The Sugar Season Read Online Free PDF Page A

up enough to accept the sight of tubing lines in the woods. Bascom’s also bought sap from some producers; Bruce’s friends Peter and Deb Rhoades were one of that group. The lots covered about 800 acres and comprised a vast patchwork spreading out from Mount Kingsbury, with a few satellite lots. In all, factoring in those who sold sap to Bascom’s, there were 68,573 taps feeding into the sugarhouse in 2012.
    As for the total length of tubing on those 800 acres, Kevin calculated by multiplying the average length of tubing per tap, 30 feet including the mainlines, by the total tap count. This put the total tubing length at 1,755,450 feet. That amounted to 332 miles, equivalent to the distance from Acworth to Philadelphia.
    When I mentioned that figure to Gwen Hinman she said, “And we have to walk that three or four times a year.” It was all the more mind-boggling and weirdly impressive when you considered that all of that tubing, those 1.75 million feet, were designed to be airtight and under a vacuum pressure far lower than that of the air outside.
    Regarding the strength of the vacuum pressure, Kevin told me about steel tanks that had been left empty for too long and collapsed like beer cans. Timothy Prescott, director of the Proctor Maple Research Center at the University of Vermont and an expert on vacuum, told me that contemporary vacuum systems could pull water out of the ground through the trees’ roots, like a sucking straw. He also qualified that statement by adding that vacuum pressure did not harm the tree. Another scientist and former director of the Proctor Center, Mel Tyree, a specialist in sap hydraulics, agreed. He told me that a tree generates negative pressures of its own far greater than those that vacuum pumps apply. He told me that the tree’s ability to transport liquids under negative pressures is a wonder of nature.

    O N J ANUARY 26, when the temperature ranged from 25° in the morning and got up to 45° in the afternoon, Kevin notedon his production chart that the sap “ran a little.” For Kevin, “ran a little” was a relative term. In 2010 they dumped 500 gallons on the ground after a little run in February. Kevin liked to have at least 17,000 gallons on hand before he fired up his evaporator. That would yield about 300 to 400 gallons of syrup, depending on the sugar content of the sap.
    Kevin didn’t want the tapping crew to begin too soon because he didn’t want the tap holes to dry out, for the wood to seal in the drilled holes. But his son Greg, who left a construction job each sugar season to come to work at Bascom’s for his father, said they needed to begin because they had a short crew and would never finish otherwise. They started on January 23 and three days later finished the Pond Lot, putting in 6,022 taps. On January 30 they finished Hall’s Lot, raising the count to 11,425.
    The trees didn’t freeze on the night of February 1, after the temperature got up to 48° in the afternoon. When Kevin checked the temperature early the next morning it was at 33°. The crew finished tapping Ken’s Lot that day, putting the count at 13,907. They moved to Glenn’s Lot, a section on the south side of Mount Kingsbury, and finished tapping there by February 3, bringing the total tap count to 17,105. They were one-fourth done.
    Kevin didn’t think there was a need to hurry because he was more than two weeks ahead of the earliest date he had ever boiled. But during those two days, on February 1 and 2, when warm air flowed up from the south, the trees awakened, and there was a major sap flow from Connecticut well into Quebec. At Bascom’s they gathered 10,000 gallons of sap.
    And so Kevin made his first boil of 2012 on February 3. From those 10,000 gallons, which had an average sugarcontent of 1.7 percent, he made 166 gallons of syrup. Many other sugarmakers over the region also boiled on February 3.
    For many sugarmakers, using a wood-fired evaporator and not in possession of