The thermometer nailed to the porch post says twenty-six degrees, and Hank Kowalski stands in the dooryard at ten of five in the morning studying it the way another man might study his bank statement. The snow squeaks under his boots — the dry squeak of a hard freeze, which is what he wanted to hear. The sky over the ridge toward Craftsbury Common is still black, but there is a softness starting at the edge of it. "That'll do," he says, to no one in particular, and walks down to the sugarhouse to lay the fire.
The sugarhouse has stood on its shelf of hillside since 1911, when Hank's great-uncle Walt raised it out of hemlock he milled a quarter mile from where it still stands. The cupola on the roof — the louvered vent that lets the steam out — is original, its boards silvered and warped and stubbornly sound. When it breathes, the plume can be seen from the town road, and in Craftsbury, Vermont, that plume is an announcement older than the telephone: the Kowalskis are boiling.
Hank is sixty-four. He has 3,100 taps on the sugar maples that climb the hill behind the house, and every gallon of syrup he makes starts as roughly forty-three gallons of sap, clear as well water and barely sweet. The arithmetic has never been in his favor. "Freezing night, warm day, and the sap runs," he says. "That's the whole of it. It was true before anybody was here to boil it, and it'll be true after. You don't improve on it. You just try to be ready."
Being ready means six weeks, give or take, from late February into April — a season Ruthie Kowalski, sixty-one, calls "mud season with a deadline." The driveway goes to soup. The truck wears its chains. Nobody in the house sleeps a full night. "People ask what we do in March," Ruthie says. "I tell them we don't sleep, we don't sit down, and everything we own smells like woodsmoke. And then April comes, and you'd pay good money to have it back."
It begins with the tapping, in the deep cold of February. Hank and his son Pete go up on snowshoes with a cordless drill and a pouch of spouts, boring each hole two inches deep, seating each spout with two knocks of a hammer. The sound carries in the cold: the whine of the drill, the knock, then quiet. Blue tubing webs the hillside now, carrying sap downhill to the gathering tank, though Hank keeps a few dozen galvanized buckets on the trees nearest the road. "Those are for remembering," he says.
When the freeze gives way to a soft afternoon, the trees let go. Sap ticks into the buckets like slow rain, the mainline hums, and the tank at the foot of the hill fills a thousand gallons at a time. Hank checks that tank the way other men check the mail — twice a day, hopeful, braced for disappointment.
Then the fire. The evaporator is wood-fired, as it has always been, and it eats: four-foot sticks of ash and beech, split the summer before and dried under the eaves, fed into the arch every seven minutes by the clock. When the fire is right it does not crackle so much as roar, a low freight-train sound that makes the whole building tremble, and the sap in the pans above it rolls in a boil you could not stop with an argument.
Freezing night, warm day, and the sap runs. That's the whole of it. You don't improve on it. You just try to be ready.
Inside the sugarhouse on a boiling night the air is a warm fog that smells of sweetness and smoke, and everything drips. Hank works the pans with a long-handled scoop, watching the syrup sheet off its edge — "aproning," the old word for it. At 219 degrees he opens the draw-off valve and the finished syrup runs into the filter felt, dark gold and steaming. He checks it in the hydrometer cup anyway. He has done this for fifty years. He checks it every time.
Word travels the way it does in a town of a thousand people. Neighbors see the steam and come up the hill in their barn coats, carrying nothing, expected. Grandchildren arrive in snowsuits and are immediately underfoot. Somebody's dog settles by the woodpile. On the warming shelf at the back of the arch, Ruthie's chili pot has been going since noon — venison some nights, beans always — with a stack of bowls beside it, a coffee can of spoons, and no ceremony whatsoever.
"The boiling nights are the whole reason," Ruthie says. "You could make syrup with oil heat and a machine that texts you when it's done — people do, and God bless them, it's still good syrup. But then what? Nobody drives up a muddy hill at nine at night to watch a machine. They come for the fire and the steam and to hear Hank say four words an hour. I feed them chili so they'll stay. It works. Forty years it's worked."
For the children there is sugar on snow. Ruthie boils a pot of syrup past the syrup stage, carries it out the door, and pours it in ribbons over a pan of packed snow, where it stiffens into taffy. The kids twirl it up on forks. Tradition demands a dish of dill pickles alongside, to cut the sweet, and Ruthie honors the tradition. "The pickles are non-negotiable," she says. "The pickles are how you know we're serious people."
The Kowalskis have never advertised. No sign out on the paved road, no website, no farmers' market booth. There is a shelf at the end of the driveway — jugs of syrup, a price list in Ruthie's handwriting, and a wooden box with a slot in the lid. The same families have been stopping for forty years, some of them now in their third generation of stopping. "I think we've been shorted twice," Ruthie says. "And one of those came back the next week with the five dollars and a coffee cake. You don't advertise spring. People know where to find it."
You don't advertise spring. People know where to find it.
Hank reads weather the way some men read scripture — daily, closely, braced for correction. He will listen to the forecast on the radio, but, he says, "the forecast is for Burlington. This hill has its own opinion." He goes by the feel of the snow underfoot, the sound of the brook, the south side of the maples. He has also watched the season migrate. His father tapped by Town Meeting Day, the first Tuesday in March. Hank taps in February now, some years in January. He doesn't editorialize about it. He just moves the tapping.
The migration he watches closest is the one inside the sugarhouse. Pete, the middle of their three children, moved back to the hill four years ago, and this was the first season he ran the evaporator alone — the fire, the pans, the draw, all of it, with his father up at the house pretending not to look out the window. Running a wood-fired rig solo is the sugarmaker's solo flight: too hot and you scorch a pan you can't replace, too timid and you boil all night for nothing.
"First night he ran it alone, I made myself stay in the house," Hank says. "Sat at the kitchen table holding a cup of coffee I never drank. Around two in the morning I could hear the fire door bang shut, regular, like it should. Syrup came off clean. Fancy grade." He pauses the length of a full minute. "Best syrup I never made."
By mid-April it is over. The taps are pulled and the lines flushed, the pans scrubbed bright, the cupola shuttered until next winter. In the canning room the year's syrup stands in rows, holding the light. On a nail by the door hangs a ledger that goes back to 1946, gallons and dates in three different hands — Hank's father's, then Hank's, and now, at the bottom of this year's page, Pete's. Ruthie looked at that page a long moment this spring. "Well," she said. "I guess we'd better keep the chili recipe."
