Life in Vermont: Sugaring

It seems that lately I've been posting a lot about my "job" as an odd mix of tour guide, chauffeur and chaperone, but that doesn't mean that it's not fun. Despite my fearsome reputation and general contrariness I do love my students, which is, of course, how I always get dragooned into taking them places (that and the, what seemed at the time, innocent decision to take the van training at school). One of the great RAs out here at the Q, Nicole Baker, asked me earlier in the week if I would help drive a group of Qsters out to a sugar shack in Huntington (and by ask I mean she, as is her wont, violently kicked at my door until I agreed to serve as the second driver. Nicole is very persuasive - and she definitely has a bright future in international business (if not world domination). So yesterday we loaded up a dozen students in the two school vans and headed off to the wilds of Huntington, which is a few minutes past the Round Church in Richmond. Oddly, despite my eleven years in Vermont I had never visited a sugar shack when they were actually "sugaring," the process wherein you boil down the sap to get the syrup. I've visited the shacks several times, including last year when I was shepherding the visiting Russians around, but it was always off-season. The standard rule seems to be that you have to boil down around forty gallons of sap to get one gallon of maple syrup. On this visit we did get to try some of the sap itself, which just tastes like weak sugar water (and you can see why it would take so many gallons of sap). Nevertheless, despite the fact that Vermont is so small geographically we're the national leader in maple syrup production (although our production is dwarfed by that of our neighbors to the north in Quebec - of course, no Vermonter would be caught dead consuming Canadian maple syrup which they generally consider inferior if not outright toxic). Yes, in addition to being very biased about their maple syrup, they are also very knowledgable. You would be hard pressed to find a Vermonter who doesn't have a favorite grade of maple syrup, and who can't speak eloquently about their choice. The students really enjoy the trip. The highlight, naturally, was consuming sugar on snow, which is heated maple syrup poured on crushed ice (served with a pickle to "cut" the sweetness). The entire process is fascinating and fairly complicated - you can only "harvest" the sap for a couple weeks in very early spring - and since our weather this time of year is pretty unpredictable (we had a blizzard while I was down in Virginia that dumped more than two feet of snow on the ground in one day) it can really be a challenge to get the maple syrup produced. There are a lot of small producers that Vermonters are fiercely loyal to, which is not surprisingly one of the things that I find most charming about the place.