Sugaring

This story appears in the March issue of Vermont Life.

By Geoffrey Gevalt
YWP Editor

It is March and late at night, so late I don’t want to know the time. I am outside under my “sugar roof” watching sap boil. My family is inside asleep. One light burns in the kitchen, a beacon. It’s 22 degrees, forecast of 40 tomorrow – another run coming. A spotlight from the rafter shines on the steam and the pan, a tiny two feet by three feet. I’m nearly out of sap and am determined to squeeze out just a little more syrup before shutting down for the night.

I am, by every possible definition, an amateur at this. I tap 40 to 50 trees a year. I use third-hand buckets and the new narrow-gauge taps. In any given year I will haul, in clean, five-gallon paint buckets, 400 to 500 gallons of sap. Do the math: Each gallon of sap weighs about 8.5 pounds. (A gallon of syrup, if you wondered, weighs about 14 pounds though Vermont syrup is heavier because we cook it longer – tastier that way.)

I’ve been sugaring eight years. Each year I scorch the pan, bang my knuckles, spill sap, run out of wood, gouge my head, burn my fingers, spill some syrup and, miraculously, produce eight to 12 gallons of syrup that amaze my friends and relatives (out of staters) and soothe our taste buds just about every day of the year.

I started, as we all do, on a rock hearth dug down in the snow and a kitchen pot. I have, as we all do, graduated to cement blocks and a bigger pan and then to a real evaporator pan and arch. As we all do, I constantly feel the siren call: More taps, bigger evaporators; bring on the tubes and a vacuum pumps. And, oh, wouldn’t that stainless steel, motorized filtration press be nice? And the gas-powered finisher? Reverse osmosis! Late at night, like now, I imagine a full-sized sugar house and 1,000 taps and stacks of empty gallon cans with fancy labels.

I get hung up, as I always do, with the labels: What would I call this place, this 3-acre opening in the woods where I live in Hinesburg? Hardly a farm, even with our rangy chickens. No name comes to me. The dream disappears with the steam. I reach for the tasting spoon, take it to the snow to chill it and have a taste. Mighty fine.

My watershed year was 2000. With the millennium came my 50th birthday and my uncle and aunt bestowed on my a gift of $500 cash -- $10 a year – to “buy something just for you,” my aunt said, “something frivolous.” Hmm. Got just the idea.

In February I gave a call to a sugaring supply shop in East Montpelier. “I’m looking for a small evaporator pan,” I said. They had just the thing. “I’d like to come up on Tuesday. How early are you open?” “Early enough,” the man said.

At 8:15 a.m. on a Tuesday in late February I was fifth in line at the sugaring supply shop. I was youngest by far and the only one wearing a tie. I waited and watched. Some of the old timers asked me questions, with a twinkle. “Yep, that’s how I got started,” said one. “How many taps you got now?” I asked. “Oh, by the time I’m done here today, about 15-hundred,” the gentleman responded, adding, “but my wife doesn’t know that yet.” I heard the story about how one of them had a sugar shack made of blue, plastic tarps. “Not a good mix fire and plastic tarps,” he said. The group guffawed.

Armed with equipment, pointers and stories, I left East Montpelier feeling like somehow, in that short space of time, I had finally found Vermont.

Over the years I’ve wandered around to other sugarhouses to compare notes. I visited one at about 1 a.m. and was handed a can of beer before I’d even introduced myself. I went to another where the evaporator looked like a Greyhound bus with its back end chopped off; the man has 20-THOUSAND taps. (Goodwin’s in Cabot; don’t miss it!) I’ve talked plenty with the folks at UVM’s Proctor Maple Center – the researchers – and learned that narrower taps help the tree heal faster, that there IS something happening with global warming and that temperature fluctuations determine what happens inside the tree.

But mostly I’ve learned on my own. I’ve learned which individual trees produce the most, that a south wind seems to stop the run, that bacteria breaks down the sugars to simpler sugars which burn at lower temperatures which is why syrup is darker later in the season – more bacteria.

And I’ve learned this: Somehow, mysteriously, when you start to boil friends appear out of nowhere, sometimes late at night, with six-packs or kids or food or nothing at all. But they all bring time, plenty of time to stand around, talk and watch liquid boil.

People have the notion that everyone in the family helps out, but that’s not really true. It takes a certain crazy obsession to make syrup the old fashioned way – with buckets and with a wood fire. The family helps out from time to time but I have one memory that will stick with me for a long time.
When my youngest daughter, Lily, was nine, she realized she had gotten big enough to help but not big enough to carry the five-gallon buckets we use to collect the sap from the trees.

One warm day, she used Bungee cords to strap a bucket to a toboggan climbed aboard and came zipping down the hill to the sugaring operation.
She didn’t spill a drop. And laughed all the way.
The true mystery was that she was able to repeat that – and still can – and has never had a calamity.

I’m tired. Time for bed. I reach over for a filter, tie it to the spigot on the side and drain a quart or two into the stainless pail. I pour the last two buckets of cold sap into the pan and shut the dampers. Walking over to the corner of the structure, I reach for the light switch and look, absently, towards the woods. I am startled: Dozens of pairs of eyes reflect from the darkness. Deer. Curious deer on the move. I step out of the light into the trees and watch. Slowly, one-by-one, the eyes disappear and I hear crunching in the snow as they wander away.

I turn, switch off the light and make my way to the house.

Geoffrey Gevalt is founder and editor of Young Writers Project, a nonprofit that helps students write better.