Sugaring in Vermont

I won a writers' retreat in Vermont. No-one could have been more surprised than me: I am the kind of woman who normally doesn't even manage to win the home-made ash tray in the church fete's tombola.

Vermont is very similar to the Lake District... with more trees, fewer sheep and bigger mountains. Whereas spring is well-established in Cambridge now, Vermont remains in winter. Eager to walk, I headed up the lane and found a maple syrup shack. Last time I was here, I had walked past the hut oblivious to its purpose, but this time it was a hive of smoke and activity.

I would have stayed outside, taking a few photographs of the quaintness of the building, but Harold's wife invited me in to meet Harold whose family have been sugaring on this site for generations, and in this particular shack since Harold's father built it in 1946. The things that I had mistaken for ropes coiled around the winter trees were, on closer inspection, a complex network of pipes. In the olden days, syrup was taken from the maple trees through hammering in a tap and hanging a bucket underneath, into which the sap would drip as it made its way up the tree. Now the maple syrup farmers use vacuum pipes which carry the sap to the shack. The sap runs at the end of the winter when the nights are cold but the days are warm. This year, the sap had been running for about 6 weeks.

I'd seen the sugar shacks last time I was here. They are slightly dilapidated wooden buildings with elevated roofs. During sugaring, the roofs are further elevated to let the smoke and steam escape. The smoke comes from huge log burners which are used to heat the shallow pans of sap which sit on top of them. The sap boils down until only syrup remains. I know all of this because I bombarded Harold and his wife with questions. I didn't mean to, but from the minute that she invited me in I was in a fever of excitement: gabbling away about a chapter I had once read in Laura Ingalls Wilder about the maple syrup harvest, and how we had sugar beet in Lincolnshire where I'd grown up, and had it been a good winter for her, and how I hadn't tasted maple syrup until my friend Meg brought us some from Canada. It was possible that Harold's wife was regretting inviting me in before we reached the threshold of the shack, and I was regretting my children's absence. Normally, they can be trusted to ask the same questions as me so that I don't talk quite as much.

There are times when I wish that I was a photographer. I'm not a visual person and prefer to play with words, but the inside of the shack was a world that I would have loved to have had the expertise to catch on camera. Two naked light bulbs illuminated the top of the stove where five long pans of syrup were simmering. Steam and smoke filled the shack like a thick sea mist, through which Harold's white-bearded face swam in and out of focus. I paused for breath long enough for him to tell me some of the logistics of the harvest: each tree produces a quart of syrup and, as a small scale producer, Harold runs a thousand taps. They export their syrup directly all over the States. The early syrup is pale and delicate, the later syrup is dark and rich and better suited for baking. This was their last tapping and he allowed me to take a taste. It was as thick and rich as black treacle.

In terms of harvesting the syrup, little has really changed for decades, but in terms of marketing and sales, the modern world has intervened. The making of traditional tin containers, for example, has been outsourced to China with the result that - Harold gave me a sly look as though testing out my political leanings - the tin is contaminated and he now has to use glass bottles. He lowered his voice and grinned. England apparently exports tin containers as well, but they're badly designed so he loses a quarter of an ounce per can and, therefore, can't use them. Unable to think of an appropriate response, I asked after the weather.

We talked about the mildness of last winter which had resulted in virtually no syrup harvest. Did this mean, I asked, that syrup was being sold for a higher price this year? By this time, I think that he had begun to feel quite sorry for the English woman who clearly knew nothing about the wider world and the scandals which abound in every aspect of farming. He paused in his work.

'The thing is,' Harold said, 'major buyers are trying to drive down the price they are willing to pay to local producers because they claim to have accumulated a stock pile of syrup.'
'Oh.' I tried to remember if I had read this anywhere - perhaps in the New York Times. I thought of twenty-year old news stories from the Daily Mail which criticized the EU's stockpiling of butter and wheat. My thoughts had drifted to thinking of pancakes when Harold brought me back to reality: 'If they do have a stock pile, it's because of the illegal harvest they stole from the forests in Quebec.'

I said goodbye to Harold and continued walking down the lane which looked as though it should have been in the English Lake District with a head filled with images of contaminated Chinese tin, badly constructed English gallon pots, and stockpiles of stolen Canadian syrup.

Back at the retreat, I carefully recounted the things that Harold had told me to the other writers gathered at the dining table. One of the writers was also a professional photographer. He hoped to visit Harold the next day to take photographs but we were snowed in and by the time we could walk up the lane the harvest had finished, the stove was cold, and the shack had been left until the following year.