Tag Archives: maple syrup

Hilltown Postcards

Hilltown Postcard: Maple Sugaring

I recall the late Win Donovan saying when we moved to Worthington that the hilltowns have two seasons — winter and the Fourth of July. Then I learned about another: maple sugaring season, which typically straddles winter and spring. And when I was a reporter, it was part of my beat covering small towns in the western part of the state for the local paper.

Maple sugaring season happens when the weather is warm enough during the day to get the maple trees’ sap flowing and cold enough at night that it stops. A lot of work goes into getting those trees ready and then boiling their sap into maple syrup that is sold in jugs to customers.

Each year, I tried to find a different angle and hilltown maple sugarers were very accommodating. Of course, Mother Nature had a hand in that. My story could be about the season starting early or late. The season was long or short. 

By the way, the official end to the season is when the spring peepers — small tree frogs — begin making a high-pitched “peep-peep.” Yes, I learned that from a sugarer.

Maybe I wrote about the business of maple sugaring, including those folks who have a seasonal restaurant serving breakfast with the syrup they made. 

Then there were those optimistic folks who have been sugaring for decades. Paul Sena in Worthington was one of my go-to sugarers. Hank and I still drive there to buy syrup, my favorite sweetener, from him.

I recall going out with a sugarer as he started tapping maple trees, that is, attaching the tubing that will run sap downhill to a large vat. I hung out when the first batch of sap was hauled back to a sugarhouse and boiled into syrup in a wood-fired flat-panned evaporator that billowed slightly sweet steam.

One story was about a new system that used reverse osmosis to pre-concentrate sap, which shortens the process of boiling and saves on firewood. That was a far cry from the very old days when people used oxen to haul the sap that was collected in buckets.

Maple sugaring was also the inspiration for one of my novels, Northern Comfort. Using what I learned from the maple sugarers I interviewed, I tried to capture the process of stringing lines, tapping trees, and boiling. Miles Potter, one of the main characters, helps his buddy, Dave, a relative newcomer who is enamored by the old-time ways including sugaring. He taps the trees owned by a doctor in town. For Miles, the work is cathartic since he was involved in a tragedy. Here’s an excerpt:

Yesterday, when the temperature rose into the forties and everyone’s houses dripped melted snow, some sap collected in the vats at the bottom of each sugar bush. Today, the run was full-blown with two thousand gallons ready to be boiled into syrup.

Dave was full of local lore as he moved around the sugarhouse after Ruth and the girls went home. He talked about how farmers in New England used to make maple sugar, forming it into hard cakes. Maple syrup became popular in the late 1800s when someone invented the evaporator, which resembles a flat-bottom boat when it’s empty.

Miles glanced up from the firebox’s door. He raised a gloved hand.

“Dave, you’ve told me this story six years straight. Why don’t you tell me this on the third week when we’re so sick of this stuff and pulling all-nighters we vow never to do it again? Or better yet, save it for the doctor. I bet he’d love telling his buddies back in New York all about it.”

Dave studied Miles.

“Shit, you can be such a spoilsport sometimes.” He reached for his leather gloves. “Anyway, around the Civil War people up North began using maple sugar instead of cane sugar and molasses from the South. They used to call it northern comfort.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember that from last year.”

The sugarhouse, only yards from Dave’s house, was unheated, except for the evaporator’s fire box. Step a few feet outside at night, and the cold had a punch, but next to the evaporator, all was humid and hot like a woman’s mouth. The swirling sap in the pan gave off a bank of steam, which rose to the sugarhouse’s vented roof.

They fired up the evaporator about an hour ago. It’d be another two before Dave could pour the season’s first syrup. As Dave reminded Miles, the first boil sweetens the pan, so it takes longer than the next firings. They’d be here until ten or so and resume boiling the next day.

Miles helped Dave build his sugarhouse seven years ago. They took measurements from an abandoned shack in South Hayward that had collapsed from heavy snow the year before Dave’s was built. Rough-hewn boards nailed vertically covered the rectangular building. On the wall near the shelf for the radio, Dave penciled the starting and ending dates for each season, and how many gallons of syrup they had made. Today’s date was Thursday, March 5.

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Hilltown Postcards

Mud and Maple Syrup

We took the kids for pancakes at the Red Bucket Sugar Shack on the far end of a paved road in Worthington. It was a charmingly rustic place with long picnic benches and crushed stone on the floor. Red wooden buckets were hung from the maple trees along the road, for show only because no one serious about sugaring used them anymore.

The sugarer, Jeff, a tall, red-headed man who looked more like a cowboy than someone who boiled syrup, tapped the trees in his sugar bush and elsewhere, collecting the clear sap that ran through plastic tubing to a metal vat. He trucked the sap back to his sugarhouse to boil it down into syrup in a large, flat-panned evaporator that billowed steam, slightly sweet and pleasant. 

Sugaring meant early spring although, as we found, winter hadn’t given up. The days rose into the forties, but the nights fell below freezing. It was worrisome to us, because we were down to our last bit of firewood at our home. But that’s the temps the sugarers need so the maple trees don’t bud and end the season’s draw. It still snowed, but it was the wet kind that melted the next day. Poor man’s fertilizer, I heard it called. 

Now, feeling the change in the weather and a good breakfast out, we were ready for a drive around town. The trees were bare still. Snow lingered in the woods and in dirty drifts along the roads where the plow’s blade shoved it. But the light was stronger and the air had a different scent, something green and fresh.

Zack, Win’s father, promised to put us on his list of people who get fiddleheads later in the spring. The old man had his secret spot beside a river in Huntington. We ate fiddleheads before, but store-bought. The tightly coiled fronds were a little like asparagus although I parboiled them twice to cut the tonic taste.

Hank decided to take Indian Oven Road, named that because of a rock formation in the middle of this winding dirt way that must have looked like an oven to someone long ago. If any Indians were there, however, they were just passing through.

Not many houses were on this road, newer homes, of course, at either end, and a few hunting camps in the middle. Hank discovered it last fall and it saved a few miles getting from one main paved road to another so it was a bona fide shortcut except in the winter when the town did not plow.

The last big storm was a month ago so it should be clear, but as we rounded the first curve, the road’s surface ahead appeared wet and loose. Mud. The other early spring phenomena.

“This doesn’t look too good, Hank. Maybe we should turn back,” I told him.

But Hank kept going.

“We’ll be okay. Just relax.”

But we weren’t okay, because we only went a few yards before our VW bus sunk into mud. The tires spun but couldn’t catch anything hard enough to move forward or backward. Hank put the van in neutral. I closed my eyes.

We were stuck, really stuck.

I got the kids out of the VW as if four skinny kids would lessen its weight and asked them stay on the bank. They watched as I pushed the front.

Hank should be doing this, but I didn’t know how to drive stick. He had the VW in reverse, giving it a little gas, but it was useless. It was digging itself deeper.

I yelled for him to stop. No way was this going to work.

Hank lit a cigarette. He smoked then. His jaw was tight as he got out to check the van. Mud was halfway up the wheels. He shook his head and glanced at a log cabin a hundred yards back, built smartly where the road was firm.

A man came out. We didn’t know him, we were still new to town, and he scowled as he looked our way. Hank tossed the butt into the mud, then walked toward him.

The man Hank was talking with didn’t appear willing to give us a hand. But Dan came, reluctant, complaining about the people who didn’t have any common sense driving on a dirt road during mud season and how tired he was pulling them out.

Then, Dan saw our kids standing on the side of the road, looking a little scared about getting home, and his face softened. He had two daughters of his own. He wasn’t an unreasonable man, just an inconvenienced one.

He went to get a chain and his truck. He thought he could get us out, but Hank would have to be careful so he didn’t dent his truck’s grill when he towed us. The rescue was a success thanks to Dan, who I am glad to say later became a family friend.

And we rookie newcomers learned another lesson about country living that day.

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