Giant sugar maples line each side of the abandoned town road above our farm – gnarled veterans with ropy bark and knobby knees. When the fog is just right on spring and autumn mornings, the trunks look like nothing so much as enormous elephant legs descending from the mist above, their unseen owners parading downhill in search of the nearest Ringling Brothers tent.
No piece of land has everything, it seems, and when we first moved to this Vermont hill farm nearly six years ago, I was dismayed by its lack of a sugarbush. The leaning red barn and peeling white farmhouse cried out that this farm, by rights, ought to have a sugarbush. But the hillside above the farm was a thicket of hemlock and red maple, often so thick that even seeing into it was a challenge. The only clear exception was the line of giant sugars along the old roadway, a constant taunt over what might have been.
My first thought was that the sugarbush had been cut for lumber at some point in the past – the ultimate hill-farm defeat. But our town has never been among the wealthier hereabouts, and who’s to say what that farmer was thinking as he removed the old crosscut from its peg in the barn.
A brief investigation in the woods above the house seemed to confirm my worst fears: I found the remains of a stone foundation, in just the size and place where a sugarhouse ought to have been.
So I was startled that first fall when, looking back at the hillside from across the pasture, I saw a sea of orange and yellow foliage. That couldn’t all be red maple, could it? No way! I hustled past the house and crashed into the hemlock thicket above. Soon, I had found a single, large sugar maple, its trunk barely visible from even a few feet away. A bit more crashing, a few more discoveries, and, as with one of those eye puzzles that suddenly morphs from a random blur of color into a surprising 3-D image, I saw for the first time that the old sugarbush was still there.
The county forester came by within a few weeks. His increment borer confirmed the obvious: these sugar maples weren’t in great shape. A quarter of them were standing dead. Close to half were hardly growing at all. Nature’s cards were plainly on the table: this hillside was meant for red maple and hemlock, not sugar maple. The soil, for some reason, was not sweet enough for young sugar maple to take hold.
Ignoring this evidence, I drafted a dramatic plan for my consulting forester: let’s cut out all the softwood, give those maple crowns some growing room, and maybe even use the tractor to spread lime and really get things going. She, however, had a more clear-eyed analysis: my plan had at least a 50/50 chance of turning the entire hillside into a wild raspberry plantation.
Why is this old sugarbush slowly dying? Has the hillside been depleted by generations of sheep and cows, whose calling cards – scraps of barbed wire and evidence of soil erosion – are still to be seen? Is the modern scourge of acid rain sucking the life out of the soil – the life, at any rate, that I want to see lived? Or was this sugarbush actually planted in the first place, making it more a monument to human folly than to wholesome agricultural days of old?
Not knowing the answer to any of these questions, I’ve scaled back. We’ve cleared some of the softwood but left most. I’ve spread lime where it’s easy. We’ve opened up around the best of the crowns but are leaving the struggling trees to end their days in coniferous privacy. I’m hoping my strategy will add a few years to the best trees’ lives, especially given that “a few years” to a sugar maple could be far longer than the 40-odd years I’ll be able to spend on this place. Assuming I’m lucky.
We put out a few hundred taps out each spring, not the few thousand I once imagined, and we have plans to rebuild a smaller sugarhouse on the foundation of the original. But is all this the right thing to be doing? The maples are clearly saying it’s time to go, yet I’m insisting that it’s not, for why bother to labor on a Vermont hill farm if you can’t start and finish your day with a medicinal draft from the maple syrup jug?
They say no animal has a better memory than the elephant, whose long life and measured wisdom have earned it a treasured place among the earth’s inhabitants. If only I could interview my band of elephants as they amble past our hill farm on certain autumn mornings. Where have they been? Where are they going? And where do I fit in?