Sugarin'

A Primer in Six Easy Lessons

Here's everything you need to know about maple sugaring...tongue in cheek, of course. What follows is looooong, but worth the time. This was originally published in The Chronicle in Barton, VT in 1977  by Chris Braithwaite. It's quoted exactly as originally published. Enjoy!

Editor's Note: We found the following notes scribbled on the backs of old pin-up calendars, newspapers and lunch bags in a sugar house in the remote hills of West Glover. The author identifies himself only as the Sugar House Troll. Save for some reorganization and corrections of a few lamentable errors of spelling, grammar and fact, we pass on his notes intact.

Lesson I: Where It Comes From

Anybody from down country knows just how it's done. You poke a hole in a likely looking tree, and catch the maple syrup as it runs out.

If fact, maple syrup is made from sap, and sap is so close to water that a thirsty man would never notice the difference. This sap yields so little syrup so grudgingly that the sugar maker is never quite sure that his gathering crew didn't take a shortcut and dip the last tubful out of the brook. If he's a modern sugarmaker with no gathering crew to holler at, hew suspects that a chipmunk chewed through his pipeline and dropped the end in the brook.

It does very little good to yell at chipmunks, and even less to yell at gathering crews.

Lesson II: How to Get It

Maple trees take exception to having holes punched in them, and get even by teasing sugarmakers almost to death. If it's too cold, sap won't run. If it's too warm, it won't run. Come perfect, clear spring weather with freezing nights and thawing days, it'll run like Roger Bannister for a few days, and then stop. A storm might make it run again, but a rain storm will probably be too warm. A snow storm might make the sap run, but you never know. This is because the trees will drop down gobs of the white stuff and knock the tops off your buckets. They'll fill up with melted snow which yields just as much syrup as brook water. It doesn't do any good to yell at maple trees, either.

Some of your modern sugarmakers have been so frustrated by this experience that they have put the whole bush on pipeline and hooked up a pump to suck the sap out of the trees. That probably doesn't work either, but may be a good way to use up surplus electricity.

Lesson III: How to Make It

Having gone about nuts waiting for the trees to give up a little sap, and having worked his help and his equipment almost to death lugging it to the sugar house, the sugarmaker now proceeds to get rid of it. This is accomplished by building a big fire under it and turning it into steam. Along with wood ashes and empty beer cans (see Lesson Six: How to Get Rich), steam is the major by-product of the maple industry.

It's a scientific fact that the steam from all the millions of gallons of sap boiled off in Vermont each spring rises to the heavens and hangs around till June, when it rains down on the sugarmaker's hay fields. This is another one of the wonderful cycles of nature.

The sugarmaker watches and waits and measures and dips and cusses and waits some more until the big moment when he opens the tap on his sugar pan and a pitiful little trickle of maple syrup drizzles out. For every 45 gallons of water he sends up in steam, he gets about a gallon of maple syrup. This is ridiculous.

Lesson IV: How to Keep Warm

The well-equipped sugarmaker will have somebody on hand to keep. Firing a sugar rig is a fine example of the way people tend to lose track of why they're doing a job and get obsessed with the task at hand. The gathering crew, for example, gets obsessed with keeping the buckets empty, and hates the trees for filling them up again. The sugarmaker wants to convert all that sap to steam, and hates the crew for bringing in more.

Now the fireperson's job is to get rid of that huge pile of wood he spent the winter collecting. And a sugar arch is a wonderful device to get rid of wood. He stokes it and pokes it and stuffs it full of the driest bits of split hardwood and dead cedar and valuable antique barn board he can lay his hands on, and takes great pride in the hole he leaves in the pile.

Becky the Fireperson says this is a wonderful release for anyone who has spent the winder trying to stretch a February woodpile through April.

For the modern sugarmaker who heats his home and boils his sap with oil, the satisfaction much lie in knowing he'll keeping a lot of Arabs pretty busy.

Lesson V: How to Get Around

The common forms of transportation in the maple sugar bush are horse, tractor, foot, snowshoe and helicopter. None are satisfactory. The difficulty here is snow, which varies in depth from one inch above the top of the highest pair of boots present, to the approximate height of Wilt (the Stilt) Chamberlain's belly button. This year a neighbor helped us string pipeline on skis. It was an interesting performance. He got around fine. But with a ski on each foot and a pole in each hand he couldn't carry anything that wouldn't fit in his pocket, or get closer than three feet to any tree (except once, when he used one to stop himself. He is trying to figure out a better way to stop himself.) If he got off his skis to do something, he was too short to climb back on.

He suggested that his combination of high mobility and utter uselessness made him an ideal candidate for supervisor. Every sugar bush needs a supervisor, and he did fine until the Troll accidentally backed the tractor over his ski tips.

Lesson VI: How to Get Rich

Maple sugaring is highly profitable, provided that you own the sugar bush in the first place, your grandfather bought the equipment in 1926, and you don't figure your time is worth anything. If you figure the cost of buying the bush, equipping it, and paying the help and yourself a living wage, sugaring would make a tax shelter that could keep a Rockefeller dry.

But there are some profitable opportunities in sugaring. It should be possible to obtain free help by convincing the neighbors that sugaring is an indispensable part of the Rural Experience, and a whole lot of fun. Make it clear that in turn for the experience, the help should provide some refreshment. Any beverage will do except milk, coffee, hard liquor, orange juice, tea, soft drinks, apple cider or water.

After the wood pile is gone, the buds are out and the sugar house is full of empties, haul the syrup home and sell it. That will cover expenses. Then collect all the empty refreshment cans, rent a truck, and head for the redemption center.

That is your profit.

Chris Braithwaite, The Chronicle, 1977