Sugaring Down
The year in 1968 and idealistic anti-war activists David and Jill have moved to an abandoned hill farm in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom to start a commune-hoping to refocus their efforts to build a new society. Joined by a rotating cast of committed activists and fairweather freeloaders alike, David and Jill are confronted by the harsh environment of northern Vermont, where they discover the complexity of country life, make connections with their new neighbors (good and bad), and struggle to find their place until the fissures blowing apart the larger anti-war movement reach their collective at Zion Farm. Sugaring Down burrows below the surface of sixties counterculture and the New Left to explore the contradictions and passions that lead to the implosion of the protagonists' dreams, and their turns down two very different paths.
"When I read Dan Chodorkoff's historically vivid Vermont novel, I thought of Faulkner's famous statement: 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' Sugaring Down takes place in the turbulent 60's, when the Vietnam war was malignantly in our communal hearts and minds. But Chodorkoff's story is also about the friendships and fateful decisions we made in our flurried passions, at the same time hauntingly sensed that we may never again feel quite so alive."
-Howard Norman, author of The Ghost Clause
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"In Sugaring Down Dan Chodorkoff tells the story of a young couple, of the communal days of 1968 and 1969, of political passions and of a Vermont landscape that exists in its own weathered right. The notion of revolution that animates the young communards has become distant but that is all the more reason to read this compelling, deeply felt novel. Historical moments exert enormous pressure; people make fateful decisions. At the same time, Chodorkoff shows us a world whose natural rhythms cast an almost timeless spell. The northern Vermont village he writes of is to some eyes a nowhere but in Chodorkoff's hands it feels remarkable-an essence that speaks to dark perplexities and calm, sun-blessed mornings."
-Baron Wormser, author of The Road Washes Out in Spring
"Sugaring Down whisks us back to the late 1960's, another turbulent time in American history when the personal and the political were deeply entwined. The winds of change have swept up David and Jill, a couple who make very different choices in their resistance to the war raging in Vietnam. With his vivid depictions of communal life in Vermont and the radical underground in New York City, Chodorkoff has delivered a mythic tale of love, revolution, and redemption.
-Suzan Ritz, author of A Dream to Die For
"David, the protagonist of Dan Chodorkoff's insightful new novel Sugaring Down, is conflicted. He has moved to Vermont in 1969 to be part of an activist political collective, but finds himself drawn to the quiet rhythms of the Vermont seasons. The more radicalized his comrades (and especially his girlfriend Jill) become, the more David finds true fulfillment in putting down roots.
David and friends come to Vermont's Northeast Kingdom with very little practical knowledge. Through his closest neighbors, the vividly realized Leland and Mary Smith, he gradually acquires the skills to survive. He must use them all when the collective disintegrates and he faces a winter alone.
Leland and Mary do not pass judgment on the newcomers and become a guide to much more than splitting wood and boiling syrup. They advise David and friends on what not to say to hostile individuals in town, how to behave at Town Meeting, and in general how to act so that - eventually - they might be accepted in their community.
I appreciated that through Leland and Mary, we also learn some Vermont history that predates the counterculture. David has never heard about Barre's radical history (Mary, the daughter of a granite worker, has Italian roots), or the forced sterilizations of Abenaki people during the eugenics movement, or the bulk tanks that forced Leland and Mary's to give up dairy farming.
Chodorkoff is especially evocative as the reader sees each successive season - their glories and their challenges - through David's city-bred eyes. And it was painful to this veteran of the late 1960s to relive the heated political conversations of the time. The book takes place at a time when some on the "New Left" were turning to violence, and Chodorkoff does not shy away from these upsetting themes.
Chodorkoff uses the maple sugaring process as a central metaphor, hence the title. The sap boils off (and there is furious boiling indeed) and we - and David - are left with the essence. Sugaring Down is a worthy addition to the growing literature about Vermont during this tempestuous time."
- Rick Winston, author of Red Scare in the Green Mountains
