The Sugar Season (28 page)

Yet everyone knew that 2012 was not an average year, with its early start, snow drought, and pending forecast for North Carolina weather.

“I’ve never seen a winter like this one,” Alvin said. Then he thought for moment. “Of course, 1981 was a dry winter. And there was that winter in the 1940s when we got five feet of snow when the apple blossoms were out. That was a strange winter.”

We looked at 1981 on the chart, which read, “Biggest Production,” at 1000 gallons. Alvin had started boiling on February
16 that year too. After a few sporadic boils and a pair of intense two-week runs the season ended on April 1.

And there was that 2010 season noted on the chart, when David first boiled on February 23 and when the early warm weather came. The boils were sporadic, it was 60° on March 19, and David’s last boil was on March 31. Three days later, on April 3, the temperature was 85°.

A
LVIN’S CHART AND
sugarhouse had been the focus of many news stories. Most newspapers in the maple syrup regions ran a story every spring. Alvin’s chart may have become the most famous production chart in the industry in 2004, when a story ran in the
Boston Globe
with the headline, “Warming Trend Blamed for Syrup Season Change.”

The lead paragraph read, “The state’s maple syrup producers say they can see the effects of global warming in their backyards: they are tapping their trees about a month earlier than they used to. . . . A giant chart on the wall of the Clark Sugar House in Acworth shows that the maple syrup season began changing about twenty years ago.”

The story quoted Alvin, who said, “Most everybody’s tapping a lot earlier than they used to.” The story went on to say that the Clark chart might be a glimpse of the future. Scientists were predicting that New England’s temperatures would rise by six to ten degrees by the year 2050. And then, the climax of the story, a statement by Barry Rock, a professor at the University of New Hampshire who did research on climate change. “I think the sugar maple industry is on its way out,” he was quoted as saying.

A
LVIN HAD TURNED EIGHTY
last summer and threw a party for himself. Alvin kept his farm looking pretty with many flower gardens, and a big vegetable garden and raspberry patch. Perched on the hill above the sugarhouse and Crane Brook he had lovely views to the eastward and the small mountains—the place became spectacular when the leaves turned in the fall. He and David owned about 800 acres, and they used 200 of them as pasture for a herd of thirty bison. Because of this, because the herd was a commercial operation for meat—lean meat, they would point out—Alvin’s yard had the look of a gardener’s dream and a Sioux hunting camp, with buffalo skulls drying and aging on top of poles next to the lovely raspberry patch. They served buffalo burgers at the birthday party and buffalo chili at the sugarhouse. Anyone who wanted buffalo meat could drive up to the Clark’s house and buy it or buy syrup, plenty of that too. There was a mounted buffalo head outside the door to the little room where they sold the meat and syrup. At Alvin’s party they set up an organ, and a group from Alvin’s church sang a hymn and a patriotic song. It was like being at a party from 50 years ago, or maybe 150.

The first time I talked with Alvin was in 2010. It was mid-March, and the sap run was all but over. When I rode on the sap trucks with George Hodskins and Greg Bascom I learned that some producers had called Bruce asking if they could buy sap, and I also learned that David Clark was going to retap several hundred of his trees so that he could boil on Maple Weekend. One producer told me this was risky for the tree’s health, to wound the tree again that late in the season.

I wanted to get to know the Clarks because I heard their sugarhouse was beautiful inside. Once, when I attended the Langdon town meeting, I heard Alvin speak in support of the food program for the poor in Langdon, and I’d noticed how much respect he commanded. So in 2010, on one very warm afternoon after I left Bascom’s I stopped at the Clark sugarhouse. The mood that day was gloomy. Alvin told me it was a poor season, and he said that David recently had surgery to remove a tumor from his skull. He was left with a lot of medical bills, and the syrup crop was meant to cover them. Usually sales of syrup helped fund the farm operation, but not this year.

I didn’t stay long, and Alvin followed me outside. He said it would be better to talk after the season was over, that I should give him a call and come up to the farmhouse. In June I did that.

Alvin’s wife had died four years ago, and he lived alone in the farmhouse, but David was not far away, living in a house at the bottom of the hill and near the sugarhouse. Alvin told me that when David was working construction—he worked on bridges—he came up to the farm every morning at 3:30, and Alvin made him coffee and a lunch. Alvin had been born in this house, and it was packed with keepsakes and photographs and articles about maple sugaring and the sugarhouse. There was a buffalo hide on one of his couches and a buffalo head in the dining room where we sat and talked.

He showed me a photo of his father boiling on a flat pan in the woods, and later that summer we went out and uncovered that arch; Alvin dug through the leaves and humus like a bear, saying, “This is history.” His father and grandfather had made syrup. When I asked how many of the
households sugared back then he said, “Everyone. Everyone made it.” He told me he was one of the first to get into plastic tubing and that Ken Bascom, his friend, came over often to look at it. Alvin got up to 3000 buckets, and it was hard work going through the deep snow to get to them. With tubing they were able to move their sugarhouse from the woods down to the road.

Toward the end of that visit Alvin said he had been invited to attend the opening of an exhibit about climate change at the science museum in Concord. He said a copy of his chart would be part of the exhibit. He didn’t think he would be able to attend, though. David had no interest in going. He didn’t believe in climate change. “But I do,” Alvin said.

“I’ll take you,” I answered. “We’ll make a night of it. We’ll go out to dinner. Kathy will come.” I was bubbling with eagerness. Alvin said to call a man named Richard Polonsky, the organizer of the exhibit. Polonsky had made the copy of Alvin’s chart, and he had brought a video crew to the sugarhouse last year. I called Polonsky—he was as pleased as I was that Alvin would be attending. There would be a show in the planetarium and also a talk by Barry Rock of the University of New Hampshire. Polonsky said if we arrived early, he could show us the exhibit.

We had a good time that night, Alvin, Kathy, and me. We stopped at a diner in Hillsborough, and we laughed a lot. We were a little late getting to the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, but there was enough time to see a part of the exhibit, which was titled, “Seasons of Change.”

Richard Polonsky, along with some of the museum staff, came out to greet us. Alvin had dressed up, wearing a yellow shirt and brown tie and jacket, and a baseball cap with the
insignia “Apollo 14” on the front. Someone asked him where he got the hat, but Alvin couldn’t remember. He had made a donation, he said. Alvin made lots of small donations to many organizations.

We climbed the stairs to the second floor, and Richard took us to a space where syrup was displayed in a cabinet. Alvin’s chart was mounted on a wall nearby, reproduced in color with the red and black lines and the handwritten figures. Next to the chart was a monitor with a looping video of Alvin, working at his sugarhouse and talking about the changes he witnessed over the years.

It began with a shot on a March day, with patchy snow on the ground and Crane Brook running:
“From 1911 on we’ve been making sugar on this farm.”

There was a shot of Alvin by the evaporator, standing under buckets hanging from the rafters:
“My father and his brothers sugared. I’ve been sugaring all my life.” A
shot of maple trees and tubing:
“When springtime temperatures are right, the sugar comes down, up and down, and we catch it.”

Alvin inserting a spout and attaching tubing, sap flowing in:
“All over, the other producers feel more or less the same as I, that something is happening.”

Crane Brook, swollen with snowmelt:
“Years ago, I remember we’d get heavy ground-freezing. This year, the ground around here never froze.”

Outside the sugarhouse, Alvin at a giant maple, checking tubing:
“I remember when the maples looked really nice, back in the forties, the fifties. Today they don’t look near as healthy.”
Near the end, Alvin in his truck, driving along Crane Brook Road:
“I read a lot about the polar bears, in the Arctic losing their homes. The ice is melting, the glaciers are falling into the ocean. The sea is rising—maybe not very much. The weather has warmed. I just hope we can continue on in our lifestyle, as we have in the past, in future generations.”

Alvin stood shaking his head when the video finished; he couldn’t believe his chart was in a museum. We went into the planetarium then, joined an audience, and watched the planets spin, stars come into view, constellations rise and fall, and we saw an image of the sky outdoors on that night.

During intermission Alvin and Kathy went to see the “Seasons of Change” exhibit, and I talked to Richard Polonsky. He had enjoyed getting to know Alvin, was happy to have him there, and, when we returned to the planetarium, would bring him up to speak. Richard said that years ago he been a farmer and a sugarmaker, and it made him appreciate the role of maple syrup in the culture of New England. He then told me a story, one that I supposed had motivated him in this endeavor. Richard did his sugarmaking on his father’s land. His father was a veterinarian who owned the largest mink farm in the eastern United States, but he lost all of his animals after giving them food poisoned by PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), which have been shown to cause numerous health effects in animals, including damage to their reproductive systems. He had traced down the source, sued Monsanto, and won his case, but before the trial began he had a stroke. The money he won, a million dollars, was paid out within a few days, Richard said.

We returned to the planetarium where Barry Rock was ready to give his talk. Rock was in his midsixties and had been working for many years on studies of the environment and chemical evidence of climate change collected using satellite imagery. He was the lead author of an important report
about climate change published in 2001, titled the
New England Regional Assessment,
part of a series of reports on climate in the United States sponsored by the US Global Change Research Program.

Polonsky opened the program by talking about “Seasons of Change,” saying it was sponsored by the National Science Foundation and that it would travel to a series of museums over the next four years. He said he was pleased to have Alvin Clark present and asked him to come up front and say a few words.

Alvin at first did what New Englanders often do when they talk about themselves, which is to draw family lines. He said he was related to the Greens and the Fisks. Of climate change he said, “I could see this coming in the chart year after year, since 1959. And I could see the gradual change in the weather as I kept the figures on each day and poured the sap.”

And then, “You’re welcome to come to our sugarhouse. I’m not a bragger, I don’t like to brag, but we’ve got some of the best syrup. I don’t like to say that, but people who have had it, they know it.”

Richard introduced Barry Rock by saying that he had been talking about climate change and how it can affect maple trees for a very long time.

Rock began by pointing out the irony of his speaking here tonight, in the Christa McAuliffe Planetarium, named after the first teacher in space, who died during the
Challenger
disaster in 1986. Rock was working for NASA on the space shuttle project then, but after the explosion of the
Challenger
his project collapsed. Independently he began using remote sensing technology to study the effect of air pollution on the
trees of Camel’s Hump Mountain in Vermont. He grew up in Vermont. After giving a lecture on remote sensing at a conference he was offered a position at the University of New Hampshire. When he arrived in New Hampshire Rock found, sitting on his desk, a stack of letters that had been forwarded from NASA.