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God willing and the creek don’t rise

8/9/2019

I mentioned previously that we had an impressive downpour a few weeks back here in Arlington, Virginia. Four and a half inches of rain in an hour is a lot of precipitation, and the result was flooded basements and a few washed away structures. Quick, heavy downpours have become rather more frequent here in recent years, whatever the reason.

Flooding is something I grew up with in Houston, Texas. Everyone remembers Hurricane Harvey. What fewer folks are aware of is that for the last twenty years Houston has averaged five days of flooding a year, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. I doubt this is some recent trend; look online and you can find this picture of downtown Houston inundated in 1935. More than fifty years back, I can remember walking out of my elementary school to find the street leading to my house under a couple feet of water, not from a hurricane or tropical storm, just the result of an afternoon thundershower. Those are common throughout the year in Houston because the place is hot and humid most of the time. You get accustomed to clouds forming slowly into big clouds and then impressive thunderheads that dump a torrential soaking around 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Doesn’t cool things off, either. Evenings after a thunderstorm are just as hot and even more humid.

Much of this is due to simple geography. Houston was founded at the confluence of two streams, White Oak Bayou and Buffalo Bayou. This is an area of town known today as Allen’s Landing, a perpetuation of the myth that Houston’s founders, John Kirby Allen and Augustus Chapman Allen, somehow arrived there in a canoe or something, disembarked and declared the area a lovely environment to settle. The Allen brothers indeed founded Houston, but not in such a picturesque fashion. The two land speculators managed to acquire some 6,600 acres of coastal prairie in 1837. Having been provisioners to Sam Houston’s army, they decided to found a city and call it Houston. John was a member of the Republic of Texas House of Representatives and even got the city declared the capital for a short time. You can read all about the Allen brothers on Wikipedia. John died of congestive fever in 1838, by the way. A synonym for “coastal prairie” could well be “swamp,” if my experience of Houston is indicative. People who live in swampy, mosquito-infested marshes tend to get fevers a lot. By the time I was growing up there, the mosquitoes weren’t as big a problem, though: the city had these trucks driving around spraying DDT.

In fact, Houston is one of the best examples of Man vs. Nature in the world. Houstonians have been persistent since the first settlers who decided to stick out the heat, humidity, and poisonous reptiles, even after the Republic of Texas came to its senses and relocated the capital to Austin, although at the time the place was known as Waterloo. I like to imagine an alternative history where the state kept that name rather than renaming the capital for Stephen F. Austin. Anyway, those Houstonians who stayed were determined to build something. In 1841, they declared the dock that had been built at that confluence of White Oak and Buffalo Bayous the “Port of Houston,” despite being roughly fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico. Houston wasn’t much of a port until Buffalo Bayou was widened and deepened all the way to Galveston Bay after the 1900 hurricane pretty much leveled Galveston. Now it’s one of the biggest ports on the planet. Galveston still has better beaches,though.

Houston’s growth was also enabled by the development of air conditioning. Although that elementary school I occasionally had to wade to get out of didn’t have air conditioning, increasingly every other venue did. All the movies houses, including those I discuss in an earlier post, used to advertise “air conditioned comfort.” Kids in class didn’t need comfort, I guess. Hey, there was a big fan in every room to keep the hot air circulating, so who am I to complain? And eventually even the schools succumbed to Houston’s drive to make the place habitable.

Interesting thing about air conditioning, by the way. As anyone familiar with basic physics can attest, you don’t really “cool” air; you just move heat from one place to another, like from inside your cinema or domed stadium to just outside the building walls. This means that for every space being cooled, some other place is getting warmer. Add ever growing expanses of concrete reflecting more and more heat and you can see why Houstonians spend most of their time in those air-conditioned indoors.

Perhaps nothing symbolized the determination of Houstonians to spit in the eye of Mother Nature more than the Astrodome. City fathers would not allow torrential rain and stifling heat to prevent attracting a major league baseball expansion team; rather, they built the first domed stadium and dubbed it the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Semi-transparent lucite tiles made up the roof to allow in sunlight to nourish the grass field. Unfortunately, the grass tended to give off moisture, creating occasional indoor “rain.” And the glare through those tiles made tracking fly balls almost impossible, so eventually large swaths were painted gray. This robbed the grass of sunlight, killing it. No problem. Astroturf was invented. And, of course, the entire thing was air-conditioned. Watching a game in the Astrodome was as comfortable as seeing a movie in one of those air-conditioned cinemas. The crowds were similar, too: people sat in respectful silence while the game progressed.

Despite this impressive edifice, there was actually one rain-out during the Astrodome’s tenure. In June 1976, massive flooding made it impossible for fans to get to the game. Did I mention that Houston floods a lot?

It’s not like Houstonians haven’t tried to solve the flooding issue. In the aftermath of that 1935 flood pictured above, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed and built the Addicks Dam and Addicks and Barker Reservoirs to help prevent downstream flooding of Buffalo Bayou. Sure, there were still floods in Houston, like the one that kept people away from the Astrodome that night, but apocalyptic ones inundating the entire downtown and surrounding areas were avoided. Until Harvey, that is. Nothing can prepare a city for that much rain. Controlled releases of water from Addicks Dam were required to keep the reservoirs from overflowing, and mostly that just affected the downstream flood plains. Too bad developers had built thousands of homes in parts of that flood plain, but, hey, omelettes and broken eggs, right?

From what I read, people who study climate believe storms packing more water and dropping it with greater intensity will increase in the rainy parts of the planet. This is not good news for Houston (nor for my current residence in northern Virginia, I might add). An easy answer, one you find folks throwing out there a lot on the Internet, is that cities like Houston are untenable in the long run and the country should stop investing in keeping them dry. Humans don’t really think like that, though. If your home is in Houston, you just keep trying to cope with what life and nature throw at you. Barring another Harvey, the thinking goes, all will be okay.

God willing and the creek don’t rise . . .

By the way, years ago I wrote a song about often-drenched Houston. I even recorded it. I’ve attached it below for stout-hearted souls brave enough to endure my amateur musicianship and lousy voice. I’ve tried over the years to get real singers and musicians interested enough to produce a better version. Sadly, my efforts have been to no avail. So here is “Houston, The Last Wave.” If the waters don’t move you, maybe it will.

David

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Don’t point that gun at me

8/7/2019

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I’ve been around guns my whole life. Growing up in Texas, guns were items nearly every household had. I owned a gun when I was thirteen; my dad got me a bolt-action .22 rifle for Christmas, because he grew up knowing how to shoot and it was expected his sons would, too. I’m sure I fired well over a thousand rounds from that as a kid, usually on visits to what had been my grandfather’s four-acre farm. Tree stumps, tin cans and pop bottles were no doubt terrorized by me. This was not the only gun in our house, either. My brother possessed a 14-gauge bolt-action shotgun and, later in his life, a semi-automatic .22 rifle. My dad always hunted with the double-barrel 12-gauge he’d had as long as I could remember. I do not remember any of us successfully bringing down any game, with the sole exception of the feast of squirrels my dad cooked for us once to let us know what kind of food he’d grown up on as a kid in the depression. All I remember of this meal is that squirrel was tasty, if unsatisfying. There’s not a lot of meat on those little fellas.

I did shoot something once. Long before I had that rifle, I used to shoot at birds with the BB gun my brother had as a kid. When I was maybe five years old, I hit one. It died gushing blood. I was mortified. It’s the last time I aimed a weapon of any sort at a living creature.

My dad taught us to have great respect for guns. That meant making sure one wasn’t loaded unless you were actually planning to use it. To this day, if I see a gun, I have an itch to remove the magazine and then check to make sure there’s not a round in the chamber. Trying to let the hammer down on a rifle once, it slipped and I almost shot my brother. That’s a memory that’s etched in my brain. Guns are dangerous. Of course, reading that, somebody’s blood pressure just shot up thirty points as they shout at their smart phone, “Guns aren’t dangerous! Only in the wrong hands are they dangerous!”

You could quote Shane on this: “A gun is a tool, Marion, no better or no worse than any other tool, an axe, a shovel or anything. A gun is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.” Never mind that Shane says this and then proceeds to kill three people and get shot himself in the process. He makes a valid point. A gun in Jack Palance’s hand is bad. To make things worse, Palance carried a two gun rig.

There’s nothing to fear from a good guy with a gun, the mantra goes. Certainly, trained professionals in the military, law enforcement, and other professions (I won’t elaborate) are necessary to protect us in dangerous times. I should know. I’ve received that training (again, use your imagination) and at one time qualified with a .38 revolver, 9mm Browning, and the M-16. Instructors at the time told us the standards they used for “qualification” were stricter than the most serious employed by any law enforcement agency in the U.S. That did not fill me with confidence about U.S. law enforcement, but I’ll leave that at, well, that.

For the M-16, by the way, qualifying meant firing ten rounds from a prone position at a 1 foot square target from a distance of 100 feet. When I examined my target, it had 19 holes in it. Turns out the trainee to my left got confused about which target was supposed to be his. The instructor qualified us both. I don’t know which one of us missed. Probably me. There’s a lesson there somewhere, I guess. Maybe something about making sure that qualified good guy with the gun knows where he’s supposed to be aiming.

Knowing where to aim is kinda important. I was in an environment once where pinheads like me were protected by security teams. These teams were made up of good guys who are highly skilled at making as sure as possible their charges don’t get killed. If you ever find yourself in such a situation, you’ll be glad to have these guys around. But, and it’s a big ‘but’, they’re still human. In this environment which will not be named, we set up a “relaxation” area at our camp. Somehow we found a couch and a couple of comfy chairs and even what passed as a coffee table. So one day I’m sitting in one of the comfy chairs when one of our security guys saunters in, unholsters his 9mm, sets it down on the table and plops onto the sofa.

I was staring right down the barrel of that gun. It bugged me. A lot. Years of hearing my father preach “never point a gun at someone unless you intend to shoot them” came back to me. I reached over and, with one finger, spun it so that it was pointing at the wall. Then, I said, calmly as I remember, “Don’t point your gun at me.”

The guy looked at me, smirked, and said nothing. The moment passed. Except the next day he did exactly the same thing. And I responded with exactly the same movement and words. But this time he had an answer. “The safety’s on.” And he managed to say these words in a manner that suggested I was not just an idiot, but a gutless one as well.

“I don’t care.” I will point out that when you’ve spent a few weeks in a place where people are shooting at each other a lot, you tend to go a little nuts. I added, for emphasis, “Don’t point your fucking gun at me.”

He glared. I glared back. This was the point where he was going to beat the crap out of me and I didn’t care because, well, I’d gone more than a little nuts and figured I could get in a few blows of my own. And then the security team chief came over and said, to my great relief, “He’s right. Don’t point your fucking gun at him. You’re supposed to know better.”

Yes, we’re supposed to know better. Guns are tools, not objects of worship. None of my father’s friends nor any of my grandfather’s rural neighbors “collected” guns. They had them to hunt and to protect their property, and that threat was primarily of the animal kind. My dad used to tell a story of killing a rattlesnake that bit his dog. He killed it, by the way, with a stick. Had anyone suggested to my father or grandfather that they should sling a rifle over their shoulder when going to town to buy supplies in order to “make a point,” they’d have thought the person crazy.

I’ve also spent a significant portion of my life writing about countries where the proliferation of military armaments led to utter devastation. It is an understandable human impulse when society around you seems to be collapsing to arm yourself. The result is an armed population and even more violence. It’s a downward spiral that is almost impossible to arrest. Towns in the American West, as a friend on Facebook recently noted, eventually realized this and passed ordinances against open carry. People felt safer when the only guy packing a six-shooter was the town Marshall.

I still know people who own guns. Some of them do so because they’ve had training in the military or elsewhere and believe their families are safer if they have the capability to defend their homes. Others have almost no firearms safety experience. I shudder to think these people are driving around armed. I would prefer to live someplace where the only folks who are packing heat are highly-trained professionals who have undergone some form of psychological screening, like those guys on those security teams I mentioned.

And, still, I don’t want them pointing their guns at me.

David

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Popcorn, Milk Duds and a Cherry Cola

8/2/2019

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Something got me thinking about the River Oaks Theater in Houston the other day. It’s one of the last surviving of a generation of theater houses built in the 1940s and 50s. These were not the movie palaces just about every city built in the 1930s with names like Majestic and Palace. The River Oaks and its sister cinemas were neighborhood venues. Sure, they sported big screens and impressive sound systems—even balconies—but they typically had fewer than 1,000 seats. Being in an upscale part of Houston, the River Oaks sported Art Deco stylings and decor.

I didn’t really discover the River Oaks until the latter half of the 1970s. By then its schedule was replete with foreign films, independent movies and Hollywood classics. That’s where I saw The Third Man for the first time. I discovered Fellini at the River Oaks, including Fellini’s Satyricon. This film is so ground-breaking, I saw it at a University of Houston film festival in the late 70s and the three reels were shown in a different order than the first time I’d seen it. I wasn’t able to tell which of the two sequences was the intended one. Without the River Oaks, I would never have seen Jodorowksy’s El Topo. Nor would I have learned that Women in Love is not a film you want to see on a first date. And, finally, thanks to the River Oaks, I discovered Zardoz. I own a copy of this film. Admittedly, I have never known another human soul who found it entertaining. I guess people just can’t forgive Sean Connery for that loincloth.

Courtesy Wikipedia

Among the many pleasures of going to the River Oaks was that it was just like the local cinema I went to as a kid. The Santa Rosa had the same big screen and interior layout and some impressive murals along the walls. Parents thought nothing of dropping kids off to see a movie and then picking them up a couple hours later. A few bucks bought a ticket, popcorn and a soda. When I was ten years old I saw what was for me, at that time, one of the greatest films ever released, Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Eyes wide, munching popcorn and sucking down a cherry cola—this was long before Cherry Coke and just involved a squirt of cherry syrup into a fountain cola, much better than the canned concoction of today—I consumed this B-movie tale of survival, courage, and the victory of good over evil. More than anything else, it seemed like movies were finally capturing the pulp sci-fi I’d been reading since I learned how. Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, and of course Heinlein—at last it seemed their space operas and fantasies would be rolled out to the silver screen.

Except it didn’t happen. Whatever else the late '60s were, they were not the years of epic science fiction cinema. Oh, sure, there were big-budget releases like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes. I saw the film Marooned in that same Santa Rosa theater. None of these films featured heroes and heroines flying faster than light wielding blasters and laser pistols on exotic worlds. Most of the sci-fi film of the period seemed to verge on the horror genre or delve into some variant of existentialism. That’s not to say none of them were good science-fiction. They just weren’t the space operas I grew up reading.

George Lucas apparently felt the same way. I was 23 and in college when Star Wars was released. Flipping through a newspaper, I stumbled across an ad for the film. I won’t say I dropped everything and raced down to the theater to see it. I waited about a week and went on a weekday afternoon. Sitting in an almost empty cinema, I was so enthralled I stayed and watched it a second time—you could do that back in the seventies if there wasn’t much of a crowd. And I stayed because the film captured just about everything I’d been hoping for since Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Fleets of star cruisers firing energy beams, travel through hyperspace, a universe filled with intelligent life of all shapes and sizes: heck, Han Solo even called his sidearm a “blaster.” The only disappointment was that I wasn’t watching it in the Santa Rosa. The first multi-screen cinemas attached to malls had begun their encroachment into American culture; it was showing at the Gulfgate Cinema I & 2, which lacked the character of the Santa Rosa but had a larger selection of snacks. I added Milk Duds to my movie-viewing fare.

The early eighties became, for me, the best of times where movies were concerned. Alien and Star Wars produced sequels, and then came the stream of Star Trek movies, satisfying the sci-fi fan in me. Meanwhile, the River Oaks continued to scour the planet for eclectic indie films while intermixing classics--Casablanca, the Thin Man films—with Tennessee Williams theme nights, oddities like Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Terror of Tiny Town, and every Fellini film made.

Nothing lasts forever, it seems. The Santa Rosa of my early years became an adult video and book store, then was torn down. The River Oaks converted its balcony to two smaller theaters in an effort to compete with multi-cinemas and went back to showing first runs. I moved on as well, to a career in another city and even time in other countries. Now streaming services make trips to the theater a rarer event, while cinema houses offer full meals, draft beers and decent wines to draw customers.

Still, you can occasionally find a venue like the River Oaks showing some of the old classics on a big screen, usually at midnight. It’s worth it to go once in awhile and remember times long past.

And don’t forget to pick up a pack of Milk Duds on the way to your seat.

David

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Wading the creek

7/30/2019

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I like to take a walk most every day, an hour at least and usually a bit more. I figure it’s inspirational to the neighbors to see an old codger out strolling the neighborhood. I’ve laid out a few routes so I don’t see the same scenery every time, nor suffer the residents of any particular block too often with my old frame, goofy hat and worn-out sandals. This means that, on occasion, I’ll be walking a particular path that I’ve not been down in a few weeks.

A digression: three weeks ago our neighborhood got a downpour of Biblical proportions. Some 4-plus inches dumped on us in about an hour. There’s a creek I walk along periodically—well, a “run” in Virginia parlance—that I heard on the radio rose 12 feet. Given that there’s usually only several inches of water in this “waterway,” that’s impressive. Still, that was a few weeks back. I decided to walk that route and see whether any damage was still visible.

Well over halfway through the circuit, I hadn’t really encountered anything out of the ordinary. Sure, there had been a tree down along the way, but the county had already chainsawed it into pieces and moved it off the trail. All told the walk was hot but pleasant. I looked forward to the shaded footbridge over Four Mile Run where I often stop for a moment and occasionally see a few ducks splashing in the foot or so of water that pools beneath it.

Not today. The bridge was gone. Apparently that 12-foot surge carried it away. I had to decide. Should I backtrack the half mile to take the bicycle bridge—one thing about Arlington, Virginia; it’s got lots of streams and lots of footbridges—or just wade across? Today Four Mile Run was only a couple of inches deep in places. My sandals and feet would get wet, but it’s 90 degrees, so they’d dry fast.

I remember another creek from years back, Antietam Creek that flows through what is now Antietam National Battlefield. I’ve toured it several times. The last action of the battle took place at Burnside’s Bridge, although it wasn’t called that during the war. General Ambrose Burnside’s Corps was charged with seizing this bridge, which it did, but late enough in the day that Confederate reinforcements from Harper’s Ferry prevented it from turning the Confederate flank. Today, in a memorial on one side of the bridge, are repeated the sarcastic comments of one Henry Kid Douglas, who served with General Stonewall Jackson, to the effect that naming the bridge for Burnside would needs be sarcasm or irony since his forces could have waded the creek in multiple locations. Later scholarship indicates Antietam Creek wasn’t all that easy to cross, by the way. Certainly not while being shot at.

But those words came to me as I considered the less daunting stream in my path. Would I delay my journey merely from a reluctance to get my feet wet? I certainly wasn’t facing enemy snipers on the other bank. Yet defeat or victory were not exactly at stake in my decision. Historians would not debate my course of action. On such a hot day, nary a soul was even around to observe. This was between me and Four Mile Run.

This was not the first time in my life I’ve encountered washed-out bridges or other roadblocks, although more typically metaphorical ones. I’ve even been lost in the woods once or twice, and I’ve faced situations in life where the way forward was unclear. One thing I have learned, though, is that indecision never succeeds. Pick a path and follow it. Better the wrong path than no path at all; you can always adjust later.

I plunged forward, into the three-inch-deep lazy current. The water was cool and felt good on my feet. Climbing up the rocks on the other side, I could feel the soles of my sandals squishing. Fifteen minutes later, feet and footwear were dry. It felt good, knowing I’m not too old to do something usually reserved for the young.

Next time, I’ll take the other path and cross at the bicycle bridge. No reason to be reckless, after all.

David

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"One small step"

7/26/2019

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This summer has seen much well-deserved reminiscence of the first Moon landing. I was fifteen and just out of what we called junior high school, now more commonly referred to as middle school, when I watched the landing streamed live on TV. Just the previous summer I had gone with my family to the “fancy” Houston theater to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, and of course I had seen every episode of Star Trek. Space travel was a fixture of my imagination. I don’t know that it was the first book I read, but the first book I remember reading was Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit Will Travel. So seeing someone actually set foot on the Moon was exciting.
And a bit disappointing. Of course, there was no way Neil Armstrong’s first step could be as thrilling as Keir Dulyea traversing a wormhole to the other side of the Galaxy, nor could it compete with the fantastic adventures of all that pulp science fiction I consumed. Mostly, though, I was disappointed with the “one small step” pronouncement. It sounded to me like something written by a committee.
So I was young and stupid at the time, but I’d been hoping for something like “Tomorrow the Stars!” I now realize, of course, that Armstrong faced not only a historic first step but the ridiculous position of being live-streamed to millions of viewers back home. That was as unprecedented as landing on the Moon itself. Stanley didn’t have a camera crew accompanying him when he found Livingston. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had no such added pressure when summiting Mt. Everest. Hillary claims they just shook hands and hugged in silence. Somewhat better known is his statement to George Lowe as he and Norgay were descending: “Well, George, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Hillary himself was unimpressed with Armstrong’s words; “Better if he had said something natural like ‘Jesus, here we are.’”
But imagine the consternation had Armstrong made an off the cuff wisecrack. He’d have never been able to escape it. Who is to say Stanley didn’t really remark, “Livingston, you sod, where the f--- have you been hiding yourself?” He had plenty of opportunity to spin the story a bit before making it back to give all those speeches to the explorer societies. But Armstrong was going to be stuck with whatever he said. Any wonder, then, that he came up with prepared—and prepared sounding—remarks?
And he was correct; it was a giant leap. So giant, in fact, it hasn’t been repeated since the last Apollo mission departed the Lunar surface almost forty-seven years ago. That is the greatest disappointment, of course. So many of my generation grew up believing—well, fantasizing, actually—that colonization of the solar system was just around the corner. The “space race” was supposed to give way to human cooperation exploring Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter and Venus. Turns out that was too difficult and way too expensive, so we went back to bickering among ourselves.
Still, it’s nice to remember the dream. And maybe it’s just a dream deferred.

David

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Smoke the dottle

7/22/2019

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It was during my misspent youth I first heard the word “dottle.” Houston, Texas in 1971 was an odd place, home to NASA, “Space City,” a major league baseball club named in honor of the astronauts, but also southern prejudices, pot-smoking hippies (I was one of those), flag-waving rednecks, and a lot of heat and humidity. This was a city desperately trying to be sophisticated, with a world class symphony and opera company, one of the nation’s first public television stations broadcasting “refined” programs made by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and yet rings of chemical plants and refineries spewing toxins into the atmosphere. Add the absence of a modern public transit system compounded by an ever-expanding network of beltways, outer beltways and crosstown freeways to accommodate the pre-carpool commuters; well, Houston had air quality to rival other great cities like Los Angeles or Pittsburgh.

Yet, with the Vietnam War raging and having served as a backdrop for all our post-pubescent lives, most of my high school classmates and I worried little about pollution and more about finding some decent hooch to smoke. And when you couldn’t score some MaryJane, there were always cigarettes. They were cheap, plentiful, and legal. Oh, sure, technically you had to be 18 to buy them. Rest assured, in the 1970s, the only identification required for a pack of smokes was a picture of George Washington. And you got change back.

But there was a guy in my high school, a really smart guy a year ahead of me who was a debate champion, honor graduate, all that. And the thing is, so was I. This guy, though, was, as we used to joke, born 40 years old. I don’t know if he became a stodgy, stentorian judge later in life, but he seemed destined for law school and a distinguished career. And in 1971, shocked to see a bright young speech and drama apprentice like me turning into a bad seed, he took me aside and explained to me that cigarettes were the devil’s handiwork. Mind, he didn’t seem to take issue with my long hair and pot-smoking friends.

“There’s nothing wrong with tobacco, mind you. But cigarettes just lack class. If you want to smoke, smoke a pipe.” Then he produced one of his and handed it to me with a small pouch of pipe tobacco. He changed my life that day, and I’ve never thanked him. Well, until now.

“Keith. Thank you!”

Keith showed me how to load and light the pipe, explained the art of keeping it lit without drawing too fast and burning it out. His final admonition: “Properly smoked, you can enjoy a bowl for an hour or more and a pipe your entire lifetime. And you’ll know you’ve smoked it properly if, when it goes out on it’s own, there’s a small amount of unburned tobacco still in the bottom of the bowl. That’s called the ‘dottle’.”

Years have passed and I now know that these directions are not universally considered truth. There are many who argue that a dottle results from improper smoking, that a correctly-smoked pipe burns smoothly all the way down leaving nothing but ash. Perhaps. But I will note that, according to Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes left a dottle in every pipe he smoked. In fact, he scraped his dottles out at the end of every day, packed them into a fresh pipe and puffed away on the collection to start the next morning. I’ve never done that, but I will confess, many’s a day I’ve dug out the last pipe from the evening prior and smoked the dottle to start my day.

Pipe smokers are a disappearing breed, by the way. Smoking in general is declining, which is good. I attribute most of this to public shaming and ordinances increasingly banning lighted tobacco products anywhere within sight of public spaces and commercial areas. Still, you see people sneaking a smoke here and there, and if you’ll look around the next time you’re stuck in traffic, I suspect you’ll notice lots of folks dangling their arm out a car window holding a smoking butt. Smoking continues, it’s just smokers are embarrassed to be seen doing it. The exceptions, of course, are teenagers--especially vaping teenagers--and cigar smokers. This last group generally want as many people as possible to know that they have, literally, money to burn. There are always a group of them where I buy pipe tobacco; loud, obnoxious men in their forties who like to make it known that they believe the world is filled with fools and miscreants to which they claim to be exceptions.

Pipe smokers are a quieter lot. Loading a pipe, lighting it, nursing it, cleaning it, setting it aside to rest while selecting the next one, these are rituals ill-suited to the hectic, modern world. Pipe smokers accumulate pipes as well. They have to. It takes awhile to break in a pipe, smoking it slowly and giving it a decent rest over many weeks before you can just light it up and puff away while pounding keys on your typewriter or computer or whatever you write on. And maybe Keith still has that pipe he showed me almost fifty years ago, but I typically burn one out after ten years’ use. That means I want to have some breaking in to be ready to replace that pipe that finally cracks wide open. Mark Twain reportedly chain-smoked corncob pipes and burned them out so frequently that he’d pay people to break in new ones for him.

Pipe smoking and writing do go together, by the way. And, no, not every decent writer plies the trade with a pipe clenched between their teeth. Nor does every briar addict feel the need to scribble words on a page and then obsess over them. But there has always been a community of pipe-smoking scriveners. I pray this community continues at least a few more decades. And perhaps something may still come of starting each day on the remains of the last.

Carpe diem!
Smoke the dottle!

David

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God willing and the creek don’t rise

Don’t point that gun at me

Popcorn, Milk Duds and a Cherry Cola

Wading the creek

"One small step"

Smoke the dottle

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God willing and the creek don’t rise

Don’t point that gun at me

Popcorn, Milk Duds and a Cherry Cola

Wading the creek

"One small step"

Smoke the dottle

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