(HOST) Commentator Deborah Luskin teaches writing and literature in libraries, hospitals and prisons throughout Vermont, but recently she got a taste of the sweet work of the sugarbush.
(LUSKIN) Every year I visit a friend’s sugarhouse, when the sweet steam of boiling sap signals the arrival of early spring. These have always been chatty, social visits, a time to catch up on the winter’s news even as Charlie stoked the fire, checked the sap level in the back pan and kept an eye on the syrup in front. Occasionally, I’d help sling wood into the sugarhouse or even help fire the arch, but it was always as an on-looker. I’d never been fully involved in sugar-making – until this year.
One of my daughters is dating a farmer whose family runs a sugaring operation, and I was invited to help out. We arrived on Saturday afternoon. Friends and family with off-farm jobs were boiling sap from the main line – three miles or so of plastic tubing that drains sap from about 800 trees directly into the holding tank that feeds the two, giant, evaporators. As the newbie, I was assigned to collecting sap from buckets on a distant patch of the 200-acre farm.
A tractor pulling the gathering tank struggled up the muddy woods road while four of us spread out through the trees. As a first-timer, the enterprise seemed like a treasure hunt, and I was delighted each time I discovered a bucket brimming with sap.
But as the tank filled my arms began to ache, and it wasn’t long before I greeted each bucket with a small, inward, groan. I was relieved when we arrived at a hillside threaded with tubing that carried sap directly from the trees into a galvanized tank. We emptied the tank by bucket brigade and delivered the load, grateful for the long afternoon light afforded by this year’s early switch to Daylight Savings Time.
Back at the sugar house, people were working like stevedores, hefting four-foot lengths of oak into the firebox, keeping the fire even and hot. While they stoked the fire, others fed the stokers a pancake dinner cooked right in the sugarhouse, dousing the pancakes with syrup straight out of the pan. It was a festive meal laced with continual work. We boiled till midnight, then fell into bed.
Overnight, the weather changed, and the sap run slowed. Even though there was little sap in the buckets, we still had to empty them, so that the sap wouldn’t sour. While there wasn’t much sap to gather, the chore still involved visiting every tree and emptying every bucket. Back at the sugarhouse, we again boiled till midnight. Then the predicted freeze arrived, locking the sap in the ground once more.
Now, we’re left waiting. We’re waiting for the weather to turn and the sap to flow again. Then we’ll be back out to the woods, working hard but joyfully, gathering the sweet sap of spring.