Corey Hendrickson: Gathering Time

When a photographer takes on a project, it often leads to knowing a surprising wealth of information about an obscure subject. Just ask Middlebury, Vermont-based photographer Corey Hendrickson what he discovered about maple trees while filming his new documentary Gathering Time. For the film, he followed Andy Paonessa and Meghan Stotko as they gathered sap to create maple syrup by hand, a process called sugaring.

The operation is in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and it always feels a bit like traveling back in time. The landscape was shrouded in fog and the moisture had a great effect on the audio.

Sugaring is physically demanding work, which is why today much of it is done by machine, with tubes tied into the trees and sap flowing into larger storage containers. But Andy and Meghan still gather the sap the old-fashioned way, using metal buckets covered to protect the sap from the elements.

Maple Sugaring is a seasonal operation, entirely dependent on the weather – and more specifically the cycle of freeze and thaw, typically in spring. I had a rough idea of when we would film, but it was impossible to finalize until a few days beforehand.

At first, Corey wanted to tell the story of the landowner who allows Meghan and Andy to sugar using his trees, a ninety-four-year-old WWII veteran named Francis Whitcomb.

The plan was to contrast his history and age with the younger generation still working the ‘old fashioned’ way. He was fantastic and did the interview despite having recently been hospitalized.

While Corey loved interviewing Francis, after filming the rest of the documentary he realized that the footage of the farmers sugaring was strong enough to stand alone.

It was hard to cut Francis out of the film, but in some ways true to him too as he loved ‘the hard work’ of it all.

And hard work it was, even for Corey as he followed the crew throughout the process. His lens would fog up during the evaporation process, and the constant drizzle posed a risk to his camera. At one point, he wedged his knee into a trailer to keep from falling off the tractor.

Francis Whitcomb passed away shortly before the premiere of the film, and so Corey ended up placing some of his interview online separately from the film, to help show the world his interesting story and love of working with his hands.

In the end, Corey loved having the chance to immerse himself in the world of sugaring, and the final film debuted at the Middlebury New Filmmaker’s Festival last summer. He hopes to show it at a few more festivals, in addition to planning more documentary projects in the future.

Filmmaking can be bittersweet, but Gathering Time documents an age-old undertaking with respect to the entire process, start to finish, and Corey was just happy to be along for the ride.

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