The Sugar Season by Douglas Whynott Read Free Book Online Page B

purchase Eric was a minister in Canterbury, New Hampshire. He arranged for a tenant to manage the farm but returned in the spring to make maple syrup and grow a crop of potatoes with his brother Glenn. Eric sold his maple syrup to parishioners and, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, peddled it house to house.
    The Depression made life difficult for most everyone but none more so than ministers of churches that depended on weekly donations. In 1938 Eric Bascom’s yearly salary was reduced from $1200 to $750. In the fall one of the worst hurricanes in history hit the Northeast, with winds of 160 miles per hour cutting a swath 400 miles wide, leaving 500 people dead. The hurricane blew away barns and livestock and leveled millions of trees, destroying many sugar orchards. Hummocks, the mounds and hollows from tree trunks and roots, can still be seen in the woods of New Hampshire today.
    Eric and Elida decided to move their family to the farm in Acworth, arriving early enough to plant crops in the spring. Ken stayed in Canterbury to finish eighth grade but worked in the fields that summer. When it came time to gather hay, Ken received a quick driving lesson and, at age thirteen, drove a Chevy truck while his father arranged the loads of hay. Eric continued to grow potatoes with his brother Glenn, started raising chickens, and began building a dairy herd.
    Maple syrup was a crucial part of the farm. Later in his life Ken Bascom wrote about this in an article for a farming publication: “I was thirteen upon moving to the farm and descended from several generations of sugarmakers. We had 600 old metal buckets, a team of horses, a sled with a five-barrel tank, and a rough-boarded sap house. There was a 20-barrel storage tank and a 2½ by 8-foot evaporator. Being the oldest of five children, it became the lot of ‘Yours Truly’ to drill the holes and to tap in the metal spouts.”
    Ken’s brother, Eric Bascom Jr., also wrote about this work in an article in the Keene Sentinel, looking back at the year of 1942 during the Second World War: “The sap spouts are those tubular tin pegs and tap into holes in the trees. Usually Kenneth drills the holes. Rodney sets and spouts and I, the beast of burden, follow with a stack of metal buckets, at least one for every tree. Last year when we tapped, the snow was up to our hips. This year it’s only up to our knees.”
    Price controls were in place during the war, and maple syrup was set at a price of $3.30 a gallon. “Even so, Dad’s expanding,” Eric wrote. “If the war ever ends, the price will go up. Last year we tapped maybe 1,200 trees. This year he plans to tap 2,000.”
    To Eric, their sugarhouse seemed like a “clipper ship with crowded sails plowing.” There were other vessels on thoseseas, and he could see steam rising, “from my uncle’s shack, and Roy Clark’s. We have plumes from Gerard and Chester Mason’s in the hollow, and in the southwest, Uncle Cal’s and old Fred Green’s. There are literally hundreds of small producers around us who love the tradition and supply their own kitchens and a few village stores.”
    He described the long days gathering sap:
Each of us has a pair of 16-quart gathering pails. The sides taper in at the top, with a flared rim that allows emptying a 12-quart bucket with minimum spillage. We stumble up and down banks and trek from tree to tree to sled. The steel gathering tank holds three hundred gallons, but the tank is full before we’re halfway through the section. We’ll have to return to get the rest and that’s too bad because, as we head for home, the horses think they’re done for the day. They’re pulling 2,400 pounds of sap, all uphill, yet we’re at the sugarhouse in short order. This load and the rest will keep dad boiling half the night. It is a night and day operation that blots out everything else. When we get back to the barn we’ll have nothing to do except rub down the horses, milk the cows, clean the