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
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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