When I was about 12 years old, I had a riding lawn mower and I used to mow lawns all around Middle Granville. So now it’s Spring time and I don’t have any lawns to mow, and all I know is that I like to play in the mud. I put tire chains on my tractor, pulled the mower deck off of it, and made this wagon that I hooked behind my tractor. I went around knocking on my neighbors doors like “hey, can I tap your maple trees?” And they’re looking at me like I’m crazy but they said “sure, go ahead!” I got to go around through people’s yards and rip it all up with mud, and then spend the month of April with a yard rake flattening out all the ruts I made. That’s why I got into it. It was so much fun riding my tractor pulling a load of sap. As I got older in my teenage years, I got a big truck with mud tires on it so I could haul bigger tanks in the back of it, and at that point I had taps all over Granville and Hartford. My high school buddies and I had a blast. I actually thought that I would grow out of sugaring and get married, settle down and never do it again so I never really invested a bunch of money into it. When I got into my late 20s, I wasn’t married yet and I didn’t have any kids, so I decided to get more into sugaring. It wasn’t until my early 30s when I stepped away from doing the small time sugaring. I got involved with our local Upper Hudson Maple Producer’s Association and that’s where I got to meet David Campbell and other maple producers in Washington County. I started making friends with everybody and driving out to visit sugar houses all over the place. I eventually got involved with New York State Maple Producer’s Association and that really caught my interest. Maybe ten or so years ago I got seriously involved with that board and now I know people all over New York. Every Friday I would head out from my real job as a welder and drive to Western New York and spend the weekend with some people I met.
Unfortunately, I don’t come from a family of maple producers so I don’t have any land. I started going out and leasing people’s land here and there, and as I got older I decided that I wanted to get really big into sugaring and do it as a living. I thought that the only way you could do it for a living was to have at least 10,000 taps. I spent about five to seven years around the Granville area and even up into Warrensburg looking for some land to lease but I just couldn’t find it. Washington County has got a lot of agriculture, so we have lots of hay fields with little patches of woods behind it, but even a big patch of woods is probably only 3,000 taps. I would’ve had to do a bunch of these to get where I need to be and it just wasn’t economically feasible for me.
By that time, I had quit my welding job about three years prior, and my first job after that was managing Merck Forest, which had about 12,000 taps, and they hired me to make syrup for them. It was there that I had an accident where I got caught up in a diesel powered vacuum pump. I was two miles back into the woods and it was just me and my dog. I ended up breaking my neck, fracturing the C3 in my neck, fracturing my skull (it took 20 staples to put it back together), I broke my nose, both cheek bones and my eye socket. I was wrapped up in this vacuum pump thinking I was gonna die. I passed out a couple of times and was in and out of consciousness. I was wearing three layers of clothing and they were being ripped off, so it had me wrapped up so tightly in them that I couldn’t breath. When I woke up, I was all wadded up and I tried to get my jack knife out of my coat pocket so I could cut my shirts off and get out. Then, I got in my truck and came whistling down the hill to the caretaker’s cabin bare chested, blowing my horn. The caretaker, Nick, is yelling at me like “what the hell you doin’ Mike?” I said “Nick, I had an accident out back. My head hurts like a bastard, how bad is it?” I showed him my head and told him not to sugarcoat it. He’s like “holy shit, there’s a hole right in your head!” We went up to the cabin where his wife was and they put me in a chair and called the rescue squad. They took me to Bennington hospital where they put me through the CAT scan and then the doctor comes in. I’ll never forget this. I asked what was going on with me and told him I had to get back out there because I had stuff to do! He says “you aren’t going anywhere for a while Mr. Bennett, you’ve got some pretty serious injuries. Your neck is broken, your C3 is fractured and your skull is cracked. Your injuries are too extensive for this hospital, we think there are better places out there for you.” I asked him if I was going to be able to go on a helicopter ride and he said my injuries warranted it which got me excited. My dad and mom showed up and my dad was a disaster, so I said they better just put me in the ambulance so my dad can follow me to the hospital. Once we got there, I asked if I was going to be able to walk again and they said they didn’t know that yet. In that moment I thought to myself “I might never be able to make syrup again.” My biggest fear was being stuck in a wheel chair. I don’t like to be in the sugar house, I like to be out in the woods. That’s when I realized how bad it was. People don’t realized it, but your life can change in a heartbeat. It really hit me hard.
I don’t work at Merck Forest anymore ‘cus I’m a hazard, so now I’m with my buddy out in Lake Placid who knows the people who own Crown Maple who I’m doing work for today. Anyway, they needed 15,000 taps put in so they hired me to manage nine guys and we did 18,000 taps in three months. Since then, I’ve grown to be a pretty well known tubing installer in the industry. I did a fair amount of work for people all over the place and that’s what I did until I found the piece of land I had been looking for. I found it five miles from the Canadian border. It was 600 acres of land and in 2014 I finally put in 10,000 taps all myself. I started about the middle of January and that’s tough ‘cus you got snow up to your knees. I sold the sap to a friend of mine at the time and I ended up putting my own sugar house up. It’s a pretty unique set up. I bought a tractor trailer that still had wheels on it, stuck an evaporator in it and had to buy generators because there’s no power up there. I bought a used reverse osmosis machine and some tanks and put those in too. The first year we made 440 gallons of syrup there.
My dad’s got three boys, I’m the middle kid, and Mike Grottoli has got three girls. Mike grew up in the Granville area like a typical farm boy. I might have been eight or nine years old when I first met him and his family. One day he came by the house and I was cooking some sap out back over a fire pit and the next thing you know he’s like “hey, let’s go over and see Steve Schinsky.” Steve had a sugar house built into a bank and all the sap just flowed right into the back of it. I was sitting there looking at it like “oh my god, this is awesome!” You know, I was out back on galvanized buckets cooking over a fire pit with a grate over it. I tasted some of Steve’s syrup and man that was good stuff. My syrup tasted like tar. It was so black and horrible that I was the only one in the house that would eat it and I could only deal with it for two or three weeks ’til I got sick of it.
I drive a lot all year round. I’m always driving so I think a lot too, and I’m like jeez, you know, I’m just a small town boy who grew up in Granville, and now I’ve gone out to play some major league sugar making. I think about Mike Grottoli and as much time as I’ve spent talking with that man, I knew that he was living his sugaring dreams through me. He was married and had kids and now he’s got grandkids so he can’t go off and do what I do, but I always see him smile when I tell him where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing.