A Passion for Pipes Blog

Big Medicine

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 09:21:24 -0400

I find myself this morning sitting out on my balcony here in Park City, Utah enjoying a bowl of Marlin Flake and thinking about the last several days I spent down at Zion National Park.
I’ve been on the road since early August and won’t return home for another two weeks - hence the slow, infrequent posting here.
Pictured above is a photo I took Monday afternoon when Wendy and I were out hiking and seeing the park. This is a mystifyingly beautiful place replete with cliffs and monoliths that shoot over a thousand feet straight up from the canyon floor. These sandstone towers were once sand dunes that were three thousand feet deep when an ocean covered them, depositing minerals that cemented the sand into sandstone. By comparison, the tallest sand dunes in our modern world - located in the Sahara Desert - are only about 300 feet deep.
Once inhabited by the Paiutes, then by farmer settlers, Zion was made a national park in the early 1900s. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve been in my life. That’s saying something for somebody who grew up right outside Yellowstone.
The effect on my psyche was enormous. Coming into the canyon, I sensed that this place is “big medicine,” as my indian friends would say. The energy literally shifts into something both menacing and peaceful. This is fierce beauty.
Here you see a picture I took sitting outside my inn room at yesterday dawn, puffing away on some Commonwealth. It was a cool 62 degrees while I was having my pipe, a far cry from the 100ish temperatures we endured Monday afternoon hiking through the rocks. Aside from my sojourn to St. Louis earlier this month, I can’t remember being so blessed hot. It is one thing to be hot. It is another to be in the blazing desert sun with the heat radiating and reflecting from rock 360 degrees around.
Yesterday, as we left Zion to return here to Park City, we drove North along the Wasatch Mountains for five hours. It was a glorious day.

Making Friends

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 09:00:16 -0400

Last week, Saint Louis’ oppressive heat kept my pipe bag zipped tight in my briefcase. I had no desire whatsoever to enjoy a bowl of tobacco. It seemed to me that one more match’s heat or one Zippo flick might tip the balance of the Universe into some dreadful state where cool would be only a figment of memory.
I arrived here in Seattle mid-afternoon last Saturday. It is Summer here. Make no mistake about that, but cool evenings and mornings are to be had here and it is glorious, indeed. I’ve been teaching a seminar here (on loyalty strategy) and I’ve enjoyed bowls in the quite evenings so much after speaking all day.
This morning, I am sitting out on my sister’s deck overlooking Puget Sound and the Space Needle, enjoying some Marlin Flake in my Nanna Ivarsson Danish Egg.
As I wrote some weeks ago, I had finally decided to smoke this pipe after hoarding it like some gold-hoarding goblin. It has become a regular part of my rotation and I have gotten to know it very well, indeed. I have, in a way, made friends with the this pipe. It has been quite the unexpected friendship in that I have grown very fond of it and to tell you the truth for me to smoke an expensive pipe is not unlike making friends with billionaire. Familiarity and ease feel more elusive. Perhaps it is because of my rural and modest upbringing.
I am a person to whom friendship with a pipe comes slowly, like some wary bird to hand. Fondness, affection, and admiration have always been easier for me than is comfort. The only way I can make friends with a pipe is to smoke it often. I need the fingertip roll, the radiant bowl, the deepening flavor of the tobacco as the coals claw downward. I need to come to know the draw. The bit must be make itself familiar to my mouth.
Making friends with a pipe is so very rewarding but it takes so very, very long. I wonder how I will ever make it through my collection. This, I think, is the flip side of being a collector. At least for me there are too many pipes ready at hand. I feel a slight hesitation to reach for a smooth new beauty when a gap-toothed, craggy-faced old buddy smiles at me from the elbows.

St. Louis

Wed, 6 Aug 2008 09:30:29 -0400

I’m spending this week in St. Louis working with a new client. People think Washington, DC is hot. Let me tell you: here in St. Louis they know from hot.
For the last two days the heat and humidity index have combined to produce a 117 degree effect. My client told me last night at dinner that the last two days are record-breakers. I believe it. I work in Phoenix in the Summer when it is 110 or 112 and that is nothing compared to this. One literally can’t breathe. Needless to say, my pipes have not left my pipe bag since going onto the balcony is akin to smoking a pipe in an equatorial swamp.
Last night as I wended my way to dinner in University CIty, I peered through the windows of Jon’s Pipe Shop - a pipe and tobacco emporium not too far from my client. Unfortunately, they were closed.
I loved the window display at Jon’s. There were lots of vintage posters, ads, and products in the window. The place had the well-worn air of a pipester’s haven. I intend to find out more sometime today or tomorrow afternoon.
It’s rare to see a pipe shop on a tony street next to trendy, upscale restaurants. I like that. I like that a lot. I can see myself ambling from a bowl of Full Virginia Flake to a fine Cabernet, foie gras, and duck confit. Of course, this is Autumn fare, and since I’m coming back here next month, I’ll initiate Autumn this way.

What really matters....

Sun, 3 Aug 2008 09:00:47 -0400

The last seven months have been among the most challenging of my professional life, but as of last Thursday morning I finished working on a project that was a wellspring of both tremendous stress and tremendous learning for me. I must confess that I feel a great sense of relief and accomplishment at this point, now that I am done. The end result was spectacular but the path to that end was strewn with rocks and brambles.
By way of thanks to one of my team-members, I took her out for a light dinner and wine. As we recounted our last few months, I learned that another colleague of ours had just passed away the morning before. She was understandably shaken and more than a little sad. A young woman who is just finishing graduate school, she has had precious little experience with the Reaper.
It was just about a month ago that our colleague was diagnosed with stomach cancer and told that he had only a month left to live. As things turned out, this was a timetable that was cruelly accurate. There are deadlines and there are deadlines.
Our conversation - and the sad news - set me thinking about what really matters. How many of us live as if our time here knew no bounds? How many of us care more for our things than we do for our friends and loved ones? I confess that I have too often been guilty of this gracelessness and ingratitude. Given how blessed my life has been, I should behave differently and I should certainly think differently.
I have concluded that while my pipe-collecting has been a source of great joy and satisfaction to me, I have allowed it to cross the divide from hobby to obsession. Given who I am, this is hardly a surprise. I am not known for doing things by half measures. While more than a few people would condemn this wretched excess, I celebrate it. The pipe world has blessed me with friendship, entertainment, knowledge, and placidity. It has given me starlit alone time where my stresses have surfed my smoke stream straight on out into the recesses of night. It has given me wonder and awe. It has also distanced me from other things and people that also matter.
Years ago, I thrust myself headlong into a rigorous personal development curriculum. For five or so years I focused intently on various paths to enlightenment, recognizing that the paths are places to journey, not expectations of arrival. I vividly remember one particular seminar process I went through. We were told to spend our entire weekend as if we had just one month left to live. Let me tell you; it changed almost every aspect of life – from how food tasted to how sweetly intense the blended scents of sage and ponderosa pine were as they were carried by the Oregon high desert wind. It is one thing to imagine having just one month left and altogether another to know. I can’t be sure but I suspect that while the imagining of the thing might sweeten experience, knowledge may very well have a bitterly different effect.
I have decided to attempt to bring more balance to my life - to spend more time reading, walking, exercising, and even getting back to practicing and playing classical guitar once again. I won’t be giving up pipes, but I will be dialing things back.

The allure of simplicity.

Sat, 2 Aug 2008 08:43:53 -0400

When I look at Cornelius Mänz’s pipes, his training as a graphic designer and artist are very much in evidence to my eye as in the Danish Egg depicted above.
His use of curves expressed in counterpoint to one another reveal fluency with form, not only in terms of expression in positive space, but in negative space as well. The lines of his pipes go on and on and on past where the wood stops. The eye builds so much momentum following shape edges that - like a ski jumper - it is propelled into space.
This long and curvilinear shank terminates in a remarkably simple transition to stem. No ornamentation on either stem or shank disrupts the visual momentum upward or downward. The shank’s shape serves only to contain and express the vertical graining in the briar as its edges describe - no, dictate - the shank arc. If it were even a smidgeon shorter, it would not work nearly as well.
The arc of the bowl-shank bottom is continuous, like the bottom edge of chair rockers. Mänz expresses a ninety-degree angle in negative space in opposition to the sensuousness of the curve below. This juxtaposition - to borrow from a description of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work - is “a geometry of miracles.” It is a skillful conjuring of simplicity. Mänz knows how to stay out of his own way.