The Sugar Season (14 page)

Such a change would reduce the viability of New Hampshire’s ski areas, a $650 million industry in the state; kill the snowmobiling economy—already almost eliminated in southern areas due to lack of snowfall; increase the frequency and severity of heavy, damaging rainfall events; increase the frequency of summer droughts; increase coastal flooding and property damage from an estimated rise in sea level; increase human health problems due to extreme heat; and bring change in forest species and extinctions.

Peter Rhoades, as the chairman of the planning board in Alstead, already knew of the danger of heavy damaging rainfall events. In 2005, when ten inches of rain fell in a single day, the Cold River flooded, taking out bridges, washing away homes, and killing five people. A photograph of one of the destroyed bridges appeared in the New Hampshire
Action Plan on the opening page of chapter 3, “Adapting to Climate Change,” which included this statement: “In 2005, forest-based manufacturing and forest-related recreation and tourism in the state contributed over $2.3 billion. These industries will face significant challenges as the climate continues to change. Climate models project decreases in the number of frost days, where temperatures dip below freezing, and increases in the length of frost-free growing seasons. Tree species composition is likely to change. . . . The eventual changes in forest composition and function could profoundly alter the scenery and character of New Hampshire, as well as the ecosystem services our forests provide.”

“A climate like North Carolina?” I said of what seemed the strangest detail in the report.

To which Peter responded, “We want to give this to our grandchildren, but we can’t give them something that isn’t there.”

But the feeling that day was only that the season was coming to an end, not the industry. Peter was the welcoming host, as was Deb. It was a beautiful spring day in March: the brook was flowing, the sugarhouse was running, even if it was a quick season, and all seasons are different—1925 was a quick year. Deb took off some syrup—this was dark and chocolaty with an orange hue and richly flavored, not something you’d see in a pancake restaurant or even on a grocery store shelf but instead something almost enchanting for home use, especially if you knew where it came from and how it was made.

We left them to finish up. Later Peter ran water through the evaporator and a cleaner to take off the burnt sugar and the niter—or sugar sand, the crystallized potassium nitrate.
Getting that off was essential. Then he took down the smokestack. He closed the windows and then turned it over to the squirrels and mice.

A
YEAR LATER
on a Saturday night in 2011 my wife and I walked along the road to Peter’s sugarhouse, lighting our way with a flashlight. It was a cloudy and dark night, about 8:00 on March 12, a few days after the big ice storm at Bascom’s. A cold winter. When we got close I turned off the flashlight because we wanted to see what the sugarhouse looked like. The snow was piled high around this opening in the woods, and the trees rose all around us while the brook roared from down below. Then a cascade of sparks rose from the stack, shooting high as the treetops. Peter was stoking the fire and tossing more wood on. We could see the steam billowing through the vent windows and hanging over the roof, and we could smell the scent of maple sugar.

Peter was alone inside, making the first boil of the year. Deb boiled earlier in the day, and Peter took over for her after dinner. They hadn’t poured off any syrup yet. The first boil was often slow, Peter said, and it was made even slower by the low sugar content in the sap.

This was a delayed season, 2011. Peter’s trees were still relatively frozen. “The sap’s not really running,” Peter said. “Blah weather. Temperatures in the high thirties. Cloudy.”

“Some sunlight is needed?”

“Not just sunlight, but a change.” Something to trigger the run. That would happen fairly soon. In the end Peter and Deb would have their best year, making 150 gallons.

We stayed about two hours, talking to Peter and watching the boil. The steam hung sometimes around the waist, sometimes above the head. We left before Peter poured the syrup off, unfortunately. He said that a half hour later he poured off five gallons. When we walked out we did the same as when coming—turning off the flashlight to watch the sparks fly in the air and see the rosy glow inside the sugarhouse.

On Sunday afternoon I returned again, and this time I meant to stay until they poured off the syrup.

Petey was at the sugarhouse on this day along with Peter. Deb was off running errands. Petey had brought a stuffed animal, a dragon, and placed it on the stairway above the evaporator. The dragon was on loan from his school, here to help him write a story about his adventures over the weekend. Petey figured he would get two pages out of today.

Peter was bringing him along slowly, teaching a bit at a time. When maple syrup boils it builds up foam, and sugarmakers use a defoamer—usually canola oil, a few drops at a time—to settle the foam down. By some mysterious process three or four small drops of oil break the surface tension of foam over the entire boil, and the chatter of the bubbles settles down immediately.

“Why is foam bad?” Petey asked.

“It is when it comes up over the side. Otherwise it’s not,” Peter answered.

After an hour Peter’s mother, Ellie Rhoades, stopped by. She lived at the end of Rhoades Road in the house where Peter grew up. She had done the boiling in this sugarhouse in 1948, she said, when Peter’s grandmother was away tending to a sick relative. She and Peter’s father gathered sap on weekends and at night.

After Peter’s mother left, a friend named Anton Elbers dropped by with two of his friends. He said he wanted to show them a real sugarhouse. Elbers was an original back-to-the-lander, a member of a commune that settled in this area in 1971. A local farmer helped them begin, and for years he and Anton sugared together. They ran a sugarhouse in partnership and got up to 3000 buckets. Anton still did some sugaring on a small scale, he said, but it was impossible to continue at that level because you had to commit four weeks full time to it. He wasn’t a fan of plastic tubing. “I wouldn’t do tubing,” Anton said. “I just wouldn’t go there. I couldn’t see putting tubing in the woods. I couldn’t do it.”

“I couldn’t see going back to buckets,” Peter said, laughing.

Anton explained the evaporation process to his friends, and Peter told them about sugar content and the Rule of 86. Peter said he boiled an average of fifty-seven gallons of sap to get a gallon of syrup. Anton explained the reverse-osmosis process, how it was possible to filter out eighty percent of the water so that a sugarmaker only had to boil four gallons. Which was something Peter didn’t do here. As a result his was a slower process. Anton teased Peter about the syrup not being ready for his friends.

Good things come from waiting. They left as I had the night before, a half hour before the syrup was ready. Peter poured a few gallons into a steel bucket. He asked Petey to watch the float level while he tended to the syrup. The float level showed the amount of syrup in the flue pan, and Petey kept an eye on it, at one point opening the valve to let a little more sap flow in.

Peter brought the syrup to the bench near the window and poured it through the layers of felt cloth. He then
poured it into plastic jugs. A one-gallon container, a half-gallon container, seven quarts, a pint—almost four gallons altogether. He set the jugs on their sides to cool.

Peter poured some of the syrup into tea cups and set one on a shelf by me. “Try some when it’s cooled a bit,” he said.

He poured some into the grading set and compared. An A-medium, he said. Peter labeled the jugs, putting the date on them and the grade. He then stoked the fire, and the boil roared up again.

Peter asked me if I ever heard of a man named Hemon Chase. He was a surveyor and wrote a couple of books about his life. “He was the person in the oldest generation I admired most,” Peter said. “He and Ben Porter. Ben Porter was a surveyor too.” And a sugarmaker, I heard, someone who also refused to use tubing, declaring he would never suck sap out of his trees.

Peter admired their honesty. “I don’t know if it was their character that made them surveyors or whether it was surveying that made them who they were. Maybe it was being out in the woods all day. I suppose that today surveyors don’t even have to go into the woods.”

“Thoreau was a surveyor,” I said. “Henry David Thoreau, who wrote
Walden.”

“Hemon used to drink a shot glass of maple syrup every day. I used to bring him a quart now and then.”

I had been and would go into the woods with Peter on occasion, and I had wondered how his life in the woods influenced his development. Peter was known as an ethical forester. (“I hope so,” he said, when I brought it up one time.) Mostly I liked hearing his perspective as I watched him work and listened to him talk about trees. I watched him
make choices as to which trees to cut and which to leave in a town forest in nearby Walpole—he was making decisions that would bear out long after his lifetime, such as when he selected an oak tree that would bear acorns, that would produce other oaks, that would also bear acorns, that would feed wildlife that would find that particular spot a favorable place to be 150 years from now. It seemed to me that the mentality of ethical forest management was similar to the mentality needed to reduce the human effect—the mentality for effective forest management could be a guide for reducing climate change. The long view, 150 years from now.

Peter stoked the fire and it roared again, another stream of sparks soaring up the stack. I picked up the teacup and sipped. My words: “Oh my, this is amazing. Never have I tasted anything like this.”

How to describe it? I couldn’t stop sipping, light sips.

“I hope I don’t get sick drinking so much of this,” I said.

“You won’t,” Peter answered.

Just then Aunt Margaret came to get Petey, as it was getting dark. Peter’s Aunt Margaret was a teacher in Baltimore before she moved back to Acworth to take care of her parents, and she lived in the old farmhouse atop the hill above the sugarhouse. Peter handed her a teacup.

I said something that included the word amazing about the taste.

“The best,” she said.

Petey took his dragon off the stairs and walked out, but Peter called him back. “Here, take a quart of syrup for Aunt Margaret,” he said.

I soon left with a gallon of my own, enough to last a few months. I stopped to look at the sugarhouse again, the steam
still rising, clouding actually, as it rolled down the roof. I saw sparks shoot up through the chimney. So elemental, all of it. I walked along the brook, passing through a pocket of cool air, carrying the jug that was so hot I had to keep switching hands.

When I got home I told Kathy she should taste some while it was still warm. She made some toast. I opened the jug, and she bent down to it.

“It has the scent of the sugarhouse,” she said.

I bent to take a whiff of the vapors. “You’re right. It’s not just the maple scent, but the sugarhouse itself.”

“Yes,” she said.

“It has the scent of the wood, the woodpile, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

That was it, the magic of this. Under the right conditions the sweetness of the sap, the taste of the tree, and also the character of the place where it was made. It seemed so, on this particular day.

10

T
HE SUGAR MACHINE

B
RUCE LEFT A PHONE MESSAGE
and then sent an e-mail, asking whether I had seen the new sugar machine. This was a surprise to me because the sugar-making operation had always been off-limits. “Top secret,” Bruce said back in 2010. He even said this to the woman in Brattleboro who sold the granulated and powdered maple sugar; Cindy Finck was her name. You couldn’t help wonder what was going on in the sugar plant. Sometimes they ran three shifts, making sugar day and night in that room with the closed doors beyond the Cooler.

Occasionally I talked with the man who was making the sugar, Joe James. This always happened when I was in the Cooler by the scales, when Joe came out of the room, dusted in powdery white. To me Joe had the look of an Iroquois warrior—tall, fierce, and sensitive, with a shaved head and a goatee. He was a chef by trade, one who now made sugar. Joe was quick to say that he was not a sugarmaker. “I make sugar,” he would say. And lots of it. Day by day Joe was probably making more maple sugar than anyone else in the world. Leading up to the changeover to the new machine, Joe was putting in serious hours building up a surplus of
granulated and powdered maple sugar, just in case there was some sort of malfunction.