Working outside on a sunny afternoon in early March, I’ll catch the scent of somethinglike burnt sugar, and it will take me a minute to remember what it is. It will have been a year since I caught that first whiff of boiling maple sap. The smell will lighten and sweeten over the course of the afternoon, but it starts off a little sharp. If I look to the south, I will see a cloud of steam rising above Chris Kendall’s sugarhouse, a snug structure he built close beside Old City Brook. When I walk by later with my dog, there will be pickups parked nearby, and if the day is especially fine, someone catching the sun in the open doorway will wave and call hello.
A little farther down the road, I’ll see another cloud of steam above the Phelps sugarhouse, where I first learned about making maple syrup. Fifteen years ago, I was that most pathetic of creatures – a newly arrived flatlander. I had read somewhere that blueberry muffins and iced tea were the traditional fare in Vermont sugarhouses, so I knew what to do when the family invited me to stop by for a visit. Somewhat perplexed when I presented them with a paper bag of freshly baked muffins and a jug of tea, they thanked me politely and set them aside. That day, after they had explained the basics, they gave me a job to do. Equipped with a long-handled strainer, I stood beside the stainless steel flue pan and skimmed off the brownish foam that rose to the surface of the boiling sap, tiny bits of bark and wood pulp, I was told. As friends arrived throughout the afternoon, and I was introduced as the new neighbor, I began to take a certain pride in my skimming technique. I might not know enough to join in on the gossip, I might not get the jokes, but I was a pretty good skimmer.
The Phelps sugarhouse sits at the base of Bear Mountain, a good-sized hill with caves near the top where bears hibernate. The floor is packed dirt, hard and smooth, and there are a few old lawn chairs for sitting. If Sunday afternoons are good for socializing, much of the real work in a sugarhouse goes on at night, after the day’s sap run has been collected. Fifteen years ago, the Phelps boys and their friends would meet after school to gather the sap in buckets from about 900 taps. They worked fast, fanning out in the sugarbush, pouring the sap into a collection tank on the back of a tractor-drawn wagon driven by Delwin Lewis, whose grandson and great-grandson were part of the regular sugarhouse crew.
At some point, once the fire was burning steadily in the arch, and a bit of local news had been chewed over, and the hot dogs had been roasted on sticks (traditional fare, it turned out, was cold beer and hot dogs), there would be four or five people left for the long hours of boiling. By my second year I had been promoted to the job of “drawing off,”keeping an eye on the gauge at the front of the syrup pan that lets you know when the sap has reached a temperature of 7.1 degrees above the boiling point of water. When the needle tips past the 7 at the top of the gauge, the person drawing off opens a valve, releasing the syrup into a stainless steel bucket, and then shuts the valve when the needle dips back below the 7.
It’s crucial to draw off at the right moment, before the syrup burns. And you don’t want to draw off for too long, or else the syrup will be watery. After you have drawn off, though, it will be a while before you need to do it again, and you are free to move about. I liked to go outside and walk a short distance away so I could look back at the sugarhouse, to see yellow light pouring through the windows and the ghostly cloud of steam hovering above. Overheated from standing near the arch, I relished that first breath of cold air. Because sugaring takes place at the intersection of two seasons, it’s possible to experience both in a single day. The mud that had sucked at my boots in the afternoon would crunch underfoot at night.
In 1997, the year I learned to draw syrup, the comet Hale-Bopp’s long orbit brought it close enough to be seen from Earth. In March, at its nearest point, the comet was 122 million miles away, and though it was tearing along at breakneck speed, it seemed to hang suspended in the spring sky. Night after night, we would stand outside the sugarhouse to watch it, fascinated, as the sap boiled inside. The comet wouldn’t be back around for another 2300 years, someone remarked. If Bear Mountain and the sugarhouse and all of us grew smaller in the silence that followed, there was a kind of glory, too, in just being there at the right time.