The Sugar Season by Douglas Whynott Read Free Book Online

did you come back?” For a moment Bruce’s face reddened and his eyes went wide, like I was a teacher calling on him in English class. But then the look turned to amusement, which I thought was the difference between then and now.
    “I wanted to prove I could do it better than him,” he said.
    In 1965, a few months after Ken Bascom became a full-time sugarmaker, an article about him and his family appeared in a magazine called Food Marketing in New England, published by the First National Food Stores. The story took the form of a defense, and celebrated the farmer and his wife who were making a go of maple syrup production against the claims of a city dweller who stated that it was a thing of the past, strictly for fuddy-duddies, that young people didn’t care about it anymore. “‘Well,’ we said, ‘it is old, as years go, one of the few arts taught the white man by hisIndian predecessors on this Continent. But we can’t disagree with you too violently on the matter of giving it attention. It’s . . . Spring around the corner . . . it’s new life rising . . . and it’s a field of human endeavor about which there still is much deep and moving mystery.’”
    The editors intended to send the Bascom piece to their cynical friend, with a circle in red pencil around the words, “young people don’t, etc.”
For Kenneth Bascom is a young man and his wife Ruth is a young woman, and if it doesn’t embarrass them too much to say it (they’re real New Hampshire people, who are not the expostulating kind)—we rate them as being as high a type of young people as the U.S. produces on any level you care to name. Ken Bascom isn’t shuffling his feet in this maple business. He’s enthusiastic. So is Ruth. And they work their heads off at it, and succeed at it, and plan to double it. Ken sold his herd of cows last October. They were doing well too, eighty Holsteins, forty-five milking, and at the time they were sold, Ken was making a ton of milk a day and the herd production was 520 pounds butter fat, 13,000 milk. But maple trees interested him most, and the opportunity ahead, he feels, is great and the whole sugaring enterprise stimulating. This is thinking against a trend, an individualistic thinking, planning and operating which make our country what it is—the sort of thing that showed to the Russians who read the magazine article above that what makes America tick is people free to go against, as well as with, the tide.
    Ken was hanging 6500 buckets, so many, the article stated, that stacked end to end they would stretch more than a mile.He also had 500 taps on tubing as an experiment. Ken bought sap from other sugarmakers who delivered it to his sugarhouse, and he also bought syrup. He bought it in thirty-gallon drums and paid for it by the pound. The article stated that Ken hoped someday not to have to buy syrup, once he further expanded the operation. Ken would continue to farm. He had about 600 acres under production, 150 on which he would raise hay and clover. He would also cut 200 cords of wood a year—100 cords for sale and another 100 to be used to boil sap. Two hundred cords of wood at four feet wide and four feet high would stretch 1600 feet, about three-tenths of a mile.
    The article focused on the maple sugar parties that the Bascoms held at their sugarhouse each year. The parties were very successful—in 1964 there were 500 visitors. On those weekends the Chevys, Pontiacs, Buicks, and Fords were lined up along Sugar House Road, and tour buses came from Boston. To advertise the parties, Ken and Ruth had produced an informational brochure that they mailed to prospective visitors. It read,
During the season (approximately March 13–April 18) we will be serving sugar on snow, hot fried doughboys and syrup, pickles and coffee at our sugarhouse. Not every day but on the days and nights the evaporators are working. The charge is $1.00. We must have a reservation for large groups. A few days notice is