Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [128]
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,