Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff

are pastured. J. R. Sloan’s Green Mountain Mainlines, the nation’s largest sugaring operation, using sap from about 130,000 taps, according to Bruce, is headquartered in town, and the roadside welcome sign greeting travelers depicts an old-time sugarhouse.

      The first time I pulled into his driveway at the very beginning of April a few years ago, temperatures were climbing toward eighty and the season was ending early, though the high peaks of the Green Mountains not too far distant were still capped with snow. A square-jawed, plainspoken man with penetrating brown eyes, Bruce is a vice president with Leader Evaporator in Swanton, Vermont, a short ride from the Canadian border. You might think that after forty years at the country’s largest maple equipment manufacturer, selling and installing evaporators and troubleshooting sugarhouse problems, he’d have a largely analytical approach to the business. But maple remains deeply personal.

      Bruce’s grandfather started sugaring in the early 1900s; his father continued the operation, and Bruce grew up in it. Now his son Bradley, the eldest of four, sugars with him and also works for Leader. Knowing the time and effort that go into the frenetic season, the “guys in the shop think I’m crazy,” he laughed, shaking his head. “But I can’t put a value on the days I spent working beside my dad and the time it gives me with my son.” Bruce and his dad would collect sap together. When partway through, his father would fire the evaporator, and Bruce would finish gathering. When Bradley turned ten, the three of them collected together, and Bruce thought his dad would head to the sugarhouse to light the arch when about halfway done. Instead, he sent Bruce to the sugarhouse so he could keep collecting with his grandson. Bruce chokes up as memories flood back. “I didn’t get it until later,” he said. It’s no surprise the operation is called Gillilan Family Maple.

      With Bruce at the controls, I rode the draw bar of a blue tractor as we headed through a meadow, crossed a brook, and entered the woods on a rutted path. “It’s a bit muddy back there,” he warned as we approached a board-and-batten pump house beneath evergreens. “We usually sugar until the tenth or even the fifteenth of the month, but with this weather we’re just about done.” Crisscrossed with blue and black tubing, the maple orchard is punctuated with pine and hemlock and a smattering of oak. Normally he puts out about eight hundred taps, but this year he only had time to set two-thirds of that amount. “The property has potential for twelve hundred, maybe thirteen hundred,” he said with a wave of his hand.

      Back in 2010, the sugarhouse was fairly deep in the woods, built of rough vertical boards darkened with age. He told me about an experimental RO—a reverse-osmosis machine—that Bradley built, as we looked over the two-and-a-half-by-ten-foot evaporator sitting on a concrete pad. Bradley is good at tinkering, he said wistfully, something he got from his grandfather. The family’s first sugarhouse was built nearby in 1906 but had to be moved downhill a few hundred yards because a downdraft on a stiff south wind would blow flames out of the firebox door. He and Bradley were thinking about a new one close to the road where they could attract visitors and make it easier for families to stop by.

      The woods were filled with ghosts and memories. Bruce pointed to tapped trees that were too small when he began working here with his dad, and lines that were strung by Brad. He showed me where he and his son were thinning out the softwoods, but not too quickly, lest the maples get sun-scald from a sudden increase in light. His dad died in these woods, marking a home site for Bradley. He was crushed by a falling tree. Bruce’s eyes dampened as he showed me the spot.

      Returning from the woods, we entered the canning room attached to a gambrel-roofed garage his father had built in 1985 and also used as a workshop. With its knotty-pine walls and gleaming stainless-steel counter, it seemed like a cross between a cozy cabin and a chemistry lab. The walls were filled with blue, red, and yellow ribbons and plaques the family had earned for its syrup. There’s an award to Bruce’s dad from the Franklin County Maplerama for lifetime service. Brad was on the committee that made the decision, and got to present his grandfather’s award. “Dad built the garage,” Bruce said smiling, “and added the canning room later.” They used to can in the garage at the house but had to thoroughly clean after each use because “Mom’s car had to go back in.”

      When my wife Mary and I paid Bruce a visit after sugaring season in 2014, he had a bigger tractor, and the roadside sugarhouse had become a reality. He and Bradley had built it into what was once the garage portion of the building where they’d done canning. When we arrived, Bruce was in the process of lining the interior with white-coated metal to provide washable walls. The wood-fired evaporator that Bradley had designed gleamed. Just that morning, Bruce had been testing a new filter press with clear plastic plates that was lighter and less expensive than metal models. It also enabled an operator to observe the syrup as it was processed. Bruce was sure it would catch on among producers.

      While we were at the sugarhouse, a few of Bruce’s grandchildren stopped by with his wife and daughter-in-law. Among them were Bradley’s young sons, Xavier and Gavin, both of whom now drill holes, tap in spouts, and hang buckets on their own trees. Regardless of process innovations or the weather, Bruce Gillilan felt good about the future of sugaring.

      • • • • • • •

      THE FIRST THING you notice when stepping into Lyle Merrifield’s sugarhouse in Gorham, Maine, is his collection of antique maple artifacts. Displayed are all manner of spiles and buckets—wooden and metal—syrup jugs, sugar molds, and other tools of the trade, along with quaint images of sugaring. But unlike the objects he so carefully exhibits, the gable-roofed, vertically sided sugarhouse with an ell for a salesroom is fairly new, bright and airy with lots of windows, including a transom over the double doors. A carpenter by trade, Lyle built the place himself, mostly using timber cut and milled on his property.

      Golden retriever by his side, the big, gentle man in his thirties, president of the Maine Maple Producers Association, smiled broadly as he joyfully took me through the spacious building immediately behind his home. Enthusiasm rose off him like steam from a raging evaporator. Not from a sugaring family, he had his first taste in kindergarten on a class outing to tap a tree. He remembers it clearly, the bus driver wielding a carpenter’s brace and drilling the hole. A few years later he made some syrup with the Scouts, but not until his early twenties did he really get started.

      Lyle lives on the twenty-five acres where he grew up in a now suburbanizing area. It’s a self-described “gentleman’s farm” where he bales hay and raises beef for hamburger, but his passion is maple, even though most of his six to eight hundred taps using vacuum tubing are on neighboring property. He sees advantages to sugaring in thickly settled areas, and tours are a mainstay of his business, with frequent visits by school groups.

      Cheerfully entrepreneurial, he gets over four thousand visitors on Maine Maple Sunday weekend and sells, in those two days, over five hundred gallons of syrup, some of which he buys in bulk from other state sugarmakers. Two dozen friends and family members man the farm and serve thousands of maple soft-serve ice cream cups. They go through a hundred pounds of pancake mix, and people wait in line for up to an hour. He sells maple-coated nuts, tubs of maple cream and maple butter, and can’t keep up with the demand for candy. His maple cotton candy is popular, and he graciously gave me a container of the woolly stuff for each for my children.

      Like other sugarmakers, Lyle thrives on hard work, being outdoors, contact with friends and family, and experiencing seasonal change. You wouldn’t think of him as a historian, at least not in the tweedy professorial way, but there’s something that fascinates him about maple’s uniquely tangible heritage, which is manifested in the artifacts he keeps on walls and shelves. He might not have generations of sugarmakers in his family like Bruce and Bradley Gillilan, but he feels deeply connected to the larger collective kin of sugarmakers.

      Perhaps it comes from his time spent handling carpentry tools, but he’s fascinated by the progress of technology that speaks to past lives—even something as simple as the transition from homemade wooden taps fashioned from hollowed sumac twigs to metal ones of iron, steel, aluminum, and stainless, and then plastic taps in various colors and formulations for use with tubing. Such objects “have a lot to teach about how and why people did things and the way in which they lived,” he told me with reverence in his voice. Not content with mere static displays, he sometimes