Sugar Season: A Letter from the Shack

Dale Whitfield starts his mornings at two-thirty during sugar season. The fire in the evaporator arch has already been burning for an hour by the time most people's alarms go off. He's 54, and he's been doing this on a hillside outside Cabot, Vermont since before he was old enough to stay awake through a full boil. His grandfather built the sugar shack in 1961 with salvaged lumber from a barn that burned. Some of those boards are still charred on the back side. Dale's never replaced them.

This letter arrived — written, he says, on the back of an old evaporator manual — during the last week of February, when the sap had finally started running and the freeze-thaw window was open. He writes about the smell that lives permanently in his jacket, the forty-gallon math of turning raw sap into syrup, the four-mile walk through snow every morning before firing the arch, and a 180-year-old sugar maple on the east ridge that he calls the old woman. He also writes about his daughter Wren, a nurse in Burlington, and a phone call she made last year in the middle of the run. He knew, from that call, that the shack would outlast him.