Back Creek Farms is unique in that it isn’t sitting on a particularly prolific sugar bush compared to other producers in the area. With Valerie tending the pan, Pat goes on his rounds checking on the sugar bushes-the various stands of sugar maple trees that the Lowrys have tapped.
Valerie, after ferrying a batch of her homemade breakfast burritos to the sugar house, will take over tending the fire, watching to make sure it burns continuously and feeding wood into the fire by hand. He shuffles off to the sugar house to stoke the fire under the pan, where the maple sugar water will boil slowly until it becomes syrup. On a typical day during the boiling season, Pat wakes up early and checks the weather. The air must be cold enough to freeze overnight and just on the other side of freezing during the day for the trees to “run,” an expression that describes the water inside the maple trees on its journey through xylem and phloem, from the roots to the buds. Specific conditions must be met for maple syrup. Making maple syrup this way is a lesson in observation, starting with watching the weather. Back Creek Farms is one of about 10 maple syrup makers in the area known as Virginia’s Switzerland, but they’re the only ones left on Back Creek, a 60-mile-long tributary of the Potomac, where once the sugar maple steam hung like a fog on chilly winter mornings. The Lowrys still make maple syrup the old fashioned way, in a long, open rectangular pan cooking over a wood fire. Together, Pat and Valerie Lowry have been making maple syrup for 20 years, but Pat Lowry has been at it almost his whole life-tapping Highland County maple trees since he was 8 years old, trailing along at his father’s hip and huddling near the bubbling iron kettles to keep warm. “That’s when the skimmings are delicious,” Valerie smiles. This is what she calls the skimmings, the reward to the syrup makers that only materializes in the precious seconds before the syrup is ready. It’s a soft mass of semi-solid maple sugar, as sweet and fleeting as the air above a plate of pancakes. Just when the sugar water is making its final conversion to maple syrup, Valerie scrapes something sticky from the sides of the pan. All is quiet except for the sounds of burbling water and the occasional rustling of Fred, the barn owl, who nests nearby. The open boiling pan emits a sweet-scented vapor, and tree sand creates swirling patterns on the surface of the simmering water, lit by the heavenly sunlight beaming through a skylight in the rafters. Valerie Lowry tends a six-foot pan of hot maple sugar water with a watchful eye.
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