Sugaring II, c.1980

In an interview, Roland Rochette once said: “I like to do things that the younger generation haven’t seen. I think it’s kind of instructive for the younger people. Younger people, a lot of them, don’t believe what the older people did and how hard they worked.”

Today’s younger generations in Vermont mostly see maple sugar trees connected to miles and miles of blue plastic tubing and a vacuum pump, and few of them ever see sugaring done the way Rochette has shown it here. An ox is pulling a sled that has a big tub on it, and the man beside the sled has gone from tree to tree and emptying the sap into the tub, one bucket at a time. The man and the ox are on their way back to the sugarhouse, the building in the upper right. We see steam rising out of the roof vent, and, next to the sugarhouse, a stack of logs (which Rochette made out of tiny twigs), fuel to feed the fire that is boiling off the sap into syrup.