every tree I was talking about. After they died no one was interested in what I had done that day. They gave me validity.”

That would have worked both ways, I suppose, in that he would have given validity to them too. And validity seemed to be what he was passing on, or hoped to do. That could be a mutual gift.

Bruce was looking at a similar challenge, but with a very different set of conditions. His too was a forestry operation looking at another generation.

Bruce’s name came up that day as we talked about taste. The syrup that the two old friends produced was markedly different in character. Sometimes when Peter and Deb stoked the fire, smoke came into the air. Some people claimed that smoke was a component in the flavor of this type of syrup. When Bruce and Peter used to visit Peter’s sugarhouse, he teased him about the wood smoke getting into the syrup and said he should try to find a way to filter that out.

This was a part of the discussion about the difference in flavor between the modern method—filtered and flash cooked—and the traditional wood-fired approach, with its lengthy boil. Often the word used to describe this kind of syrup, cooked for a long time over a hot fire, was caramelization. Bruce himself claimed that the caramelization of sugars was the difference between the new and the old.

The description of taste and flavor in maple syrup could go much farther. Vanilla was the most common word used, after the maple flavor itself. Creamy and chocolate were other descriptors. Some aficionados claimed that terroir, the influence of geology and geography, played an important role—the granite soils of New Hampshire or the limestone and shale soils of Vermont. The Canadian agriculture department created a flavor wheel for identifying the flavors
of maple for the purpose of developing accomplished tasters who would wield all sorts of descriptive words, such as marshmallow, dark brown sugar, brown coffee bean, or even roasted dandelion root, coconut, mango, or baking apple. Or even hay, which I had yet to experience.

This syrup would be darker in color. Between this day and the time five days ago, when I checked tubing with Peter and he made the first fire of the season, there was some 50° weather. “Because of the two fifty-degree days we had this week, the syrup is going to be B grade,” Deb said.

That was okay with us. We liked B grade best of all. I had talked to one sugarmaker who sold to a diner in Boston, and the waitresses told him they got better tips when they served B grade. They thought it had more flavor.

“The sap and the syrup is always changing over the course of the season,” Deb said. “Sometimes it will get dark and then lighten again.”

When some of the syrup was ready—219° by the thermometer, sixty-seven percent sugar by the hydrometer, sheeting off the spoon the way Peter liked—they took off a gallon and a half. They boiled two hours to get that gallon and a half.

After opening the draw-off valve and pouring syrup into a stainless-steel bucket, Peter poured the syrup through two filter cloths, one a bit finer than the other, into a cream pan. We tasted some: exquisite.

Peter then poured a sample into a jar and placed it into a grading set, matching it to other samples. This syrup was not actually B grade but rather a notch lighter, an A dark. Third on the scale of color: A light, A medium, A dark, then B, and even a darker C grade, all according to light transmittance.

Deb poured the syrup into containers, plastic jugs, labeled them, and we left with a gallon. Its flavor—maple, vanilla, maybe a note of chocolate, and something else, some as-of-yet-unnamable quality.

A
WEEK LATER
in that 2010 season, when we visited again, on March 20, the first day of spring, their season was over.

“This is the earliest we’ve ever shut down,” Peter said. “The trees want to run. It just won’t freeze.”

“We’ve been making C grade all week,” Deb said.

When we arrived on this bright March day, Peter was on his tractor gathering water. He was going to use it to cool the evaporator and to clean it. Deb was in the sugarhouse, doing the last boil. They would make a few gallons at the sugarhouse, take what boiled down sap was left over, and finish it off at their house.

The 2010 season turned warm during the second week of March, right after Town Meeting Day. The temperatures started to rise into the forties and fifties by day and settle around the freezing point at night, or even a few degrees below at Bascom’s, but not enough to give the trees the charge they needed to run. During that week I had been at Bascom’s and gone to check tubing with Jeremy Bushway, a member of the tapping crew at the Cole’s Lot, one of the colder places among Bruce’s sugar lots. There we tromped along on snowshoes following the mainlines and looking for leaks, and we were on the way back toward the road when Jeremy said it was going to be a “quick season.” I didn’t know what he meant and wasn’t sure I believed him—there was so much snow on the ground—but I knew the run had slowed in the
last couple of days. Kevin told me the sap had run all through the night—good for gathering but not a good omen for the season. Jeremy said the forecast for the next five days called for temperatures above freezing at night. He told me that people on gravity were cleaning up their equipment. Jeremy would work one more day checking tubing and then be finished for the season.

They were saying that the sugarmakers farther north were doing better, that the temperatures were fluctuating between midtwenties and midforties, and they did keep going longer. But later that year, when Timothy Prescott, of the Proctor Maple Research Center, gave talks at maple meetings, he would say that 2010 “was a strange year, a short season with few freeze events. Between March ten and March twenty-seven there was no freeze at all.” There were only three major freeze events during the 2010 season throughout Vermont and New Hampshire, Prescott said. Normally the season would have gone to mid-April in the northern part of Vermont. “We lost about two weeks,” he said. “This was a good year for vacuum, not for buckets.”

The warm period came before New Hampshire’s Maple Weekend, when sugarmakers opened up their sugarhouses to the public. Some sugarmakers called Bruce, asking if they could buy some sap to boil, but Bruce told them he didn’t sell sap; he bought it. Some sugarmakers boiled water that weekend just to have the evaporators running, out of custom. As a result of the 2010 short season the date for Maple Weekend was moved to an earlier date, from the fourth weekend in March to the third.

As Tim Prescott said, 2010 was a good year for vacuum but not for buckets. Bascom’s held on as though they were a hundred miles further to the north, with their high vacuum
and tight tubing systems and their colder lots. Unlike many others, Bascom’s didn’t shut their vacuum pumps off at all during the season, which made the trees produce for a longer period. Bascom’s boiled until April 3.

On March 20, when Peter shut down, he was quick to say that every season is different and told me, when I talked about the character of the 2010 season, that “in 1925 my grandfather and his brothers made all their syrup in February.”

But Peter worried about climate change and the effect it would have on maple syrup production. He had been to a conference on climate change a few years ago, where he heard that at present trends there would be no maple syrup production in southern New Hampshire by the end of the century “and possibly within the next fifty years. It seems to be accelerating.”

In 2009 the State of New Hampshire issued a “Climate Action Plan,” which contained some dire warnings:

Changes are already occurring to New England’s climate, including warmer winters, reduced snowfall and snow-on-ground days, increased rainfall, rising sea level, and more severe weather events that result in increased risk of flooding. These changes are projected to grow in severity and could include other impacts such as a decrease in the abundance of sugar maples, stresses on our fisheries, more widespread occurrence of insect-borne diseases, and an increase of heat-related illnesses. Although the extent and timing of these potential impacts is uncertain, the costs of inaction could be large. The Stern Review found that failure to take actions to avoid the worst effects of climate change could depress global gross domestic product (GDP) by as much as 20 percent below what it otherwise might have been. On the other hand, avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change would require the investment of just 1 percent of global GDP per year. As a small state, New Hampshire is responsible for only a minor fraction of emissions contributing to global climate change. However, the actions identified in this plan will enable New Hampshire to continue to do its part to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and prepare for a changing climate.

Another paragraph stated, “On a regional scale, the 2007 Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (NECIA) concludes that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at current rates, by late in this century New Hampshire’s climate will more closely resemble that of North Carolina.”