Silverwing

I'm a lifelong tobacco enthusiast that stuck a piece of river reed into a dried out feed corn cob after reading some Mark Twain at about the age of 11, and never looked back. It was just for show. I stuffed some drywall putty in the bottom and CA'd the stem in place, rolled up the legs on a pair of coveralls and went and sat with minnows nibbling my toes in the Ogeechee River just south of Halcyondale and I was alive. And that was with no tobacco!

About 12 years old I had an encounter with a black and mild after church one Sunday and alas, the innocence of youth expired, finding a somewhat untimely demise according to my mother and father.

They were unhappy and perplexed that their son of merely 12 would steal his father's barely used Grabow and smoke cigarette butts out of it while never even knowing what a stinger or pipe cleaner was, probably ruining it forever in the process.

The true beginning of the journey however, starts just prior to my first encounters with processed tobacco, when I made friends with a young man who's family owned a farm a county over from my own.

We began to spend weekends on the family farm, where they farmed and flue cured Virginia tobacco. We would go riding around in a beautiful Cutlass Supreme on deserted dirt roads, exploring old tobacco barns and long abandoned tenant shacks and sharecropper's houses, some with little more than a crumbling brick foundation remaining. We always wore army surplus BDUs, I have no idea why. We just did. They didn't even fit. We wore the jungle boots which actually worked out pretty well. The thing about the coastal plains of South Georgia is that it's often in drought, but when it isn't it rains every damn afternoon. A thunderstorm will blow in and you'll swear on your mother that your god, whomsoever it may be, has brought the sky down upon your head and that some terrible rapture of life and limb is upon you with a ferocity that only the cold indifference of mother nature herself could muster... and as quickly as it begins it is over, the birds sing, the clouds flee the sun's burning rays and the smell of summer rains endure as life carries on, seemingly untouched aside from being a little bit soggier. It was in those very summer rains, in those very BDUs and jungle boots that my love affair with tobacco began.

Ever had a Vidalia onion? The same soil that produces that onion used to grow some of the finest Virginia tobacco, in the same region that that onion varietal comes from. If you know anything about cooking southern food, the Vidalia is praised for it's naturally mellow, sweet, caramel flavor, even when raw. The tobacco of this region is much the same, and I consider it a notable part of the low country "terroir" if you will.

Raw tobacco is nothing like what we smoke, we're all pretty well aware of that. Seeing it in such a raw state, and then watching it change into a cured tobacco leaf, it only added to the mystique. Even this flue cured leaf wasn't ready to smoke after leaving the box. It still had quite a ways to go, but the thing I'll never forget is the aroma.

To this day, the smell of a good mature Virginia takes me back to the smell of those flue curing trailers when they sat empty. The grassier, woodier notes take me back to the smell of the leafs as they neared completion, and the smell of dark fired reminds me of a my first job, working with a tobacco manufacturer, where I worked my way up to assisting the head blender.

In closing, it might be cliche to say, but tobacco is a part of who I am, and it always will be, even if I were to stop using it entirely, god forbid. I find that a pipe is the best, most nuanced expression of that for my purposes, and for that reason I thank you, fellow piper. Without other pipe smokers, none of us get to enjoy this and so in the light of that shared interest I'm here to share my journey with you all.

“I despise you. I despise your order; your laws; your force-propped authority.”
-Louis Lingg
I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done...in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done! -John Brown