The Sugar Season (30 page)
Authors: Douglas Whynott
O
N SUNDAY, MARCH
18, the temperature in Langdon rose above 80°. That evening before sunset my wife and I walked a pair of dogs for a friend. While the dogs played I stood in a field and felt the pleasant spring air. Nearby, flying bugs drifted in a warm pocket. Off in the field I saw a small cherry tree that had begun to bloom. Overhead a bat flew by, searching for insects, I assumed. Later, when we arrived home, we heard from the small pond in the woods the sound of the peepers, the chorus frogs, riotous and joyful.
When Bruce said that the weather of 2012 was “once in a hundred years,” he wasn’t quite right. A study of satellite data from 1979 to 2010, comparing standard and extreme deviations, determined that some of the temperatures in the United States in March 2012 occurred with a likely frequency of once in every 4779 years. Because the data in the study was only for a 31-year period, and during a time when the planet was warming, the researchers stated that if they had used a century of data, the extent of deviation from the norm would have been much greater. So Bruce could have said that the weather in March 2012 was once in every 5000
years. You could also say that it was the kind of weather predicted to occur at the end of this century.
These “Summer in March” conditions were a meteorological event, caused in part by an unusual position of the jet stream, which looped to the south in the western United States and curled far over the Great Lakes and Canada to the north. This caused a high-pressure area to stand in place over the midwestern and eastern United States, blocking cold air masses and holding in place warm air from the South. In the western states the southerly loop trapped a low-pressure area and drew cold temperatures from the north, bringing record snowfall to Oregon.
Though the Summer-in-March conditions were primarily a weather event, they were also likely an event driven by global warming. As the meteorologist Andrew Freedman wrote, “Although studies have not yet been conducted on the main factors that triggered this heat wave and whether global warming may have tilted the odds in favor of the event, scientific studies of previous heat events clearly show that global warming increases the odds of heat extremes, in much the same way as using steroids boosts the chances that a baseball player will hit more home runs in a given year.” The lack of snow, which, when present, tends to reflect heat and cool the soil and air, had also contributed to the heat wave.
March 2012 was the warmest in the United States since record keeping began in 1895. The average temperature in March in 2012 was 51.1
°,
8.6 degrees above the national average for March. There were more than 14,000 temperature records broken nationwide. Perhaps the most unusual
occurrences were the 21 temperature records in March occurring at night and the low temperature for the day that broke previous daytime high-temperature records. The January to March period in 2012 was also the warmest in history dating back to 1880. And as it would turn out, 2012 was the warmest year in history. Every state in the United States experienced a record warm temperature in March.
Chicago broke daytime records nine days in a row, beginning on March 14. All the record temperatures were in the eighties: 82° on March 16, 82° on March 17, 85° on March 21. The average high temperature in Chicago in August is 82°. Thus the name, “Summer in March,” given by meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground.
Record high temperatures were set in cities throughout eastern Canada on March 21. The high temperature in St. John’s, New Brunswick, on March 21 of 25.4° Centigrade, or 78° Fahrenheit, set a record high for March and was also higher than any previous recorded temperature in April.
On March 20 Burlington, Vermont, reached 80°, the earliest 80° day in that city’s history and thirty-nine degrees above the average temperature. On March 20 Concord, New Hampshire, set a record at 81°, as did Caribou, Maine, at 73°, breaking its record by twenty-three degrees. On March 21 the low nighttime temperature at Mount Washington, New Hampshire, was 44°, which broke the previous daytime record of 43°.
The heat wave of March 2012, the Summer in March, Jeff Masters said, “was simply off-scale, and ranks as one of North America’s most extraordinary weather events in recorded history.”
O
N MARCH
16, in the midst of the heat wave, the American Forests blog published a short article titled “A Biological Clock” by Katrina Marland that began with an explanation of how our own biological clocks work, describing how tired we can become after pulling an all-nighter, then stated that scientists at the University of Edinburgh had identified the genes in plants that regulate their circadian rhythms. “They have found a set of 12 genes and one particular protein that work together to help the plant go dormant at night, saving its energy for growth, processing food and other actions that it can only perform during the day when the sun and other conditions are right.” The genes help the plant to make adjustments and to change with the seasons. “The knowledge has possible applications in a number of fields, but perhaps most important is helping scientists understand—and possibly even predict—how plants respond to interruptions in their natural cycles. If you have experienced, as many of us have, particularly strange weather patterns lately—here in Washington, D.C. we’ve had 80-degree days in March and our blooms have been out for weeks—it’s easy to see how significant knowledge like that could be.”
Maple trees also seemed to be going through a disruption to their biological clocks. The buds began to swell during the March heat wave, and that spelled the end for some sugar-makers. Many of those who kept producing made buddy, off-flavored syrup.
Peter and Deb Rhoades boiled from March 8 to March 15, shutting down when the temperatures began to soar. Usually the Rhoades sent 80,000 gallons of sap to Bascom’s, but in 2012 that amount was down to 21,000 gallons.
At Smith’s Maple Crest Farm in Shrewsbury, Vermont, near Rutland in the central part of the state, Jeff Smith
boiled from March 12 to March 20. On March 12 the temperature at Smith’s farm was 80° outdoors and 100° inside the sugarhouse. After nine days of 80-degree temperatures Smith shut down and pulled his spouts.
A sugarmaker located in Londonderry, New Hampshire, on a south-facing mountainside, said he experienced temperatures in the nineties during March. The trees produced sap that was like jelly.
One sugarmaker in upstate New York near Lake Champlain went fourteen days without a freeze but kept producing sap with tubing and vacuum based on the pressure differential. He noticed that, during the warm spell when there were no freezes, the run slowed down at night and then picked up again at nine o’clock in the morning. On the warmest days, “the four-day hot season” as he called it, between March 17 and March 20, the thickened sap plugged up the reverse-osmosis machines. At one point the sap looked like cottage cheese, and they dumped it on the ground but kept their vacuum pumps running so that the tapholes wouldn’t seal. Because it was so dry, he said, “we were drawing air through the tree fibers.” After a rain the vacuum pressure went up again. They resumed boiling after the hot days passed, but the syrup was buddy from then on.
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.”
I
T 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?
