Je suis la pipe
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Fred Brown - Apr 4, 2023
- 4 min read
Let’s take a quick trip to the long, long ago. Back of the beyond, as the wanderlust mountain adventurer and pipe-smoking author Horace Kephart once said of a hiking trip into the deep woods and ridges of the Great Smoky Mountains.
The time of this Pundit adventure was somewhere in the late 1940s or early 1950s on a peanut farm in the dust-covered and rutted red clay roads of South Georgia.
My grandfather was a farmer of anything that would grow green, including tobacco, sorghum, peanuts, corn, vegetables, and on and on. He even kept pigs around for (uh) slaughter and butchering for his smokehouse. Pipe firmly clinched, grandpa, of course, performed the slaughtering and butchering while his grandchildren cringed on the sidelines.
He smoked a corncob pipe, usually grabbing a browning barn-aging leaf from a hanging stalk. He’d crumble the leaf in his palms, stuff it into the battered and rim-carved cob, strike a kitchen match off a hip of his overalls, and puff contentedly.
I tried an immature leaf once, just like my grandfather. Ripping the match up my backside and puffing.
My pipe-loving friends, that is not recommended. I turned as green as a fresh tobacco leaf. I shan’t tell you the rest. You can imagine if you’ve ever experienced a seismic nicotine hit!
And, ahem, I may have been all of 10 years old at the time. I figured anything my grandpa did was simply fine for moi!
Again, not recommended.
What has me in a reflective mood is the recent bulk and tin order from Smokingpipes.com. A nice 16-ounce bag of Gawith Hoggarth’s No. 25 Mixture accompanied by its beauty of a tobacco jar (it’s a tight-locking can) and a couple of small batch tins of Erik Stokkebye’s 4th Generation Resolution.
One of my earlier years of sampling Gawith blends was the hefty 1792 flake. Brothers of the briar, I was slam dunked (please note the reference here to March Madness of bracket basketball and now the Final Four crescendo) once again with a volcanic nicotine eruption!
And those of the Briar Brotherhood who enjoy a bit of history will recall that the Revolutionary Wars in France began in 1792.
The conflicts of that era led to King Louis XVI losing his head (um, ah, via the guillotine in 1793).
This was just one year after old Sam Gawith and Thomas Harrison, his father-in-law, moved the entire kit and kaboodle tobacco operation (snuff was big then) from Scotland to the Lake District of Merry Ol’ England.
The ye olde tobacco equipment from the time of Louis XVI (with head firmly attached before the fatal blow) continues today in use for the famed Gawith and Gawith & Hoggarth tobacco blends.
So the lesson here is to watch those muscular nicotine contents if you are a wuss, like the Pundit.
However, I do enjoy the G&H aromatic mixtures, such as No. 25. Sweet, easy on the tongue, and the nic hit is not a blast of the sweats and other drastic bodily events.
No. 25 is quite easy on the nerves and is an all-day smoke for the Pundit, as are many other G&H aromatics.
I avoid twists, ropes, and plugs with strength ratings off the charts. I’m just not tough enough for these nicotine brutes but admire you pipe puffers who handle them, including something called a bogie, with little or no loud emissions from the netherworld.
And here is trusting that my pipe-puffing pals enjoyed St. Patrick’s Day with your favorite Wearin’ O’ the Green and a pipe full of, mayhaps, Cornell & Diehl’s 2023 St. Patrick’s Day Reserve from the rich mind of talented and creative C&D master blender Jeremy Reeves.
Of course shared with chums over an Irish pint or some Irish coffee, hopefully. And just because St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone doesn’t mean you can’t share a pint with your puffing pals.
And now a note from a pipe-smoking Irish Bard, just to top off the day:
Mistakes are the portals of discovery—Irish author James Joyce.
From the Irish to the greatest of American pipe and cigar-smoking authors, Mark Twain.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famously known to the world as Mark Twain, was born Nov. 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, and died April 21, 1910, in Stormfield, Redding, Conn.
There are too many quotes from this greatest of authors, but here are just a couple of Pundit’s favorites:
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education—Mark Twain
Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been—Mark Twain
And another tip of the hat to the French Wars mentioned earlier.
Charles Pierre Baudelaire, a pipe-smoking French poet, was born April 9, 1821, in Paris, France, and died Aug. 31, 1867, in Paris.
Baudelaire comes to mind since he penned a poem from the viewpoint of his pipe!
This fell under the collection of Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil). Yes, that’s right. Just a few words from les poem, maestro, if you please:
I am the pipe of an author;
One sees. . .That my master’s a great smoker.
Spring has sprouted (les Pundit is not les poet). That means days are longer and pipes and tobaccos have more time to bring much joy to our lives.
And in our efforts channeling Baudelaire, Je suis la pipe d’un auteur. Until next time pipe-smoking friends.
Written by Fred Brown
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There’s a pipe in my collection that I cannot bring myself to smoke, though I’ve had it for more years than I care to recall. It’s old, or shall I say, well experienced; that experience, that oldness came to it long before it was in my possession. The pipe is an old Comoy’s Grand Slam from the 1940s. The shape (#93), a slightly canted, stack billiard (sometimes referred to as a Belgian) is right up my alley, and it’s a beautiful example of it. It came to me with some wear and tear; nothing unusual for an old pipe, but more the signs of one that has been well loved, smoked a lot, treated as a favorite tool, cherished, in a sense, by frequent use. It’s the pipe equivalent of a vintage car that’s been driven a lot, enjoyed fully and maintained adequately, rather than one kept in a spotless garage, dusted and detailed weekly, brought out only for leisurely Sunday drives, or to be ogled behind the ropes at the next Concours d’Elegance. When it arrived, those uncounted years ago, it wanted a little restoration. Nothing dramatic needed to be done to it, but the stem was oxidized, the finish a little dingy. The cake was even and fairly thin, and the airway was relatively clean, both signs that its previous owner cared for it, but the bowl’s surface was a little drab and dull. It took little effort to reveal its beauty, to show the lovely contrasted stain and interesting grain beneath the old wax. I often think I should do before and after photos of pipes that I work on, but those thoughts always come after the work’s been done. This one would have been a great illustration of how years of handling that can sometimes make a pipe more beautiful, can other times make it just look grungy. Once I’d cleaned up the externals, it was time to address the inside bits. I approach this a little bassackwards, I realize. It would be more sensible to take care of the inside before addressing the outside, but it’s how I roll. If an old pipe isn’t pretty to look at, it’s unlikely that I’ll care much about it, and cleaning is usually the hardest part, or at least the most boring part of any restoration for me. Alcohol and pipe cleaners. Lots of pipe cleaners. That’s why I leave it for last. Sometimes, I’ll even give a pipe a test smoke before a deep cleaning, just for a point of reference. I gave it a sniff to get an idea of what I was up against, and it stopped me cold. There in that bowl was an aroma that I had not smelled in decades. My head was instantly filled with memories of being in the back room of a fabled Berkeley tobacconist’s shop where I stumbled upon a few jars of long discontinued blends. One of them, a blend called Forty and Eight, had the most engaging and unusual scent of any tobacco I’d stuck my schnoz into. It was sweet, but not in a candy store way. There were none of the usual vanilla, cherry, berry or anise notes of typical aromatics, nothing that could be compared to aftershave or deodorant soap, but something almost musky, a little earthy, something exotic. The shop’s owner couldn’t tell me what was in it, how, or where it had been produced. The old blend had been retired before he’d bought the place. The printed catalogue gave no clues, either, other than being overprinted with the word “DISCONTINUED” in bold, rubber-stamp type. (And, I don’t recall it as being “highly aromatic” as the description indicates.) There was still quite a bit in the jar. Being, at that point, an intrepid explorer of all kinds of tobaccos, whether I thought I’d like them or not, I had to give it a try. It was burly based, but also comprised a good measure of virginia leaf, and maybe some other varieties; I didn’t have enough experience at the time to really pick it apart. But, that aroma was unlike anything I’d experienced before or since. It was something now completely lost to time. Until it wasn’t. Memories are powerful things, and there is no sense more tightly bound to memory than our sense of smell. One whiff was all it took to carry me back in time, conjuring a vivid recollection of something long submerged in the inky depths of a subconscious mind. Look, I know as well as anyone that pipes are meant to be smoked, and that many feel it almost sacrilegious to have a pipe and not set it to its intended task. In this case, I simply can’t. I won’t. Ever. Rationally, I am fairly certain this pipe would probably be a great smoke. It was too well loved by its previous caretaker to be anything less than that. My choice not to smoke it is an emotional one, not something rational. Of the thousands of pipes that have passed through my hands over the years, this is the only one to create such a singular and vivid, almost Proustian recollection of temps perdu, of lost time. It revivified a long dormant memory that is mine, and mine alone, and that’s enough. I keep it in a drawer with other old English pipes. In some ways, it’s nothing special, just a nice old pipe. I don’t lavish it with any particular care that arguably befits the hidden treasure that it holds. It’s not in a special box, or displayed preciously in a glass cabinet. Every once in a while, I take it out, point my nose bowlwards, and every time, those memories return just as powerfully as they did the first time. I have no idea how long it’s been since its last owner smoked it, but in the years I’ve had it, there seems to have been very little degradation of the aroma, and that’s […]
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Soon now, supposedly, our neighborhoods will shift from grinning pumpkins, skeletons in various assortments, and zombies dashing about to pretty reindeer, angels, and flashing lights illuminating homes with sparkling stars and laughing, scurrying Santas. But, lest we forget, there is the turkey season, fancy pie aromas wafting from kitchens, and a national pardon of a big Tom Turkey. Remember, now, that only one of these holiday personalities is a pipe smoker. And that is the hefty, bearded fellow in a bright red suit sitting in a sleigh with a herd of deer hitched up and ready to streak across the globe, bringing tidings of joy and many presents. Ok, the scene is set for the next couple of months, right? So, before we get too far off the beaten path, let’s just take a deep breath of fresh autumn air, shall we? Ahh. That’s better, isn’t it? What’s got the Pundit in a snit is not all the Halloween spooks who came a-jostling for candy. Or the wild turkeys gobbling in the backwoods or all the fuss and feathers over the big one—Christmas. No, it is that we might need to take note of all the little things that mean so much to us. Like a good sunrise (seriously, Pundit has not gone all Pollyanna.) Mayhaps we need to appreciate more of what we have than what we have not. Or something like that. Like, a good pipe in the morning with coffee as the dawn brings us coolish weather now that we have flipped the calendar to autumn. But it also brings beautiful leaves that have become a spectacle of technicolor in the wind. It is the little things. The rereading of an enjoyable book and finding something you did not see or learn in the first go-round. Or a stunning phrase you commit to memory with the re-read, while smoking that favorite pipe. And you notice a superior puff that just seems to be different. It’s in the air and the seasons of meaningful little things. It’s aromatic! 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A fact is not a truth until you love it—Shelby Foote. A parting thought: It is said that famed Southern author William Faulkner carried a packed pipe in a coat pocket wherever he went. That’s one effective way to deal with workday conflicts and confusion. A calm and objective judgment in our everyday human affairs, as the quantum man said.
Welcome to The Pipes Magazine Radio Show Episode 633. Our featured guest tonight is Jon David Cole. JD is the Owner/Tobacconist at The Country Squire in Jackson, MS, and the accompanying online store. We’ll have JD and Brian talking about what’s new at the store and in the business in general. At the top of the show, Brian will discuss tobacco growing, what happens to the leaf, and provide updated information on where tobacco is being gown today. Tobacco production originated in the United States and we were once the #1 producer. It’s quite different now.
