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Lizzie AppleProfessor Lourie 10 May 2015Writing 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!”

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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 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

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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 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

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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

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

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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

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middle of 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.

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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 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.

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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.

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

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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 ninety-eight percent water; they

boil it down to syrup. Less liquid, more sucrose.

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

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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

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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.

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

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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,” 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.

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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.

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

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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 could feel a system of roots

growing, nudging at the dirt, taking up new space. It was a kind of

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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.

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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 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.

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