We'll leave the light on for you

 An old friend named Joel stopped in last week. I did not think that I would be seeing him any time soon and honestly, perhaps not at all. But, he is here and it has been nice catching up with him and his friends. Joel is not a real person, but a favorite in contemporary fiction circa the Summer of 1990.

This was an exciting time in history for me.  September 8, 1989, was the last time I went to work.  That was the last time I worked for the City of Port Aransas and my last official day of drinking. Nine months had passed.  

On January 8, 1990, I started Basic Training with the Army.  This was one of the most uncharacteristic choices I have ever made.  The backlash of alcoholic armageddon left me choosing what I felt at the time the opposite of my recent past; instead of running, I was going to dig in and fight.  I met a man who was so sure of himself.  He had the military in his history, but he was no conformist.  In fact, he was the most nonconforming person I had met to that point in my life.  His confidence in who he was became a crown jewel that I needed to possess.  The military seemed to be the way to get that. They welcomed the 24-year-old version of me with open arms.

I returned home from Basic in May and oddly, my life became directionless again as far as what I was going to do for a career.  Summer quickly came and I just sort of existed day to day. There was an old show that had begun at the dawn of the 80s that I had been watching every Thursday night, but it was on summer break.  On July 12, 1990, something wonderful happened.  A replacement series about the fictitious town of Cicely, Alaska tested the waters our our hearts with 8 episodes. Instantly, we all needed to know more about these unique people.

In the first 8, we fell in love.  Somehow it seemed that we always knew them and we had returned home.  In August, outside my staticky reception of WCAX channel 3 in Burlington, Vermont, the world was getting serious.  Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.  Tensions had been mounting in the Persian Gulf all throughout the 1980s during the war between Iran and Iraq.  In 1987, the US began to reflag Kuwaiti oil tankers to deter attacks, and evidently, this move did not prevent blatant all-out aggression.

When I enlisted in the Army on 18 November 1989, nothing had happened since the invasion of Grenada on October 23, 1983, and before that, Vietnam was the last big conflict.  Joining the NH National Guard, I envisioned weekends and two weeks in the summer and maybe in the next 6 years aiding local flood victims.  Then 33 days later the US invaded Panama.  

On day three after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I could feel my future and from that day I verbally stated many times that I would be personally affected.  Over the next 90 days, the path grew more treacherous. Narrowly avoiding the first call-up of 600,000 US Reservists, we were first in line for the 2nd 600,000 activation. A fellow reservist appeared on my doorstep Monday evening November 12th, just as the first snowfall began. Our turn.

When you live on the surface of Mars, or similarly the desert of Saudi Arabia, you long for something to read that provides an escape.  Something that takes you away from here.  It does not look like this and is harmless and kind. I was at a PX one day at KKMC (King Khalid Military City).  Our convoy deviated from our normal route much to my co-driver/Assistant Platoon Sargent's desire.  We were carrying medical supplies from Log Base Alpha to a CASH (Combat Army Surgical Hospital) in the middle of nowhere.  

At the PX, I found a book written by Tom Bodet.  You may remember him as the guy back in the '80s and '90s who advertised for Motel 6.  He was probably best known for the catchphrase: "We'll leave the light on for you." The book was called End of the Road.  Wouldn't you know it, it was written about a small town in Alaska called End of the Road.  It was filled with quaint but lovable characters. Sound familiar? Best of all, it was as far from the Middle East as it gets.

I fell in love with these people.  Mr. Bodet made them easy to love and almost primary color defined sort of like in the old days of the Westerns when good guys wore white hats and bad guys wore black.  It was not blatantly like that, but the flavor was there. Tom was sprinkling on some herb that made it so you just had to be a cold-hearted idiot not to accept the fine people of EOTR.

I passed this book on to over 20 friends while in the desert and it brought a lot of love and relief to a group of home sick people.  All of this time, I thought of my other Alaskan newly found friends in Cicely.  Would I ever see them again?

In 1991, back in the US, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I would see my friends in Cicely again. Now Monday nights at 10 PM, Northern Exposure graced our screens.  While NE gave us some of those spoon-fed moments in the first season that helped us adopt these wonderful people, they put the cheese away and did not get stuck within the boundaries of reality. A drama-comedy that on a moment's notice took on Twilight Zone turns, time travel, journeys through history, and many people's private dreams.  I not only came to love these friends but also respect them.

Northern Exposure never streamed.  Well, until 33 years later.  Very quietly, it suddenly showed up on Amazon Prime.  It is a fine thing to meet a town full of people at 25 years old and then revisit them when you are 58. I am savoring this trip down memory lane and it is a joy.  It is an amazing thing to discover how my experiences over the last 33 years affect and contrast with this part of our creative history.

I don't think Tom Bodet's End of the Road would have caught my eye that day at KKMC without my first having met those wonderful folks from Cicely Alaska.  This wondrous and composite turn of events, they brought me sweet relief and joy in a very barren and difficult place and time in the world.

Good morning in the morning

 What have mornings meant to you as you scroll the pages of your life? It is interesting to think of all of the different kinds of mornings that we can experience.  From my childhood summer mornings, I can recall, setting one foot on the floor followed by walking straight out the door to see my friends.  Another day's adventures awaited.

Those much too early wake-ups in which we sprayed the grass the night before with water to get the night crawlers to surface, so that we may select them for participation in our early morning fishing trip.  2 hours before before sunrise, very little sleep, we drove toward lakes and rivers with the hopes a very good day. It is a journey into a world that somehow does not exist, until this misty morning.

As a child, I woke at 4 o'clock and tuned into the airwaves from hundreds of miles away.  Learning about places I did not live, and getting to know people I did not know.  Warmth traveled across the stratosphere until the light waves from the east strangled the radio waves out. This friend is to return tonight after the sun sets in Western New York.

Early morning, in a hole in the dirt in Kuwait, dug into a minefield.  I was in the eye of the storm and because of that, I did not know what was happening.  I sat in my hole, sunrise seemed 100 hours away.  I carefully tuned my Walkman, looking for news I could scrape off the AM dial in English.  Through bits and pieces of Voice of America out of Africa and the BBC World Service from London, I found out my position in world events.  Then, like a beacon of hope, the BBC began to spin the song Disappear by INXS.  There was so much power in the moment, I could never explain it.  To this day, when I hear that song, I can feel that spot in the world. It seems that we leave a piece of us in those places that have that much gravity.

The sun did rise that day. Unbeknownst to us we had actually been ahead of the armored division that we were supporting. They hammered through like a storm.

A few days later it was 3 o'clock AM.  I awoke from sleep where I always slept, the hood of my truck.   I listened to the president call the cease-fire and that he looked forward to welcoming thousands of us home.  It seemed impossible, yet it was happening.

Those mornings in which I started new jobs, and let me tell you, there have been a few.  I remember all those first days of school with the smell of new clothes everywhere. An old friend once further described a grammar school morning. Gray fall skies, and maybe drizzle while inside, bright florescent lights hummed overhead. 

The early morning hours were my father's last hours.  In the wee hours, we went to the jetty and should not have been there because the wind and the waves were a rage. The sun rose out of the Gulf of Mexico as we sat watching, the warmth of a 7-Elevin coffee in our hands.

The first days of school for my children and the subsequent days that followed with their roller coaster highs and lows.

There are infinite possibilities when you wake up in the morning.  I do feel sometimes that routine has taken over, coffee, wood stove, commercials for injury lawyers, skin remedies, coin and jewelry resellers, and automobiles. <Yawn> All I could say is there is still a chance to mix it up.  Read or write something, listen to music instead of turning on the droning morning news. Cook something tasty. Do something you love. 

Just have a good morning.

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: