XVII. LINDSAY’S STONE COFFEE
The wind blew all night long, a wind that seemed to be cleaning up and burnishing all the spaces between the stars. The rock wall against which I leaned my back kept stealing away the warmth from my blanket. Vachel slept off the level on the ferns, at a forty-five degree tilt downward. We both looked out to the mountains and the stars, and it was an epical summer night on the Rockies.
The mountains were compact and black and clear, and a dim light behind them glorified each. A young moon arose and poised herself above us, and only slowly and very unobtrusively crept across the sky. It was a night of persistent gale but of a steadfast starry universe. It seemed to call for rain, but there never came a cloud, only the metallic interstellar spaces grew lustrous and more lustrous, and the mountains more and more romantic. Our eyes were religiously and adoringly spellbound. Our hands—our feet—that is a different tale.
Their hearts were pure,
Their hands were horribly red,
as Balzac said of two young ladies of France.
Vachel, who had tied the tassels of his old steamer rug together and made a sleeping-bag, was meditative of Peary and Shackleton and their companions, and though he had procured an extra flannel shirt and had tied himself up in all he possessed, he still could not find the temperature at which corn ripens in central Illinois. We heard the waters of the creek pouring down below, we heard movements among the trees, and the idea of a bear coming to us was not unsuggested. Vachel picked up his steamer rug and came across to my rock and laid him down nearer to me. We slept then till dawn, slept with one eye open and one shut; one ear alert, the other muffled.
The lovely light of the east flooded upward and over us from Lake St. Mary, bathing our mountain-side in a peach blossom glamour; small birds winged it through the wedge of air ’twixt mountain and mountain. The creek poured more loudly into our consciousness, and the sharp points of our rocky bed jibbed upward towards our bones. Then it was morning. Then it was coffee time.
I shall never forget the poet as he looked in the dawn, with his red handkerchief tied over his old felt hat and under his chin, and the concentration of his gaze as he plodded about in three pairs of socks and half-laced boots seeking extra twigs to make that fire burn. He looked like a true dwarf or old man of the woods from a page of a fairy-book, but not really visible to human eyes.
And it was an unpractical fairy who expected damp wood and large wood to burn as easily as dry withered pine. It sometimes took a long while to set our pot a-boilin’. Once, however, that had been achieved, great was our reward. We had our coffee, “Lindsay’s stone coffee,” as we named it, better than any other coffee in the United States.
“Stephen,” said Vachel quietly to me one day, “you must let them know just how this coffee is made. I’m not one of those selfish people who keep such secrets to themselves. The ladies especially will like to have our secret.”
The first point is that you take a stone which has never seen either sunset or sunrise, a stone lying at the feet of trees not less than 100 feet high. It must have lain there not less than 4000 years and listened to the music of a waterfall. That is the important point. Any decent coffee beans ground in any kind of clean grinder will do. A pot that has seen more than one continent is preferred.
You then cut a square piece of white mosquito net sufficient to hold the coffee and the stone. Tie up carefully like a plum-pudding, but leave seven or eight inches of string attached to it so that you can pull the coffee sack up and down in the pot at will. Vachel in this matter of coffee is a complete immersionist. The coffee must go right under.
It is prepared, moreover, in silence and without fear of flame and smoke. The pot stands on a funeral pyre, and is allowed to lift its lid several times before a hand swathed up in a towel darts in to rescue it.
We pour it out into our tin cups. It is black, it is good, it has a kick like a mule; it searches the vitals and chases out the damps; it comforts the spine and gives tone to the heart. And the poet, silent hitherto, sits holding his large cup before him. Then he takes a sip and looks at me.
“Thadd touches the spadd,” says he at last in a deep gastronomical gestatory voice which seems to lend expression to his ears and shoulders. “Thadd touches the spadd,” says he in happy relief.
Coffee should be made with love;
That’s the first ingredient.
It’s all very well about the stone,
Say I, but it needs a heart as well.
The coffee knows if you really care,
And will do its best if you lend it encouragement.
You can flatter the coffee whilst it is in the pot,
And it will rise to your persuasion.
But the commonest cause of coffee being just indifferent
Is your indifference towards the coffee.
TO THE WORLD’S END