Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff

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СКАЧАТЬ that made the decision, and got to present his grandfather’s award. “Dad built the garage,” Bruce said smiling, “and added the canning room later.” They used to can in the garage at the house but had to thoroughly clean after each use because “Mom’s car had to go back in.”

      When my wife Mary and I paid Bruce a visit after sugaring season in 2014, he had a bigger tractor, and the roadside sugarhouse had become a reality. He and Bradley had built it into what was once the garage portion of the building where they’d done canning. When we arrived, Bruce was in the process of lining the interior with white-coated metal to provide washable walls. The wood-fired evaporator that Bradley had designed gleamed. Just that morning, Bruce had been testing a new filter press with clear plastic plates that was lighter and less expensive than metal models. It also enabled an operator to observe the syrup as it was processed. Bruce was sure it would catch on among producers.

      While we were at the sugarhouse, a few of Bruce’s grandchildren stopped by with his wife and daughter-in-law. Among them were Bradley’s young sons, Xavier and Gavin, both of whom now drill holes, tap in spouts, and hang buckets on their own trees. Regardless of process innovations or the weather, Bruce Gillilan felt good about the future of sugaring.

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      THE FIRST THING you notice when stepping into Lyle Merrifield’s sugarhouse in Gorham, Maine, is his collection of antique maple artifacts. Displayed are all manner of spiles and buckets—wooden and metal—syrup jugs, sugar molds, and other tools of the trade, along with quaint images of sugaring. But unlike the objects he so carefully exhibits, the gable-roofed, vertically sided sugarhouse with an ell for a salesroom is fairly new, bright and airy with lots of windows, including a transom over the double doors. A carpenter by trade, Lyle built the place himself, mostly using timber cut and milled on his property.

      Golden retriever by his side, the big, gentle man in his thirties, president of the Maine Maple Producers Association, smiled broadly as he joyfully took me through the spacious building immediately behind his home. Enthusiasm rose off him like steam from a raging evaporator. Not from a sugaring family, he had his first taste in kindergarten on a class outing to tap a tree. He remembers it clearly, the bus driver wielding a carpenter’s brace and drilling the hole. A few years later he made some syrup with the Scouts, but not until his early twenties did he really get started.

      Lyle lives on the twenty-five acres where he grew up in a now suburbanizing area. It’s a self-described “gentleman’s farm” where he bales hay and raises beef for hamburger, but his passion is maple, even though most of his six to eight hundred taps using vacuum tubing are on neighboring property. He sees advantages to sugaring in thickly settled areas, and tours are a mainstay of his business, with frequent visits by school groups.

      Cheerfully entrepreneurial, he gets over four thousand visitors on Maine Maple Sunday weekend and sells, in those two days, over five hundred gallons of syrup, some of which he buys in bulk from other state sugarmakers. Two dozen friends and family members man the farm and serve thousands of maple soft-serve ice cream cups. They go through a hundred pounds of pancake mix, and people wait in line for up to an hour. He sells maple-coated nuts, tubs of maple cream and maple butter, and can’t keep up with the demand for candy. His maple cotton candy is popular, and he graciously gave me a container of the woolly stuff for each for my children.

      Like other sugarmakers, Lyle thrives on hard work, being outdoors, contact with friends and family, and experiencing seasonal change. You wouldn’t think of him as a historian, at least not in the tweedy professorial way, but there’s something that fascinates him about maple’s uniquely tangible heritage, which is manifested in the artifacts he keeps on walls and shelves. He might not have generations of sugarmakers in his family like Bruce and Bradley Gillilan, but he feels deeply connected to the larger collective kin of sugarmakers.

      Perhaps it comes from his time spent handling carpentry tools, but he’s fascinated by the progress of technology that speaks to past lives—even something as simple as the transition from homemade wooden taps fashioned from hollowed sumac twigs to metal ones of iron, steel, aluminum, and stainless, and then plastic taps in various colors and formulations for use with tubing. Such objects “have a lot to teach about how and why people did things and the way in which they lived,” he told me with reverence in his voice. Not content with mere static displays, he sometimes sets up iron kettles on wooden tripods to demonstrate colonial boiling. He envisions himself on history’s continuum, seeing in his syrup not only the weight and density of sugar, but of time. He’s never alone, even when he’s by himself, he assured me.

      • • • • • • •

      LIKE LYLE, Mike Girard has a large collection of sugaring artifacts that he displays at meetings and in his sugarhouse, home, and business office. He feels a similar connection to a collective sugaring heritage that goes beyond a general sense of history. His part in the continuum of maple culture is deeply personal because he has attached himself to a piece of sloping sugarbush that’s been tapped for over a century and a quarter, by him since 1976. The land is his touchstone. More than ownership, his relation to the land is one of belonging.

      Though discouraged by his grandfather who sugared in Quebec, Mike began his maple ventures in 1960 at age eleven after observing some roadside buckets on a trip with his dad. Soon he was tapping on the family dairy farm in Simsbury, Connecticut, using an evaporator his father bought. Eventually the operation grew to six hundred taps. He is an athletic and articulate man with neatly trimmed dark hair who runs a construction company displaying a bulldozer on its logo. You wouldn’t immediately peg him as someone deeply in love with trees and a plot of land for its natural, sustainable values, but sugaring has made it so.

      Mike recalls making maple candy instead of doing homework, selling it at recess during fourth and fifth grades, much to the chagrin of his Catholic school nuns. Eventually he built a sugarhouse on the farm, but wanted more than roadside trees. After diligent searching, he bought land and a sugarhouse just about a mile south of Vermont on Number Nine Road in Heath, Massachusetts, a town of about four hundred souls. Although it’s eighty-five miles from his Simsbury home, a trip that gets longer as he gets older, he fell in love with the property and its history of maple production.

      The operation was begun by George Brown in 1887, and Mike speaks about it as one might an inheritance. He considers himself a steward, another in a line of several sugarmakers who have tried their luck here with nature and a bit of tinkering talent. Though it has been more than a century since Brown’s horses collected sap, and throughout the years Mike has installed over three and a half miles of vacuum tubing through the woods, he feels a bond with this land and its past that almost makes the differences in technology illusory. The sugarhouse has been rebuilt a couple of times and expanded, but the structure would probably be familiar to Brown despite an oil-fired evaporator and installation of battens over gaps between the old boards so wide “you could throw your hat through.” For decades the woods have been carefully managed for maples, and though storms have wrought sudden and sometimes violent modifications, the place has a purposeful, time-defiant personality formed by years of sugaring. “I suppose there will always need to be changes to keep maple viable,” Mike observed, “but it’s the memories that keep sugaring and the place alive.”

      Some memories are bittersweet, such as the closure a couple of years ago of Peters General Store about three hundred yards down the road. For almost a century, they had sold syrup from Mike’s sugarhouse. Other memories bring a smile, such as the two dozen times he won first prize at the Heath Fair, and the other ribbons he’s garnered.

      Mike took me through the cupola-topped board-and-batten sugarhouse with its adjacent two-bay woodshed. It holds thirty-three cords no longer needed since the purchase in 2000 of an oil-fired three-and-a-half-by-twelve-foot Darveau “Mystique” evaporator with digital auto draw-off, preheater, and air injection. He describes the machine as looking like “a СКАЧАТЬ