Cowboy Coffee
Gulls calling in the distance. A heavy breeze entering the room through rattling screen windows. The smell of the sea. A slight rind of salt covering everything. Argue about whether there is a better way to wake up and you’ll find me stone deaf.
Our family beach house sold well before I reached double digits in age, but I remember those mornings distinctly. The front porch faced east toward the shoreline. The bedroom my cousin and I shared was knotted pine, floor to ceiling. It glowed in the mornings as the sun tried to push past the blinds, yet there was enough darkness to keep me snoozing past sunrise. That was back when I could sleep through the night.
Always the last one to wake up, I’d reluctantly peel my eyes open and yawn. Toes curling under the sheets, I’d notice the grit of Carolina sand spread everywhere in the bed. I’d sit up and realize that I was missing out. Daniel had woken up long before and joined the adults in the kitchen. I could hear faint murmurs and laughing spells as my dad, my aunts and uncles, grandparents, and a family friend of two welcomed the day at the kitchen table.
I’d slink out of bed hoping I wasn’t too late. The table, already cleared of plates and food, would be littered with half drunk cups of coffee, most smeared with lipstick. There may be a few sequined cigarette cases laying next to a half eaten piece of pie. I wasn’t worried about food, though. Granny always saved me a plate or cooked up something special. No, it was the brown stuff I was after.
They’d say, “Gu’mornin’! D’ja sleep good?” Then a hair tussle and a kiss on the cheek. And I’d say, “Yes, ma’am! Can I have some cowboy coffee?” They’d’ sneak a glance over to my dad. He’d give a half smile and a nod. Someone would grab a cup and start filling.
You might be asking yourself, who in their right mind would give a six-year-old coffee? Well, it wasn’t really coffee, per say. It was 95% milk, enough sugar to put a Starbucks concoction to shame, and just a splash of the brown stuff. Enough to give it a light toffee hue. It was an affirmation that I was loved; that I was family. It was a model to think on--that adulthood was hard but had it’s rewards.
As I entered the room each morning I could tell a conversation ended upon my appearance. Something heavier preceded me. The stories of the Bob So-And-So’s that had recently died. The stories of my grandfather’s father paving the first road out to this beach house using leftover shingles, back before there were any other rooftops visible from the porch. A recounting of life and reconciliation of what it all means.The sea will do that to a heart. A little fart like me walking into the kitchen and asking for a cup of cowboy coffee will put an end to that sort of talk. There’s only so much explaining one wants to do before lunch.
Every now and then I’d sneak a sip of the full strength. My aunts drank it black. Adulthood tasted bad.
Cowboy coffee was the preface to a life narrative; a sort of preamble that says there are a mix of flavors to be had. It can be sweet, but the bitter core of existence is quite shocking unless you learn to ease into it. Cowboy coffee came and went throughout the years. I can only remember it being allowed twice when I was back home in Georgia; once in a cup with a heart shaped handle, and once in a muted moss green cup covered in stenciled elephants. Years later I glanced down at that same green cup and realized all those piles of pachyderms and tangles of curious trunks were more than artistic expression. The elephants were having an orgy. Same cup, different story. That’s growing up, I guess.
My transition out of cowboy coffee was to camp coffee, in the hills of Tennessee next to North River. I was still the last one to rise. I hadn’t learned to appreciate the chill of a mountain morning yet. I’d lay in my sleeping bag listening to the crunching gravel sound of men moving about camp; to the early hiss and poof of the lantern being lit and the scorching drone of a Coleman stove doing it’s work to heat up the percolator. As the water roils and eventually boils, the percolator dances back and forth on the uneven steel grates. It creates a metallic melody to beckon in the morning. This sound is one of the great comforts of my life.
There isn’t much talking done at this time of day. Each knows their job and duty in getting the camp moving. Eventually the clattering of wood and utensils dies down. The stove is turned off. All that’s left are more steps on gravel and the crackle of morning fire. I can hear someone settle into a chair and lean over to warm their hands. I can hear someone walk down toward the stream. Someone farts. I giggle and go back to sleep.
Hours later…“Jonathan, come on out, son. Breakfast is ready.”
I’m sweating in my sleeping bag. The day has gotten on. The sun is out and it’s burning a hole through the tent. I emerge and see that the fire is almost out. There are a few charred scraps of paper plates and a tangle of wilted plastic fork tips on the edge of the pit. I grab the last of the bacon and eggs, maybe a biscuit.
“There’s some coffee left if you want some.”
I could be 9 or 11. Age is blurry when you’re in the woods. As a child, you think you’re a man. As a man, you revel in simplicities and memories of childhood. They merge as one.
I am holding a small styrofoam cup in my left and a nearly empty percolator in my right.
“How much should I put in?”
My dad looks over and shrugs, “However much you want.”
And this is where I have to start making choices. I know how the men take it--mostly coffee, a splash of cream and a little sugar. It’s terrible, but if I pour too little of the brown stuff then I’m still a child sipping his cowboy coffee by the fire. I gamble and try some blend in the middle. It’s terrible. I take a few sips off the top and frown. The cup doesn’t fit in my chair’s cup holder, so I stare at it and swirl slowly until the drink goes cold. The men are standing around stoically now, not impatient, but with that very specific countenance that says, alright, we’re done here, it’s time to go fishing.
My dad walks over to the firepit and snuffs out the last flame. He glances over to my cup, then up at me.
“No good, huh?”
I sneer and shrug my shoulders.
“Dump it out. Let’s go catch some trout.”
So I do. No judgement. I close the door to his Cherokee and he cranks the engine. He hands me an ice cold Dr. Pepper and gives me a wink. We go fishing.
Proportions are important in life. Ultimate satisfaction is that moment when you have a piping cup of perfectly balanced coffee in your hand, but you’re not sure how it got there. You know you made it. You know you poured it. You didn’t consciously make an effort.
But I had barely begun that journey. I didn’t know how a percolator worked yet. I didn’t know the curious little device circulated water up a spout and continuously cycled it through the grounds. I didn’t know coffee grounds came in different sizes or qualities. Most importantly, I didn’t know that by waking up as late as I did I was only left with the dregs, the muddy stew at the bottom of the pot caused by grounds slipping through the porous basket above countless times while I slept the day away. No matter what blend of coffee, cream, and sugar I chose, my coffee would still taste like an old boot. I didn’t know yet that a man can learn to appreciate the taste of an old boot.
Caffeine addiction didn’t come until much later, when a teenage version of myself tried their best to look thoughtful journaling at coffee shops. Five dollars a day on gourmet coffee was a substantial chunk of my net income, but I experimented as frequently as possible with things like double shots of syrup and zebra striped mochaccinos. I’m not necessarily proud of that. I’m not ashamed, either.
Somewhere in the middle of all that self-discovery I found myself sitting indian style in a little glade about a hundred yards upstream of Jack’s River Falls, in the north Georgia mountains. It was my first backpacking trip. We picked the dead of winter when reports said the temps would drop into the negative digits. They did, and I spent the night debating the value of adventure over death. As the mercury rose to roughly five degrees on that first morning, I sat by our fledgling fire with my blue coffee cup and sipped my first taste of luxurious, silky, sweet black coffee. To save weight I had left the accoutrements at home. It was the first time I’d ever enjoyed coffee in its basic form. It was a good cup. It was good to be alive.
To be honest, it was just piping hot Folgers instant coffee that tasted like an old boot, but it was what my soul needed to usher in the day. I’d found space to appreciate the utility of the drink rather than just the taste. Nearly freezing to death will do that to a heart.
I surveyed the array of miniature titanium this-and-that’s I had acquired to do all my cooking and eating with. It was comforting to know I had spent three to four hundred dollars on lightweight cookware to heat up my oatmeal. That’s before I realized the Quakers Oatmeal single packs were wax-lined and held water on their own. No dish ware necessary.
To my right, Joe had mounted a full-size stole-from-his-mamas-kitchen frying pan atop a Coleman burner. He was frying eggs, mountain bread, and stirring some grits on the side. He brought butter. After finishing my oatmeal I still had a half cup of coffee left.
“Do you want some cream and sugar?,” Joe asked.
I nodded. He tossed me a stuff sack filled with spices, sweet-n-low, sugar in the raw, and pure cane sugar. There was a mini bottle of flavored creamer. I picked my proportions and fixed up my coffee. It was better. Then he grabbed my small titanium bowl and dumped in some grits, eggs, and topped it with a slice of buttered bread.
The day before, as we hiked in, I watched that frying pan swing back and forth on his backpack thinking, This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. I had done all the research. I had a working memory of all the weights and specs of that season’s primo backpacking gear. This guy is carrying 20lbs more than he needs to. But as I sat there with my coffee rejoicing in the simplicities of survival, I couldn’t help but think that my own methodology might need some tweaking.
In my late 20s I did have a spurt where I convinced myself I liked my coffee black. That lasted until the moment a friend topped off my cup and added creamer unknowingly. I took a sip and thought, this is better. That’s how it is now; straight coffee and a splash of cream. Sugar is a luxury I save for the woods.
Today I sit here in my robe with a lukewarm cup watching a Colorado sunrise. Snow is on the ground. It’s the end of February, technically still high winter in the Rockies, but with spring only a month away I know alpine camping season is right around the corner. It can’t come soon enough, and I am noodling out a few ideas on how I can make my coffee more efficiently. Percolators don’t work as well at elevation.
Just a year ago when Joe still lived with me, we’d wake up early on the weekends and wordlessly shuffle around the kitchen attending to our own coffee production methods. He uses an old electric percolator, I, an overly complicated pour-over method. I buy small batch local stuff. He loves his Folgers. When the two aromas mix it smells like a barnyard. After the brews finish we’d bundle up in down jackets and fingerless wool gloves, shuffle to the back door, and step out into the sub-freezing air to enjoy the morning. There’s something about numb fingers and hot breath over a steaming cup of coffee that draws an instant connection to the mountains, the woods, a crackling fire. Each sip induces a reverie. The memories of mornings spent atop cliffs or under the bows of rustling trees are always accompanied by something hot clenched between my gloved fingers. The coffee cools quickly in that kind of weather, but I can never wait long enough. I always burn my tongue. I will suffer the cold for that connection any day.
Mountain pursuits change. Gear is upgraded. Sleeping on the ground gets more difficult each year. I’ve spent a lot of mornings now convincing myself to unzip the sleeping bag and stick that first leg out into the cold. Often I think the whole reason I camp is to chase the surge of dopamine I get when I flick a lighter and induce a small explosion under the percolator. A whole lifestyle can be boiled down to a single brief moment of joy. The first sip of coffee on a cold mountain morning will do that to a heart.
Rocks to Rivers
I read an article this week about a guide who took a personal float day and managed to land a record breaking Snake River cutthroat measuring in at 31 inches. A 30 inch or bigger trout is typically said to be a product of 10,000 casts. In his case, the guide mentioned it was more like 10 million. Conditions were hot and it was a miserably slow float. I imagine self doubt and inevitability were sinking in, then, WHAM!--the trophy strikes. I bet it was spectacular.
That got me thinking about my first trout on the fly. It was a cartoonish little brown in the 10 - 12” inch range. It had a slightly blue iridescent gill plate and an array of widely spaced spots that extended all the way down to its tail.
Truth is, when I finally slid that average sized Salmo trutta into my net, I cried.
Here it is.
I wasn’t exactly bawling beside the stream that morning, but I was choked up, eyes moist, mouth pinched at the sides. I straightened up, muttered a few honest prayers of thankfulness to the river gods, and snapped the picture above. I was elated, not just because of my close encounter with an honest-to-God Colorado brown trout, but because months of pain, depression, anxiety, and effort had finally culminated in success. Dejection turned to relief, and I was on a new path.
I had better back up a bit.
I don’t remember catching my first trout. It was surely a rainbow stocker I snagged with a rooster tail on the banks of the Tellico River in eastern Tennessee. An improbable stroke of luck, at best I reckon my 1/8oz spinner finally dodged enough tree branches and river weeds to entice a fish. I’m sure I was giddy. In my family catching a trout out of the Tellico is a right of passage. It’s manhood. No doubt my dad was coaching me and beaming with pride, “That’a boy! Keep his head upstream...reel ‘em in steady...let ‘em run if he wants.”
Back then I never caught many fish, but my heroes did. My dad and my older cousin competed to see who would “limit out” each day. My grandfather ran camp and chuckled at them. He was the wise old sage that knew all the secrets of the stream. Our fishing trips I’m sure are much alike those of other anglers. We say we go to fish, but in truth we are chasing the lore of our family traditions, old and new. The trout is the symbol of that journey.
The early days. Dad and Daniel.
I was most likely back at camp chugging Dr. Pepper and plowing through a bag of gummy worms. If I caught one fish I considered my job met for the week.
While these finicky fish have remained the embodiment of our kinsfolk, trout fishing wasn’t always a major focus (to me). Growing up I dabbled in a bit of everything; art, photography, athletics, politics and so forth. I’ve always been a hobbyist. Whatever the schtick, I immerse myself in it and commit. Sophomore year of college I found rock climbing, which turned into an obsession for nearly fifteen years. I don’t think I ever came close to qualifying as a dirtbag. I never quit my job to pilgrimage to the Yosemite Valley. I never spent a full season at the Red, kicking around at Miguel’s and soliciting beta to conquer The Motherlode. But, I did focus all my physical and mental goals in progressing in the practice of anti-gravity. Climbing was my identity; a constant across many stages of life.
It was December 18th, 2018. I was in prime shape. I was gliding through bouldery “V-hard” problems and sticking moves I considered above my ability. That night I breezed through a difficult crux and then cranked underhand on a good sized block. Only two easy moves to top out. My right hand was an inch from the final hold when something in my left arm snapped. I fell off the wall and landed on the crash pad below, dazed. Two weeks later I’m sitting in the DTC Surgery Center prepping to have my bicep reattached. During the procedure they also found my labrum was shredded. In the long term both would heal.
Recovery time is eight to nine months before any substantial physical activity is possible. Now, this is no Aron Ralston situation. I didn’t have to squander under a rock, drinking my own urine for five days before chopping off my arm and hiking out through the desert. I’m thankful for that. Climbing is inherently dangerous. People get hurt. I’m one of them.
That doesn’t mean my injury wasn’t life changing, though. My job requires me to be stationary. I’m in a chair for nearly nine hours a day during the week, and I cherish any time I have to be active. Take that away and I start fraying at the edges. Life post-surgery was hazy. I was doped up on oxycodone. I hated the meds and was disgusted at the notion I use any saved up PTO on such unjust circumstances, so I went back to work and did my best to adjust.
There was a lot of pain. It hurt to move. It hurt to sleep. It hurt to laugh. I was a faberge egg. The boredom was worse. Anxiety permeated my mental space. I smiled through the pain and told folks I was healing nicely, and yes, it’s a bummer but I’ll get through it. Only, I still wasn’t sure how. I didn’t know what the hell to do with myself. A few weeks later the sling and bandages came off. My arm was a mashed potato horror show. Still swollen and colored like fading sunset, my arm could barely support the weight of a cup of coffee.
The joy of losing my sling faded quickly. I had to find some way to fill the time outside my working hours. Mid-January I sat sulking in my unmade bed wearing an old flannel shirt, socks, and underwear. I sipped a lukewarm IPA and tried to keep my attention on another low grade sitcom marathon streaming on Netflix. The mind doesn’t have much time to process in those five seconds they give you between episodes. Regardless, a memory popped into my head. It was a conversation with my cousin Daniel from a few years before.
We sat around the fire pit at North River, our base camp when fishing the Tellico.
When the trip ended I wouldn’t be returning to Atlanta, but instead swing north toward St. Louis and then west to Denver. I was leaving the South for good. As such, I was muttering a sentimental thought here and there about how I hated to think I can’t just drive to Tennessee anymore, and I wonder what things’ll be like next time we can all get back here again, and of course I’ll always make the trip back to snag a few more trout by the lip.
“Aw, well hell man, where you’re going is pretty much trout Mecca.”
“Huh?”
He took a drag of a Marlboro and swigged a Bud Light, “Shoot, there’s more good water out there than you can ever fish. Big boys, too. I’ve seen pictures of some fuckin’ huge trout. Not like the stockers here. Fly fishing is the big thing out there.”
“Huh.”
I filed that convo in the “good to know” folder of my brain. I knew my dad and grandfather used fly rods sometime way back, but I’d never seen it. We always used spin gear on the Tellico. If they didn’t fly fish I didn’t imagine there’s any reason I would need to, either. After that trip I joked a few times about how I should learn to fly fish so that I could get a head start on my retirement hobby.
It came much sooner than I expected.
I never finished my IPA. The brew was full-on hot, sitting by the fireplace, when I closed my laptop at 3 a.m., eyes bleary from five or six hours of googling. My search history showed pages with titles like, “Fly fishing 101”, “What is tippet?”, “Do fish bite in the wintertime?”, “What do I need to start fly fishing?”, and so on. The next day I found a guy on Craigslist who sold me two rods, two reels, a mesh vest, two spools of tippet, about 70 flies, some random tools, bobbers, nail clippers, and fly floatant, all for 75 bucks. The lot of gear smelled like pot, but it seemed in decent shape. I found boots and waders a few days later; used Simms gear with enough life left for a season or two. The previous owner was a little shorter than me and two times rounder. As a wind sock they could power a small sailboat. If I were to fall in the river and these things filled up with water, I’d be done for. Kaput. Like the Kraken was dragging me to a watery grave by my ankles. But they were the right price and I was on a budget.
January 20th, 2019 was my first day fly fishing. It was a balmy thirty-something degrees with a foot of snow on the ground. I spent the day using a thingamabobber and split shot rig like a rodeo lasso. I fashioned a crude dry fly leader and whipped it across the water like Indiana Jones. The idea of a dead drift hadn’t come up in my google searches yet. Actually, there was no drift at all. I plunked the flies in the water and immediately snatched them out. That’s how it’s done, right? I caught zero trout. Determined, I kept it up. I did more research and found Tom Rosenbauer’s podcast. Saturdays and Sundays were always the same; up at 5 a.m., streamside by 7:30, fish ‘til dark. I rounded out January and fished straight through February this way. No trout. I listened to a lot of Alan Jackson.
Day 1 on the fly.
Zero fish. Side arm casting. Waders tied in the back like a ponytail.
Winters in Colorado give you roughly nine hours of daylight. If we assume I fished hard on every trip, which I did, that totals to about 90 hours of me standing in waist deep water during the dead of a Colorado winter, waving a nine foot stick around and having nothing to show for it. Each day I ate a mound of tuna salad and drank a lot of beer. I chain smoked Parliaments to keep my fingers busy, each cloud of smoke a reverie to warmer times. I will write about the cold purgatory of winter fly fishing elsewhere. What I will say here is that hell is hot and often it seems like the more favorable option.
That finally brings us to March 2, 2019, when an unsuspecting spring trout was hungry enough to eat a size 22 midge right next to my feet. The drift was nearly at its end. My leader paused just so, like the Matrix glitched and respawned a fresh set of fish right there in my cold little run on the South Platte. I was lucky the eat came only three feet away. An unfamiliar jiggle at the end of the hookset meant I was, in fact, finally catching, not just fishing. I was frantic and likely would have bungled the whole thing had I fought the fish longer than fifteen seconds. But that was all the time it took.
An honest-to-god Colorado brown trout.
And that’s all the time it took me to transition, in spirit, to a level of acceptance I’d been fighting since I got hurt. The anxiety and depression I’d been suppressing wasn’t rooted in my arm healing. It was underpinned by the feeling that I was a sellout. I knew that even though my arm would get better, I had fundamentally changed. Years earlier I’d broken my ankle at the climbing gym. I’ve never walked the same since. Now I’d given an arm and shoulder to the sport. The thought I kept having and didn’t want to say to anyone was, “If I’m honest, I really don’t think climbing is worth it anymore. I’m tired of getting hurt”. For me that’s an identity shed and a life narrative lost.
But let’s not forget that at this moment I have my first brown in hand, who is terrified, peering up at a bearded buffoon who is beaming ear to ear, not because he caught a fish, but because he now has a purpose. Chasing trout.
I can’t say whether the journey began when I was a youngin’, slinging lures in east Tennessee, or if it was in the recovery room after my surgery. I once read that you should never assume you know enough to write about why something happened. Only write what happened. Well, I never climbed outside again. My wanderings now lead me toward creeks, rivers, and alpine lakes. And the trout continues as the symbol of growth.