Coffee, Tea or...??

   My neighbor loves coffee, almost obsessively so, sometimes purchasing "rare" beans for $90 a pound, roasting them (he has his own semi-portable roaster) and savoring the light, delicate flavor and color of what appears in his cup (the end result of which I think is so thin and watery that to quote an old phrase, tastes to me like something "rinsed in dirty socks").  As you can guess, I lean to the more robust side, preferring my coffee dark and "bold" (my neighbor retorts that I like my coffee "burnt").  But it is much the same with my taste in beer, leaning towards the dark stouts that have a bite (vs. the mild, almost milky 4% flavor of the traditional Guiness)...my friends, almost to a person, drink only the lighter lagers and IPAs and consider my pint glass which is filled with that rare almost-bitter stout,* an exercise in drinking "mud."  But Popular Science had a brief piece on the universality of coffee, noting their different but similar wordings throughout the world: kohi (Japanese), kaffee (German), cà phê (Vietnamese), kahveh (Turkish), kā fēi (Mandarin), кофе (Russian), and kapé (Tagalog); the translations for tea follow a similar path.  But no matter the words or the taste or thickness or color of the coffee, the people drinking a cup will likely display as much variance as my neighbor and I.  As Joni Mitchell sang, "blindness and light"...lager and stout, day and night, yin and yang.

    This brings me to the book Underland and how author Robert Macfarlane begins with this: We know so little of the worlds beneath our feet.  Look up on a cloudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of millions of miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon's face.  Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe.  I have rarely felt as far from the human realm as when only ten yards below it, caught in the shining jaws of a limestone bedding plane first formed on the floor of an ancient sea.  The underland keeps its secrets well.  Geologists recognize that on climbing to the top of Mt. Everest one will find sea shells; but when the subject comes to heading the other direction and digging below, you will only find one animal (besides humans) who has dug deep into the surface, albeit only 13 yards (<12 meters)...the Nile crocodile.  Said a review in The Atlantic of Macfarlane's book about us humans and our digging: Elsewhere, workers labor daily to extract gold that lies more than two miles underground.  Macfarlane tours a potash mine with winding passages that reach from beneath the Yorkshire moors to far below the North Sea.  If you think such depths are startling, consider the sheer number of holes humans dig.  One estimate suggests that for every person alive, there may exist 21 feet of borehole hollowed out in pursuit of geothermal energy, and natural gas, oil, and other hydrocarbons.  But as Macfarlane grips and squeezes his way through crevasses and ruckles like a rat delicately trying to avoid tripping a sensitive trap (indeed in some areas he only has room to move his fingers in order to pull himself through -- no room to move his side-turned head, his knees, his elongated feet, and absolutely no room to turn back; he tells the tale of such a person in a similar exploration who became trapped in a similar crawl and perished despite rescue efforts), he discovers far more than expected...ancient cities, burial grounds of millions, buried river stones that were placed centuries earlier during droughts (with wording on one that said, "If You See Me, Weep") and ice that "sings."

Photo of a moulin: M. Huss of LiveScience

    It was that chapter on moulins and gneiss that I remembered the words of the guest lecturer on my Alaska cruise some years ago, noticing the awe on my face as a section of the glacier we were looking at broke away and crashed into the water; "you know you're watching the death of a glacier," he said.  It's difficult to imagine the weight of these ice sheets, one section of "Inner Ice" described by the author as: Trillions of tons of ice, up to 11,000 feet thick, so great in their mass that they have warped the bedrock beneath them down into the Earth's crust by up to 1,180 feet below sea level.  If melted at a stroke, the ice would reveal a vast concavity occupying the island's centre: flattened mountains, crushed valleys.  He also witnesses a calving, watching snow that fell at the top of the ice sheet ten of thousands of years ago now locked in as ice and breaking away at its journey's end: The face is a Gothic city being pushed into the sea.  Towers, belfries, chimneys, cathedrals, finials: all are going over the edge.  Tunnels, crypts, cemeteries: all will be shattered into bergs....Where the freshest calvings have happened, the ice is bluest.  These marks of rupture seem not scar but revelation.  This is the first sunlight that ice has seen for tens of thousands of years...In Scandinavia, this blue light is sometimes known as the 'blood' of the glacier: an uncanny image for an uncanny phenomenon.  I stop to drink at a meltwater pool, dip my face to the ice, feel the blue blood-light soak into my eyes, my skull.  One thinks of King Caspian discovering the pool of meltwater that turns anything that touches it (including an unfortunate lord knight) into gold (from The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis).

     There are stranger and simpler ways to perish than melting; said Popular Science: Down 30-plus glasses of water in a few hours, for instance and you'll do yourself in.  Less morbidly, the same issue showed a graph of what we're discovering in this melting permafrost (the released methane is 30x more potent that our CO2 emissions).  A bit deeper reveals thawing bacterial spores from tetanus and fragments of the flu virus that killed ten of millions in 1918, as well as anthrax spores being released from the once-frozen reindeer that perished in the early 1900s (said the section: ...in 2007, scientists reported signs of cellular life in 8-million-year-old Antarctic ice...in 2014, virologists discovered a pathogen 10 times bigger than the flu in 30,000-year-old permafrost.  Once thawed, it started preying upon amoebas.  It doesn't seem to infect humans, but reports of antibiotic-resistant bacteria from the same era could be cause for worry.)  Okay, same issue telling us that that tree you planted to offset your CO2 emissions from that leaf blower or lawn mower?  Well, driving that SUV across the U.S. will need about 499 more of those trees planted just for that one-way trip!  Yikes.  But wait, cows produce a lot of methane, don't they? (so say the alternative meat makers)   And yes, cows pollute more than our cars, as in about 15% of the entire world's man-made emissions, said Ruth Kissinger in her new book, Slime.  But enter algae (what??).  Turns out that adding a small amount of a type of seaweed to the normal cattle feed can reduce methane emissions by +/-50%, according to one of several studies being conducted.

    Then came the stunner of a movie, Life Itself, which is billed as a movie "that will remind you that we're all part of something bigger."  Watch the opening 15 minutes and you'll be thrown off; watch the preview and you'll basically have no idea of the heart of the movie.  Wait, what???  Yes, but stay with it and continue past the opening Samuel Jackson part, and wait a bit longer and get past the obnoxious drunk in the coffee shop part, and it is then that the movie pretty much begins (although those opening scenes prove important).  It will will grab you and turn you around and cause you to wonder just how much you know about your past, or your future, or what awaits you because of your past.**  It's a bit like coffee in a way, it all breaks down to something far smaller, like molecules said alt-coffee manufacturer, Atomo (and why not help the environment in the process).  As NPR reported, the company has created a caffeinated drink that looks, tastes and acts like the real thing...without using any coffee beans (what, no beans??).  But as my neighbor and I have shown, opinions of what constitutes "good" coffee can be at opposite ends of the spectrum.  Perhaps on the surface everything might appear simple...the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, the ice that melts, the family ties that bind us.  But maybe with a little digging, be it into the soil or into our own histories, we may discover that things are far more complex, and far more individual.  We might even discover that while we are all indeed "part of something bigger," underneath it all, everything --and everyone-- has a story to tell.


*I say this because finding such a "stout" is nearly an exercise in futility in England, although progress appears to be coming.  Even here in the U.S. stouts are generally available in stores but not in restaurants, their selection often limited to a single "dark" or red lager, and then 20 or so IPAs and fruity beers such as wheats and Belgians...but this is only reflecting what the market wants; in the southwest coast area of England, I found only 2 restaurants that offered stouts, and virtually none were available (other than Guiness) in pubs...ironically, even at the annual Newquay beer festival there were over 300 beer offerings but alas, not a single stout.  Now, about that coffee,,,

**Another lookback I enjoyed was Echo in the Canyon, a reflection of Laurel Canyon in the mid-60s and how musical life somehow coalesced in that one area and how easily and eerily it seemed to come together.  From the viewpoint of Jakob Dylan (yes, the son of...) emerges aging faces looking back: Michelle Phillips, Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Brian Wilson, Stephen Stills, David Crosby, Jackson Browne, Lou Adler and many more, even Ringo.  It was somehow a time and a point where the "stars" truly aligned...