Nose

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Walking: Big Cypress Swamp

Yes, we hiked in this stuff:

FLORIDA'S TAMIAMI TRAIL-STATE Highway 41-runs west from Miami across a damp green universe of confusing light and shadow, seeming to cleave Everglades National Park from its less renowned northern neighbor, Big Cypress National Preserve. This is an illusion. The roughly two million wild acres are interdependent, according to the man who lives in the middle of them, "with Big Cypress providing a gradual flow of waterit travels about a mile every 24 hours-that is cleaned for the Everglades and in the process makes a thriving ecosystem."
Clyde Butcher, a large man with a white corona of beard and hair that almost swallows his glasses and baseball cap, is standing in a foot of water less than a mile from his house, just north of the official park/ preserve boundary. He's wearing running shoes without socks, long pants, and a longsleeved shirt, as I am, and leaning on a staff. It makes walking easier and can also be used to ward off creatures, in the unlikelihood that this is necessary.
Though the swamp is populated by alligators, two kinds of poisonous snakes, various spiders, stinging ants, bears, and a subspecies of panther, and harbors the aptly named sawgrass, mosquitoes ("They're wimpy"), and pockets of mud 30 feet deep-and though during electrical storms Clyde's copious hair stands on end and blue flashes have shot out of his fingers-it isn't dangerous. Not a bit. "If you get into the mud you just walk on your knees," he says. "The snowshoe effect" And if lightning strikes? "Well, don't get close to a single tree. Particularly if you're holding a tripod."

Neither of us knows exactly where we are, but we're not lost; we're "misplaced." White ibis clatter in the upper branches of cypress trees festooned with little ferns and bromeliads, some of them in bloom. Orchids lurk in the shadows. Swamp apples-"edible, but only after they fall"-dangle, and coco plums shine like fat blueberries in the sunny spots. Pale lichens abound, a sign of clean air, and carnivorous fish-gambusia-nose about in the muck we've disturbed, looking for mosquito larvae. All around, slimy periphyton sponges up the phosphates and nitrates, but the air is surprisingly fresh and fragrant.
It's August, and the water's both cool and as clear as a trout stream, the second surprise. The third is the firm bottom that makes walking easy. Clyde, a professional photographer known for big, black-andwhite, beautiful and vaguely disturbing shots of primordial nature, is talking about working in such a place. "The equipment weighs 65 pounds, and there's no place to put it once you get here. Setting up the tripod, assembling the camera, everything has to be done over water." This universal element can be a problem in other ways. "Water picks up the slightest movement. Sometimes I set up a shot and then have to lie down, to keep from disturbing the surface reflection. Even then, my heartbeats send out little ripples."
On occasion his wife, Niki, a slim, elegant woman and a painter, comes along to help. But often he's alone. "The only real danger here is breaking a. leg or something and not being able to walk out. There's no way they'd find you." To rest, we go down on our knees, since there's nothing to sit on but cypress knobs. Meanwhile there are the stories, full of alligators: sunning on the Butchers' lawn where clueless tourists try to pose their kids next to them; lurking underwater where one had to be struck in the nose with a paddle to prevent its attacking baby gators moved in the mouth of a mother that then dissuades the father from eating them; alligators hauling dead things into their holes so the decomposing bodies can keep them warm in winter (before they eat them).
Cottonmouths are another consideration. "One bit me in the foot while I was getting into the car. My own fault," he quickly adds. "I forgot the flashlight" Another big one was caught by a red-shouldered hawk that had to call in its mate to help carry its writhing, venomous, thoroughly annoyed neighbor. Then there were the concerns of the secret Service detail accompanying Jimmy Carter, when he brought his entire clan to the Butchers' for a stroll in the swamp. "The agents were ahead of us. I took Carter off on a different trail, and they came splashing through the water after us, furious."
I ask what Clyde looks for in the swamp while photographing. "A space," he says. "Something you can feel you're in. Biological order in visual chaos."

The death of their teenage son in a car accident in 1986, when they were living up in Fort Myers, led to momentous changes in the Butchers' lives, including Clyde's choice of this relatively unprofitable medium. "I decided I was going to do what I wanted to do-use only black-and-white film-and not what I had to do to make money." Color he considers duplication, black-andwhite interpretation. "When you look at a color photograph, you focus on a particular color. With black-and-white, everything is equally important. To put in the color imaginatively you have to participate."
Similarly, looking at the large format photographs he favors-some are as big as eightby-five feet-is "the same as being there. You have to scan it, just like you're doing now. You have to re-create it yourself. It's not a picture, but an experience."
He and Niki raised their two children on a sailboat in southern California and have generally lived what she describes as "an adventurous, spiritually aggressive life." They bought their 13 acres here in the literal middle of nowhere in 1992 from an eccentric orchid grower and built a house with the word "Rejoice!" written in the concrete at the foot of the front steps. They opened a gallery on the highway the next year. To their surprise, customers came-and keep on coming. "Even Floridians thought my photographs had been taken in Belize, or Africa. I would say, 'They're taken in your own backyard.'"

Most of the swamp lore he learned from a friend, a former alligator poacher who had lived with the Seminole Indians and who took him onto Big Cypress' back roads and trails until, "after a couple of years, without saying anything, one day he just walked off into the swamp, and I followed."
In addition to producing art, the Butchers founded the Loose Screw Sanctuary that, among other things, helps fund environmental causes by conducting the annual Big Cypress Muckabout, a swamp walk that brought 12 people in 2000-and some 3,000 last year. They left behind hundreds of pairs of new running shoes that the Butchers gave to a charity in Miami.
Clyde and I set off again, determining directions from the sun, listening for sounds from the highway but fooled by the wind in the cypress, the twang of a bullfrog, a pileated woodpecker's mocking shriek We're still misplaced, have been out for three hours, and our drinking water's almost gone. The vastness of this public domain is daunting to even drive across, but to stand in the middle of it, uncertain of the way out, is to easily imagine the worst. "I've been walking out here since 1986," Clyde says, "and have never seen another person."
We approach his house, still knee-deep in Big Cypress. "Now here's where we have to watch out for that mama gator. She likes to lie up in the sun there. This is the trickiest part because the water moccasins hang out on the grass, where the hunting's good."
Safely on dry land, past the alligator nest and the snakes' killing field, he pauses and asks with obvious satisfaction, "Isn't this a wonderful spot? There's nothing quite like it anywhere."

Comments, etc.: conawayjim@gmail.com

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

To order my book of travel essays go to:

http://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-America-Pursuit-Elusive-Landscapes/dp/B00A16UKCG

Monday, August 5, 2013

My book's new to the ether

My book of travel reportage, Vanishing America: In Search of Our Elusive Landscapes, is now available as an ebook from Counterpoint Press. I hope you'll take a look at:
http://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-America-Pursuit-Elusive-Landscapes/dp/B00A16UKCG
Included are 18 essays ranging from Big Sur and Napa to New Orleans and Nantucket, from rural Maine to Portland. Of Vanishing America Jim Lehrer wrote, "Jim Conaway at his journalistic and insightful best... He gets the connection between what is happening to places and physically and to people sensually."
And Tracey Kidder: "This is an enthralling, lovely tribute to a lot of what is precious in America. One can only hope that this beautiful book is not an elegy."

Monday, July 29, 2013

A chat with Women for WineSense in lovely Sonoma

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EddRakrmZLU&feature=youtu.be

Comments, etc.: conawayjim@gmail.com

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Christmas at the beach

This is only the eighth batch of Pine Barrens single malt “American” whiskey, according to the hand-marked label. It's meant to reflect the lovely evergreen expanse of eastern Long Island's pine barrens - not Tony Soprano's New Jersey version - made by Long Island Spirits from full-blown beer (Blue Point Brewing Company's 10 per cent barley wine) distilled and captured in this cunning, pricy little bottle. The initial taste has a distinct note of nutmeg with some caramel, not pronounced enough to get in the way of the overall pleasure. Christmas is definitely evoked, then a sharp, clean poke in the back of the palate (it's 95 proof). Pine Barrens is remarkably bright, aged for only a year to preserve the freshness of that unique taste. However, I’d love to try it with a bit more age on the finish.
Their website is http://www.lispirits.com/pine_barrens.php

Thursday, July 25, 2013

On Writing: The novel as loss and recovery

   Often journalists finding that an assignment has dropped out of the ether - they once dropped out of stamped envelopes - and that they themselves are about to be transported to a realm unknown, think, “This would make a good novel.” As if in the unrealized state a novel depends solely upon access to a world apart, and our own lovely sentience, and all we have to do is write it.

  Nice to think so, and almost impossible not to say those words aloud from time to time, but no, those experiences rarely make good novels. They don’t even make coherent ones.

  The reasons for this are almost as varied as life itself but basically boil down to the fact that good novels come out of loss - of love, fortune, ideals, experience, writing itself. Whatever emotions you were originally possessed of are transformed into something less than the experience itself, and the cherished illusion that worked so beautifully in the imagination is either reduced, or frittered away in the rendering.

Most people are unable or unwilling to endure for long the second sort of loss, which involves attempting, over and over again, to get it right, followed by the spectacle of the thing itself evaporating into the slip-stream of constricting distance. This usually means, at least in my case, that the experience hasn’t been pushed through the filters enough, or it has been pushed through too often and all perspective lost, making of the original experience something else entirely. Not the crystalline truth you were so sure of, but a candidate of last resort which is in fact what most novels, even good ones, turn out to be.

I suspect that even the most celebrated examples of fiction are unacknowledged compromises. In Remembrance of Things Past the subject was so masticated in the author’s mind over a long period of dissolution and decline that it sprang full-blown decades later from an almost sexual encounter with a cookie dipped in tea.

There’s an extraordinary American example – Moby Dick - the long-gestating novel and forceful emergence of an entire world out of the fecund rot of the re-imagined past. In it, an aging Melville sets sail again in a great sloshing, mnemonic vessel of obsession, transcendental belief and yeomanly know-how; what works its way up from the seemingly depthless springs of his brain is part of the culture now, an exuberantly alive story in language of the same ilk.

How I would like to know what Melville thought as he struggled with that experience, seeing it evanesce beneath his pen into characters of another world as well as his own, all set on a narrative course to the literal end of things and infused with a vision most novelists yearn for but never glimpse.

Melville’s loss must have been three-fold, including the first two I mentioned – diminishment of the experience by the very act of setting it down, and any author’s knowledge that the novel could have been just a bit better – and the fact that few appreciated Moby Dick when it was published. Melville then passed into obscurity, in his time, a kind of scribal Van Gogh sitting out the February of the soul somewhere in New England and gazing out onto sere, dry land lit by the descending sun.

There are quicker and more satisfying ways than a novel to replicate and cherish a moment in life and impose a modicum of control you never really had. Doing this can preserve something of the moment’s essence, but in what form? Memoir may be the most obvious and approachable, redeploying the past as revelation for writer and reader, but memoir lacks the sheer exuberance of the imagination and, more importantly, can’t easily accommodate the unforeseen. And memoir’s really lost to the liberating, sometimes demonic possibility that is the novel’s glory, even though memoirs’ strengths and satisfactions are many.

Non-fiction in general has the same limitations as memoir, only more so, enjoying the underpinning of constant factualness the novel lacks in all but the particulars but fatefully bound by the same thing. Fact sets nonfiction on its way and provides confabulatory tree blazes through lands both wooded and desolate, but it’s always “real” and the journey’s outcome usually known before boot meets ground.

Which brings me to my own recent novel, Nose, set in a vernal, isolated valley in northern California, bound by the great prospects and occasionally great fortunes of wine. I'll get to that, but be prepared: the journey from imagining to actually holding a book in covers is harder than ever these days. So much has changed in the process that it’s almost unrecognizable to a writer remembering the hopeful, once quite wonderful, not-so-long -ago.

Comments, etc.: conawayjim@gmail.com

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html
To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Monday, July 15, 2013

On Writing: Wine as speed

(Excerpted from my keynote address to this year's wine bloggers conference in British Columbia.)

Wine is an accelerant. It lifts the spirit and loosens the tongue and at least in the beginning inspires and energizes. Wine provides human beings with a glimpse of the eternal for which we have yearned for from the beginning, and still do. On a more prosaic level, wine greases commerce and what’s now called social interaction - it makes business deals more palatable and occasionally gets you laid – but best is the exponential speeding up of social standing. Wine’s one of the best ways yet discovered to re-write one’s story, or to recreate an entirely different one. Money acquired in unremarkable or unsavory ways may be instantly laundered in stainless-steel tanks of chardonnay rapped with arteries of glycol and in pricy barrels of cabernet whose indelible stains cover a lot more than aging capacity.

The idea that you can take two steps away from destructive and enriching real estate development in a distant place and claim devotion to nature and “the land” in this one shows how easy this transformation is. Cooler clothes, a studied recitation of wine descriptors and cultivars, a pretended knowledge of and affinity with ageless European culture and, “Viola, I’m a vintner!”

We all know the tired cliché, “It takes a large fortune to make a small fortune in wine,” truer today than ever maybe, but if you believe it then why not back out of it with the Balzac-ian one: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”? Not all are based in real crime, of course. That term can still be applied to bribing politicians, but what about just entertaining them lavishly and pouring money into their causes or their spouses’ “non-profits” that aren’t really?
What about misrepresenting a pile of rocks to get a plot zoned for a house in a vineyard, or acquiring some of your neighbor’s land with an aggressive lot line adjustment? Are those crimes? Yes, if tacky ones. And what about getting tradesmen to effect a landscape adornment and then not paying? What about finessing effluent reports or, for that matter, technically disassembling an entire wine and putting back together minus the defects and calling it what you will?

There’s more to wine writing than chronicling the seasons of the vine or Ridel-diving for exotic olfactory associations. However intriguing these subjects may be, some of the adverse public reaction to wine criticism in general – what’s perceived as its snobbishness and lack of utility - might derive from a widespread if subliminal adverse reaction to terms like “forward” and “plush” and other fatuous stand-bys.

Wine writing can be a lot more than tasting notes and puff pieces about corporate chateaux and the cycles of the vine. The unhappy effects of monoculture are evident today and in evidence in much of California, better than houses and malls, granted, but with the ever-increasing effectiveness and cost of high-end trellising, thousands of miles of steel cables bind gorgeous landscapes from San Diego to British Columbia and, when concentrated in places like Napa and Sonoma, can be seen as figurative stays keeping the lid on both development and the ever-expanding demands of big growers and corporations for water, tax advantages, and wine-related enterprises that can become poor substitutes for an uncluttered view and true nature’s casual, soul-healing variety.

Indeed, the question of environmental impact of wine, including the fine sort, is inadequately – often never – addressed by professional critics and the journals they write for. Obviously those organs are for people hungry for quality, insight, and glimpses into the personalities of those who make the stuff and envision ways to push the limits of terroir and technical manipulation.

But most such publications ignore the impact of what is a unique form of agriculture, at least in terms of making and marketing a beverage that has no real nutritional benefit for the imbiber, however gargantuan the temporary psychological one. Wine’s wonderful if ancillary enhancement of actual food is a value all its own. But the body does not in any medical sense actually depend upon wine, yet it is treated in many circles with an almost religious devotion, as if biblical transubstantiation no longer requires the blessing of the host.

Those who fail to rave in print about the practices of wine are in turn raved against as blue-noses or ingrates, the point being that there is room for a holistic approach to wine, both its production and its imbibing, that some leaders in the industry embraced long ago and still do. Unfortunately they’ve inadvertently provided cover for big producers who feel no real devotion to the land beyond its service under the plow, most notably corporations making the usual green noises while seeking in every covert way imaginable to get around them.

Aspiring wine writers should look at the whole glorious, imitable culture of wine, as seductive and often rewarding as it is, and at its human costs as well. Also the money tree that shades it all these days. There are the usual cliches, like “You need a large fortune to make a small one in wine.” Well, that’s often true, but not always. As relevant of course is old Balzac’s maxim: “Behind every great fortune is a crime.” This is true in spades if crime includes influencing politicians to approve potentially catastrophic development and subverting changes in product content and labeling that could extend or save human life and also maintain land that bears some resemblance to the America that formed us and our children.

Comments, etc.: conawayjim@gmail.com

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Monday, July 8, 2013

On Writing: Napa Redux

(Excerpted from the keynote address I gave at this year's wine bloggers conference in British Columbia, continued from my July 3 post)               

  When Napa: The Story of an American Eden first came out, the members of the GONADS were among my many critics, particularly the vintner who told the joke and had to buy his wife a new Mercedes. (The punchline was, "You rarely get either at home.") Others belonged to established Napa families. I had committed an act of “faction” with Napa, according to the daughter of one revered valley clan writing in the San Francisco Examiner, after gaining admission “to peoples’ confidence” through my “serious, gentlemanly approach” and then producing “a misrepresentation and a betrayal.”

  I liked her and am sorry she felt that way. But I recognized something distinctly southern in her notion that one must be either a cultural acolyte, or a betrayer.

  I had simply wanted – and still do - to capture a unique part of the country, one with the most valuable legal crop anywhere and a product that embodies all the charms and excesses of making it in America. Here the sainted family farm had acquired hyperthyroid bells and whistles, but pointing that out wasn't comfortable, and still isn't.
  That same impulse inspired my novel, Nose, set in a valley much like Napa, one in the midst of the last recession when many of the shibboleths of California’s high-end wine trade were threatened. Maybe fiction's better suited to the imaginary exploration of greed and landed fealty, I had thought at one point. And it was less likely to produce literary casualties among the natives of broader Enotopia, which has increasingly come to resemble Napa Valley.

  There are two stark and instructive ways of looking at places like it, both a bit cliched at this point but still instructive. One version is as a giant hot tub full of naked little Jay Gatsbys standing up to shake it and be noticed. The other is as a veritable Eden at the outset of the nineteenth century, when grizzlies still dipped steelhead from the river and high on the Mayacamas range a raindrop needed a week to reach the earth, so thick was the canopy of redwoods and other trees.
  This was the southern tip of of the most extensive temperate rainforest on Earth, a domain starting way up in the southeast Alaska whose demise is one of the great tragedies of a dying planet. The tension between those two visions is what inspired me and is a fitting subject for any writer.
  Michael Pollan says that eating is an agricultural act. Well, so is drinking wine. It can also be an environmental one. In that possibility lie all sorts of stories that anyone interested in writing about wine can and should explore. All the awkward manifestations of industrial success of the last two centuries - disappearing water, particulate in the air, chemical penetration of the very mysteries of life, rising seas and temperatures - are reflected in the glass in your hand.

     Even the indirect environmental effects of wine should be inherent in writing about it, like an enduring light in the back of the writer’s mind. There’s also inspiration in the past lives of those involved in making and moving wine, as well as clues about what sort of wine they might make. I’ve found that people who destroy beautiful landscapes elsewhere to make enough money to construct their Edens in wine country are likely to behave just as ruthlessly in the wine business.

     It’s all grist for the writer’s mill anyway, and totally justified. It may not make you popular with some so-called “vintners” - usually a silly description since most of them aren’t really. They’re accustomed to perceptions of emerging from public relations campaigns, or from critics ignoring the foibles and often the desecrations of those behind the labels.

     The relevance of wine is broader than most people realize, or admit to. In our loud, exhaustively political era even becomes political. In part at least you can predict a person’s politics by the wine they’re associated with, not so much the varietal as the way its made and the claims made for it. To generalize a bit, you could say that big, jammy alcoholic cabernets are Republican, and restrained, classically-structured, food-friendly cabernets are Democrat. The former’s about power, individualism, exclusivity, the latter about balance, community, finesse. In that equation, Screaming Eagle’s a Romney and Frog’s Leap an Obama.

     Writing about all this matters, but learning how to do it isn’t easy, and young writers today face challenges that are doubly daunting.

Comments, etc.: conawayjim@gmail.comTo see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

On Writing: Beyond Thunderbird

(Excerpted from my keynote address at this year's wine bloggers conference in British Columbia)

    I grew up in Memphis, in the long shadow of bourbon about whose vast penumbra danced the lesser shades of gin and scotch. My father and uncles all drank bourbon, often at odd hours, and although there was beer, too, it was a far less significant phenomenon. Wine there wasn’t, unless you included a sweetly sour beverage characterized as “Sauterne,” that appeared only at Thanksgiving to test your sophistication.

Generally, wine was foreign, weird, and more or less useless except for that sub-category, Thunderbird, which was both cheap and instantly transformational. A fraternity brother of mine used Thunderbird to make Tom Collins instead of the standard mix and one night rendered insensate a whole roomful of Tau Delta Taus and their dates at the Peabody Hotel.

Today when I think of the raucous, intensely alive, often violent ‘Fifties, I’m struck by the unlikelihood that I would someday write a book about proper wine and its social manifestations on the far side of America, that it would get the attention of the New York Times’s wine critic, the late Frank Prial, and make it onto the best-seller list; and that I would be accused of unfairly enticing stories from valley vintners with southern charm.

Now you might think the South and the vernal creases of northern California have nothing in common. If so, you’re mistaken. For openers, viticulture was first envisioned as an American enterprise in the South, by Thomas Jefferson who rightly predicted that wine could positively affect the culture of the country. But first, the journey.

My wife, Penny, and I came to wine like many of our generation, the stations of the cross being Blue Nun, Lancer rose, and a desiccated red in the proverbial Chianti fiasco with the straw base, a built-in lagniappe because you could use the bottle later as a candle-holder. Also, of course, Gallo’s Paisano in a jug with a metaphorical handle that helped launch many a climb to more ambitious heights.

We lived in San Francisco and New Orleans for a couple of years, and a few more in Europe. I worked briefly for both the Times-Picayune and then the Rome Daily American, where I had our wine jug filled weekly from a spigot in the Roman equivalent of a 7-11 up the street. Then in London I wrote a novel about New Orleans while buying cheap claret in an intimidating wine shop on Kensington Church Street.

We eventually settled in Washington, D.C., where I wrote another novel and drank my way slowly upward, like most everybody vaguely interested in the essence of grape, unable to afford the really good stuff. Figuratively speaking, wine was a large, hoary cask into which much disposable income was poured. However, the subject itself seemed almost infinitely varied, the people involved in it interesting, the landscapes lovely, the pastime mellow. After consuming too much wine – unlike with bourbon – one retained some reason and ability to speak. But wine could also be a bottomless trough of seemingly arcane knowledge, sensual obsession, and penury; the only way for a freelance writer to really take that plunge was to find a figurative sugar-daddy.

I found the Washington Post. Hired by Ben Bradlee to write profiles for the magazine and then the Style section, I also became the default wine critic after the real one quit and the editors had to fill a column every week with words like “approachable” and “buttery.” Now, for any writer worth his or her salt, that’s not too difficult. But to avoid terminal phoniness one has to then actually learn something about the substance in question.

To my great surprise, I discovered that many of those associations have a basis in chemistry. A wine really can have a cigar-box nose and a spicy middle palate and even a long berryish finish; it can be both approachable, and buttery. The best examples of all this cost a small fortune. Bradlee couldn’t have cared less about the wine column but, hey, the Grahams were buying.

The next stage in the development of all oenophiles is insanity. Fortunately mine was temporary, a kind of vinous Tourette’s Syndrome in which you shout out wine descriptors at dinner parties and hang around stores in bad neighborhoods stacked with wine boxes and attend tastings of inky east European liquid in misshapen bottles. Enabled by the Post, I followed my insanity to Napa Valley, and things were never quite the same again.

There was a genuine sub-culture where smudge pots and wind machines were advertised in the newspaper and the entire civilization rocked to the diurnal rhythm of wine. Oh, and ate really well, too. The seed was planted for a book, not about wine but about the people involved in making and promoting it and the incredible beauty and fragility of the place.

First I had to finish a peripatetic book I was already writing about the inter-mountain West, which I mention because it was financed in part by the wine column I continued to write after leaving the Post. (I must be the only person ever to write a column about Arkansas Muscat on a battered Remington typewriter in the back of a Dodge van converted to a camper and parked outside Clovis, New Mexico.) Then I moved temporarily to Napa, whose phenomenal story had never been told because most wine writers were more interested in the substance than in the convoluted back stories of the families involved, and ordinary reporters were intimidated by wine.

Delving into Napa, I was reminded of the South: many in the valley were related, if not by blood then by experience; they shared equipment and sometimes spouses, a love of wine, and a willingness to help each other. People inter-married with slightly less alacrity than in east Tennessee and raised their children to take over what was an odd combination of farming, high craft, and an almost religious belief in the god-given rightness of the cause.

The more established families were primarily agricultural, but the scions were rocketed into a sudden celebrity for which they weren’t prepared, the gusher syndrome like that evinced by Jett Rink in Giant. The Mondavis, for instance, Italo-Central Valley émigrés to Napa who made it with hard work and the old man’s uncanny promotional abilities, were replete with conflicts befitting Absalom, Absalom, if not Genesis: brothers brawling over patrimony in the vineyard, the expulsion of the eldest son, multiple matrimonial trade-ins, spectacular dissolution. And the valley attracted a few sun-struck iterations of Faulkner’s Snopeses, although unlike the environs of Oxford they often hailed from LA’s real estate salons or mid-Peninsula dot-comery.

Some of those I interviewed were actual southerners, like the man who today owns more vineyards in northern California than most anyone and arrived in the valley a milk-drinker; his son, who grew up in Napa, has a wife nicknamed Boo, after the character in To Kill a Mockingbird, and sells a wine called Hogwash.

Another similarity with the South was, of course, drinking. Wine may lack the immediate, stunning clairvoyance of bourbon but it does, I will now reveal, make you drunk if you consume enough of it. More expensive wine is required to do this than is the case with bourbon; getting hammered on the good stuff may build fortunes, but not yours. I saw in the valley impressive displays of sobriety among heavily-engaged cognoscenti talking about assault, balance, finish, but behind the gorgeous backdrop of Douglas firs and designer stressed steel inebriation was not unknown.

This I discovered most forcefully when invited to a meeting of crypto-revelers known as the GONADS (Gastronomic Order of the Nonsensical and Dissipatory) who met once a month at a different member’s house, ate wonderful food and drank fabulous local wines pulled from some of the best cellars in the valley, all on a patio high on the east slope of the Mayacamas Mountains. There must have been thirty different bottles, including old, legendary Stony Hill chardonnays and vintage cabernets from Stag’s Leap to Spring Mountain; we ate cheese and fettucini and veal scallopini and osso bucco and fresh-baked bread.

Business and politics had been banned from discussion, so there were games involving funny hats, thrown firecrackers followed by thrown crusts, wrestling, spilled fine wine, and jokes that included one about oral sex and eggs Benedict. Shirts came off to let burgeoning stomachs breathe free, and napkins were draped over heads to ward off the sun - another southernism. I had agreed not to write a column about the GONADs’ lunch, but the book was another matter, and I periodically sat in the bathroom to take notes and avoid expulsion, torn between totally abandoning myself to the grape and retaining some semblance of mind, aware that Tau Delta Tau would be thoroughly at home here.

(Next: Napa Redux)

Comments, etc.: conawayjim@gmail.com. For my bio click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html
To order my novel, Nose, click on:

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Friday, June 28, 2013

Walking (continued): Under the Tetons

(Outside the town of Jackson a little patch of woodland that looms large in U.S. wilderness preservation. Since this visit Brooke and Terry have lost their cherished place at the Murie Center. And yes, that's an Ansel Adams photo at the end.)

"Look, a bear."
Not one but three black ones, a mother and cubs, close enough for us to clearly see the blond streak down the mother's back as she ambles in our direction. I'm at the historic Murie Center in northwestern Wyoming. My companions-nature writer Terry Tempest Williams and her husband, Brooke, the center's former director-are used to looking at wildlife, but not so closely. Terry's wearing a crisp blouse, slip-on boots, and a silver Navajo clasp in her steelgray hair; Brooke has on a faded T-shirt and old running shoes, but they're clearly a team. Ever since we entered this flat, riverine landscape of spruce and quaking aspen under the brow of the Grand Teton Mountains, they have been identifying flowers in a kind of antiphonal botany lesson: goldenrod, sticky geraniums, monkshood, bog orchids, coneflowers.
"They're like old friends," Terry says. "Right, Brooke?"
"Right" He pauses. "And those are asters. There's scarlet gilia. And horsetail, which has survived since the Jurassic-it lived with the dinosaurs."
We're in the middle of what's called the Around the World Walk but is really just a jaunt, as Terry calls the half-mile loop. The name was bestowed by the well-known naturalist Olaus Murie who, with his wife, Mardy, established their nonprofit here for "creating strategies for conserving wild places."

Now deceased, the Muries were long-term residents of the beautiful Snake River valley and early influentials conservationists. They owned and later donated these 77 acres on the outskirts of Moose, where hikers provision before taking on the Cascade or Paintbrush canyons and tourists gas up for the drive to Yellowstone or Grand Teton National parks.
The Wilderness Society was born here half a century ago, and much of the nascent Wilderness Act of 1964 was debated. The Muries also mentored people, among them Terry and Brooke when they were instructors at the Teton Science Schools in the town of Jackson. "This was Olaus's daily walk," said Brooke. "You can make it around in half an hour, or you can take all day."
"We see elk here all the time," adds Terry. "During the fall rut, the woods are full of bulls bugling. You can smell the pheromones."

I smell dust and pine needles baking in the sun. The bleached carcasses of fallen lodgepole pines are banked by pine squirrel middens-piles of needles and cones picked clean as corn cobs-and all around are rotten logs full of ant colonies. An unseen pine siskin chatters ominously. Other possible distractions hereabouts are big gray owls and moose, but Ursus americanus has all our attention.

"Hey," Brooke whispers, with no effect on the bear. Sandy-haired and sunburned, Brooke has degrees in biology and sustainable business, and where wildlife's concerned he's more scientist than entrepreneur. By his own admission, he "wants to save the world," in part by preserving scenes like this. Among the ways the Murie Center seeks to foster conservation is to host conferences and retreats with wilderness as a common theme, bringing together young conservation leaders, business people, government officials, academics, and kids, some from urban centers. Even now, a group of teenagers from Newark is eating bagels in one of the collection of historic log cabins from which we set out.
Terry has written several books, among them Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, touching on the urgent need for protecting natural landscapes and their indigenous inhabitants. In The Open Space of Democracy, she insisted that "our character has been shaped by the diversity of America's landscapes and it is precisely that character that will protect it."
"We're here," Brooke tells the bear. Spontaneously Terry and I add our voices to the announcement, and the sow digs in her heels. One of her cubs goes up a spruce, the other off into the brush. For a long moment the mother stares at us, then turns, stands, and braces her front paws on the spruce. We tiptoe past, aware of both the charms and the perils of a jaunt in this valley.
The clearing ahead in washed in clear mountain light. We emerge into a meadow under the gaze of Buck Mountain, rising some 12,000 feet above sea level. Marching off to the north are the other peaks of the Tetons, which means "breasts" in French. One story holds that the word was bestowed upon these decidedly jagged granite uplifts by lonely Gallic trappers. The rock faces could as easily be seen as facets of prime American jewels, the high defiles full of snow in July. A stream is running over cobbles, providing an inspiration in this dry season.
Terry says, "I depend a lot on the soundscape. That's the ruby-crowned kinglet we're hearing."
"And the chipping sparrow," says Brooke.
And the private jet, approaching the Jackson Hole airport a few miles to the south. "That's a sound the Muries never heard," Terry adds, and we reflect on the vast changes that have overtaken the valley and the nation in the last half century. The spring-fed runnels passing through the little rock garden make a sound that gradually replaces the whine of turbines, and we relax a bit.

This discreet pocket at the foot of the mountains has been largely untampered with for a long time, despite its closeness to millions of people who pour in annually to embrace the grandeur of mountain and plateau. Incredibly, all this was little noticed by Americans until the mid-20th century, after park status had been long debated, with loud opposition from ranchers and persistent advocacy by, among others, the Muries. Brooke tells the story of Olaus meeting with ranchers in an effort to sway them, after his pickup had been stuck in a stream. He returned after the meeting to find that some of the ranchers had pulled the truck out for him, "the point being that they might not agree with him, but they liked and respected him."
The park became a reality in 1950, and from that point on visitation-and development on the park's periphery-has grown exponentially. Today Teton County has one of the highest median home prices in the nation.
The trail takes us back through the woods and loops past the Murie Center. The historic cabins are on the National Register of Historic Places, and restoration of these functional artifacts of ranching is another objective of the center. We cross a little wetland on a rustic bridge, pass some cottonwoods, and we're standing on "the beach," a stretch of sand overlooking the floodplain of the Snake, with Black Tail Butte in the distance.
Now the soundscape includes distant highway traffic, but anyone wishing to get really away and into the alpine experience can easily do so in the immediate neighborhood. For instance, just up the road is the trailhead to Death Canyon, offering quick access to the ruggedly gorgeous country for which the Tetons are famous.
We have come most of the way Around the World, and only an hour has passed. Walking, however, is not a matter of time, or distance, but of perception. This proximity to both the wild and the civilized has provided much to see and to think about, as Olaus Murie no doubt intended.
"It's been a meditation," says Brooke.
"And a gift."

Comments, etc.: conawayjim@gmail.com

To see my bio, click on: http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2013/02/heres-concise-bio-for-those-who-have.html

To order my novel, Nose, click on:  

http://www.amazon.com/Nose-Novel-James-Conaway/dp/1250006848/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1362180145&sr=1-1&keywords=nose

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Writing, wine and Nose discussed 6/27 at Ram's Gate winery, Sonoma, at 5:30

http://wwsnapasonoma.com/an-interview-james-conaway/

Sunday, August 11, 2013

Comments outed

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Walking: Big Cypress Swamp

Monday, August 5, 2013

My book's new to the ether

Monday, July 29, 2013

A chat with Women for WineSense in lovely Sonoma

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Christmas at the beach

Thursday, July 25, 2013

On Writing: The novel as loss and recovery

Monday, July 15, 2013

On Writing: Wine as speed

Monday, July 8, 2013

On Writing: Napa Redux

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

On Writing: Beyond Thunderbird

Friday, June 28, 2013

Walking (continued): Under the Tetons

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Writing, wine and Nose discussed 6/27 at Ram's Gate winery, Sonoma, at 5:30