For a taste of maple syrup and traditional culture, follow the snowshoes into the woods.
By Cindy Loose
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 11, 2007
A wolf runs to my car door as I park between a sugar shack and a lumberjack-style building at the end of a wooded country lane, about 45 minutes outside Quebec City.
Its teeth seem to be bared in a smile, but maybe it's a snarl. As I debate whether to get out of the car, a huge man with a long beard appears, wearing knickers, a puffy shirt and suspenders -- clothing that only adds to his striking resemblance to Paul Bunyan.
"Not to worry, that's just Lulu," he says with a heavy French Canadian accent. Actually, Pierre Faucher is saying Loup-Loup, meaning Wolf-Wolf in French, but it sounds like Lulu. And she's only 80 percent wolf. The rest is Siberian husky.
Loup-Loup greets thousands of customers each year here at La Cabane a Pierre, and at Faucher's other property, Sucrerie de la Montagne, just outside Montreal. Both properties are dual-purpose, producing maple sugar and preserving French Canadian traditions from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Visitors from around the world come all year to tour the maple groves, to dance to French Canadian music, to learn to play the spoons and to eat a hearty French Canadian country meal, parts of it doused in syrup.
This month and next, though, are prime time. It's sugar-shack season. Maple trees are tapped, sap drips into buckets that are then collected on sleighs pulled by Belgian horses, and wood fires blaze to reduce the thin, watery sap into a sweet amber liquid.
Faucher won't begin tapping his trees until tomorrow; he always waits "until the decline of the moon of March." But that first step in the sugaring process is already well underway in the United States' four top maple-sugar states: Vermont, Maine, New York and New Hampshire, in that order.
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It's been a weird winter for many of the maple producers in those states. The snow, instead of steadily falling and forming frozen layers, has come in major spurts in many areas. Over Valentine's Day weekend, for example, parts of Vermont got five feet of snow in 24 hours.
For the men and women who rise early to strap on snowshoes and head into the frozen forests to pound taps into maple trees, the odd weather has meant they've been slogging through snow up to their knees. Without snowshoes, they would sink to their armpits, says Jacques Couture, president of the Vermont Maple Foundation. This makes the work twice as hard, and a worker who can normally drive 750 taps a day is accomplishing half that.
But any day now, if it hasn't already, the sap will begin to drip. Producers eager to get customers hooked on their product will open their doors for tours. Most will add special events, such as a fiddler band, pancake-eating contests, petting zoos, sleigh rides and, almost always, free samples of hot, sweet and often gooey treats.
All sell maple syrup, maple sugar, maple candy and whatever else they can think of that uses syrup as an ingredient. Many also stock their stores with whatever they produce outside sugaring season, which generally runs from March to mid- or late April. Thus you might find cedar furniture, cane chairs or refinished antiques. Or a chance to pet an alpaca, then buy a sweater made from its wool, or pet a lamb and buy a sheepskin.
Although touring sugar shacks is an old tradition, akin to touring wineries or visiting pumpkin patches in the fall, it has been growing ever more popular. In New York state alone, sugar shacks logged 2 million visitors during two maple sugar weekends last year, said Mary Jeanne Packer, executive director of the New York State Maple Producers Association.
And why not? It's North America's first harvest of the year, and takes place in scenic settings. A visit includes a chance to feel both the last gasp of winter and the first breath of spring. Perhaps most important, it lets you step back into an old tradition from a simple, rural past.
Besides, sugaring, as it's called, is a fascinating process. Consider: You must boil down 40 gallons of sap to get one gallon of maple syrup. Vermont typically produces about a half-million gallons of syrup. That means Vermont farmers gather 20 million gallons of sap a year, one little drip at a time.
For travelers, sugar shacking is also a chance to rub elbows with locals and experience the kind of small-town life you might have thought disappeared in the 1950s.
Churches, firehouses, civic groups and sometimes an entire town will host events around sugar-shack season. Apparently everyone in Marathon, N.Y., for example, has an active role in the annual maple festival, to be held this year March 24-25.
Each high school class has a booth. The seniors are in charge of sausage sandwiches and "spiedies," an Upstate New York delicacy that's something like a shish kebab on bread. The Boy Scouts have the maple-flavored cotton candy concession. The maple queen and her court will lead the parade. You can "see the village from the sky" on a helicopter ride or see it from the ground in a horse-drawn cart. There's a quilt show, an antique family Bible display, a soapbox derby, a show by 80 "gallery-quality artists and crafters" and Civil War reenactors. The Methodists are serving a chicken dinner; the Presbyterians decided to keep it simple and will sell soup and sandwiches. The Catholics are going with their traditional spaghetti dinners. The Masons have pancakes, and the local congressman will bring a yet-to-be named NASA astronaut.
If you'd like to blast even further into the past, then one of Faucher's two properties is the way to go.
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Shortly after I arrive at La Cabane a Pierre, a busload of sophisticated-looking teens from Connecticut arrives. It's a stopover on their way home from a school-sponsored week in Quebec City brushing up on their French.
The boys horse around during the tour of the sugar shack and a re-created trapper's shack in a maple grove. I'm betting they'll all be making snide remarks and rolling their eyes at the music of country fiddlers and washboard players.
They and other visitors that day find seats on benches at pine tables inside the replica of a big lumberjack camp, built by Pierre and local craftsmen, using axes to get that rough-hewn look from the timber. A lumberjack meal is served family-style: maple-cured ham and sausage, pea soup, meat pie, souffle omelet, baked beans in maple syrup, potatoes baked with cheese, bread just pulled from a wood-fired oven. Even before dessert arrives, waitresses in traditional dress set out pitchers of maple syrup and encourage diners to try it on everything.
The adults in the crowd are offered Faucher's family recipe for a Quebec Caribou: a mixture of red wine, white wine, blueberry wine, white whiskey and a touch of syrup.
After a couple of those, you don't feel at all shy about responding to the invitation to learn to play wooden spoons, which poor families would use in olden days to supplement whatever store-bought instruments they'd acquired. The traditional French Canadian band begins playing and calling out instructions for line dancing, sounding so much like a Louisiana Acadian band it would take an expert to tell the difference.
Amazingly, the teens, without benefit of Caribous, join in. Maybe they're on a sugar high. And we haven't yet had the hot maple taffy poured on ice.
Watching from the back of the room, Faucher beams. "We're keeping a culture alive."
You need reservations and a car to visit La Cabane a Pierre (418-479-5200, http://www.cabaneapierre.com), which is about 45 minutes south of Quebec City, off Route 73. In March and April, lunch and a tour for visitors older than 12 is about $17, and about $21 for dinner. During the off-season, prices for adults increase by about $2, and the property is open to individuals whenever groups have made reservations. To find details on hundreds of other sugar shacks in the Quebec region, including Faucher's Sucrerie de la Montagne (which also has cabins to rent and is open daily year-round), go to http://www.bonjourquebec.comand type "sugar shacks" in the search field. For sugar shacks and special events celebrating the maple harvest near Ottawa: http://www.ottawatourism.ca.
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