From The Editor
[img_assist|nid=648|title=|desc=|link=none|align=right|width=187|height=250]Until last spring, the Vermont sugaring ritual was something I understood and admired from afar. I’d gone out to watch people empty buckets and bring in the sap, then stood around a large pan, surrounded by steam watching it boil down. But I was merely an interested observer, beguiled by the charm of it all. I made all the appropriate remarks and was given a small bottle of syrup as a reward.
I’d watched; but I didn’t understand.
Not, that is, until last spring when my daughter and her husband decided to make syrup. And why not? They had moved into a new house. There were three or four dozen maple trees on the property and, more importantly, a small sugar house that hadn’t been used for years but still worked. It was wood fired, also a good thing since my son-in-law is what everyone in the family calls a “tree guy.”
More precisely, Mike is an arborist. He went to school (Paul Smith in the Adirondacks) to learn all the skills—academic and practical. He knows all the local trees by their Latin names and he can also climb them and go to work with a chain saw. He loves what he does.
As a matter of fact, Mike purely enjoys working. Which is, again, fortunate. Because that sugaring operation I’d found charming from afar turned out to be mostly hard work. Hours and hours of it.
The trees had to be tapped and then the buckets hung. Once the sap started flowing, it had to be collected every day. Mike and Hadley, my daughter, and their one-year-old, Brantley, did this in the last hour of daylight, at the end of the working day. Then they took what they’d collected to the sap house where they built up the fire (did I mention all the wood that had to be cut, stacked, dried and then burned) and began patiently boiling the sap down to syrup.
The whole thing required more or less constant attention. This meant eating dinner, standing up, in the sugar house. And once you started a run you had to stay with it until it was finished … sometime around midnight.
Then you got to do it again the next day. And the next. While holding down your day job. Mike would leave the house early, spend all day working to, say, landscape a property, then come home and start gathering sap, with the baby for a companion. They couldn’t wait, either of them, to see how much sap had flowed and how full their buckets were. It was like Christmas, that way. Hard work, but he and Hadley were down with it. They seemed to think it was fun. And Mike had this quaint notion that he was somehow getting over. That all this sap—25 or 30 gallons when all the dust (and soot) had settled—was his for free. “All you have to do,” he’d say, “is go out and get it.”
Didn’t cost a thing. In fact, they might even be able to sell a few jars for ready cash. All those hours and hours of labor that went into each gallon of that—admittedly delicious—syrup somehow didn’t count. To figure out how many gallons of sap he and his one-year-old gathered to make 30 gallons of syrup, just do the math: multiply 30 by 50 (the standard reduction ratio) and you get 1,500 gallons of sap. But who’s counting, when the whole thing had been so much fun?
This is a peculiarly Vermont attitude about life and its labors. Mike and people like him, who make Vermont what it is, don’t see any real distinction between work and the rest of life. It is, to use one of his favorite expressions, “all good.”
There is a lot of good in Vermont that is—to Mike’s way of thinking—there for the taking. You just have to work at it. In this issue, for instance, we visit the notion of order. Orderliness, that is. And how to get it. Kath James tells us about four sisters from New Jersey who moved to Vermont and began a booming granola business…just for the fun of working together. (Now for profit.) And Will Riseley spent some significant time with the members of the Stratton Mountain Ski Patrol—hard workers, for sure, but no group could possibly enjoy their work more. That and much, much more. Happy Spring!
