Twain's Feast (38 page)

When you talk to sugar makers in Connecticut today, you’re likely to hear about a conversion moment—the day a maker decided to go out to his or her own backyard maples and see what the trees had to give. Small Connecticut makers tend to have started from scratch. It’s different in Vermont, where a single operation might run a hundred thousand taps; Vermont maple syrup is big business, a brand defended by inspectors who travel the state judging purity and imposing fines for improper grading. That’s admirable, and obviously important—by far the majority of American maple sugar comes from Vermont, which makes about 5.5 percent of the world’s total, and it should be made and sold correctly. Still, I love the fact that sugar makers from Connecticut often come to sugaring relatively late. For them it’s a new direction—an abandonment of one life, an adoption of another.

Which brings me to Bill and Amy Proulx. Before starting to sugar, Bill was a cop, serving on the Hartford K-9 unit for about twenty years. His best dog, Bruno, helped in some eleven hundred arrests, seven hundred of them felony convictions. They also did rescue work—there’s a picture of Bill and Bruno at Ground Zero on 9/12. Once, Bruno’s barking told Bill that there was still a fugitive hiding in a marsh they’d already pulled six guys out of—even surrounded by police and arrestees and diesel fire trucks, Bruno could smell the apocrine sweat a stressed man releases. Bill describes police work as 98 percent boredom and 2 percent sheer terror, which his unaffected stories graphically bear out.

Bill started sugaring after visiting his friend Armand Barrett one night during a good run. Armand is descended from French Canadians— Quebec, with apologies to Vermont, is the true center of the sugaring world, producing some 85 percent of the world’s total—and his own backyard sugarhouse is made of wood salvaged from an ancient and collapsing one down the road. “I walked in there,” Bill says, “and I don’t know, it was night, and the smoke was going, the evaporator was boiling. . . . It just gets in your blood. We started sugaring not long after that.” But it was only a hobby at first, guided by Armand and a book called
Backyard Sugaring.
“We had twenty taps going straight into buckets. Our evaporator was this big commercial lasagna pan, probably two feet long by twenty inches, set over a fire we’d built in an old oil drum with the side cut out. There had to be a constant stream of sap into the pan—we could boil down maybe four gallons of sap an hour, forty or fifty gallons a day, and that’d give us a gallon of syrup. The system we’ve got now, we can go through five hundred gallons an hour. Five thousand gallons on a good day.”

But before the boiling comes tapping the trees, which is something like blackjack—Bill and Amy have a certain amount of information, but at the end of the day they’re still playing the odds. A tapped tree starts healing right away; a given hole will run with sap for five or six weeks at the absolute most. A sugar maker who taps in early February to ensure catching the first, most valuable run risks missing the whole second half of the syrup season. When Bill and Amy were hobbyists, they could simply have waited for the weather to turn before setting their twenty spouts (usually called spiles). Now, with some three thousand holes to drill, they have to try to anticipate the run. But if they’re too early, they can’t retap; putting too many spiles into a single tree leaves it vulnerable to disease.

On the other hand, if they wait too long, they might have only a few weeks before the maples bud; after that the sap will only make “buddy” syrup,
¹⁸
which one maker compared to burned bacon and is mostly used as an additive in chewing tobacco and other products. So when Bill and Amy tap, they’re betting that the best run will be in the next four or five weeks. A too-long spell of cold weather after they tap would kill their season, allowing them to gather only half of what they might otherwise. “A couple of times recently, you’re sitting there in January and there’s birds out,” Bill says. “You’re going, ‘Man, we should be tapping
now.
’ [The year] 2000 was a total disaster, we got like five percent of our normal crop. It’s better when it’s cold to start—when it’s warm, you need the weather to swing twice, to cold and then to warm again. When it’s cold, you just need it to warm up.”

This year their timing looks to have been perfect. They tapped most of their trees a week or two back, avoiding a bitterly cold February that left a lot of sugar shacks that tapped earlier in bad shape for the year. Now there are only a few taps to go; we climb into Bill’s pickup and head off toward a local Scout camp.

Drivers of passing cars honk or wave; the four-hundred-gallon white plastic tank in the pickup’s bed makes Bill as identifiable as an ice-cream man. At one stoplight a car pulls up beside us, the driver shaking a jar as she calls, “Will you taste my syrup?” Bill obliges in the parking lot of a nearby fire station, declaring that the effort, which is her first attempt at sugaring in between teaching neuromusicology courses at UConn, has good flavor and great consistency. She beams—you can tell that her kitchen is going to be steamy this year.

Bill has the same kind of deal with the Scouts that he does with all the landowners who let him tap their trees, trading a percentage of finished syrup or its cash value for sap (the Scouts, wisely in my opinion, take syrup). Most of the trees to be tapped are spaced evenly along the road, maybe ten feet between each trunk. Bill thinks they were planted as part of a farmstead, possibly that of one Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Knowlton. Knowlton was the founder of Knowlton’s Rangers, the precursor to the U.S. Army’s intelligence service; he fought at Bunker Hill and died on September 16, 1776, at the Battle of Harlem Heights (his son survived the fight). Probably Knowlton never got to enjoy his trees, either for their sugar or merely as grand ornaments along the lane. But we can enjoy them now, over two hundred years later, on a snowy March morning. And if Knowlton sugared, his scar wood might still be here in the old, wild maples, not to be exposed until the trees fall and are cut open. Then someone might see his old auger holes in cross section, buried under more than two hundred new rings of growth.

In 1832 the appropriately named Ethan Greenwood wrote to the
New England Farmer,
asking, “Why should men delay to plant all sorts of good trees because they may not live to see them fully grown? What can a man do better on the face of the earth than to cultivate and beautify it? While ever ready to depart, the lover of beautiful trees should act as though he expected to live a thousand years.” Greenwood understood the wonder and generosity of planting trees, the way it both concedes mortality and comforts. But tending is beautiful and creative in its own way. If Bill owned this land, he’d tend the sugar bush, trimming back the understory and the weaker maples to give the best trees more light. Trees on open ground would crown lower and wider than those crowded in the forest, spreading up to eighty feet across. The light would touch more leaves, the trees make more sap, the sap perhaps run sweeter.

All Bill can do now is gather from the trees as they stand; he drills two inches into the nearest trunk. When he clears the wood, the hole wells with sap—it reminds me of sticking a finger into wet sand, the depression quickly filling with ocean water. As sap streaks from the hole, Bill hammers in a blue plastic spile, tapping just hard enough to create a good seal; the sap flows down the attached clear plastic line, dropping with tiny thumps into the bottom of a white bucket. He lets us do the next few. I drill, then Erik taps in the spiles, almost shuddering with excitement as sap fills the lines.

It’s beautiful. And it’s fun—but that’s because most of the work was done last week. At its height, sugaring is no more restful than any harvest. Tapping, cleaning, prepping, hauling, boiling—the urgent rhythms are more reminiscent of a fisherman hauling nets of schooling sardines than the quiet roadside stands you see in a Vermont autumn. What you see then is a sugar maker’s dormant period; the trees have made their summer starch and are yellowing, reddening, readying to sleep.

It’s all very benign; what we’re doing isn’t really much different from what the Iroquois or Algonquin would have done, cutting into the sapwood and letting a container fill. Even the switch to plastic buckets by everyone but hobbyists and Mennonites has something to recommend it, since lead can leach into sap from traditional galvanized pails. The path from stone ax, sap guide, and
mocuck
to power drill, plastic line, and bucket is a simple and direct one.

But our next stop, farther up the mountain, is something different. Beyond an ice-edged brook crossed by a single board, a spiderweb of black and white tubing winds from the back of a simple wooden shack and out of sight into the woods. Bill and Amy have hundreds of miles of line, all suspended four feet off the forest floor; most of their taps drain through the lines and into the shack’s vacuum system, one of the major innovations in modern sugaring.

It’s not that warm a day, maybe forty degrees at most, and last night it was in the single digits—exactly the kind of frustrating combination that freezes sap solid in the trees, without enough daytime heat to thaw it and let it flow. Still, the sap seems to want to run. Gravity alone has filled the long tubes—hundreds of yards in some cases—so that some has trickled through the pump and into the seven-hundred-gallon roadside holding tank it feeds. “It’s a real good sign for tomorrow, as long as tonight doesn’t get too cold,” Bill says. “We better kick this on for a bit, clear the lines.” The vacuum engine is loud in the shack; I cup my hands over Erik’s ears. But after a few moments, sap dumps into the catch tank, five gallons at a time, less than ten seconds between each broad spray. Erik gets fist-pumpingly excited, beaming, shouting with every burst.

“This’ll at least double your flows,” Bill says. “People think it’s sucking the sap from the trees, but that’s not really right. What makes the sap flow usually is a pressure differential between the tree’s interior and the open air, made by the shift from warm to cold and back to warm again. The sap just wants to go where there’s less pressure, so we lower the pressure with the vacuum. Each tree, individually, is just drip . . . drip . . . drip. But look here—you couldn’t get more flow than that with a water nozzle opened wide up.”

The system does mask the character of the individual trees, with those giving eight gallons a day pouring into the same lines as the poor ones that should probably be thinned out. And Bill loves the look of buckets hanging on trees; losing that is probably his biggest regret about putting in the lines. Still, if you try to imagine running three thousand buckets back to the car from maybe twenty-one hundred trees scattered all over the Connecticut countryside, it’s easy to see why he put in the system. Of course, the lines don’t eliminate work; just stringing them was a major undertaking in itself. Now they need regular flushing with boiling water. Squirrels and fisher cats (like minks on steroids, Bill says) will gnaw through for the sap, sending him and Amy out to bind and splice and fix it all.

“When the temperature’s in the twenties at night, we all celebrate,” he says. “Then it hits the forties the next day, and, man, you’ve got a gusher going. It gets so we can’t keep up, running back and forth to the holding tanks with the truck. It gets real hectic around here around tapping, and once the flow starts, it’s usually a good eighteen- or twenty-hour day. But you can’t cry about it—if you’ve got a good run going, you can make twenty thousand dollars’ worth of syrup in a day, enough to carry you through all the down months. There’s no tomorrow during a good run; you just have to be ready to go.”

Erik and I are staying at a bed-and-breakfast, a 1740s farmhouse with a long hill behind it. The owners let us use their toboggan. Erik is new to snow; after his first run, he tosses handful after handful into the air. “I throw it up to see it sparkle!” he yells. “To celebrate!” I throw a handful; it sprinkles over his face. “How do you get it so high?”

In his
Autobiography,
Twain wrote that he didn’t fear annihilation; before he was born, he’d spent all of eternity in that condition. That’s an overwhelming but oddly comforting thought—trying to remember the years before you were born is like a Zen koan. But it’s sad to think that Twain often went further, not only coming to terms with his mortality but seeing in it a great blessing; in one agonizing passage, he declared that he would not restore a single friend or family member to life. “The most precious of all gifts,” he declared, “that which makes all other gifts mean and poor,” is that of death. He’d sustained terrible losses; they must have been made more unbearable by his rich memory, by a life spent looking back and back and back.

Still, I’m selfish enough to want the joyful Twain, the vibrant Twain, smoking his cigar and munching on boiled eggs in a stagecoach descending through the mountains or feeling “sweet to all the world” as he feasted on fresh milk and berries. I’m selfish enough to want the Twain a friend watched chasing driftwood beside a river—throwing up his hands ecstatically, yelling when the wood went over the falls—and who later said he hadn’t been so excited in three months. I’m selfish enough to wish that he hadn’t sunk into despair, not only for his sake but for mine. I wish he’d found some kind of peace in his final days, something that he felt could sustain him. Because even from this great distance, it’s purely heartbreaking to think of Twain’s final years—of how a man who took so much joy in life could be so wounded by it.