The Coffee Chronicles

 

 I like to hike. I also love my coffee. While I can get away with choking down instant coffee on the trail, there is nothing like freshly brewed coffee to make that experience so much more robust. In 2018 when the Crawford family was hiking the Appalachian Trail, Ben Crawford the dad, mentioned people that he saw using an Aeropress coffee maker and made the statement I feel like I’m missing out on something.

Ben's words intrigued me and I had no choice but to buy one on Amazon. If you don’t know what an AeroPress is,  the best way to describe it is like a wide syringe that holds coffee grounds and water and after a rest time allows you to push the water out into your cup using the syringe plunger. I then took the aero press with me on a family canoe trip and impressed myself and others with this amazing coffee. 

Three years have passed. Many pieces of hiking gear that I bought three years ago have not been used in quite some time. When it comes to cooking, this can be very detrimental. When I don’t practice all the time with my food preparation for the trail, it usually ends with me taking a homemade backpacking meal with me, only to take two bites out of it and declare it inedible. So now for two days, I have been making my morning coffee in the aero press as opposed to my normal French press. And I am currently struggling to make that perfect cup of coffee. In the first 20 minutes of my day, believe me, so many times I want to turn back and run to the safety of my French press.

But I am determined. I will scrape and claw my way into fantastic coffee making in this aero press device. In doing so I will become a mentor in the art of making coffee in this way. My motives are selfish but how many others will be thankful that I was?

A Walk Down Memory Lane

It is more than selfish, however. When you think of all the different ways that you have had coffee. In my generation, people perked coffee in electric percolators on tabletops, glass Pyrex percolators on the stove, and aluminum percolators on the stove that were sold for a dollar and a half in the grocery store. Then the mid-1970s saw the introduction of the Mr. coffee automatic drip coffee maker. To my recollection, this made a slightly higher than a lukewarm cup of coffee that tasted somewhat like coffee and a lot like plastic. In the first half a decade it was out it was a novelty and no one really took it seriously. It was a copycat of the Bun-style coffee makers that you saw at diners.

I remember at 13 years old I could make coffee in the morning on the old gas and gas stove while my mom got ready for work. She trained me well and I knew exactly when to turn the burner down so as not to boil over the coffee. To this day perking coffee on a stovetop is still a fine way to brew a cup.

During the 1980s the coffee maker became more prevalent and taken seriously. Advances in technology helped with the plastic taste and the temperature. Perhaps a sacrificing of standards coupled with the world getting busier helped.  

The War

By the time we got to 1990, I found myself shipped out to the Middle East during the Gulf War. I procured a large bottle of instant Nescafé instant and a four-dollar Chinese cookstove that burned anything except gasoline and used the equivalent of mop strings to wick flames through a vented double-wall heat tube to create a blue flame. This type of stove is better known today as the butterfly stove and I still have one in the garage for sentimental reasons.

In the desert, I’ve seen people make coffee in many ways including on dried camel poop. Believe me when someone says "sorry about the coffee" I can honestly say, “I’ve had worse“.

Diabolical Atrocities

Although tolerance in different stages of quality of the coffee will change with your situation at the time, there is one thing that is completely unacceptable when it comes to coffee. I am serious as a heart attack here. It is never acceptable not to have it. When all of the grand plans are made whether you are an individual going for a backpacking trip or going out on a family camping trip in your car or a business executive traveling from hotel to hotel or a national guard unit away at Fort Devens for the weekend in 1993, you will have coffee. No excuses. No apologies. No tolerance. Even if you were a Lieutenant in charge of a platoon in the United States Army, it is your responsibility to make sure that the people in your command have this one thing before you ask them to do anything else.

The lieutenant in this story in my opinion completely failed in his life mission. That Sunday morning when we were awakened from sleep made to sit in Army trucks on a cold gray Sunday morning in the Springtime, and sit there and wait for whatever it is we were waiting for. They pathetically handed us a stupid MRE (Meal Ready to Eat)  through the window. Again, absolutely not acceptable. If you have ever drunk the disgusting package of instant coffee that comes with an MRE with cold or lukewarm water, you would know that this is not coffee.

I don’t know if anybody remembers who was with me that day but I took a vow that I have held to for the rest of my life since that day. I promised that as long as I was around, the people around me would never go without coffee in the morning, never in the rest of my life. Thus far I have not broken that vow.

Y2K

In the aforementioned Gulf War, during the push into western Iraq, we basically lived the Gilligan's Island "3 Hour Tour" scenario.  A 36-hour mission that really took days taught me better than anything ever before about the personal responsibility to be prepared.  At the tail end of the '90s the new millennium was coming and maybe, so was Y2K.  In the summer of 1999, a supercell thunderstorm assaulted Claremont New Hampshire where I lived at the time.  A storm strong enough to take down the power for 4 days in West Claremont and level the gazebo on the town common.  I worked in White River Junction Vermont at the time.  On the day of the storm, I already know that my house at the top of East Green Mountain had no power (and unfortunately had an electric stove).  I decided as I drove down Washington St which is the local business district in Claremont, I would stop at one of the local fast-food restaurants because they did have power.

When I walked into each restaurant, it appeared that riots had ensued and people were screaming and having tantrums!  McDonalds looked like someone purposely emptied the napkin and straw dispensers and maybe even a trash can onto the open floor.  They were out of food and could not take many orders for popular items.  The patrons did not understand in a peaceful manner.  I moved onto KFC.  They actually killed their equipment trying to keep up, from what they said, but I wondered if maybe the storm might have been related.  Restaurant after another I tried to get food, to no avail. The thing I noticed the most though, was how fragile and explosive people were acting.  So post-apocalyptic!  For just a power outage!  Then, my real fear rose.  What if the embedded switches DO fail on January 1st, 2000.  What if the grid does go down.  In 1999 the internet was basically in its "toddler" stage and information was bad.  More so, the programs coming in from the shortwave radio underworld in which I had been a part of since the 1970s, was warning everyone, "Get out of the cities, get out of the cities, get out of the cities."

I am not going to be unprepared so I started sale buying just a little extra here and there.  One of the sales that kept reoccurring in 1999 at the local Market Basket was Beechnut Coffee for a mere 99 cents a pound.  I thought this would make a great doomsday coffee!  Besides, say it with me..."I've had worse." Or so I thought.

My friend Nick and I had shared many days in years past trying different coffee, all of it was finer and absolutely not Beechnut.  He was amused by this collection of doomsday coffee and wrote a wonderful list of alternate things you can do with Beechnut Coffee.  The most memorable suggestion was: "Your kitty likes it too!"

Of course, we all survived Y2K and lots of people got rich, me not being one of them.  I did try the "coffee" if you could call it that.  I can certainly say that Jack's Camel Dung Nescafe Instant in Saudi Arabia was much better than this.  So, it sat around for a while.  In mid-2001, my not-yet wife Donna was house-sitting for some friends of ours.  We were talking on the phone and she suddenly sort of choked and said, "Oh, this Beechnut Coffee is terrible!"  I was elated, "Beechnut Coffee?" I asked.  "I will be over in a half-hour."

I gathered every last can of it and brought it to our friend's house and proceeded to build a pyramid of doomsday coffee on their kitchen table.  They were happy, I was happy and the most important thing, we did not waste anything, although I think the "kitty" idea could have fallen into the recycling category.

I digress...

So, it's day 3.  I have stepped up my efforts to make an excellent Aeropress cup of coffee.  I even read 2 articles that differed from each other to gain a better understanding. (Is your head singing John Mellencamp's "Check It Out"?  Mine is).  I am far from arriving at the Master Brewer status that I long for.  But I am going to get it.  I promise.  It is too important because I know:

Pad Thai you can make at home!

 

A Mountain is Missing

In 1984, like any 18-19 year old might do, I used to write out dreams that I had because I loved how they could reveal what my most prominent concerns were at the time.  Like the one in which I was working back at Toys R Us (my high school gig), working a register and every time someone gave me money, I had to hand it to a gunman standing next to me.  Obviously, what money I was making at the time, had immediate places to go. Simple, yet direct.  

Yesterday morning, I had a very powerful dream but its abstract construction was very impressive.  We  no longer lived in our home.  I could not tell if the world/pandemic had changed things up to become even more severe than they previously have been, or what.  We moved into what seemed to be a yurt-ish tent, in a part of town where there were many of these.  The neighborhood was rough with other people living in similar dwellings.

I could tell that I was not so welcome in this area.  Feeling the intimidation of those around me bearing down, I did what I learned to do growing up from changing schools as often as I did.  I walked right up to the biggest most threatening one there and started talking.  The reception was cold.  One was a tall young man with buzzed hair and camo clothing that was clearly a military outfit at one time.  The other one was much shorter and seemed to be no threat, but I could tell he had the backing of the other unconditionally.  Although I did not think of it at the time, this probably meant something positive overall.

"Were you in?" I asked the tall one, gesturing at his clothing.  "No." I sensed a change in pace of everything in him immediately.  "But I hope to be someday."  "I was" I told him.  "Ten years, was deployed during Desert Storm one year to the day of taking oath."  He immediately warmed to me, he told me about his family and his hopes.  I made a couple of friends.

A day passed.  The grayness of living in what seemed like Great Depression accommodations seemed like nothing that any of us would think to complain about.  Looking back, it makes me wonder what the flip side was all about.

Today, we had to make a trip to our old house in Weathersfield.  When we arrived, it was empty, like when you move out and there is nothing to do but sweep up with a broom.  I noticed suddenly something seemed very wrong.  I looked out the window and just knew that I had to be wrong.  So I quickly went outside, to the garage as we had not moved anything from it yet.  But the garage was GONE!  Like they came the day before with excavators and demolished it and hauled it away in dumpsters.  There was no concrete, there were no contents. Wiped from existence as though it never was there!  I was devastated!  There were so many things of mine in there:  the floor jack, the impact wrench, tools, and more tools.  I had to find them.  

I was sure that my former landlord had something to do with it. Not because he could have anything to do with it, because he has been out of my life for 28 years now.  The missing garage brought back a memory of that landlord being in hiding back in 1992.  So he came to his trusted tenants and asked if he could keep his vehicles in various garages, my property that I was renting to own was one of many. I will never know if he was hiding from the IRS, a hitman, the mob, an angry ex, an angry husband, the police, or what, but I did not care.  It was a simple request so I stored a vehicle. Another tenant across town, despite the landlords' pleas, did not give permission for his garage due to work that he was doing in it at the time.

As the story goes, the following spring, that other tenant was behind on rent and was begging the landlord for some work to allow him to trade some of the back rent for work.  The landlord told him, "well there is this one job, but I am not sure you would want it."  The tenant eagerly assured the landlord, "anything, just name it and I will do it."  "I need a building taken down," he told the tenant.  "Actually, it is a garage. It's your garage."  Yes, he made him take his own garage down as retaliation for not allowing its use the year before.  It was terrible.  A lone concrete slab sitting behind the house with a car parked on it with roll-away toolboxes on the perimeter of the slab.

For reasons none other than association, THIS popped up into my mind when I discovered the missing garage.  But soon, I realized that this landlord had been from a completely different point in my life.  That was the first clue.  The ground was raked to make it seem like it never existed.  But it was the items inside that I was truly devastated over.  Then I noticed cardboard boxes on the edge of the woods and the camper was inside the treeline.  But none of the contents were what I needed.  I was in a tailspin! It was all gone, but it was too perfectly removed.  I was pacing back and forth in a panic when I realized what was happening.  I stopped, planted my feet into the ground, and boldly stated, "this is a DREAM!"  Then I woke up.

The lingering effects of this dream agitated me.  Why did it make me feel the way it did?  These were just "things" and yet, it felt like so much more.  I knew suddenly what it was.  For weeks, Liam and I have been getting his 1999 VW Beetle up and running.  Saturday after Saturday we have worked side by side each week.  I have wonderful memories with him while he was growing up, but this is one of our most bonding experiences ever.  It is so precious to me and I can clearly see it means the same to him.  This has been something that we both have loved so much and the thought of losing it is like a mountain being ripped from our midst.

I am so thankful for the relationship I have with my sons and I hope that we can find more things to get closer over.  I now know what Ben Crawford was talking about when he told the story of how Dove, his oldest daughter talked endlessly about what her house would be like someday as they hiked through Pennsylvania on their family's Appalachian Trail thru-hike.  I get it.

I am so moved by our ability to bond, his ability to learn what he is doing.  I am impressed with how he has put all of this together and is applying his strengths in every area of his life.  Our relationship is so precious to me for sure.