ASHFIELD -- Fans of the sugarhouse restaurant at South Face Farm will see a bittersweet spring as owner Tom McCrumm plans to shut down the long-running pancake operation at the end of maple syrup season this year.
"There comes a time," said McCrumm. "And you know, I'm not pulling the cord entirely. I'm downsizing it. Making arrangements."
He decided to retire two years ago, then arranged with a local family to manage the restaurant for a few seasons so their teens could raise money for college. "The kids had worked here before, so they knew how to do it," he said. "They're very good. I don't have to worry about them."
McCrumm and his wife Judy Haupt burst out laughing when asked why they are closing up shop. "You mean because we're seventy?" she quipped.
He said running the tapping and boiling operation, as well as the pancake and maple syrup restaurant -- which draws three or four thousand customers every year to Watson-Spruce Corner Road -- entails an enormous amount of work, in part because his business is pretty much a one-man operation.
"I'm skilled. I'm a factotum. I can build anything; I can fix anything, figure most anything out. Why pay someone to do it when I can do it myself? Plumbers and electricians cost sixty dollars an hour. Then you have to wait for them to get here."
He said a lot has changed since he first got into the business.
"When I first started getting really interested in sugaring, thirty or forty years ago, what would be considered a really huge sugaring operation would be 20,000 taps. Nowadays really huge is half-a-million. You see these large operations up in Quebec, the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, and places in New York state."
Advances in technology such as "reverse osmosis" and more efficient equipment have helped the industry grow, he said -- and that now, far more syrup can be made with far less fuel, meaning that the numbers work from a business perspective.
He said that in spite of that fact, to be a successful farmer, you have to adhere to the "harvest mentality," meaning that when the going gets tough, the tough get going.
"No matter how many obstacles they throw at you; you deal with them and you keep going, because you have to. You make hay when the sun shines. When the sun shines, let's make hay. It's not like, if the sun's shining, let's go see if the baler works. You have to be prepared."
Nonetheless, he said he believes he has the best job in the world because he gets to "go outside and play in the woods" whenever he wants. A recent ski mishap set him back with fractured hip, leaving him confined to the sofa for a while.
"I kept looking out the window saying darn! I wish I were out there working!"
McCrumm and Haupt, now mostly retired as a nurse practitioner, spoke kindly about the many human connections they have forged over the years through their work lives.
"I have my sugarhouse customers, my mail order customers, and my wholesale customers, and Judy has her patients," he said. "Some of her patients are children of the patients she had 30 years ago."
The two said they identify with people involved in their life's work, and that part of retiring will mean giving up part of that human connection.
"Judy will come home and say, 'Oh, I saw one of my favorite patients today.' Same with me; I'll say, 'Hey, guess who came to the sugarhouse! Good to see them again; and they brought their friends from Botswana.'"
Most of the South Face customers are from the Pioneer Valley, but regulars show up every year from Provincetown and Truro, Westchester County, and Connecticut.
"If the weather is perfect, it is packed. Oh my God. Why people wait two-and-a-half hours to eat pancakes from a paper plate is beyond me. But they love it. Sausage, too, the whole works. Sometimes I can't believe how much people eat."
Anyone familiar with South Face Farm will have noted the large mailbox, painted in the distinctive "Rasta colors" of red, gold, and green. "We've been to Jamaica three times," said Haupt. "We like the food, and we like reggae music."
McCrumm said the "Bob Marley mailbox" is just one expression of his sense of humor. "I like to put things out there and see if people get it," he said. "There's a phone pole near the sugarhouse and I stuck a tap in it," he said. "Every once in a while someone will say 'phone tap.' My sugar house is full of stuff like that."
McCrumm said he and his wife enjoy skiing and cycling, and are ready to spend more time "just playing." He said he will miss his customers, many of whom have been coming to the sugarhouse for decades, but that he will not suffer from any sort of post-retirement identity crisis.
"I can be that old ex-sugarmaker who gets to go skiing all the time," he said. "I'm just fine with that identity. I've got no problem with that."
He said the restaurant will probably open the first weekend in March.
Mary Serreze can be reached at mserreze@gmail.com