Free The Sugar Season by Douglas Whynott Page A

older men, wearing themselves out after three hours.
    I think it is difficult to comprehend the frenetic anxiety of someone who made most of his year’s wages in those six weeks of the sap run and who had to get the supply to fill his regular accounts. Sometimes, when help wasn’t available and the crew was undermanned, the work fell upon Bruce. Ken had him up at 5:30 on some days and in the woods by 6:00, and kept Bruce out gathering until after dark, only to have him up again at 5:30 the next morning. Slogging through snow, carrying heavy buckets that sometimesspilled on legs and into boots or doused the gloves on freezing March days. Such was the life of the son of the first full-time sugarmaker. But as Peter Rhoades, who was one of those boys, said when I asked if this was especially hard work, “We always worked hard, it was just a part of our lives.”
    When the season was over, Bruce cut wood, those 200 cords, alongside his father. Ken Bascom was producing about 20,000 bales of hay each summer, and later as many as 30,000 bales. They would load hay all day and into the night and then deliver it the next morning. Making hay, like making syrup, is a burst activity. On some days Ken delivered syrup packed in jugs to his customers at retail stores, gift shops, and farm stands in New Hampshire and Vermont. He made his deliveries in what they called “the boat,” the poor man’s pickup truck, a secondhand station wagon loaded to the limit of its suspension system. Ken and Ruth sold syrup from their house too.
    In those years, when his maple crop wasn’t enough to fill his accounts, Ken drove to Quebec and bought a few barrels of bulk syrup to make up the difference. Sometimes it was cheaper to buy Canadian than to produce it at home. Ken wasn’t the only one doing this. Large distribution companies in the United States took advantage of the cheap supply of Canadian syrup, companies like Maple Grove, American Maple, and, eventually, Springtree in Brattleboro, Vermont, which supplied large grocery chains and helped develop national markets. Bruce rode with Ken on some of these trips to Canada.
    Bruce attended the University of New Hampshire. His grades were poor at first, especially in freshman English,which was another exercise in torture. He took two forestry courses along with Peter Rhoades and thought about going into forestry, but he finally decided on the business school. Bruce got As in most of his business courses.
    During the sugar season he went home on weekends. Ken was still using buckets, but Bruce was thinking a lot about tubing. Tubing was the way of the future. Operations with buckets depended on cheap labor, and he knew all about that. Bruce saw tubing as the economic replacement for the dependence upon cheap family labor. The quality of tubing had improved since Ken Bascom had tried it in the mid-1960s. As part of a research effort Bruce visited two maple farms in New Hampshire that had converted to tubing. During his spring vacation in his sophomore year Bruce traveled to Ontario and worked in a state-of-the-art tubing operation owned by the sugarmaker Dennis Nolet.
    Bruce met his wife the same way his father met his, at a square dance at UNH. Her name was Liz Parker. She was a year ahead of him and studying history. Liz seemed everything that meant sophisticated to Bruce. Her family lived near Washington, DC, and her father was an educator with the US Agency for International Development. During her primary school years Liz lived in Vietnam and Thailand. Bruce was smitten and feeling like he could do just about anything.
    Bruce brought Liz home to Acworth. Liz woke up early and went to the kitchen. Ken was there, waiting, she thought, and had all sorts of questions for her. Bruce worked in the fields that day, picking up rocks that had worked their way to the surface during the winter freeze. Picking rocks, with the bending and lifting, was the least desirable job on thefarm. The wet rocks also tore