Coffee Makes Outdoor World Go 'Round

 

Author’s Note: When I first came to Sand Springs in 1966 to teach school, there was not a more iconic place in town than The Pioneer Barber Shop located just south of Second and Main on Main. Roy Bowman and his son Roger cut hair there, Roy, I think, from the 1920's until his passing in the 1980's.

Roger served a hitch in the army right out of high school in the late 1950's, came home and started cutting hair and was doing that when I arrived. I honestly believe that every serious sportsman in Sand Springs (and a good many of the city fathers and other outlaws) got their hair cut at the Pioneer.

Many limits of quail and bass were shot, caught, and eaten inside its narrow confines. I came to love the place. Often I went there when I didn't need a haircut. I wasn't the only one that did that. Count me in. Take me home country roads.

One day while there, Roger, for no apparent reason, asked me what I liked about teaching. I told him it wasn't for the money. I told him people thought you got paid for doing nothing in the summer, but that it wasn't so. Your salary was only for the 180 days by law that school was in session, and that that amount only was dispersed over the twelve months of the year. The good side was the amount of free time you had to do all the things your millionaire friends couldn't do until about a year before they died.

He thought about that, and one day enrolled at TU looking for a history degree, and got one. He did an excellent job teaching that subject at Clyde Boyd Junior High for twenty years, met his lovely wife Sue there, and then (ironically I thought) retired about 12 Years before my 38 years were over at Charles Page. 

I saw him one day at the post office. "Roger," I said, "I'm getting ready to retire. What's the best thing about being retired?"

He paused a moment and looked up at the sky while rubbing his chin. Then he looked straight at me and said, "That first cup of coffee in the morning."

I started laughing, and haven't stopped since. It was, at the same time, both the most profound and humorous comment I had ever heard about such a simple subject. Yes! That first cup of coffee in the morning, the one that for years and years, late for work, scalded your lips and wet your lap.

That chance meeting with Roger occurred a long time ago. The Pioneer's gone. Long live The Pioneer. Roger takes his coffee now on the other side of the river, where the next cup is as good as the last, and always will be. Perfect.

Along about dark one evening this past week, Brian Loveland shot a nice, fat doe while hunting out of our tent camp up in the Big Bend country of the Arkansas River. 

From where I stepped outside the tent, I could see that he had dragged the doe’s carcass over to the little creek that runs by our camp and was using creek water to wash out the deer’s body cavity. He couldn’t have been over four hundred yards from camp, if that far. It was getting dark quickly. 

A half-moon hung like a thin piece of a silver wafer in a lavender Southern sky, a radium bright star at its base. Probably Jupiter. Probably time for a cup of coffee, I knew that for a fact. I stepped back inside the tent, popped some oak kindling into the old sheepherder stove, filled the enameled percolator with water, and added fresh grounds to the pot’s coffee bin. 

Fighting an allergy attack, making a pot of coffee was about all I was up to. That, and hearing Brian’s hunting story when he finally came into camp. 

We had heard geese all night, distant voyagers ahead of something big and cold up North, passing so high up among the Milky Way we could barely hear them, laughter coming down from the stars like the sound of a distant party down somebody else’s street. Wish you were here. Hello. Goodbye. 

“Brian. Was that geese?” 

“I think so. I been hearin’  ‘em all night.”

“Somethin’ big goin’ on up North. Headed our way.”

And then back to sleep after one last flashlight check of the clock set on the chair next to my head to make sure the alarm really was set for five. First one up had to stoke the woodburner and put on the coffee. Always the coffee.

There was a time in my boyhood that I was pretty sure that I would never drink coffee. Not if I had anything to do with it. Mom drank four or five cups a day, even in her young and beautiful twenties, long before I had ever heard the word “addict,” but it was understandable. Her father, Austin, made coffee so strong it would stand a spoon, and he, too, couldn’t seem to get enough of it. Roughneck coffee, right out of the Seminole Field. 

He was all the time trying to get one of us kids, as I am certain he did Mom at the same age, to, “Here, just take a sip.” Which, eventually, she did, as we all do, and the rest as they say, is history. 

I got hooked my second year of college working for a moving van company up in New England with “Boston Cliff” Miller, a sixty-five year old Irishman who used to tell me stories during breaks while we drank our “Joe” about how Old Man Kennedy, that would be Jack’s dad, made his money selling bootleg liquor to guys like Cliff, which is why he was still moving pianos at sixty-five. Cliff, I mean. Old Man Kennedy did somewhat better. 

Anyway, heading into my Junior year I was hooked, haven’t looked back, and haven’t regretted it. The best cup of coffee I ever had is the next one. 

One time while teaching school I had, let’s see, five different jobs, and just about lived on coffee. One of them was to help the late Red Suggs make donuts at the Daylight Shop in Sand Springs. I came in about 11:30 every night, made donuts ‘til about 4:30, went to the local radio station to do the news and fill in for the morning drive DJ’s if they showed up late, or drunk, or both; left for home and a shower, off to school by eight, driving a bus from three to four-thirty, and writing columns and magazine articles before “bedtime” for anyone that would pay me. 

One summer I talked Red into going to Canada with me to fish the Churchill River up in Northern Saskatchewan. Red loved to fish, but like a lot of that “Greatest Generation” was scared to death that the Depression he knew as a boy would someday come back and put him to riding the rails again as he did as a boy out of Jennings, and so would never take any time off to do that which he enjoyed most. 

When the plane’s pontoons touched down off the point of that island, Red was like a man let out of prison. There was a boat turned over on the beach. We had a small outboard that came in on the plane with us, a fifty gallon drum of gasoline, grub, a wall tent, a frying pan, and an axe. 

Red attached the motor to the boat’s transom, hollered something over his shoulder, shoved off toward a distant point gone jagged with spruce, and left me to set up camp and figure out the week’s social activities. I had the coffee on over an open campfire when he came back in a couple of hours later. 

“Conrad,” he said, “I’m sorry, Buddy. I plumb forgot all the manners my momma done taught me.” He was grinning as I handed him a cup of coffee poured into a blue, porcelain cup. 

“No problem, BUDDY. You’re the dishwasher all week. Now tell me, why is this coffee so much better than that you make back home in the shop?” I had intended that last comment as a needle, but needles wouldn’t hurt Red. 

Red paused, taking another long pull on the bitter liquid, and said, “It’s in the water, Son. It’s in the water.” 

Which is the part I was remembering when Brian came through the tent flap all cold, and red nosed, and said, “Man! You got coffee! “ 

“Five dollars a cup,” I said. “They get that, you know, over in Tulsa.” 

“I know, I know. Put it on my ticket.” 

The wind was kicking up out of the north outside, making the tent’s canvas billow like a ship’s sail, and the old Coleman lantern to swing gently from its wire hook around the ridgepole. We both agreed it was the best cup of coffee we had ever had. Well, until the next one.

© 2016 and 2021 Conrad M. Vollertsen