SUGARING TIME, VERY LOCAL VERSION

 

The sugar shack behind my house

The sap started running more than a week ago, what with the weather reaching into the 50’s, holding to that temperature one day as late as ten o’clock at night.  The untimely warmth would have been surprising but for the fact that we’d been getting used to seesawing temperatures. There was snow. Then there was no snow. Two weeks before it had been nearly 20 below zero. There will surely be snow again before it's gone for good.  With a rush to put in taps and begin collection, we* had several barrels full in no time. There are about 60 taps in all this year, my trees and the Hustons' combined. This first collection was to be boiled down in the first sugaring weekend. Keep in mind the ratio of sap to syrup is about forty to one. 

The sugar shack circa 2015.

Sugaring had been done here by the previous owners–we’re talking about pre-2010–and they left behind a few barrels and tubing for sap collection that were a help getting this operation going.   

INSIDE

 Art wall

The evaporator at work.  Note charred woodwork around the chimney, right.

A syrup supervisor at work.  (Ben, home from college
for a weekend of sugaring)

OUTSIDE 

Sketchy chimney

The sugar shack looks better in some respects than it once did, and is slightly more comfortable; that is, no more standing in the rain if you need to get away from the steam, a choice of seating, and–well, that's about it, really.  Most of the time spent in the sugar house consists of ladling in fresh sap, keeping an eye on the color, adding wood, and making sure the whole thing isn’t going to burn down.  (I refer you to the chimney, above.)  

Choice of seating, sheltered from the weather, mostly.

Plans are afoot (i.e., being talked about) for an upgrade.  What we need, I learned, is an arch.  I wasn't quite sure why, and checked out the roof, figuring it had something to do with the construction, inhibiting the flow of the steam and smoke plumes in some way I didn't understand.  If we're going to upgrade, why not replace the chimney?  

Anyway, I looked up "sugaring arch."  Back in the 1800’s, according to a local's memory as recorded by the Woodstock History Center, “people went off into the woods to sugar with only the following tools, viz., an ax, a neck yoke, gathering pails, and two five pail kettles.  They would chop down two trees, dig out the snow from between them, put up two crotches [trenches?], make wooden trunnels [pins for fastening timbers], hang on the kettles and build a fire.  And they would make wooden troughs and spouts or spiles [spigots], and tap the trees with their ax.”  Sounds like fun.  But that description said nothing about arches.  A major improvement on this primitive sugaring a bit later in the century was the building of a stone arch.  This still didn’t explain exactly what an arch was in this context, but after thinking about it, it seemed there was nothing else in the design that could be described as an arch except for the stone, or the brick or whatever it was–maybe the trench described above?–that contained the fire.  Hence, the current “arch” in the shack–and this definitely needs to be in quotation marks–may be the enclosure of the fire within concrete blocks.  Which blocks, by the way, tend to disintegrate over time due to the intense heat. 

Hard to imagine that I wouldn’t have known as least some of this stuff, given that sugaring has been going on here for the last ten years.  

A modern arch with evaporator on top, complete with its own chimney.

No olde neck yoke needed

More time-passing activity, Ben chopping.  Does this give the impression
Ben was the only one on duty?  Not!  In reality grandson Hans was too,
as was Lesley, and Chris who really does most of the sugaring work. 

SOMETIMES IT'S MAGICAL

Keeping an eye on the sap often lasts into the night.

Passing time waiting for the sap to thicken and darken can be beautiful and perhaps introspective. Interesting things may happen. There may be interesting sounds.  And not only at night.  On the first day of sugaring, family members tending the fire were loudly serenaded by a whippoorwill, and following that, a barred owl (who-cooks-for-yoooou). In the afternoon a very large coyote streaked across the field in front of the sugarhouse after crossing my lawn–yes, that close!  We all think it may have been the one we’ve seen around here before, the same one that stood not 15 feet away from–and looked directly at–my insanely barking dog a while ago, and the very same one who left a big scat right next to my house last week.  

I, by the way, was either indoors and heard nothing, or was outdoors distracted by my apple tree pruning, and missed all the sounds and sightings. Alas.

Our local coyote, photo from Chris Huston's wildlife camera

Robert Frost, not surprisingly, was moved by the hours spent sugaring.  I looked up Frost to see if he’d had something to say about sugaring, as indeed he had.

EVENING IN A SUGAR ORCHARD

 

From where I lingered in a lull in March

Outside the sugar-house one night for choice,

I called the fireman with a careful voice

And bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch:

‘O fireman, give the fire another stoke,

And send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.’

I thought a few might tangle, as they did,

Among bare maple boughs, and in the rare

Hill atmosphere not cease to glow,

And so be added to the moon up there.

The moon, thought slight, was moon enough to show

On every tree a bucket with a lid,

And on black ground a bear-skin rug of snow.

The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.

They were content to figure in the trees

As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.

And that was what the boughs were full of soon.

WHAT IT'S ALL FOR

It all boils down to this, a kettle full, ready to pour into jars.

And ultimately, this.

In the steam:  Chris Huston, chief sugarer and guru

* Whenever I say ‘we’ I am using the royal we. I do almost nothing, no lugging of barrels, no setting of taps, and no supervising of the boil. The work is done by the Hustons with occasional assistance from other family members or whoever else happens to visit.