Maple Sugaring. David K. Leff

the literature and lore of sugaring have shaped the image of an individualistic, off-the-grid, self-sufficient activity where a deep relationship with the land is paramount. “It is that happiest of combinations, a commercial affair which is also an annual rite, even an act of love,” wrote Dartmouth College English professor Noel Perrin in his elegiac 1972 book, Amateur Sugar Maker.

       The ever-ebullient Rob Lamothe

      Perrin, who died in 2004 at age seventy-seven, grew up in and around New York City but in 1963 bought a farm in Thetford Center, Vermont. It served as home and writing muse. Here he built an eighty-eight-square-foot sugarhouse near a dirt road roughly a hundred feet from the Pompanoosuc River “in conscious admiration of Henry David Thoreau.” Like his mentor, he vividly records the process of construction and meticulously accounts for costs down to the penny.

      Perrin bought a two-by-six Grimm evaporator and made as much as fifty-seven gallons of syrup from 104 taps, some of which he sold to the Globe Corner Bookstore on Boston’s Freedom Trail, where his books were also available. Perhaps no one has rendered sugaring in such straightforward yet poetic terms. We share in his worry that a dirt floor may thaw during a boil, causing his evaporator to tilt and burn, and his pleasure in using a hydrometer, an instrument of science that “makes sense to the eye.” He relates some sugaring history, rails against weather that produces a “deceitful” season, and delights in chickadees, snow fleas, and other natural phenomena. He describes his rural neighbors with affection and humor, from the town selectman and builder who helped install his evaporator to the man from Corinth who collected sap with two horses and a sled.

      Capturing in few words the essence of his world for the sophisticated, urbane readers of the New Yorker, where part of the book first appeared, Perrin notes that “gravity and wood are the chief natural resources of a Vermont farm.” Reinforcing long-held attitudes among the public and many small-time sugarmakers, he writes: “When you’re producing a sacred article, you don’t have to maximize your cash return.”

      A couple generations before Perrin’s experiment as a gentleman farmer, Scott and Helen Nearing tapped America’s back-to-the-land homesteading vein, stepping out of the mainstream and into a somewhat ascetic life built around sugaring as a self-reliant means to earn a living. Scott was an economist and passionate exponent of country life, labor, peace, and leftist causes. His beliefs cost him a college professorship. Helen was a musician. Both of them strong and preternaturally energetic, they “thumbed their noses at city life” in the heart of the Great Depression and bought a rundown farm “on a side hill of a valley directly facing Stratton Mountain” near Jamaica, Vermont. They did so out of deeply held philosophical yearnings to simplify life, control their livelihood, make contact with nature, and find time for “study, teaching, writing, music and travel.” They grew much of their own food and constructed several stone buildings during two decades on the land. Sugaring, as well as lecturing and writing, were their source of cash. They found that even “novices in maple production can turn their energy and ingenuity into a craft that offers scope for imagination and new ideas, and pays sufficient financial returns to provide a simple, but adequate living.”

      By their example and writings, the Nearings became icons of back-to-the-land homesteading and were influential in the 1960s agrarian commune movement. Published in 1950, The Maple Sugar Book: Together with Remarks on Pioneering as a Way of Living in the Twentieth Century probably contains the most comprehensive history of sugaring available, along with instructional advice on making syrup and sugar, a guide to marketing, and recipes. “A life as well as a living” was their passionate call to self-sufficiency and contact with nature. “Anyone who has ever sugared remembers the poesy of it, to the end of his days,” the Nearings wrote lyrically. “When the time of year comes round with sap rising and snow melting, there is an insistent urge to take one’s part in the process—to tap the trees, to gather the sap, to boil out the sweet syrup of the maple.” In such words I find a secular echo of Rob Lamothe’s revelation.

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      WHILE THE NEARINGS might be an extreme example, their back-to-the-land gospel resonates with many sugarmakers who hunger for some measure of financial independence entwined with an almost spiritual contact with nature and creation of something tangible and pure. A few years ago I visited Erica Andrews, then at Hurricane Farm in Scotland, Connecticut, a hardscrabble slice of southern New England she cultivated with her husband, Chris. She was dressed in a sweatshirt, work pants, and ski hat beneath which there was a big smile and thick blond braids. Her kids darted around like wood sprites as we talked. Fiercely individualistic, she wanted to live as independently as possible. The farm was named for a hurricane lamp, something the wildest storm can’t extinguish.

      Growing up in suburbia and earning a British literature degree with a minor in theater and photography, Erica never expected to be a farmer. Her agricultural odyssey started when she and Chris were dating and he decided he wanted a couple of chickens. Soon they had more chickens, a garden, and were raising turkeys. She was waitressing in a martini lounge at the Mohegan Sun casino, and he was teaching school when their daughter was born in January 2004. At that point, they decided to supplement their income by freezing and canning vegetables, which also enabled Erica to be a stay-at-home mom. In spring, she sugared over an open fire with a couple of chafing dishes resting on concrete blocks, making two gallons the first year and three the second. She started baking breads for sale. Hungry for knowledge, she attended livestock auctions and began buying and selling animals, sold food at farmers’ markets, and made contacts in the agricultural community.

      They had been looking for a house for the better part of two years when they bought Hurricane Farm in 2008, a bargain fixer-upper on just a few acres. She termed the place a natural farm, not organic, but said that they lived an organic lifestyle, meaning close to the land. Though her life has now moved on, farming routines worked well for the family at the time. It allowed her long hours with the children, who saw the fruits of hard work and knew where their food came from, she told me when we sat on a picnic table near her sugarhouse while her then six-year-old played in melting snow, occasionally tasting syrup.

      A distinctive structure, the sugarhouse featured a cupola-topped gable roof supported by cedar posts and open on all but one side where it was attached to another farm building. Between posts, firewood was stacked, creating temporary walls. “We’re outside people,” she said, “and though sleet and rain make it tough sometimes, we want to enjoy outside weather.” The small, single-pan, foot-and-a-half-by-three-foot evaporator, purchased on credit around the time they bought the house, yielded twelve gallons of syrup in 2009, its first year. They tapped seventy-five trees on their own and neighboring land using tubing fed into five-gallon pails resting on the ground. In addition to syrup and fruits and vegetables, the farm produced eggs, beef, pork, turkeys, sheep, ducks, and rabbits for pets. They ran a meat-based Community Supported Agriculture program and were vendors at the Coventry Farmers’ Market a few towns away, the state’s largest.

      Rough around the edges and with evidence of many projects in progress, Hurricane Farm was a throwback by a couple of generations to when rural Connecticut was full of small places that grew a variety of crops sustaining families. “Being as self-sufficient as possible is the heart of my ambition,” Erica said with religious conviction as she opened the firebox and tossed in a few chunks of wood. “It’s what makes me thrive.” I never asked if she’d ever heard of the Nearings, but articulate and energetic, she is among their direct spiritual descendants. The way of the future, she postulated, is for people to do more for themselves on their own land, or buy directly from small local farmers. Sugaring teaches patience and the need to slow down and be aware of the world around you, that things come in their moment. “I feel like I’m dancing with nature,” she said with a wide smile.

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      FOR BRUCE GILLILAN of Fletcher, Vermont, sugaring is not only a connection to the land, but a legacy that has long infused family life with meaning, an unbroken chain stretching back generations. Bruce sugars in a country of tiny towns and modest houses set in rolling green hills patched with forest and fields