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Lizzie Apple
Professor Lourie
10 May 2015
Writing the Journey
Kenn Hastings and Breadload View Farm: Cornwall, Vermont
Carol’s Hungry Mind Café
“Come spring we sugar.” Kenn Hastings has been tapping maple trees for thirty
years. I notice his glasses, the white hair, ridges in the skin of his hands, that half-lisp he
has. In the café over black coffee he talks of Yankee ingenuity, of blackstrap: dark syrup,
thick like molasses. Of Indian sugar: molten maple boiled into light-brown granules.
A few weeks before this meeting, I got Hastings’s phone number. I knew from my
professor that Hastings worked three miles down the road from the college. I wanted to
visit the sugarhouse over the semester and write about what I saw. I called Hastings in
January to ask if I could watch him work during the sugar season this spring. He
responded with immediate enthusiasm.
“What do you know about sugaring?” he asked me over the phone.
“Nothing,” I blushed to no one.
Hastings breathed out a laugh from the other end, “That’s perfect!”
I’d imagined him younger and more concise – with just a few stories that
followed easy threads of action, and with less to say about the mechanics of his job. I’d
imagined he would treat me carefully, as I didn’t know anything about sugarmaking. But
even from the phone conversation, I knew that Kenn Hastings would always have
something to say, and that I probably wouldn’t ever really follow his extraneous bouts of
expression. He seemed to stumble over his language, too happy to make much sense at
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all. Nevertheless, I was ready to begin my stint as a neophyte sugarer. We planned that
first meeting for mid-February, at the beginning of the sugaring season.
It’s snowing outside the café, with temperatures in the teens. After such a cold
winter, the sugaring season will get a slow start this year. The trees need a little warmth
to get the sap flowing. “They are living things, you know.” Hastings speaks in reverence
about the trees, and clutching a navy-painted coffee mug, he explains that they check the
trees every February as the season gets started. They look for where the maples might be
wounded from the cold. The bark can freeze over winter.
The sugar maple is full of veins like straws, webbed tunnels. The sugarmakers tap
holes, one or two per tree during a season, and wait for the sap to flow through the spouts
and into the blue plastic tubes. They never tap a frozen tree – they are careful. But even
years afterwards, you can see the marks from old tap-holes healing, darker and wide
around the drilled places, patching up.
The sugar maple survives by lifting water from deep soil layers, searching in the
dark of the ground for sustenance. A sugar maple will grow a network of shallow roots,
and it shores up all the close-by nutrients for itself. The wood is harder and denser than
other maple species; its sap holds the highest sugar content – it gives the clearest kind of
sweetness.
The wood from a sugar maple can make violins and guitars and drum shells,
archery bows and pool cue shafts. The bark is ridged and grooved, like little rivers
formed in the vertical canyons in the trunks.
Hastings gulps at his coffee and explains that sugarmaking requires a lot of
waiting. He says that the syrup flow is erratic and uncertain. I think of him huddled in the
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sugarhouse and preparing pots and the dry wood to boil sap into syrup – wondering when
the buckets will fill. Hastings rests on the game of it, on how little the sugarmakers know
about what will happen each year. And some years it flows and flows. There have been
days of “devil runs,” sap never stopping and keeping him at the farm for hours and hours,
filling the buckets dark and rich.
Back in 1987 Hastings was working at a small farm in Cornwall. He didn’t have a
lot of money and he didn’t have a lot of instruments to work with. Sugarmaking was
much tougher then. He remembers one day that the big tub was leaking in the
sugarhouse. I imagine a metal vat, punctured at its side. I imagine gallons of sap,
somewhere in the boiling process, escaping steadily from the container. He was losing
sap and running out of time.
He stops to explain that once the sap leaves its tree, it is no longer sterile. Upon
impact with the air, the sap will begin to deteriorate – its yeasts and sugars start to eat
each other. Sugarmakers have to work fast.
He could not afford to have a leaking tub. So Hastings hopped into his truck and
dashed off to buy a new one. He didn’t have the $750 it cost, but he signed an IOU and
promised he’d pay in a month or two once there was syrup to sell. When Hastings
returned to the farm, he had “a backload of sap coming out his ears.” I imagine he’d
stored it in buckets. I imagine the buckets covered the whole floor of the sugarhouse. He
worked for twenty-seven straight hours. The sap kept flowing, a great run, a devil run,
but a long day. He boiled as much as he could. Hastings celebrates those long days. He
celebrates the community which surrounds the work of making maple sugar. He
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remembers all the thirty years of friendship and of help which have gotten him through
the business.
Tapping fingers on the café table, he uses words like saptrail, jack wax, sap spout,
sugarbush – words I don’t yet understand. Maple sap can be pulled into strands of candy
– la tire. French Canadian settlers arrived to the New World and learned about the sugar
maple from Native Americans. These new settlers gave French names to many of the
processes.
Maple sap can be made into cream and beer. I’d imagined only syrup, but now
I’m at this softwood, café table thinking I’d like to taste maple cream, thinking how thick
it is, does it come in a glass jar, is it white or still a little brown.
The Algonquin and the Iroquois lived in Vermont long before it was Vermont.
For years they collected sap in carved bowls. They bellied the dark wood with knives and
held the vessels under maple trees. They would heat stones over fire and then drop them
into bowls of sap, causing some of that water to evaporate. Less liquid, more sucrose.
One story describes a village of Native Americans lying on their backs
underneath a grove of maples, letting the thick sugar-liquid drip into their mouths; their
eyes closed and their palms facing the sky. It must have been a silent kind of sustenance,
a cold filling of the body with sucrose and water, slow and soft and peaceful.
Hastings moves his hands wider when he talks about how many new instruments
have been made over the decades for sugaring. At his farm a system of blue plastic sap
tubes connects all the maples. Each tree is drilled and its hole is then filled with a clear
spout. The blue tubes attach to the spouts. These tubes are suctioned. From the middle of
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February to the middle of March, all the sap is vacuumed to a central container,
eliminating so much of the labor which had been hauling buckets in the years before.
In the sugarhouse sits an enormous, silver oven with different vents for each grade
of syrup. He says that the steam puffs out of the great metal thing and fills the whole
room in March when they boil.
Hastings tells me that at Breadloaf View Farm they are full of stories, that he’s
got thirty years of sugar in his head. That every end of season he’s cleaned the 635 pieces
of technology (sap tubes, pots, pans, ovens, storage containers, wood-slat buckets, and
metal pails) they use in the sugarhouse all spring – how the whole thing feels sticky, feels
saccharine.
Breadloaf View Farm, Part 1
Kenn Hastings arrives on time in a Subaru. I
am standing on the sidewalk in front of St.
Mary’s Church, just down the road from
Carol’s coffee shop – thick coat and a scarf
tucked in at the neck. It’s March and it’s still
in the twenties. This year, the sap has come
late. You need cold temperatures at night and
warm temperatures during the day to get a good sap flow. Hastings and his crew at
Breadloaf have been waiting a couple of extra weeks this year in the cold.
My boots are hard with salt, and the wind is really picking up. I wish I’d worn
warmer clothes. Hastings takes his car right up to the curb, grinding over ridged ice. The
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crunching of it – I think how much this sounds like brushing hair, how I can almost hear
it inside my head. He’s dressed in snow-proof boots and layers of Patagonia coats. His
glasses are clean; he squints through them – “How are ya? Ready to go?”
Hastings has got the heat cranked up to eighty – all the thick air spicy and coming
from below the floorboards. We drive down Cider Mill Rd. I ask again about that “devil
run” they had a couple years back – all those hours at the farm while the sap flowed
steady dark. I wonder if his wife minded how long he was gone. He laughs with the
whole of his face pulled together – throaty, he says, “She knows I’ll come home when I
get hungry enough.” But he goes on to talk about how she visits the farm pretty often in
season. I imagine them together, moving through all the snow or watching sap boil in the
wood sugarhouse.
Vermont Maple Syrup Sold Here – a painted wood sign hangs on the sugarhouse
which faces Cider Mill Rd. A snow-packed driveway winds through the maples and the
small cooking cabins at the Farm. The trees are thinner than I thought they’d be. A couple
of the sugarmakers weave through the snow-paths on tractors. Outside the sugarhouse a
man in grey fleece stands with his sandwich and a plastic zip-lock.
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Hastings takes me to a row of maples down the back of the hill – the snow is thick
and loose here, almost dry. Some of it falls in my boots and I’m starting to lose feeling
from my toes in, to the under-slopes of my feet. He holds his hands over notches in the
bark, shows where the tree is healing itself. I find patches in the wood which are darker,
spots and patterns, all these from years of tap-holes. He speaks about the trees –
“remarkable, how they fix themselves.”
Hastings clears a new path in the snow to reach a tree for drilling. He turns back
to me as he works and says, “Sugaring is like a disease.” Hastings draws his fingers into
fists, glad with this new language he’s found for it. He means that it’s gotten into him,
that it’s been there for these thirty years. Every February will find him at the farm. I
never understood how anyone could want to be outside in Vermont all day in the winter.
But now I’m watching him pulling on this web of sap tubes, drilling tap holes, on a
tractor moving downhill over the frozen trails. Trees and mountain and snow – the
midday sun spreading like watercolor. I think, remarkable, how they fix themselves.
Breadloaf View Farm, Part 2
We drink maple sap from paper cups. Hastings calls it the blood of the trees. I’ve
returned to the farm with three college friends. Now there are five of us gathered around
the plastic bucket of sap and handling Dixie shot-glasses of the sugar-water. It’s sweet
this year. The trees are healthy and have stored up a high level of sugar over the winter.
It’s been really cold for a really long time, and the sap is finally starting to flow with this
break in the weather. It’s mid-March and it’s good sap. This tree-blood comes out ninetyeight percent water; they boil it down to syrup. Less liquid, more sucrose.
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My friends wanted to meet Hastings and to the see the farm. They’d heard me
telling stories about maple sap for long enough, and needed to see it for themselves. Meg
in her tie-dye pants and a pair of grasshopper earrings hang down to her shoulders.
Quincy who we picked up in the dining hall a few minutes before our trip with the
promise of tasting maple sugar. And Logan, Alaskan and owner of a silver Ford Explorer,
in his knit orange hat and his grey shorts. He asks all the right questions.
We hear a truck lurching over the gravel driveway, hauling sap. Hastings explains
that Breadloaf partners with sugarmaker neighbors for the boiling process. “It works out.
It just helps everyone this way,” he says, boasting a gap between his front teeth “We pay
them, they do less work, we sell more syrup in the end.” A lot of sugarmakers will
partner up for the boiling process. It’s a lot of extra work to make the actual syrup, to boil
it down to the perfect grade. It requires a good oven, a good sugarhouse, and a lot of
cooking-ware. It also requires a lot of time. But at Breadloaf, they do all of this work.
They produce syrup and cream and granulated maple sugar. They even produce a special
cooking syrup, robust in flavor and designed for baking breads and cakes and pies.
Inside the sugarhouse (where all of this boiling takes place) we listen to Peter
Gabriel on the radio. A vat of saccharine and brown in the corner; a great metal tub full
of the half-boiled sap. Its surface congeals in shiny pockets of dark sugar. Around us,
wood walls and the notched beams spreading from the ceiling vault. But Hastings takes
us out the side-door and into a red and black six-person ATV (the Polaris club car) which
pulls us muddy over paths between the trees. This whole farm is melting and mudding.
I’ll go home with it painted at my ankles and drying at the sides of my shoes.
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Hastings runs his muddy left hand over a sap tube; he’s got dirt stuck to his arms
up to their elbows. He leaves them dirty like that at work all day. “Taking the sap doesn’t
hurt the trees, but the tap-holes will stay like scars,” he doesn’t wince. “The whole tree
will grow up around the drilled part, even though you’ll still see it dark around the spot
for years after.” He pulls on the tubes and checks that they’re solid and stuck. The small
plastic spouts have to be pressed well into their tap-holes. Otherwise, they’ll lose their
sap. It’ll drip into the mud and frost instead of into the tubes.
Down a hill of maples and vanishing snow, they’ve set up a cabin; where all the
sap is suctioned into grey cylinder tubs. Milk-white, it looks sweet from the way the
liquid pools, a kind of sheen at its surface. Tree-blood, I think.
We walk back to the “club car.” I’m remembering that I’ve read that sap runs
before a rain and after a snow. And now in March the ground is thawing out; sap should
move easy out of each of these trees. But Hastings pushes on the brakes – he’s noticed a
tree that’s letting its sap out too slowly. La secheresse, ‘The dryness’ – symptom of dying
maples in Quebec in the 1970s.” This tree is giving sap slowly. The bark flakes and peels.
This one won’t live much longer. They’ll get rid of it by next year. He wedges the tube
deeper onto the spout, shaking his head.
He kicks it into drive and we’re winding up another mud-path on the way to the
sugarhouse again and these sap tubes are arranged like birdcages. They bulge outward at
their centers and gather at each end, an elliptical construction of blue plastic. They loop
and hook. We watch sunset through their blue bars.
In the sugarhouse they’ve got the sap boiling. Thick towers of steam coming from
vents in the metal face of the oven; the smell of dark sugar. “I’d hotbox a car with this,”
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Meg squints and whispers. Quincy grins, grabbing at the down coat barrier to Meg’s
elbow. It smells like a dark kind of sweet, tangy and full.
We sign the guest book before leaving, Meg with that crazy small handwriting she
likes to get elitist about, Logan signing his name and his home state, where apparently
they tap a lot of Birch trees for sap to make beer. Hastings and I shake hands; he asks us
to come back on Friday.
We pile into Logan’s Ford. A dining hall mug rolls at my feet. I’m packed in with
a backpack in my lap and some trash wrappers in the door-pocket. Meg and Quincy are
laughing in the backseat. I put the window down for the rest of the drive, feel my fingers
get thick with the half-cold.
Meg and Me, Post Sugar Trip
Meg left her water bottle at the farm. She thinks it’s in the backseat of the “club
car” and crusted with mud by now. This is the third one she’s lost since school started.
Meg broke her phone last week and three days ago I noticed a rotten potato on the
windowsill in her dorm room.
Once, Meg “fell off the world.” She bit down all her fingernails and told me she’d
given them to the moon. She wanted to help it grow. Meg left college in November and
had to start taking some medicine which sometimes made her stomach hurt and always
made her sleepy. She came back in February with an armful of watercolors that she’d
made in her bedroom at home by looking out the window. She hung them above her
dresser here at school, beside a handful of last autumn’s maple leaves. Her psychiatrist
had said that she wanted Meg to get outside more.
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Meg didn’t mind that it was still cold when we went to Breadloaf that afternoon.
In the “club car,” she shot her arms into the sky and grabbed handfuls of it, like it was
something to claw at. Meg thought Hastings was funny. Sometimes she and I still laugh
about the way he pulls his chin into his chest when he’s talking (or blathering.)
Meg likes to write about things in a tangerine journal, calls it marginalia but I
know it’s all really good stuff. One night, maybe a week after our visit to the farm, Meg
and I were out at a party and drinking dry white wine from a bottle over the hardwood
floor. I remember that she cut her lip on the aluminum wrapping, that she wiped the
blood with her shirtsleeve. Later, on the couch, she grabbed the tangerine notebook from
her shoulder bag and opened it to the page she wrote on March 30th.
The trees up here are the swallowing kind and the mountains of the same variety,
I think. I walk under them because there are only two ways to walk above (and only one
of which I am inclined to do.) I saw those hippies shit flowers all over the landscape and
they breathed gossamer unto the morning, the day, the night. Will the warm take it all
away? Only the warm will tell and it ain’t here yet, friendly fuzzy faces say. My body
feels all piece-like, not peace-like, but like a system of organs that fit together but don’t
fit together quite right. It’s really clean in Vermont, but sometimes I need dirty.
We were smiling on the couch in the half-dark and I felt a lot of bodies around us.
It was a system of organs, a draining of sap from the body, a boiling down to syrup. The
whole night felt sticky and my teeth were rough and salty. I knew Meg was a really good
friend with really good things to say and I was glad that she’d come to the farm with us. I
decided that Vermont is good at taking people apart, organizing them back into bodies. I
think I could feel myself drawing up water from the ground, redistributing it, shallow. I
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could feel a system of roots growing, nudging at the dirt, taking up new space. It was a
kind of healing, but also a kind of carrying. I thought, remarkable, how we fix ourselves.
Mother’s Day
“I have always been a farm-boy,” Hastings says he grew up on a farm in
Vermont. The first time he helped his father sugar he was ten years old. He says his
whole life has been an attention to the changing of things. He understands how time
works, and what space does. He knows about the moving onward and outward, knows
that this movement is not a displacement. Hastings sees it all cyclically.
He measures the sugaring season by Easter Sunday. First the tulips and lilies, then
the pussy willows. It’s usually warm by Easter; the sugaring season is usually over. And
he’ll go back to work for Pike Industries, managing roads and asphalt, paving over faults
in the highways. Asphalt is the work of the summer and fall.
This year at Breadloaf has been strange, though. Snow to mid-April. This has
been the third time in thirty years that Hastings made more syrup in April than in March.
The whole earth warmed up so slowly this year. “An abnormal season.” He made 1035
gallons of syrup, all light in color, all top grade. Here at the finish line, Hastings is “worn
out.” It’s time to move back to his other job. He has boiled and boiled – he says his hands
feel sticky even when they are not.
He says that by Mother’s Day, there are almost always trilliums blooming at the
top of Snake Mountain. It’s just a short drive from the sugarhouse in Cornwall. Hastings
will take his wife to the summit and they will put their feet at the edge of the white
flowerbed, a sprawl of fragrance shedding into dry air. The flowers are yellow at their
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centers, each with three lopsided petals. The dirt and the water in the ground, the thawing
and the growing. I think it must all be good. Remarkable, even.
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Works Cited
Lawrence, James, Rux Martin, and Paul Boisvert. Sweet Maple: Life, Lore and Recipes
from the Sugarbush. Montpelier, VT: Vermont Life, 1993. Print.