Sugaring Archetype of a sloooower audio style Originally published in Current, May 13, 2002 By Mike Janssen A sugarmaker sleds through the Vermont woods, gathering maple sap for syrup. The old ritual is the subject of a 1978 NPR documentary that harks back to an earlier time for public radio, too. (Photo: Perceptions Inc., Don Lockhart.) To celebrate its 25th anniversary on the air, Vermont Public Radio recently rebroadcast "Sugaring," a classic audio documentary about maple syrup production that teaches a thing or two about change. Vermont and New Hampshire farmers still tap and boil maple sap much as they did in 1978, when "Sugaring" first aired on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered. The greater change has been at NPR, where a story with the leisurely pace of the half-hour report would have little chance of airing today. "This is probably true of life, but everything I go back and hear now seems too slow," says Noah Adams, who narrated "Sugaring" and recently took leave from NPR to write a book. Adams was hosting WATC in 1977 when Vermont Public Radio, then brand new, got a grant for a radio production workshop with NPR staffers. "It was a big deal, for all of us to learn something from the guys in Washington," recalls Art Silverman, who was writing for a New Hampshire newspaper at the time and volunteering at VPR. The workshop introduced him to NPR and helped him get a job there in 1978. Today, he produces All Things Considered. NPR tutored Silverman and several colleagues in the art of radio production, and the volunteers tromped through the wet snow and thawing mud of the Connecticut River Valley to let farmers, children and sugarhouse workers wax poetic about the season's six-week, sticky-sweet harvest. The report opens with the sound of sap drip-dripping into a bucket and closes with a gaggle of overstimulated children hollering about syrup. "Whenever I finish up my waffle I lick the plate that's smothered with syrup!" one yells. In between, farmers discuss the changing ways they gather the syrup and the significance of the season. "They wouldn't do it if they really had to make a living at it," says one woman of the sap-tappers. But "something happens when you start tapping at the tree . . . there's just some magical thing that happens and they all get addicted." "You want to be in on it," says another. "You want to watch spring start right up from the beginning." "Sugaring" still has its charms but, as its producers now acknowledge, it does drag for today's listener. A syrup industry executive uses more time to differentiate the grades of syrup than NPR would give to an entire commentary today. "I remember hearing it several years later and thinking, God, that's slow and artsy," Silverman says. Back then, he says, public radio found inspiration in documentaries produced by foreign broadcasters such as Sender Freies Berlin, a German outfit "that would have two-hour-long documentaries about the sound of rocks in your garden," he jokes. Public radio's pulse surely has quickened in 25 years, but that didn't stop Garrison Keillor from mocking a story suspiciously similar to "Sugaring" in a 1997 Atlantic Monthly story. Spoofing public radio as dull and over-earnest, it includes a fictional pubradio narrator named Jonah Hadley. His report on sugaring featured "the crunch-crunch-crunch of footsteps in the snow and the drip of the sap in the bucket and some extremely laconic Vermonters muttering something about syrup (they talked at a rate of four words a minute, which gave their mutterance an air of vast profundity), and then Jonah tied it all up with a whispery voice-over, something solemn and flabby about tradition as a force for sanity in our lives, a few sentences that managed to bring in Tocqueville, Bob Dylan, the quest for the Holy Grail, a quotation from an obscure Sufi poet, the crisis of male identity in the '90s, the myth of Sisyphus, and the Easter bunny." Does Silverman take offense? Far from it. "It's kind of nice to be singled out that way," he says.

Two decades after it first aired on NPR, Keillor lampooned the aural ode to Vermont tradition.

	To Current's home page
	Outside link: Streaming audio of "Sugaring" on VPR's website.
	Outside link: Vermont Maple Sugar Maker's Association, partial underwriter of our photo above.

Web page posted May 16, 2002
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