The Accidental Pipe Smoker
Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 6:54PM | Neill Archer Roan | Permalink tagged Georgetown Tobacco, John Casey 
Author John Casey enjoys a pipe in Georgetown Tobacco, Image © 2010 Neill Archer Roan
It was a beautiful, Summer-like day yesterday in Georgetown when I found myself with 90 free minutes before my next appointment. Having just downed a cappuccino, I felt the impulse to smoke my pipe, so I arose from my coffee house perch and sauntered over to the mother of all Washington, DC tobacconists: Georgetown Tobacco.
Having settled into one of the burnished oak pub-chairs, I took a gander at the pipes on display in the case next to me. As I peered through the shelved-glass cube within which the pipes were displayed, I noticed a backpack-toting, professorial gentleman inspecting the tobacco tins on display. He quizzed the clerk behind the counter about the availability of some of the blends.
“Do you have any Rattray’s Red Rapparee on hand?” he inquired, to which the clerk apologetically replied,“No.”
The older gentleman commenced regaling the ever-more-hapless clerk with a long and colorful recounting of his trading with the store, evidently having started smoking a pipe before the clerk’s father was out of diapers. It was clear to me – but clearer to the clerk –that his disappointment was blooming with the alacrity of an old narcissus bulb happy in its bed. The clerk smiled and stammered, attempting to prop up his enfeebled excuses, but he was given no quarter, whatsoever.
When a pipe man wants his favorite blend and is used to getting it, he’s not about to allow his complaint to be cut down in the prime of its life. When the torrent petered to a drizzle, the older gentleman pivoted on his heel, threw his head back slightly and gazed at me through the bottom half of his ovoid glasses. By that time I had settled into my chair and surrounded myself with a hazy aura of pipe smoke.
“What’s that you’re smoking?” he asked, “It smells good.”
“Frog Morton,” I murmured between puffs. “It’s a savory English blend by McClelland with a nice leathery Cyprian latakia. It’s very smooth. I love it.”
“Do they sell it here?” he asked, punctuating his query with a raised eyebrow slung at the beleaguered clerk with the energy of a lacrosse shot.
“Yes, they do,” I assured him as the clerk’s neck visibly relaxed. “But before you buy a tin, why don’t you try a bowl from my pouch? I’ve got plenty right here. It’s fresh and delicious. That way you can see whether you like it or not.”
John Casey, Image © 2010 Neill Archer Roan“Oh could I?” he answered, a smile breaking across his face like one of Ansel Adams’ suns escaping nimbus clouds.
“Do you have a pipe with you?” I asked.
“Of course. I never go anywhere without a pipe,” he said, as his backpack dismounted his shoulders with the graceful velocity of a bullfighter’s cape. The next thing I knew, a full bent Peterson reclined in one hand and my pouch of Frog Morton was in his other.
The gentleman took a chair on my right, and we began the relaxed and easy conversation that I have so often experienced with other members of our pipe-smoking fraternity. I love to share tobacco. Sharing tobacco is like sharing food in that the sharing of it seems to enhance my own ability to savor it.
“This is very good tobacco,” the gentleman observed, clearly enjoying his pipe and chair. Like me, he seemed to relish the civility of being able to sit with a brother of the briar in the middle of a warm Spring day.
Pipe smokers don’t need to know each other to have a good conversation. We feel no need to pry and no need to cross-examine one another with the usual battery of inquiries so often purposed toward discovering whose status is higher. We’re content with small talk and few words. We’re happy to traverse the territory of pipes and tobaccos. Sometimes, however, the droplets of a lifetime trickle out.
“My daughter is here at Georgetown University,” the gentleman recounted, “and I’m to meet her later this afternoon and drive her around. She doesn’t want to own a car, so I’m driving her.”
I told him about my work in Georgetown and about the blissful interval I had decided to conjure between appointments.
As we chatted, I noticed a man bustling down the store’s center aisle. He stopped and looked quizzically at me, as if he expected me to say or do something. I decided to preempt any further inspection.
“I don’t work here, I’m just a customer,” I offered, thinking that he had visited the store for something, and that he had decided I looked like an employee who would rather goof off than work – an observation that, were he to have so assessed me, reflected penetrating insight.
“I know you don’t work here,” he responded flatly.
At this point I recognized him. It was David Berkebile, Georgetown Tobacco’s owner.
“I know you. I know that I know you,” he asserted.
I felt slightly uneasy, sort of like an eighth grade boy with cigarette smoke on his breath feels when encountering the school nurse in an otherwise empty room.
“Maybe it’s just because you look so much like a stereotypical pipe smoker,” Berkabile quipped.
Had I been complimented? Insulted? I was confused.
I resorted to introducing myself, explaining that I was involved in Georgetown’s branding initiative. I explained that I was visiting many of the businesses in the village to learn more about the village and the state of business.
This is adept positioning, I thought to myself. How many people can sit and smoke a pipe on a mid-day Thursday and still be able to claim that they are working?
“I’ve heard about that,” Berkebile remarked, his face a recipe of curiosity, placidity, and a smidgeon of incredulity.
“I believe that I live across the street from one of your in-laws,” my new friend interrupted.
I relaxed at the happy distraction as Berkebile redirected his attention at the older man seated adjacent to me.
The two of them began untangling the details of the persons to whom they were referring, eventually settling on three degrees of separation. It would have been two, had there not been two divorces involved. It was the kind of conversation that people have when they are desperate to conjure a connection.
It is a weird Southern trait – establishing that you know or are related to some distant friend or relative who lives three houses down and raises heirloom tomatoes or plays the organ. It is as if Southerners require a passport to conversation, the absence of which denies further association – that is unless one is a pipe smoker. But David Berkebile did not have a pipe anywhere near him.
It was while one or the other of them were sashaying around one of several conversational cul-de-sacs that I gathered that my new pipe-smoking friend was a writer. He told Dave that his ex-wife’s in-laws’ noisy children impeded his ability to write in peace and quiet, prompting a pleading mission to the children’s parents that I had no trouble imagining at all. Nor did the clerk, I assume.
Finally the ritual of formal introduction occurred.
“My name is John Casey, my friend reported.
Interesting, I inwardly mused. One of my favorite novelists’ name is John Casey. No way it could be the same person, I assumed.
“What kind of books do you write?” Berkebile inquired. “Could I find any of your books in the bookstores?”
“I’m a novelist,” Casey replied.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up.
“I have just one book in print right now,” Casey continued. “Spartina.”
“SPARTINA!!!” I blurted. “You’re John Casey?!”
I couldn’t believe it. I was sitting and smoking with an author I considered to be one of the great novelists of the century - a man who had written a novel that I love so much that I reread it almost every year. In 1989, Spartina was nominated for and won the National Book Award. I make it a practice to read the award’s winner annually. I wish I could say that I was never disappointed. Casey didn’t disappoint me. That’s for sure.
David Berkebile’s eyes were popping. He looked as if he might bolt at any moment.
“What’s spartina?” he asked.
“Spartina is a wild grass that is native to the salt marshes on the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean,” I exclaimed – still speaking at a volume normally reserved for Newark traffic cops.
“It is also one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s about a man who builds a boat and everything he goes through trying to do it. I love it. I can’t believe you’re John Casey!”
By this time I had recovered enough from my shock and surprise that I began to notice my surroundings. People throughout the shop were staring at me as if I had started yodeling in the middle of a funeral mass. Even the clerk was mortified. I realized that I had to temper my very un-cool exuberance.
I had committed that most dreadful of Washingtonian sins: I had not pretended to be unimpressed when encountering a famous person. I had revealed myself to be an extravagantly gawking yokel.
I couldn’t believe that I had behaved this way. I know better. I have been trained. I have been around many famous people. I was once almost famous, myself.
I had once accidentally encountered Robert Duvall exiting a washroom. During that experience I averted my eyes and said nothing, maintaining a cool, unruffled exterior in the presence of an actor that I almost worship. I might as well have horrified Mr. Duvall with the observation that I refused to accept that an artist of his stature could require any attenuation of his bowels.
“I am so sorry, John, that I embarrassed you with my behavior,” I muttered with no little chagrin,” to which the wonderful Mr. Casey responded: “That’s all right, Neill. This is embarrassment I can live with.”
Neill Archer Roan and John Casey, Image © 2010 Neill Archer RoanJohn Casey, Dave Berkebile, and I spent the next hour or so laughing, smoking pipes and cigars, and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. I asked John if I could take his picture - I never go anywhere without a camera - and he graciously consented. Dave volunteered to take our picture together.
John told us about his time living on Fox Island in Narragansett Bay, a time during which he learned the language and art of boat-building that later became grist for Spartina. He regaled us with stories of self-sufficient living when he raised his own vegetables and caught his family’s dinners with fast lures and a foot-trapped, stern-board-rigged rod. We learned of his four daughters, three of whom are or will become writers, themselves. We learned of his explorations of the Potomac River as the young scull-racing son of a Massachusetts congressman.
Most importantly - at least to me - we learned that a sequel to Spartina is coming out in October: Compass Rose. I can’t wait for this book. At right you can see what the book cover design will be.
Dave Berkebile is far more polished and restrained than I am. Georgetown Tobacco is regularly frequented by pipe- and cigar-smoking celebrities from the worlds of entertainment, politics, and sports. Dave told us about one afternoon when Jonathan Winters sat in the shop and kept the place in stitches for hours.
“We could hardly breathe. We were laughing until our ribs hurt,” Berkebile reminisced.
Georgetown is a place where one shouldn’t be surprised to meet anyone, I suppose, but I never expected to spend nearly an hour with one of my favorite novelists, sharing tobacco and sharing the fraternity of pipe-smoking without having any idea with whom I was smoking.
It all began with an offer to share tobacco, a ritual and a custom I learned from my elders in this world I love.
When I am at the Chicago show, I will be buying a bunch of Red Rapparee. I will ship it to my friend in Charlottesville. It seems like the least I can do to repay the many blissful hours I’ve spent with Spartina.
By the way, John Casey loves Peterson pipes.
Reader Comments (23)
Neill - Our hobby promotes the age old tradition of calm, civilized conversation. I am delighted at your good fortune in this encounter but not surprised. The discovery of and interest in your fellow pipe smoker's history is a direct result of your passionate engagement. The fact of this man being a brilliant novelist added an unexpected and thrilling dimension which shaped your experience and I do think that it is an amazing synchronicity -- the two of you ending up i the same place on the same day -- but had he been a dedicated cop or a ballet dancer you still would have found reason to celebrate.
Neill,
Beautiful...thank you for sharing this encounter. What a great hobby we are involved in and wonderful people we meet along way is even more amazing.
Robert
Neill,
I really appreciate your story as it brought back fond memories--- I went to college at Georgetown University years ago, and used to work at Georgetown Tobacco to help pay the bills while a student. I love everything about that store; most of all, I loved enjoying a bowl with a fellow pipe smoker near that pipe display where you were sitting. I am glad to hear that David B has the same good humor. He is a very generous and good man by the way.
Neill,
Thanks for sharing the story! It's wonderful how pipes can bring us all closer together. Close in a genuine way, with respect and calm, not the "what's in it for me" attitude that infests society.
Sharing tobacco is indeed a joy -- as I have learned only in the last few years, though I've been smoking for 20...
Of course now I have to go get "Spartina" and read it.....
Thank you.
Jotham
Great Story, Neill!
I have to feel sorry for john Casey though. He looks just like that crotchety old Yooper, Lee Von Erck. :o)
Neill,
I would never consider you a yokel. I know, cause I is one!
What a story Neill ..That brought a smile to my face..Bring thoughts of coincidence and fate.
Thank you for writing with a passion and brightening up my day in the dusty shop.
Neill, what a wonderful example of life it self, and without your offer of tobacco
you might have missed the whole experience. Thanks for sharing what was a great afternoon of pipes and fellowship.
What a great story! I'm jealous. Thanks.
Best post yet!
Thank you very much for that wonderful story! I had a great time reading it while puffing some Rajah's Court.
All the best from Germany, Eddy
I will have to pick up a copy of Spartina. Seems like like it might be a good read. Nice post Neill;
This is just one of those great stories. The way you write makes us feel like we are standing in the same room and looking over at you loud with excitement, while trying to retain your composure. It's so easy to visualize. ;)
Too much fun!!!!
Neill, there are no accidents...
Great story, and made better by the presence of a camera...
Neill, what a fabulous way to spend some time, your narrative was so sincere. Thanks for sharing.
Neil your story reminded me of why my fairly new attraction to the pipe world continues to capitvate me. For the past 10 years my hobby, outside of pipe smoking, has been traveling all over America and Canada by motorcycle. After nearly 100,000 miles in long distance trips I find my biggest attraction to the road is the continuous flow of new relationships all over North America. Meeting complete strangers in lengthy conversation, sharing our mutual passion for the road never gets old. A very similar passion exists in the pipe world and your story reminds me of how lucky we are to be members of this wonderful little fraternity! A new friendship is often just a "bowl" away. I had a similer experience while sitting in my favorite New York City pipe shop a couple of months ago, sharing a bowl of Greg Pease's blends with a "new" friend. Only at the end of the conversation, after sharing with him his first bowl of one of Greg's classics did I find out that he was a cinematographer of an Oscar winning film. Unlike my motorcycle friends throughout North America, the pipe world has offered me friendships throughout the world! I am looking forword to my very first Chicago show this year as I know that more of these friendships are sure to develop!
Neill, that was a very enjoyable read. That type of interaction with fellow pipesmokers is what I miss the most today, living in a time when good B&M shops are few and far between.
As always, thanks for taking the time to share your experiences with us!
I really enjoyed that, Neill. There were certainly two writers in the shop that day...