Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff

Чтение книги онлайн.

      WHILE THE NEARINGS might be an extreme example, their back-to-the-land gospel resonates with many sugarmakers who hunger for some measure of financial independence entwined with an almost spiritual contact with nature and creation of something tangible and pure. A few years ago I visited Erica Andrews, then at Hurricane Farm in Scotland, Connecticut, a hardscrabble slice of southern New England she cultivated with her husband, Chris. She was dressed in a sweatshirt, work pants, and ski hat beneath which there was a big smile and thick blond braids. Her kids darted around like wood sprites as we talked. Fiercely individualistic, she wanted to live as independently as possible. The farm was named for a hurricane lamp, something the wildest storm can’t extinguish.

      Growing up in suburbia and earning a British literature degree with a minor in theater and photography, Erica never expected to be a farmer. Her agricultural odyssey started when she and Chris were dating and he decided he wanted a couple of chickens. Soon they had more chickens, a garden, and were raising turkeys. She was waitressing in a martini lounge at the Mohegan Sun casino, and he was teaching school when their daughter was born in January 2004. At that point, they decided to supplement their income by freezing and canning vegetables, which also enabled Erica to be a stay-at-home mom. In spring, she sugared over an open fire with a couple of chafing dishes resting on concrete blocks, making two gallons the first year and three the second. She started baking breads for sale. Hungry for knowledge, she attended livestock auctions and began buying and selling animals, sold food at farmers’ markets, and made contacts in the agricultural community.

      They had been looking for a house for the better part of two years when they bought Hurricane Farm in 2008, a bargain fixer-upper on just a few acres. She termed the place a natural farm, not organic, but said that they lived an organic lifestyle, meaning close to the land. Though her life has now moved on, farming routines worked well for the family at the time. It allowed her long hours with the children, who saw the fruits of hard work and knew where their food came from, she told me when we sat on a picnic table near her sugarhouse while her then six-year-old played in melting snow, occasionally tasting syrup.

      A distinctive structure, the sugarhouse featured a cupola-topped gable roof supported by cedar posts and open on all but one side where it was attached to another farm building. Between posts, firewood was stacked, creating temporary walls. “We’re outside people,” she said, “and though sleet and rain make it tough sometimes, we want to enjoy outside weather.” The small, single-pan, foot-and-a-half-by-three-foot evaporator, purchased on credit around the time they bought the house, yielded twelve gallons of syrup in 2009, its first year. They tapped seventy-five trees on their own and neighboring land using tubing fed into five-gallon pails resting on the ground. In addition to syrup and fruits and vegetables, the farm produced eggs, beef, pork, turkeys, sheep, ducks, and rabbits for pets. They ran a meat-based Community Supported Agriculture program and were vendors at the Coventry Farmers’ Market a few towns away, the state’s largest.

      Rough around the edges and with evidence of many projects in progress, Hurricane Farm was a throwback by a couple of generations to when rural Connecticut was full of small places that grew a variety of crops sustaining families. “Being as self-sufficient as possible is the heart of my ambition,” Erica said with religious conviction as she opened the firebox and tossed in a few chunks of wood. “It’s what makes me thrive.” I never asked if she’d ever heard of the Nearings, but articulate and energetic, she is among their direct spiritual descendants. The way of the future, she postulated, is for people to do more for themselves on their own land, or buy directly from small local farmers. Sugaring teaches patience and the need to slow down and be aware of the world around you, that things come in their moment. “I feel like I’m dancing with nature,” she said with a wide smile.

      • • • • • • •

      FOR BRUCE GILLILAN of Fletcher, Vermont, sugaring is not only a connection to the land, but a legacy that has long infused family life with meaning, an unbroken chain stretching back generations. Bruce sugars in a country of tiny towns and modest houses set in rolling green hills patched with forest and fields north and just a bit east of Burlington. It’s prime sugaring country where hay is also regularly cut and a few horses or cattle are pastured. J. R. Sloan’s Green Mountain Mainlines, the nation’s largest sugaring operation, using sap from about 130,000 taps, according to Bruce, is headquartered in town, and the roadside welcome sign greeting travelers depicts an old-time sugarhouse.

      The first time I pulled into his driveway at the very beginning of April a few years ago, temperatures were climbing toward eighty and the season was ending early, though the high peaks of the Green Mountains not too far distant were still capped with snow. A square-jawed, plainspoken man with penetrating brown eyes, Bruce is a vice president with Leader Evaporator in Swanton, Vermont, a short ride from the Canadian border. You might think that after forty years at the country’s largest maple equipment manufacturer, selling and installing evaporators and troubleshooting sugarhouse problems, he’d have a largely analytical approach to the business. But maple remains deeply personal.

      Bruce’s grandfather started sugaring in the early 1900s; his father continued the operation, and Bruce grew up in it. Now his son Bradley, the eldest of four, sugars with him and also works for Leader. Knowing the time and effort that go into the frenetic season, the “guys in the shop think I’m crazy,” he laughed, shaking his head. “But I can’t put a value on the days I spent working beside my dad and the time it gives me with my son.” Bruce and his dad would collect sap together. When partway through, his father would fire the evaporator, and Bruce would finish gathering. When Bradley turned ten, the three of them collected together, and Bruce thought his dad would head to the sugarhouse to light the arch when about halfway done. Instead, he sent Bruce to the sugarhouse so he could keep collecting with his grandson. Bruce chokes up as memories flood back. “I didn’t get it until later,” he said. It’s no surprise the operation is called Gillilan Family Maple.

      With Bruce at the controls, I rode the draw bar of a blue tractor as we headed through a meadow, crossed a brook, and entered the woods on a rutted path. “It’s a bit muddy back there,” he warned as we approached a board-and-batten pump house beneath evergreens. “We usually sugar until the tenth or even the fifteenth of the month, but with this weather we’re just about done.” Crisscrossed with blue and black tubing, the maple orchard is punctuated with pine and hemlock and a smattering of oak. Normally he puts out about eight hundred taps, but this year he only had time to set two-thirds of that amount. “The property has potential for twelve hundred, maybe thirteen hundred,” he said with a wave of his hand.

      Back in 2010, the sugarhouse was fairly deep in the woods, built of rough vertical boards darkened with age. He told me about an experimental RO—a reverse-osmosis machine—that Bradley built, as we looked over the two-and-a-half-by-ten-foot evaporator sitting on a concrete pad. Bradley is good at tinkering, he said wistfully, something he got from his grandfather. The family’s first sugarhouse was built nearby in 1906 but had to be moved downhill a few hundred yards because a downdraft on a stiff south wind would blow flames out of the firebox door. He and Bradley were thinking about a new one close to the road where they could attract visitors and make it easier for families to stop by.

      The woods were filled with ghosts and memories. Bruce pointed to tapped trees that were too small when he began working here with his dad, and lines that were strung by Brad. He showed me where he and his son were thinning out the softwoods, but not too quickly, lest the maples get sun-scald from a sudden increase in light. His dad died in these woods, marking a home site for Bradley. He was crushed by a falling tree. Bruce’s eyes dampened as he showed me the spot.

      Returning from the woods, we entered the canning room attached to a gambrel-roofed garage his father had built in 1985 and also used as a workshop. With its knotty-pine walls and gleaming stainless-steel counter, it seemed like a cross between a cozy cabin and a chemistry lab. The walls were filled with blue, red, and yellow ribbons and plaques the family had earned for its СКАЧАТЬ