“IT’S A MADNESS,” Rob Lamothe says of sugaring. “It possesses you.” Laughing heartily and dressed in trademark red suspenders and baseball-style cap, he radiates woodsy, avuncular warmth. Now one of the largest producers in Connecticut with about fifty-six hundred taps, he started in the 1970s making less syrup than I once did. An experimental toolmaker by trade who worked on rocket guidance systems for Hamilton Standard, he’s not only a Pied Piper of maple hobbyists leading curious dabblers to tap backyard trees; he’s a kind of Johnny Appleseed of small-scale commercial sugaring in northwestern Connecticut and beyond, responsible for the creation or expansion of many operations by selling, installing, and repairing equipment, giving freely of his knowledge, and, most important, infecting customers with boundless enthusiasm for sugaring and life.

      Sugaring involves lots of hard work, sometimes downright drudgery. In an age where strenuous physical labor is increasingly avoided, making syrup is paradoxically growing in popularity, perhaps because technology makes it easier than it was years ago. Though its intensity is ameliorated somewhat by the season’s brevity, even the ebullient Lamothe gets worn down in January with dawn-to-dusk days of tapping, tubing repairs, and various system upgrades. Once sap begins flowing, his season becomes crazily busy. It’s not only from long hours collecting sap and boiling, but due to forty-five hundred visitors coming through the gambrel-roofed sugarhouse sided with yellow clapboards that he and his family built. Despite exhaustingly long hours, Rob entertains people of all ages and stripes as if they were guests, whether individuals, families, or tour groups. The sudden advent of warmer weather and budding trees late in March or early April is a huge letdown, leading to four weeks of tedious cleanup, equipment repairs, and readying the sugarhouse for next season.

      However described, maple people feel tied to something larger than themselves, fueling an enthusiasm transcending the normal aversion to backbreaking toil and making the labor its own reward. Exhausting as the work can be, many sugarmakers find it a refreshing refuge from the typical routines of life. Perhaps this is because, like artists, sugarmakers typically have a day job, at least until they hit it big. Sugaring is a passion, a respite from life as usual, a means of self-expression that makes an increasingly abstract world comprehensible. I’ve heard sugarmakers rhapsodize about connecting to nature, being in touch with earth’s cycles, bonding with their great-grandfathers, finding God, or communing with the past. The exact expression of the sentiment doesn’t matter. Sugaring seems to evoke a kind of spirituality entwined with and manifest through physical work. Producers may measure the success of a season in gallons of syrup, but it’s the process, not the product, that sustains them.

      A deeply religious man, Lamothe attends church in Collinsville, just a short walk from my home. When I had a question or problem during my sugaring days, he’d often make a house call after Mass, when his connection to the creator was elevated. On one of those Sunday mornings Lamothe described tapping in the woods on a bitter cold day with a fierce northwest wind. Powdery snow was blowing off the branches as they bent and creaked. Hearing a limb snap, he turned to see penumbral light radiating from behind a tree where it danced and glistened with prismatic colors in the rising sun. All the season’s busy effort seemed collapsed in that instant of serenity and peace. Years later, the moment remains vivid, and emotion catches in his throat as he tries to explain. “I know that God had made that moment. It’s etched in my heart forever.”

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      REVERENCE FOR sugar making often takes a secular twist. From nostalgic perceptions of Native Americans, Currier and Ives prints, notions of laconic Yankees spinning yarns in billows of steam,