Western Massachusetts Sugar Shack Review

Adam’s Sugar Shack Review

Here is my impartial sugar house review. I thought others would benefit from my years of Shackin' Up.  For many years now I have gone to a sugarhouse at least one weekend every week between Valentine’s day and the end of March. You can go to Massmaple.org for addresses and directions.

Going to a sugarhouse has traditionally been the beginning of the spring riding season for me. There is something so wonderfully beautiful about the fact that water is beginning to rise up out of the ground into the leaves of trees. Usually it’s my first two up motorcycle ride, and my first ride of consequence.  It really is difficult for me to express the degree to which we anticipate shack season. From about Christmas we keep an informal countdown of days till the first shacks open.

God Bless the People’s Republic of Western Massachusetts.

The Red Bucket: Worthington, MA At the end of dirt Kinney Brook Road in in the first real hilltown going east. This is Priscilla and my favorite sugar house. There is an amazing view down the valley it's in with tap lines running this way and that. There is a huge assembled topographical map on one wall and a giant plexi window makes up the other. There is some preposterous effect in the boiling room where you wait whereby the steam seems to stratify in the air. I cannot explain this property, but it's amazing.  The coffee is lousy but everything else is good.

High Hopes: Worthington, MA Folksy and fun, it's a real Hilltown favorite, just up off RT112 it's easy to find. Some tables overlook the creek out back. If you're hungry it's an all you can eat bargain.  100% of the income at High Hopes goes into the owner’s kids college fund. It’s a nice place with plenty of decomposing snowmobiles for local color.

Strawbale Cafe AKA Hanging Mountian: Fun little place in Westhampton. It has a super nice boiling room with lots and lots of steam. It's in a very old building that's partly sunk in the ground. The restaurant itself is straw bale construction. If the weather is just right they have a fire pit and serve cider doughnuts outside.  Maybe the best coffee of any sugarhouse. It’s the place most likely to have gluten free pancakes.

Davenports: Shelburn, MA The 900 pound gorilla of sugar shacks. So authentic it pains the heart. My favorite thing, besides the old man that sometimes wears traditional Finnish costume, is the old barn window filled with maple syrups samples of years past. It makes a lovely stain glass window of amber hues you never knew existed. Beautiful views, appropriately hard to find.

Ikoa: Way out in Hancock MA. They have cows and stuff and a petting zoo. There is something nice about this place but I cannot recall what it is.

Goulds: The one everyone knows about. Gould's has a lot of history, the food is good and they make fritters. It's a bit too accessible to tour buses to be truly awesome.  This is the Official Sugar House of the Yankee Beemers.   This place has sugar and snow, which is worth a lot.

Maple Corner: Blandfield MA. It really is on a corner and they do have maple. it's really a cross country ski place that's also does maple. You can kill two birds with one stone and go skiing and have pancakes. As just a sugar shack it's not too shacky.

North Hadley Sugar Shack: Hadley, MA  Concert floors. Generic feeling, very unshacky. Plenty of parking. With petting zoo, it's where people with kids need to go and stay away from the Red Bucket so I can get a table.

Pomeroy’s: Westfield, MA  This sugar shack can be good bad or indifferent depending mainly on my mood. It’s a working dairy farm but the area around it has grown into a kind of appalling suburbia. It scores OK on shackieness by virtue of it’s unpaved and muddy parking and the general squalor that most working farms not owned by Robert Redford (or the equivalent) have. IIRC breakfast is served in a barn with a cement floor.

Windy Hill: Worthington, MA If this place is open again then you may proceed to the shackiest sugar shack of all times. Welcome back to the 1930s, the depression is back on, interior plumbing is limited. There isn't much parking; best to go early in the season before the outhouse hole fills up. You won't forget your trip to Windy Hill, but that's a good thing.  This is the polar opposite from the Olive Garden.

South Face Farm: Ashfield, MA  If you want to run into the who's who of Northampton proceed no further than South Face. In beautiful Ashfield, MA with lovely Routes 112 and 116 nearby it's a riding paradise. Frankly their corn fritters rock when compared to Gould's. Housed in a hundred plus year old barn it's really what Gould's could be were it more obscure and better.

Gray’s Sugarhouse: Ashfield, MA Gray’s has been closed about 10 years now, but it was the best. I tear up thinking about it. Frankly, I am angry that Gray’s shut down and want David Brooks to write an op ed piece in The Atlantic about the injustice of its closing down.

Steve's Sugar Shack:  Westhampton, MA Get ready to eat with the after church crowd. From what I can make if it they must be some sort of Protestant because they don't seem ethnic enough to be Catholics. At any rate a strange feature of this Westhampton shack is the boiling room inside the restaurant! Though most sugar shacks kind of remind me of a 4H project gone out of control and taken over by the adults I would have to say this one may have that effect even more.        

These are all the Sugar Shacks worth mentioning. If it’s not on this list, it’s crap.

Stephan

Stephan Gregor was better known as “The Jew” in his youth. His father, Adin Gregor was a military defense attorney who’d joined up in the Vietnam era to defend conscientious objectors from within the system, in later years he specialized in cases where servicemen and women were accused of being homosexuals. As a military brat Stephan lived in many places but mostly at Subic Military Base in the Philippines.

Stephan’s mother had left the family soon after his birth and returned to New York unable to bear the sidelong glances of the mostly southern, overwhelmingly Christian and endlessly disapproving neighbors, since they had no friends. As an attorney Adin saw he kept Stephan.

Officer housing in the sprawling base looked enough like an American suburb but to Stephan, better known as the Jew or early on as Stephanie, it was never home. He took to the world outside the gates where he slipped into the universe of prostitutes and con men that ring all United States Military bases in poor lands. In the barrio, a wall away from ersatz Americana of baseball diamonds and hedges that Stephan escaped an identity beyond his control.

Stephan became ironically known as the Filipino. Stephan could buy women, or drugs or alcohol with the change off his father’s dresser and more than once he did. Stephan became an appreciable street fighter, which in the Philippines is no mean feat, and the boys on base called him Stephanie no more. He made way in both worlds as Jews amid Christians have always done, brokering what was at hand. Stephan made no friends, but made money.

One day he purchased a Honda CB160 from a Marine down on his luck with debts to the wrong people in the barrio. Almost from his first ride Stephan sensed he he finally found something that spoke to him essentially. Alone on the bike he was beyond the reach of either identity and simply showed up unannounced in far flung places where nobody knew any of his names. On beaches far from the base where fishermen hauled nets he small conversation with strangers who knew nothing of him.

Eventually, moving off base, Stephan made a place amid many, but with nobody. When his grandfather died in New York he sold his concrete bungalow shook fewer than a dozen hands and left the Philippines forever. He flew military transport as a last favor called in and landed in San Diego, took a taxi to motorcycle dealership and purchased a Kawasaki Conquers 14 with roughly half he cash he carried with him. In 72 hours, he arrived at his maternal grandfathers wake at 57-02 Northern Boulevard Woodside, Queens.

The ride was effortless, after a lifetime of 400cc motorcycles and primitive roads he was at last as anonymous as he ever wished to be and the Conquers flattened the highways. What he found when he arrived was stranger than any serviceman’s brothel request. Every building seemed a low warren, or borrow as indeed the cities withing the city of New York were called. Rooms filled with darkly clothed people, even in the heat of summer chanted obscure but strangely familiar words.

When accounts were finally settled three somber men presented Stephan with a check for slightly less than $24,000 purchasing his share of his grandfather’s sprawling empire of tailor shops. He walked down three flights of stairs to the Conquers and headed for Mexico.

My Arcadian

I outpaced the storm from nearly the Louisiana border, clear across Mississippi and then into the Ozarks. At times, as I ran before it, I could see the pavement darken in the rear view mirrors and feel the cool sweep of wind towards the low pressure at its center.

Staying ahead of it was easier on the highway; the GSX-R’s deficiencies as a touring bike are more than made up for by what I thought of as character. When I Ieft the highway for back roads its handeling essential. Now I raced towards my Arcadian as much as I ran before the storm.

She was smart, rich and beautiful; I met her in the aftermath of Mardi Gras in 1986 and chanced on her not four months on in Fargo. She had an accent both southern and French, being of old Arcadian stock. To tell, her family had a hand in the negotiation of the Louisiana purchase and their fortune stemmed from that.

At one point I passed seven cars and a motorhome with the front wheel a good six inches off the road for the whole half mile it took. I entered the next corner blind and hard on the brakes. It went on like that for half an hour.

I turned into her drive as the storm was on top of me. As the GSX-R came to a halt before the stables, the sky blackened, a great wind came up, and hail rained down hard enough to obscure the great house only a hundred or so meters away. I stepped out of my Aerostich in a manner so graceful it startled even me and raced towards the broad steps, taking them three and four at a time. Not thinking of manners and carried along by the thrill of arrival I plunged though the doors and nearly knocked over a maid carrying a tea set -- on though the foyer, the great room, and a dining room, knocking a table that sent a glass spiraling on its edge in a huge concentric ring. Lightning crackled outside and wind pulled long drapes out of tall windows.

I raced out the French doors and onto the broad patio where I saw her running toward the house in the storm and when she saw me she ran harder still and we clasped in a wet and embrace in hail and thunder.

Laughing we chased each from room to room, in and out of the house, tracking water and mud everywhere. Her parents, whom I’d never met, were passed two or three times in this crazy procession, and began laughing too, seeing their wet daughter laugh so hard. I chased her from the house and caught her on a bridal path that led to what she called the hermitage, a small cottage shingled all over and bermed into a knoll. We ran inside and without a word took off our wet clothes and made hungry love on the bed as the storm raged outside.

When it was over I stood and walked to a desk at the window. On it were an old but very well made draftsman's compass and many pages covered with mathematical formulas written long ago in fine script with a quill pen. A volume of Byron stood open to Would I Were a Careless Child.

She produced a cigarette from a side table and the smoke coiled above her. She enjoyed a smoke after sex and at no other time. After I first kissed her in North Dakota we’d carried on an intense relationship, meeting where her work took her and where I could get to. I knew, then, what passion is, but to say I loved her would have been a distortion of a word I didn’t fully understand.

Her family, rich for generations, married either the most beautiful or smartest from the peasants around them. The result was a slender woman, with delicate hands and a charming wit working toward her PhD. Her grandmother had past away over the winter, and now she would wear her hat to the Kentucky Derby, and someday her daughter or granddaughter would too. This was neither a right nor a privilege but something as simple as a swale drawing water after a summer storm.

I asked her about the meaning of the objects in the room. She said that long ago, the family had hired a tutor to come from the North to educate the family children. It was said the tutor had fallen in love with an aunt in the mid 1800s, but that a fire had killed the aunt when the manor had partially burned down. For reasons never understood the family had let the tutor stay on here, in the hermitage. He died not long after, the family said of a broken heart. “So you see,” she said, playing up the French part of her accent, “it ended very badly,” and tossed her cigarette our the window.

I believe that I knew it was over for us then, right then. Not a moment before or after. I met her parents more properly and we went through the motions of a visit. The food was wonderful and we rode horses around the estate, me clumsily and she like she was born to, because she was. I don’t think I saw her world before that, with its special hats and walnut tables. When I left I held her a long time and when we said goodbye we both knew it was for good.

Two years ago I was checking into a hotel for a conference and she saw me walk across the lobby. A while later she knocked on my door. I was surprised to see her. “I saw you in your suit,” she said, meaning my Aerostich. “To think you’d still have the same one after all these years.”

“No,” I replied, “I crashed the one I had when I knew you, and wore out another too.” That was nearly 30 years ago. I looked into her brown eyes and she was beautiful. When I smelled her I fancied I could still feel her breath on my neck as I had so long ago.

She looked up to see that the hand I held the door open with had a wedding ring on it. “It’s been a long ride for me, I mean, today... on the motorcycle.” There was an awkward silence. “Look,” I went on, “are you here at the hotel?” “Yes” she said, “we can talk later.”

We chanced on each other in lobby and we sat on the large impersonal sofa there. She’d taken a PhD in linguistics and taught at UC Berkeley. Academics, she said, left little time for anything else. She’d never married, and kept a small house in the hills, nothing like the manor, she said, more like the hermitage.

When I left the next day I fancied I could see a thunderhead rising the the west but another part of me knew there was nothing of the sort. I stood in the parking lot for a time and began to weep, watching cars pass on the highway. I hoped nobody I knew from the conference would see me. I did not try and hide myself, but finally stood looking down at my gloves laid across the ignition as the drone of passing cars sang in my ears.

I did not weep for chances missed or days gone by. I climbed on my motorcycle, a man, and headed home.