Lynn Caulkins

There were only two of us tapping in 2012.  Nick was diagnosed with Lymphatic Leukemia in November.  In February, he was slowing gaining strength, pushing through the greatest challenge of his life, but yet did not have nearly the stamina required for sugaring.  Nick wanted to sugar one more year, a spring, annual event he had done all his life.  He never got the chance, he passed August 8, 2012.

In May of 1992 I knocked on the door of the milk house on Nick’s farm.  Nick, a seventh generation Vermonter with bright, blue eyes, salt and pepper hair, a big, pearly white smile and just the right amount of weathering to his face to keep him good looking in an outdoorsy way, opened the door.

“Can I help you sugar, next year?,” I asked meekly.

“You can try,” Nick wryly answered with his Vermont accent.

Little did I know how strenuous a task lie ahead.  Little did Nick know, I would sugar with him the next twenty years.

Sugaring is the process of extracting watery, sap from Maple trees and boiling it down to produce golden, thick maple syrup.  It takes roughly 44 gallons of sap to boil down to one gallon of syrup. The state of Vermont produces approximately 1.5 million gallons of syrup a year, the most in the US.  In The Maple Sugar Book by Helen and Scott Nearing, the Nearing’s show evidence of explorers documenting Native Americans boiling maple sap as far back as 1705.  Native Americans, however, continued to boil the sap, past syrup to maple sugar, much easier to carry and trade.

Town meeting day is always the first Tuesday in March.  The day after is the start of our sugaring season.  Nick’s brother, Donny, Nick and I would load the wooden box on the back of the small tractor with several reels of plastic pipeline.  Squeezed between the coils were our Igloo lunch boxes, or “dinner pails”, as Nick would say, three pairs of snowshoes and a shovel.  Nick mounted the big Massy-Ferguson, I found my footing on the drawbar in back and grabbed hold of the rusted, red fenders.  Donny followed with the small tractor and all the gear.  The snow covered road to the sugar bush is all uphill.  Days prior to the assent Nick would plow the roads with the bulldozer, creating a white trail lined with snow banks three feet high.

When we arrived at our destination the first order of business was to test the snow.  If we were lucky, a            firm crust, formed overnight, would hold us without snowshoes for a couple of hours before the sun     

soften the snow to wet, mush.  Our snowshoes were wood with rawhide lacing, held on with a leather

toe piece and straps around the boot.  They were perfect for floating over the deep snow and despite their length easy to maneuver.     

Each pipeline is numbered and named for its’ location.  The random growth of Sugar Maples among the Ash, Birch and Beech required the pipeline to be built to fit that spot.  Pipeline, put up should be taut when it stretches from Maple to Maple in a zigzag pattern up the hill.  A natural bowl created on the side of hill, dotted with numerous, large Maples is the ideal sugar bush.  The downhill slope allows the sap to run down the pipeline into the main lines, which carry the sap to the sugarhouse below.  Tapping requires drilling a small hole in the tree to reach the cambium layer.  It is here the sap, like blood in a vein, runs back up the tree to feed the new leaf growth.  A code of ethics preserves the trees  from over tapping, consequently not harming the trees and allowing them to be tapped for decades.  That is, one tap for each twelve inches of tree girth.  Trees smaller are not tapped and ones larger could have two.  A few huge trees, hundreds of years old could have three to five.  The tap or spout is a small plastic piece with an opening on either end.  One end fits into the drilled hole and the other snuggly into a short piece of pipeline called, a drop.  The drop is attached to the pipeline with a T shaped plastic piece.

The second order of business was to stuff our pockets with supplies.   For me, a handful of T’s and connectors in one pocket, spouts, plugs and caps in the other.  One back pocket held hand clippers for cutting string and pipeline.  My wool pants also had large side pockets.  My right leg side held small coils of pipeline, necessary for repairs.  The left leg side held my baseball hat, necessary to switch into from my wool hat for cooling down.  We all had our methods of getting through the day.  Nick’s included a coat pocket full of chocolate necessary for nibbling to keep his energy up.

Donny’s legs were long and strong, prefect for breaking trail as he laid out each pipeline on its’ correct course.  Nick and I would follow setting the taps.  Though Nick was eighteen years older than I, we moved at the same pace.  Our matching speed was a gift, slow and steady, rarely stopping to rest, working sustainably and thoroughly.  Nick would carefully drill the holes, not too close to the healed over holes from other years.  He somehow always knew exactly how tight or loose to hang the line depending on where the tap was placed.  He’d say, “we’ll keep it loose here, we’ll need the slack at the top.”  Using a small hammer I would gently tap the spout into the hole.        

And so the day would go.  The three of us climbing, slipping, falling, tapping, fixing until the sun’s work was done and so were we.  It would take two weeks to put up all the lines and two days more to hang 1,200 buckets.  Nick was the brains behind it all, he remembered how every line was built.              

Donny was the brawn, his strength and speed kept him ahead and moving us forward.  I was the blood  that kept the flow going.  The three of us created a remarkable working team.  Each bringing our own skills, perfectly fit for our respective roles.    

It was during those days of tapping that Nick and I formed a bond.  A bond based in a mutual love for working outdoors, for sugaring and for hard work.  In most other areas of life, Nick and I couldn’t have been more opposite.  He a patriarch, me a feminist, he a republican, me a democrat, he a Vermonter, me a “flatlander” (pejorative, not from VT), he a farmer, me never had worked on a farm.  We were an unlikely dual brought together by a common goal.  Farm work, often done with dangerous and noisy machinery can be isolating.  On the occasion to work closely with someone in the quiet woods in early spring brought ample opportunity for conversation.  Nick loved to talk.  While scaling, steep slopes, huffing and puffing, falling and fixing we would discuss the motions voted on in town meeting, the grand list and land values, which trees were ready for harvesting and how to fell them, occasionally politics and ALWAYS the weather and its’ influence on the crop.  Though I often disagreed with his views I would often “bite my tongue”, silent with assumed agreement.  In the beginning years, I would sometimes go home furious with the thought of his opinion, wishing I’d spoken up.  But maybe it was the right thing to do.  Over time, as our relationship and trust grew, Nick soften his hard rhetoric and I found my voice to gently defend another side.

On these March days the sky was a vivid, bright blue.  What I would say was the reason I moved to Vermont, I had to be under those bright, blue skies.  The dark, leafless trees contrast the deep, pure white snow, standing tall and proud, sentinels of the woods patiently enduring anything mother nature threw at them.  I was thoroughly convinced the woods knew Nick and trusted his wise stewardship of his 500 acres.   On the days above freezing, after a below freezing night a “run” would occur.  The sap entering the pipeline and running down to the roadside sugarhouse into 100 gallon tanks.  Donny was the cook, firing up a tremendously hot fire under a pan of boiling sap.  The steam would rise up, pouring out the sides and roof of the sugarhouse and sometimes be so thick Donny’s tall figure could hardly been see on the other side of the evaporator.  At just the right moment of viscosity the syrup would pour off into a stainless steel bucket.  Donny would pour the hot, liquid gold through a press and               

the resulting pure, clean syrup would be canned by Nick’s wife, Ellen.  During that time, Nick and I would up in the woods gathering buckets.  Taking two and half days to attend to every tapped tree, emptying its’ bucket into a 200 hundred gallon tank pulled by the tractor.  When full, Nick would drive the load to a stationary tank to send it to the sugarhouse.  Sometimes the runs were so great, we had to slow down gathering because the tank couldn’t send the sap down fast enough, the lines being so full.  On the afternoon of the third day we would go back to the first tree and start gathering over again.  A typical good day we would get eight loads.  And a good year, produce 600 plus gallons of syrup, packaged in pint, quart, half gallon and gallon tin containers, often selling out before the start of the next season.

Every year brought us an unanticipated event.  One year the bulldozer wouldn’t start, requiring us to shovel snow by hand through the woods.  Another year, three major snow storms hit in March.  Deep, wind driven snow buries parts of the pipeline.  The grueling work of digging out the lines is mandatory since the sap will not flow through frozen lines.  Set backs are not welcomed but are an aspect of the work and dealt with accordingly.  However, no one could have anticipate the type and devastation of the 2012 year.  A week, just three weeks into the season, temperatures rose to the seventies and eighties.  A season usually lasts until mid April when temperatures normally, gradually rise.   This unheard of occurrence, put an absolute stop to the season.  The warmth caused the trees to bud, which renders the sap bitter and useless.  After boiling only three times we had produced a third of a crop.  All we can do is wait for next year.

That sugaring year for the Gilman farm, never came.  For me, the end of sugaring ended all of my working on the farm.  The end closed a chapter in my life that was by far the best twenty years of my life.  It was a gift of unexplainable magnitude, to work so closely with the gorgeous, generous, loving earth.  And to work so closely with a man who, though he never spoke of it, knew his land intimately and cared for it with generations of wisdom and love.  As Nick’s health deteriorated I could feel the energy of the land shrinking.  Closing into him with each passing day until finally it was gone all together.   I haven’t been back in those woods since.  I’ve heard the farm is now a goat farm.  I can only hope the proprietors will farm and care for the land as well as Nick did.                                           

Lynn Caulkins grew up in Webster, NY.  After attending Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT she was intrigued by Vermont culture. Thus returned to live for 25 years.  She returned to Rochester in 2016.