These seven words, quietly slipped into an appropriations bill by Vermont’s U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy in 1998, briefly elevated the national status of a picturesque but little-known body of water that nestles between New York and Vermont. A short-lived, but surprisingly fierce, regional dispute ensued about the essential question: What makes a lake great?

Lake Champlain provides one way to answer that question.

The lake forms part of the border between Vermont and New York, and extends northward into Quebec. It stretches for over 100 miles north to south, but with a maximum width of only 12 miles. The lake and environs played a key role in the American Revolution, and today it drives a good deal of the local economy, drawing tourists and businesses to this remote rural region.

So it’s no wonder that locals consider it a great lake—but is it a Great Lake?

It’s complicated. Champlain does share some features with the five Great Lakes—Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior. Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes are within the Laurentian Mixed Forest Ecoregion, meaning that the climate, topography, forest type, and soil type are similar.

And like the Great Lakes, Champlain is partially a relic of the last Ice Age. The great ice sheets that covered much of North America 18,000 years ago carved out the depressions that would become these lakes. As the glaciers retreated, meltwater to their south filled the basins, while the ice prevented a northward flow to the ocean. At one point the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain discharged to the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River. The retreat of the ice sheets uncovered today’s shared northern outflow via the St. Lawrence River, which divides northern New York state from southern Canada.

But by almost all geographic measures, the idea of Champlain as a Great Lake is ludicrous. Champlain is about half the length of the shortest of the Great Lakes. One would need to row across Lake Champlain and back twice to equal the distance it would take to cross Lake Ontario, the narrowest of the Great Lakes.

By surface area, almost 17 Champlains would fit into Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes. By water volume, almost 19 Champlains would fit into the second-smallest of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie, which contains less water than Ontario. There are bays on the Great Lakes that are larger than Lake Champlain: Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, and Green Bay on Lake Michigan. Only in depth can Lake Champlain at least stake a claim of being a Great Lakes peer. Lake Champlain is deeper than Lake Erie, though Lake Superior, the deepest of the Great Lakes, is more than three times deeper.

Champlain offers a mix of open water, secluded bays, steep cliffs, and teeming marshes. The Adirondack High Peaks, New York’s tallest mountains, loom over the western shore, while the Green Mountains of Vermont mark the eastern horizon. Much of the shoreline is still undeveloped with cedar trees leaning out from limestone bluffs. Natural sand beaches develop near the mouths of the Winooski, Ausable, Saranac, and Lamoille Rivers. More than 70 islands dot the lake. Fossils from the earliest known reefs lie exposed on the surficial bedrock of the larger islands. Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, sweeps upward from the eastern shore overlooking the widest expanse of water. From Burlington, a paved bike path hugs the water, culminating in a magnificent three-mile stretch over an abandoned railroad causeway crossing the lake.

Supporters of raising Lake Champlain’s stature point to its commonalities with the Great Lakes—and its special place in early American history. In 1609, the Frenchman Samuel de Champlain became the first European to set eyes on the lake. Over the next 150 years, the lake provided a water corridor between Quebec City and New York, thus serving as a central trading route between the French to the north and the Dutch and later English to the south.

The rights to control the waterbody were often contested between the European and colonial powers. Fort Ticonderoga, an 18th-century star-shaped structure overlooking a narrow point near the southern end of the lake, epitomizes the conflicts.

Within a period of 18 years, control of the fort vacillated five times between three different countries: France, England (twice), and the United States (twice). In 1775, in one of the Revolutionary War’s first engagements, the Vermont militia—the so-called Green Mountain Boys—took control of the fort without firing a shot.

Following this capture, the Americans anticipated a British counterattack. Benedict Arnold, at this point still loyal to the rebelling colonists, had commandeered a trading schooner owned by a British loyalist in what is now Whitehall, New York, making Whitehall the self-proclaimed birthplace of the American Navy. This boat, along with another captured by Arnold’s troops, was soon joined by 13 more ships built at Ticonderoga during the summer of 1776.

When the British fleet arrived at the north end of the lake, it set out to find the Americans, and eventually encountered Arnold’s armada hidden between Valcour Island and the shore. A fierce battle ensued, with the Americans vastly out-gunned. At the end of the first day, it was clear that the American fleet would not withstand the onslaught.

But Arnold ordered the boats to be rowed past the British fleet with muffled oars under cover of darkness. To his great chagrin, British General Guy Carleton awoke the next morning to find his enemy had escaped. He gave chase through the early morning fog, at one point firing upon what he thought was a disabled colonial ship.

As the fog cleared, however, he learned that he had been firing upon a small, rocky island, which to this day bears the name Carleton’s Prize. Meanwhile, Arnold escaped to the south, eventually scuttling his remaining ships on the eastern side of the lake in what is now called Arnold’s Bay. Though Arnold lost the fight, the British fleet was sufficiently damaged for them to return to Montreal for the winter and give the colonies an extra winter to prepare and court allies.  

The lesser-known Battle of Plattsburgh occurred on the lake in 1814 and was a simultaneous land-and-sea conflict. Anticipating an attack, Lieutenant Thomas Macdonough constructed three gunboats, adding to the one they already had. The American and British fleets met in Plattsburgh Bay in September, with Macdonough’s fleet victorious. Without naval support, the British soon retreated from the land battle as well. The American victory forestalled British claims to Lake Champlain and the Great Lakes in the peace negotiations which ended the War of 1812 in December 1814.

Almost two centuries later, Lake Champlain was at the center of a less violent, but still passionate, battle. The 1998 legislative brouhaha about whether to classify it as one of the Great Lakes wasn’t about dimensions or ecosystems or relative historical importance.

It was about research money.

Since 1966, all states and territories of the United States with a border on an ocean or one of the Great Lakes have been eligible to host a Sea Grant program, a program within the U.S. Department of Commerce that provides federal funding for research and outreach about coastal and aquatic resources. By declaring Lake Champlain to be a Great Lake, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont saw an opportunity to make his land-locked state eligible to host a Sea Grant office. The minor edit to the appropriations bill escaped notice and the bill passed on a voice vote. President Bill Clinton signed it on March 7, 1998.

Once the inclusion became publicly known, Midwesterners were not pleased. “Lake Champlain is about as big as your little finger. It doesn’t stack up with the other lakes,” said a Michigan representative. An Ohio representative scoffed, “If Lake Champlain ends up as a Great Lake, I propose we rename it ‘Lake Plain Sham’.” The Green Bay Press in Wisconsin labelled Senator Leahy the Fourth Stooge for adding a sixth Great Lake.

The outrage centered on state pride associated with being home to a Great Lake, not with money or resources—the original motivation for the change. Therefore, politicians quickly found a resolution that left everyone happy. The offensive phrase calling Lake Champlain a Great Lake was struck, but Vermont’s eligibility for a Sea Grant office remained. Lake Champlain lost its status but retained its funding.

The addition of Lake Champlain to Sea Grant has strengthened the program overall. Lake Champlain serves as a microcosm of the Great Lakes for researchers. Experiments have been conducted to identify impediments to lake trout reproduction, enhance management of parasitic sea lamprey, and detect sources of microplastics, which contaminate the environment and accumulate in the bodies of fish and other animals. These same challenges face the Great Lakes, but research can often be conducted more efficiently on the smaller Champlain.

Champlain has lost the title of Great Lake. It has not lost its place in the history of the founding of our nation. It has not lost its utility as a laboratory for cutting-edge research. And it has not lost the affection of those who live or visit the region. The lake may not be a Great Lake, but it will ever be great.

The post Why Isn’t Lake Champlain ‘Great’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How, exactly, did Vermont come to mean maple?

I live in Vermont, and I do research on the making of maple syrup. It’s called sugaring or sugarmaking around here, which is a throwback to the time when most of the maple sap collected was boiled down until it was cakes of hard, dry sugar. But most people these days experience real maple as syrup, a beautiful amber-brown liquid that is made of exactly two ingredients: sap and heat. The ingredients may be simple, but the threads connecting the state and the syrup are a complex tangle, made up of stories whose seeming simplicity obscures the always messy nature of identity.

When spring is about to spring, but winter is still stubbornly hanging on, the sap begins to run. When the temperature cycles between about 40 F in the day and around freezing at night, the fluidic pressure inside the tree rises enough to push sap out of any breaks in the outer layers of the tree. Holes drilled into the tree and fitted with metal or plastic taps guide this sap’s flow into buckets or intricate systems of tubing that collect the sap.

In the sugarhouse, the sap is boiled: The water leaves in the form of steam, and the sugars get more and more concentrated until it is thick and delicious. Maple syrup has an ineffable, evocative flavor that defies easy definition, and varies with terrain and technique. It is in a category of foods with flavors so singular that they simply cannot be well described by reference to other tastes—coffee, chocolate, huitlacoche, vanilla, good scotch, matsutake, durian.

In pursuit of that flavor and the identity that goes with it, I have wandered into sugarhouses all over Vermont. I wish I could tell you what a typical sugarhouse looks like, but there is no such thing. Some are simple frame structures, open to the elements, and others have high definition TVs, tile floors, and full wet bars. Some sugarhouses have barely enough room for the sugarmaker and the piece of boiling equipment called the evaporator. Other sugarhouses have facilities for filtering, canning, and making secondary maple products like candies and granulated maple sugar.

Many sugarmakers have an open door policy during sugaring season (whether their sugarhouse has an actual door on it or not), and many are used to people wandering in. Friends, neighbors, and family are welcomed into the sugarhouse with the same casual familiarity that one would expect when knocking on the door for lunch, although during sugaring season there is a festive air and a purposeful hustle, so maybe knocking on the door for Thanksgiving dinner is a better comparison.

Strangers are usually welcomed into the sugarhouse as well, but with a different approach. Because the stranger is often a tourist looking for a glimpse behind the curtain of sugaring, or an experience unique to the place they are visiting, sugarmakers have gotten used to having a standard patter, a spiel given to tell the story of maple to someone who is interested but perhaps not yet very knowledgeable.

When I first started visiting sugarhouses, I heard that spiel often. It’s not a bad story, but it is superficial, and it doesn’t get to the heart of what sugaring means.

Now, when I walk into many sugarhouses around Vermont, the sugarmakers get right into their particular sugaring story, as every operation is unique. On a recent trip to a small, utilitarian sugarhouse I’d visited a few times in the middle of the state, the sugarmaker ushered me to the back of the evaporator, the complex rig that combines heat source, pan, and other pieces of machinery to boil sap into syrup. As with many sugarmakers, he was a bit of a tinkerer, and he wanted to show me the plumbing manifold that he’d rigged up to increase the efficiency of his evaporator’s heat exchange. I’d never seen so much plumbing complexity crammed into such a small space.

Another sugarmaker on the other side of the state, deep into the most rural part of Vermont, gave me a sneak peek at her new marketing design and a preview of some upcoming secondary maple products she was working on, like a maple mustard sauce and a maple sugar salad topping. The rolling hills and heavy forests around her operation could seem miles from anywhere, but her operation is as cutting-edge as they come.

Sugarmaking in Vermont has roots in both agriculture and entrepreneurship, and those roots show when you look closely. The level of sophistication that goes into the marketing may seem surprising at first glance, but sugarmakers who sell their syrup are running small businesses. Their rustic agricultural image belies the sheer amount of know-how that goes into sugaring itself.

I arrived at the farm of one sugarmaker with plenty of know-how on a mid-December morning, not long after we had had a pretty fierce storm. I hopped onto one of his ATVs and followed him as he motored into his woods. Maneuvering our four-wheelers around downed trees, we talked about the need to repair his tubing system and clear the woods before the really heavy snows came in January. With a chainsaw, we did a little work in the woods, but mostly surveyed the damage so he could come back out and do real work when he was unencumbered by an anthropologist.

Back at his house, we talked about the economic impacts of sugaring on his dairy farm, the possibilities of opening new markets for maple in Japan and China, the unique family knowledge that is necessary to understand how to sugar on his land, and how his children are going to college so that they can take the business into its next generation.

But all of these unique stories, while revealing, bring up a puzzle: If it’s so complicated and individualized, how can there be such a strong and unified connection between maple and Vermont? How can the identity of the place be so tightly bound up with this one product?

The connection between maple and Vermont is not measurable simply in gallons of syrup made or sales calculated in dollars. We in Vermont don’t make the most maple syrup. Quebec makes at least 70 percent of the maple syrup produced on Earth every year, and that province influences markets and policies all over the maple-making world.

It is precisely because Vermont cannot compete with Quebec economically that the connection between the syrup and the place is emphasized. Quebec makes quality, delicious maple syrup, and they make a lot more of it than Vermont, so Vermont has to sell its syrup on some other aspect, something that makes its quality and deliciousness distinct.

That something is the uniqueness of every sugaring operation in the state. Sugaring everywhere is done primarily by individual people or families who tap trees and boil sap into syrup on their own property. There are large, industrial-scale operations, but they are very few in number.

In Vermont, the story of the syrup stresses the small operator, so that buying a bottle of Vermont syrup is made the equivalent of buying a portable bit of that place, the very hillside or valley where it is purchased. It has carried an idea of small batch, boutique, niche, and micro since long before those words became part of every hipster’s and food blogger’s vocabulary.

An easy analogy can be found in scotch whisky, where a blended whisky is purposefully mixed from many different distillations to create a consistent flavor across a whole product line. Single malt whisky, on the other hand, has peculiar and distinctive flavors precisely because it is only one distillation, made and aged and bottled by itself and therefore carrying the marks of its individual creation. Vermont maple is a single malt.

The relationship of maple and Vermont is real enough, but the intense, personalized connection is heightened to make Vermont’s syrup more appealing. It’s not a false narrative at all—almost all of Vermont’s sugarmakers are individual or family operations. The names on the label are real people, and they are doing the work to get that syrup into the bottle, either by themselves or often with family.

Part of the reason that Vermonters can sell that small, family story along with their syrup is that it’s a real story. They are legitimately putting themselves into the syrup through their effort, their knowledge, and their heritage. Almost every sugarmaker I know is keenly aware of the economics of maple, both here and around the globe. And almost no sugarmaker I have ever met does it for that reason. Make no mistake, sugaring has historically paid the property taxes and put shoes on kids’ feet, and in many cases it still does today. But if that were the only thing it meant, I can’t imagine too many of the people I’ve met doing it.

Sugaring carries more meanings than that in Vermont. For many people here, sugarmaker or not, maple season is the start of spring, when smoke and steam start wafting from sugarhouses all across the state. Because sugaring means so much to us here, it is easy to communicate that meaning to others through the syrup. When a sugarmaker fills up a bottle, they are putting in their syrup, but they are also pouring themselves and this state into that container. By evoking place at such a fine scale, Vermont has made it only logical for the skiers and the leaf-peepers to look to syrup as a way to carry home some little bit of the place as a reminder of their experience here.

The post Like Maple Syrup, Vermont’s Identity Is Complex and Messy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Our wild palette of reds, purples, golds, oranges, and yellows infused with a backdrop of green is the result of the physical and metaphysical interplay of time and space. Geography mixes with topography, elevation, weather, and the shorter days of the fall season to wash across a unique ratio of deciduous trees to conifers that dates all the way back to the ancient glaciers that were once here.

The lush dark green backdrop to the changing of the leaves in New England is provided by the evergreens—those conifers—which include spruce, fir, and pine. The color comes from deciduous trees like oak and ash, which are found as far south as Virginia, and the hardwoods including sugar maple, yellow birch, and American beech, which are found only in the north. Each year, bands and pockets of these leafy trees form a moving Persian carpet rippling across the rugged, uneven topography of northern New England, changing every day and at every hour of the day for three short weeks.

“Senescence”—the term given to the changing colors of the leaves—is not what it appears: Leaves do not actually “turn” colors. In fact, the bright pigments are already hidden beneath the green. Shorter days and diminishing sunlight signal deciduous trees to slow down and eventually halt the production of chlorophyll. With the falloff in green chlorophyll, three pigments emerge—xanthophyll, reflecting yellow light; carotene, reflecting orange with some red and yellow light; and anthocyanin, reflecting red to purple.

With its flush of anthocyanins, the sugar maple is the star of the show—responsible for most of the cherry red and purple hues that spice up the northern forest palette. To give some idea of how “special” a New England fall is, in terms of color, while just 10 percent of tree species in the temperate zone produce anthocyanins, 70 percent of New England hardwoods produce anthocyanins. They only appear in late fall—just as the chlorophyll drops to 50 percent or below.

The poetic aspects of fall have led people to think that trees are “dying” when the leaves change colors. Senescence is not a passive aging that leads only to death; it is actually a sign of life—only living trees can transform green leaves to a dynamic wash of color. The precise color depends not only on the chlorophyll, but also on the complexion of metal ions and other hard-to-predict factors.

Topography and weather also contribute to the wild performance of color, as New England is a virtual internet of winding back roads that curve around lakes, streams, rivers, and up and down foothills and mountains in such a way that the landscape literally confronts the viewer at every turn.

Simultaneously, changes in elevation also result in a constantly changing palette. A cold night may happen in one mountain town early one year and late the next—or occur for one week in the mountains and not for several weeks in the valleys. The spatial and temporal variability make the color displays unpredictable from year to year, so there is always a bit of adventure in determining the best places and times to seek optimal viewing as the colors move across the landscape.

Fall colors in Stowe, Vermont. Photo courtesy of Flicker.

The most famous leaf peeping route in all of northern New England forms a loop that weaves in and out of the White Mountain National Forest, home to 100 mountains, 48 of them more than 4,000 feet high, including 6,288-foot Mount Washington—the tallest peak east of the Mississippi River. Some of the most dramatic views by far are from the Mount Washington Auto Road.

As you ascend Mount Washington, the Auto Road pulls off a unique trick: With each elevation of 1,000 feet, you are actually climbing north 250 miles in latitude, making the eight-mile road similar to a trip 1,500 miles north in latitude. Deciduous trees give way to conifers that give way to a virgin forest, home to miniature bonsai-type krummholz trees, bent by the continuous wind for hundreds of years. Driving from the base to the summit takes you, climate-wise, from New Hampshire to the Arctic Circle, and you’ll find an ancient alpine tundra up there.

Archeologically speaking, Mount Washington was at one time a massive ocean floor. Millions of years ago, tectonic plates slid under one another, moving and folding the sea floor into vast wrinkles of folding rock that you can see today all the way up the Auto Road.

Ultimately, what creates leaf season is the nearly 5 million acres of forest that make up 89 percent of New Hampshire’s total terrain—the state is the most forested in the contiguous United States.

Since 2010, the Forest Society has been actively engaged in defending New Hampshire’s scenic landscape—and its own conserved lands—from a 192-mile transmission line proposal known as Northern Pass, proposed by mega-utilities Hydro-Quebec and Eversource, a project designed to run transmissions lines on more than 1,000 towers well above tree line from the Canadian border in Pittsburg through the White Mountains to Franklin, Concord, and ending in Deerfield.

The impact of the Northern Pass is less about the number of acres that would be clear-cut than it is about far broader scenic impacts across miles and acres of cumulative wetlands and privately owned land.

Fall in New Hampshire is my favorite time of year. It is a time of chasing illusions as each year leaf peepers “weigh in” on comparing “this year” to “last year.” But surmising about whether an early spring or a wet spring or that sudden frost influenced the yellows or the reds, the oranges or the purples is part of the nostalgia of autumn in New England.

Fall is our most sentimental season because Nature talks to us so openly—in wind, in color, and in the wash of rain or snow that one day takes it all away. Fall is about the death of leaves, but it is also about the real mortality of us all, the irrevocable fact that the one thing we cannot change is change itself—and nowhere is change so consistently visible than three weeks every autumn in New England. It is the glory before the barrenness of winter, the shout before the silence of hibernation. It is timeless because it marks time so clearly.

More than any other, fall is a season of saints and poets. Emily, in Thornton Wilder’s timeless play “Our Town,” set in the fictional New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners, asks the stage manager: “Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?” He sighs: “No. Saints and poets—maybe. They do some.”

The leaves, like the saints and poets, remind us to look, to notice, to embrace the passage of time like the wind, to acknowledge it and celebrate it and be grateful—just for noticing—for finding the Zen of the present moment without concern for the past or fear of the future.

The tapestry of color says, “Now.”

The post What Leaf Peeping in New England Taught Me About the Meaning of Autumn appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.