What Clem Fournier Won't Tell Her Niece About the Last Good Trees

Future Tense interviews are speculative — conversations with invented characters inhabiting plausible near-futures. Clem Fournier does not exist. Her sugar bush does not exist. The conditions she describes are drawn from documented trends in Vermont's maple industry, where the average sugaring season now begins eight days earlier than it did fifty years ago and is projected to shift by a full month before century's end.¹ The trees are real. The math is real. Clem is what happens when you follow the math home.

We meet Clem Fournier in the sugar house on her family's 180-acre parcel outside Irasburg, Vermont, a town of roughly 1,100 in the Northeast Kingdom, where Franco-American families have been tapping maples since before anyone kept records of such things. It is late March 2034. The evaporator is cold. The season ended nine days ago.

In a good year, and by "good" Clem means a year that resembles the ones her grandmother described, the sugar house would still be running. Steam rolling off the evaporator pans, the air thick with what Clem once told a school group was "what it smells like when winter decides to become spring." Instead, she is sitting on an overturned bucket, drinking coffee from a thermos, surrounded by the plastic tubing that now connects most of her 4,200 taps to a vacuum pump system she installed in 2029.

She produced 1,340 gallons of syrup this year. By volume, the second-best season in her family's history.

She does not seem pleased about this.

Your family has been sugaring this land for four generations. What does a season feel like now compared to when you started?

Clem: Shorter. And I want to be precise about this, because people hear "shorter" and think somebody trimmed the ends. That's not what happened. The whole thing compressed. You used to get these long, slow freeze-thaw cycles. Cold nights, warm days, cold nights, warm days, and the sap would come when it was ready. You could feel it building. Now you get a week, maybe twelve days if you're lucky, and the whole thing just goes. The trees dump everything at once and then you're standing here looking at an empty evaporator wondering what happened.

My grandmother used to say you could set your watch by the maples. I don't know what watch she was using, but it wasn't digital.

You installed vacuum tubing and a reverse osmosis system five years ago. That's a significant investment for a family operation.

Clem: Sixty-two thousand dollars. Which is a lot of syrup.

Has it been worth it?

Clem: Depends what you mean by "worth it." I make more syrup now. Significantly more. The vacuum pulls sap even when the pressure differential is weak, so on days when the old bucket-and-tap setup would've given you nothing, I'm still collecting.² And the RO takes out most of the water before it hits the evaporator, so I'm burning less fuel, boiling less time. It's efficient. It works.

But my grandmother didn't stand in this sugar house for forty years because it was efficient.

She stood here because the season was long enough to be a season. You'd come out every morning and check the buckets. You'd bring the kids. The sap would freeze in the buckets overnight and you'd crack the ice off and there'd be this feeling that the woods were giving you something on their own schedule. You were receiving it.

Now I go check the gauges on the pump. The sap comes through a tube. I make more syrup than she ever dreamed of making and I cannot tell you it's the same thing.

You also run the community's first-syrup supper. Can you describe it for people who haven't been?

Clem: It's nothing fancy. We've done it since before I was born. First Saturday after the first boil, you invite everyone. Pancakes, obviously. Beans. The new syrup. Forty, fifty people in the fire hall. The point was always: winter's done, here's the proof, come eat it together.

Has the timing become a problem?

Clem: [long pause] The supper used to fall in mid-March. Now it's all over the place. Last year it was February 22nd. This year, March 1st. And nobody minds eating pancakes in February, that's fine. The problem is the whole thing was keyed to a feeling. The first warm weekend. Mud season starting. You'd walk in and the light would be different, the snow would be that wet, heavy snow that means it's almost done. Now sometimes you're holding the supper and it's still January weather outside, or it's sixty degrees and raining, and either way it doesn't land the same.

I thought about just picking a fixed date. Third Saturday of March, every year, no matter when the sap runs. But then it's not the first-syrup supper, is it? It's just a supper.

You mentioned teaching your niece to sugar. What does that look like when the cues you learned on are shifting?

Clem: That's the thing that keeps me up at night. I can teach her the equipment. The tubing, the vacuum, the RO. That's mechanical, anybody can learn that. What I can't teach her is what I learned from standing in these woods for forty years, because half of what I learned is wrong now.

I used to tell school groups: you watch for the first red-winged blackbird, that's your sign the nights are still cold enough but the days are turning. And that was true. For decades that was true. Now the blackbirds show up and the sap's already been running for a week, or the blackbirds show up and we get another hard freeze that lasts ten days. The signals and the seasons came apart from each other.³

So what do I tell her? I tell her what I know, and then I tell her it might not work. Which is a hell of a thing to pass down to somebody.

Some forestry managers in Vermont have raised concerns about sugar maple regeneration, that the mature trees are healthy but young trees aren't establishing behind them.⁴ Do you see that on your land?

Clem: [sets down coffee] Yeah.

Can you say more?

Clem: I can say that I've got beautiful trees. Gorgeous, healthy trees, eighty, ninety years old, producing like champions. And underneath them, where the saplings should be coming up? Buckthorn. Japanese barberry. And if I clear those out, the deer eat whatever tries to grow. And if I fence the deer out, which I've done on two acres as an experiment, the earthworms have changed the soil composition so much that the maples don't establish the way they used to.⁴

I'm tapping trees that are going to be here for another thirty, forty years. My niece will tap them. Her kids might tap them. But their kids? I don't know what they'll be tapping.

Is that something you talk about with her?

But she'll figure it out. She'll stand here in twenty years and look at the understory and she'll know.

What would you want her to understand that you can't quite say to her yet?

[long silence]

Clem Fournier asked that we note she is "not a climate person." Given everything she just described, that may be the most precise thing anyone has said all year about who is and isn't a climate person.

Footnotes

1. Shelburne Farms, "Maple Sugaring as the Climate Changes." https://shelburnefarms.org/about/news-and-stories/maple-sugaring-season-climate-changes ↩

2. University of Vermont, "How Climate Change is Impacting the Maple Syrup Industry," February 2024. https://www.uvm.edu/uvmnews/news/how-climate-change-impacting-maple-syrup-industry ↩

3. Charlie, A., et al., "Shifting Seasons and Threats to Harvest, Culture, and Self-Identity," GeoHealth, December 2022. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GH000617 ↩

4. Shelburne Farms, ibid.; USGS Climate Adaptation Science Centers, "Climate Effects on the Culture and Ecology of Sugar Maple." https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-centers/science/climate-effects-culture-and-ecology-sugar-maple ↩ ↩²