The Sugar Season (27 page)
Authors: Douglas Whynott
T
HE NEXT DAY
Robert told me I was going to see the most beautiful sugarhouse in St. Zacharie. He needed to stay at the warehouse to load a trailer for shipment to Acworth, but he said someone would take me there, a man named Jean-Claude Pare, who ran an
érablière
called Dole Pond Maple Products. He was a gregarious man, happy to practice his English and talk about the maple syrup industry, especially about that segment of French Canadians who sugared on the American side of the border.
There were forty-three of them in all, Jean-Claude told me. They averaged 30,000 taps each, and possessed about 1.3 million taps in all. Their output made Somerset County, Maine, the top-producing county in the United States. When we went to Jean-Claude’s house we looked at the website of the Maine Maple Producers Association, where the group he belonged to was described as the “Bulk Syrup Suppliers that proudly operate sugarhouses in the State of Maine.” They were members of the Maine Somerset County Sugarmakers Association, but Jean-Claude had also founded an organization of the French Canadians called the Alligash Group, which worked together to make certain they continued to get the E2 visas necessary to work on the US side of the border.
Jean-Claude had been making syrup in a camp near the Golden Road for twenty years. He started with very little money in 1991, working up his sugarbush, getting to 16,000 taps, and made his first good crop in 1995. Now Jean-Claude was at 37,000 taps. He and his wife worked together and hired a worker to check tubing. Finding the right people to check for leaks was difficult. “We must be ‘minuteaux,’ how do you say, fussy? To find the ‘microfuite,’ we call it, the little leaks.”
The sugarhouse we went to was near the border, but on the Canadian side, and on government land. We traveled along some back roads, and Jean-Claude showed me some wooded land he bought—“It makes us proud here, to own land.” He pulled off the road by a field and pointed to a long hill about a mile away. “See out there, you see the maples?” Then suddenly I could—a large monochromatic patch of maple green on the hillside.
The road into the woods was called “Route de Sucriers,” the Road of the Sugarmakers. Jean-Claude said his own sugar camp was not very far away, on the other side of this hill in Maine. This side, however, which faced to the southeast, was warmer—by four degrees on average, Jean-Claude said. As a result, the sugarhouses here produced more syrup on average, three and a half pounds per tap, nearly a third of a gallon.
There were sugarhouses and camps all along the way. I waved to one man I saw in front of a cabin, who looked at me strangely—Jean-Claude told me you don’t wave to someone around here unless you know them. We passed a sign that read, “Claude Giroux—Acericulteur.” A maple culturist. It seemed to be the profession of choice in St. Zacharie.
“To buy sugarhouses in these areas is very expensive,” Jean-Claude said. “Fifteen to twenty dollars per tap.” So a 20,000-tap operation would be $300,000 to $400,000. “For private sugarbushes in Quebec it is much, much more. Fifty to sixty dollars per tap. It’s crazy because the syrup cannot pay for it.” That meant that in Quebec a 20,000-tap sugarbush on private land would cost up to $1.2 million. And that 165,000-tap operation that Robert talked about—up to $9.9 million at $60 per tap. Jean-Claude said that the camps had
always been held closely and passed down within families, but now “strangers” were coming in to buy them.
At the end of the road we turned into a driveway where we came to the sugarhouse owned by a man named Vital Lariviere. Jean-Claude drove around to the south end of the building to a wall built to take advantage of sunlight, with fourteen door-sized windows—seven on the first floor and seven above. A very nice thing on a March day in Quebec, I imagined. The building, I am guessing, was thirty feet wide and eighty feet long. It was sided with natural pine, with small windows on the long sides of the building and, above, a red metal roof.
Off to the side was Lariviere’s old sugarhouse. It was quite small and didn’t take advantage of sunlight. Lariviere must have looked at the site of his new sugarhouse for many winters. Jean-Claude said, “He worked in there for years and thought about all the things he wanted in a sugarhouse. When he built this he put them all in.”
No one was there, so we drove up to the sugarbush to look for Lariviere. We passed by a machine, a wood processor that he used to cut his firewood. By using only wood for heat instead of oil, Jean Claude said, Lariviere saved enough money to pay for his living expenses. As we followed the road we passed a stack of firewood that must have been a quarter-mile long, trailing down the road and out of sight. Along the edge of the woods were mainlines. We stopped at a pump-house, looked inside, and saw the pumps and a video camera trained on them.
Jean-Claude called Lariviere, who said that it was too hot to work in the woods, so he was lying by his pool but that we could go inside and have a look around. Jean-Claude drove back to the south end.
Through that entryway was a kitchen with a round wooden dining table with four chairs and, on the refrigerator, photos of Lariviere and his children, teenagers. Mounted on a wall was a row of video monitors, one for watching television and the others for watching pumps. Off the kitchen was a room for drying wet clothing. A beautifully tooled stairway led up to the bedrooms.
Beyond the kitchen was the sugarhouse, and the first impression was one of space, open space and lots of room. There was a tool bench, well organized, along one wall—he must have been thinking about that tool bench while working in that other cramped sugarhouse. The evaporator was large, six feet wide and eighteen feet long, but not fancy. The pans were removed, and some ash was still in the arch. The evaporator wasn’t in the center of the room but instead off to the side. Above it was a box-shaped chimney, paneled in pine, wider and longer than the evaporator—the purpose must have been to channel as much steam as possible through the upper vents. On the outer paneling was affixed a garden hose, cleverly threaded through a bicycle wheel, with counterweights attached so that the hose could easily be pulled down and put to use.
“Vital is willing to try new things and experiment,” Jean-Claude said.
The R.O. room was in a back corner, nothing special to look at, just another typical room with tubes and pipes and dials. Next to it a stairway led up to a balcony with tanks for holding sap, both raw and concentrated.
In most sugarhouses the evaporator sat center stage, but that was not the case at Vital’s place. In the middle of this sugarhouse, sitting on a raised platform, was a large spa for hot water baths—what more could you ask for after working
in the snowy woods, checking tubing on a winter day or after boiling sap for many hours? I remembered someone telling me that hot maple syrup fresh off the evaporator and a little whiskey was a very good drink, though that was my fantasy, not theirs. Based on this tool of enjoyment and other innovations, I now understood why Robert thought this was the most beautiful sugarhouse in St. Zacharie.
On our way out along the Route of the Sugarmakers Jean-Claude said, “Around here everyone talks about sirop. You go into the store and they talk about sirop d’erable, and at the restaurants they talk about sirop. Everybody does it, everybody talks about it here.”
B
Y SATURDAY, MARCH
17, the sap run was down to a quarter of the amount of a week ago and the sugar content down to a range of about 1.2 to 1.5 percent at the Bascom lots. Bruce was at the store that Saturday.
“Maple Grove is flat out in Quebec,” he said. “They’re protecting themselves against a poor crop. It’s going to be a very poor crop.”
A producer named Dave Richards came into the store. Richards ran the Grant Family Pond View sugarhouse in the town of Weare. He said to Bruce, “You got a rebuild kit on that pump?” Bruce looked across the room, put his tongue to his teeth, and headed for a shelf.
Richards said he was preparing for Maple Weekend, which was a week away. Because his sugarhouse was located between the cities of Manchester and Concord, Richards had good traffic. On Maple Weekend he served hot dogs, cakes, and donuts and gave away maple treats. “It will cost me about fifteen hundred dollars,” he said.
“You’ll double that in sales, though,” Bruce said.
“We’ll quadruple that. We won’t have sap, but we’ll simmer water.” They would simmer because it was too expensive to
do a full boil. “They’ll be asking, ‘Where’s the syrup?’ I’ll say, ‘It’s outside, in the jugs.’”
When Richards left, Bruce got online and looked at the forecast for Jackman, Maine, the major town in Somerset County and the town closest to the sugar camps. Their forecast didn’t look good either, with ten days of hot weather and nighttime temperatures above freezing. That was exceptionally unusual for northern Maine. They usually boiled until the end of April.
“This kind of weather is once in a hundred years,” Bruce said.
W
HENEVER I DROVE
from Bascom’s along Crane Brook Road I passed the Clark sugarhouse and the Clark farm across the road and up a steep hill. I had gotten to know Alvin Clark over the past couple of years and followed events at his sugarhouse. The Clarks were next-door neighbors to the Bascoms, though next door was a relative term because the Clarks are in Langdon and the Bascoms in Acworth, and the two sugarhouses were at least a mile apart. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when tour buses brought people here from Massachusetts and Connecticut, they stopped at Bascom’s and at Clark’s. The close relationship went far back. Alvin Clark was a close friend of Ken Bascom. Alvin’s father, Leroy Clark, was a friend with Glenn and Eric Bascom. Alvin owned journals from the late 1920s showing that after Glenn Bascom’s wife died, he was a nightly visitor at the Clark household.
When I left Bascom’s on the morning of March 17 and saw the door to the Clark sugarhouse open and Alvin’s car there,
I had to stop in to see how Alvin and his son David were faring during the 2012 season.
“Hey!” Alvin said. He was wearing a funny-looking fur hat with long ear flaps that made him look a little like a Bassett hound. Alvin knew how silly he looked and was grinning. He was eighty. He had strong features—his face reminded me of hand-hewn beams. His eyes were a powder blue. He was sitting by the woodstove in the little kitchen where, during the sugar season and especially on Maple Weekend, they served coffee and donuts, chili, and hamburgers and also sold syrup and maple candy. Alvin had a fire going in the woodstove.
“That hat must be warm,” I said.
He laughed. “Do you want to try some sugar on snow?”
“Of course I do.”
This would be a first for me. I had heard a lot about sugar on snow and was fascinated by the antiquity of it, this way of eating maple syrup that originated with the Native Americans and was the featured product at sugar parties for centuries. Alvin cooked some syrup down to a sauce stage and then dropped spoons of the syrup on snow in a pan. It had congealed enough to lift away a piece with a toothpick. Such a delicious burst of flavor in the mouth, as the icy taffy softened and the sweet maple flavor released. It was very chewy, and I could see why they called this treat leather aprons, though actually I thought I understood only the leather part. I looked it up—Benjamin Franklin considered himself a “leather-apron man,” as a mechanic or printer, celebrating his artisanal roots: “Keep Thy Trade,” he wrote, “and Thy Trade will keep Thee.” That worked here.
Alvin was giving his sugar on snow recipe a trial run in advance of Maple Weekend. “Though we’ll probably be
boiling water again,” he said with a laugh. Actually the Clarks hadn’t done so badly in 2012 and were having an average year. They too kept a production chart on the wall of the sugarhouse. It went back to 1959, the year Alvin took over the sugarhouse from his father and the year David was born. The chart lengthened over the years and was about six feet long now and four feet high, and visually almost like a work of art, with its red lines and contrasting black lines telling of the length of the seasons and amounts made. After we ate enough sugar on snow to satisfy—it didn’t take long—we went over to look at the chart. David had started boiling on February 16, just before the first big run, and had boiled fifteen days since then. On March 12, when Kevin Bascom set a new record, David Clark had a big day too, making 107 gallons. On their evaporator, which was heated by wood, four-foot split cordwood that David cut during the off-season, and using sap reduced with an R.O. to an 8 percent concentration, the Clarks could produce 25 gallons of syrup per hour. As of March 17 they had made 937 gallons, well behind the 1400 gallons they made in 2011 but on course to have an average year.
