Travels with Barley (36 page)

Blake sips his
biere de garde
and says, “Well, I think we are coming away with lots of talking points.”

Somebody says, “Hip hip horray for Noel!”

Somebody else says, “Three cheers for Noel!”

Soon people are chanting, “Noel, Noel, Noel!”

About the third time it comes out, “Nool, Nool, Nool!”

On Saturday, I take a break from the festival to go looking for beer and dogs.

No, not beer and hot dogs.

This is Portland, remember?

I arrive, after a short drive from downtown, at the Lucky Labrador Brewing Co. in the city's tie-dyed Hawthorne neighborhood, a mixed commercial-residential enclave in southeast Portland known for, among other things, a profusion of fruit storage facilities. The Lucky Lab, as the brewpub is called, sits off a busy commercial strip in a cavernous, blocky building holding a former sheet metal warehouse.

Inside, though, it's the spacious and airy place you'd expect an artfully converted warehouse to be—skylights in the ceiling, a well-trod wood floor, exposed beams in the ceiling. The furnishings are kind of utilitarian-communal, which befits a place where the Portland Socialist Club holds its meetings. There's a long bar to my left and scads of picnic tables scattered cafeteria-like elsewhere. I make a stop at the bar to check out the beer list before heading out to the patio, where I understand most of the Lab's action is.

I notice a sign above the bar that says, “Beer: Not Just a Breakfast Drink.” I also notice I have several dog-named beer choices—Superdog and Black Lab Stout among them. (I also see, on a menu on the bar before me, that Miller Lite is the “guest tap.”)

This being my first visit, I feel obligated to order a dog-named beer. I ask for a pint of Black Lab, my Hophead leanings having been satiated at the press tasting the day before.

I head out to the patio to check out Beervana's premier beer-and-dog scene, for the Lab not only offers tasty beer and cheap food; you can bring your mutt along for company while you sit and sip. It's late afternoon—maybe 4:30-ish. The crowd is a bit thin but I look around and see at least a half-dozen Beer People/dog combos. Most seem to be couples or groups of friends enjoying a late lunch, dogs lounging under their tables or at their feet. I spy a lone diner with a big dog sitting at a table in the back and head that way.

Her name is Jeannie Wood and her dog is a Calvin, a tall, rangy black mutt of imposing but unclear bloodline. Jeannie is finishing off a bowl of bento, an inexpensive Japanese rice dish that's a Lucky Lab staple, while waiting on a cell phone call from her boyfriend. She happily invites me to have a chat about the Lab. Calvin comes over to sniff me. He accepts a pat on the head and decides I'm okay. (Which is a good thing, considering Calvin's size.)

Jeannie is twenty-six. She works in a title insurance company and when she isn't working is a rabid outdoorswoman partial to camping and white-water rafting. Calvin goes on these trips and on one recent one, she tells me, spent the entire time in the water swimming behind the raft. “He was one tired dog but he really loves the water.” That's pretty much how she describes Calvin: tireless and cheerful. She said she got him as a stray when a friend found him but her friend's father wouldn't let him keep him.

She's been coming to the Lucky Lab for the past five years; she's a committed stout drinker and waxes eloquent on the style, and why she likes malty, dark beers. She wonders, as a beer-drinking dog owner, why somebody in Portland didn't think of starting a place like the Lab before. (The Lab, it turns out, has been open since 1994.) She says she particularly enjoys Dogtoberfest, an Oktoberfest takeoff at which the main event is a dog wash, attended by celebrity dog-washers, to raise money for a local animal-emergency treatment hospital.

The everyday ambience, however, is what draws her back time after time. “It's fun to come and hang out. It's mostly dog owners, pretty relaxed. People who don't like dogs or don't want to be bothered with them can always sit inside.”

She has one other observation: “A lot of wealthy people come here. I don't know why, but they always sit over there,” she says, pointing to a cluster of tables.

Most of all the dogs that are here now are, like Calvin, on their leashes, including a dog that has appeared at the table next to us named Dexter. Dexter is a boxer that can do high-fives. His owners, John and Victoria Berry, recently moved to Portland by way of Chicago and Alaska. This is their first time at the Lab; they'd been out cavorting with Dexter at a Portland dog park (there are several in town) when somebody suggested a place where they could have their beer and their dog, too.

“It's fun,” Victoria says. “We would definitely come back here with Dexter.”

After a nice chat, the Berrys leave and Jeannie Wood, who has now made plans to meet her boyfriend, asks me if I'd look after Calvin while she goes inside to pay her bill. (The French, of course, would let you take your dog inside.) I'm delighted. For about five minutes I'll have my own dog; Calvin and I can have a real chance to bond.

After Jeannie disappears, I notice another dog, unleashed, heading our way. It's an irresistibly cute yellow Labrador puppy and it comes over, tail wagging frantically. I check out Calvin to make sure he's okay with this and see he's wagging his tail, too.

I'm holding my beer mug in my left hand. I switch it over to my right hand (the same hand holding Calvin's leash), and settle the mug on my knee. I bend down to give the Lab a pat on the head and get in a pretty good one before the pup goes scrabbling off to its owner.

That's when I notice Calvin's got his nose pretty deep into my mug and has gotten a pretty good snort of Black Lab Stout.

I'm tempted to say “bad dog” but, hey, I realize a) I was negligent and b) Calvin's just being a dog. So instead, looking around to make sure that no one is pointing a dog abuse finger at me, I say, “Why Calvin, I hope you enjoyed that.”

Then Calvin and I enjoy another few minutes of beer-bonded silence until Jeannie comes back. I'm too embarrassed to tell her what happened though she probably would've been fine with it. She takes Calvin's leash, thanks me for watching him, and bids me a cheerful goodbye.

Calvin looks back at me and I know that look—he's a dog in Beervana.

As I crossed the Mississippi River bridge, New Orleans lay sprawled and steaming in the flat, hot light of a late Louisiana afternoon. The river below was the color of dark mustard and moved as though it were a lethargic snake prodded reluctantly into motion. A tug pushing a string of barges upriver carved a white, frothy ribbon through the current, and in the distance a cargo ship did a slow, awkward pirouette, attempting a toe-point downstream toward the Gulf of Mexico just a few more bends in the river away. The air smelled heavy with rain.

In most places, summer reliably loosens its grip in September. In New Orleans, which, after all, sits in a swamp, summer cloaks the city like damp mosquito netting until sometime in October—often, late October—when a cool front finally has the guts to come and rip the stultifying veil away. Yet its rain-drenched, mosquito-plagued, equatorial summers aside, I love New Orleans.

I grew up sixty miles to the southwest in a little place called Bayou Black near the Cajunized town of Houma, which once proclaimed itself the “Oyster Capital of the World.” And for years New Orleans seemed as close as I might ever come to places like New York of San Francisco. It was my Big City. It was where as a kid you arrived, after an impossibly slow car ride along a winding, turtle-backed highway through swamps and sugarcane fields, and across a high, scarily narrow bridge called the Huey P. Long, to find high-rise buildings on the Mississippi and street cars clanging down boulevards and gorgeous Victorian row houses, emblems of wealth and mystery, along oaklined avenues; where a zoo sat (and still sits) on a broad green lawn under ancient oaks; where an amusement park that surely rivaled Coney Island stood on a vast lake that looked like the ocean to me; where you could sit at a sidewalk cafe and dunk sweet
beignets
in café-au-lait, the French Quarter, its bricked streets and exotic smells, seething and alive all around you.

It was where when I turned eighteen, then the legal drinking age, I came with friends to Bourbon Street to gape at what seemed so forbidden and sophisticated; to sit in darkened, smoke-filled clubs where bartenders in bow ties, an unerring eye for rustics like us, emptied our wallets collecting for mandatory, overpriced Singapore Slings while women who seemed like apparitions of desire danced in ways that our Catholic mothers never warned us about. We would then, though usually broke, slip into some jazz club, hoping the crowds would shield us from the dreaded Two-Drink Minimum, and listen to music that we knew was superior to all other music, and music that we ourselves listened to in a superior way. For we knew jazz belonged to Louisiana and to New Orleans and thus to us. And though we were from the country, we were natives; and we were not, at least, from Iowa.

I have now seen New York and San Francisco, Sydney and Cape Town, London and Paris, and yet New Orleans endures as my favorite city, hardly the most handsome, definitely not the most cultured, incurably not the most progressive. Still, I love the wet mystery of it, the feral seediness of it, the laconically joyful way it continues to shrug at most of the conventions that the homogenized ramparts of America live by. New Orleans always seems more Latin and European than American to me. It is like a dissolute but beloved old uncle—sometimes drunk, often outrageous, at turns maddeningly irresponsible, but always hilariously interesting and passionately moved by the verities; food, music, love, sex, and booze.

God is everywhere here: in the city's monuments to old-world Catholicism like St. Louis Cathedral, in its moldering cemeteries, and in its lawn shrines to the Virgin Mary; and sin is everywhere, too.

But as to the subject at hand—beer—New Orleans, I have to admit, is, at best, only an average beer town.

Since the days of that gifted rum-runner Jean Lafitte, New Orleans has always been more bourbon than beer but that doesn't mean, if you count wretched excess, that it doesn't have its own brand of beer culture. New York is the city that never sleeps, and the world has a surplus of cities on the move, cities that work, cities that see the clear arc of the future and pose themselves accordingly. Thank God New Orleans will never be one of those.

New Orleans is the city that never stops drinking (and, I could add, eating).

At the moment, though, I was temporarily
leaving
New Orleans, saving what I could find of its beer culture for tomorrow. For New Orleans is not the last habitable ground on the Mississippi River. If you cross over the Mississippi's West Bank and find Highway 23 off the clutter of the West Bank Expressway, you can drive another seventy-five miles to a place called Venice. It is the southernmost town reachable by road in Plaquemines Parish, a low-lying, hurricane-susceptible peninsula hemmed in by the river and its levee on one side and sprawling marshes and bayous on the others. The Mississippi, just below Venice, divides into three channels, the largest known as Southwest Pass, before finally surrendering to the Gulf. In between New Orleans and Venice are other hamlets with names like Jesuit Bend, Happy Jack, Empire, and Port Sulphur, all attesting to the area's history, aspirations, and position as a corridor for chemical and offshore oil production. Though I had spent much time in New Orleans in my youth, I had only ventured down to Venice once and remembered it vaguely as a place drowsy in the summer heat, the air abuzz with mosquitoes, where shrimp trawlers and charter fishing boats and giant oil field crew boats bobbed together in the silty-salt estuary of the Mississippi. Given the three-odd decades that had passed, and the propensity of sleepy places to wake up one day covered in 7-Elevens and strip malls, I had no idea what I might find.

But I knew two things about Venice. One: it had been named by an optimist, for you would never mistake the burg of about 500 residents scattered up and down the highway for the storied Italian city of the same name. Two: as one of those bayou communities serving as a staging hub for the beer-loving Cajuns and Texans who make up the bulk of the Oil Patch workforce, Venice would definitely have a beer joint or two. In fact, I'd learned, from an Oil Patch buddy in Houston with knowledge of Venice watering holes, that some of them had reputations as rough and tumble places. So I decided to bring along some company, a boyhood friend by the name of Jack Anderson.

Jack now lived and worked in the West Bank town of Harvey but had grown up down where I had in Houma. We'd played baseball together; slung hamburgers at a greasy spoon together; gotten in and out of a few scrapes together. I'd dated his sister Jill in high school and there was a year or two when our mothers were confused as to our actual living arrangements, since we moved and dined like nomads between households. We'd also taken up surfing together, though you won't find South Louisiana one of the stops in the classic surfing documentary
The Endless Summer
. (Jack, wiry, trim and fit past fifty, still surfs.) But one fall, a hurricane named Betsy had rearranged the sandbars at a low-lying barrier island on the Gulf called Grand Isle and thereafter, if the winds and tide were right, you could get a decent two- or three-foot break. Thus we became South Louisiana surfing pioneers, even forming the South Louisiana Surfing Association, which held at least one surfing competition before dissolving into lethargy and anarchy, surfer dudes being about as organizationally inclined as cats.

What forged our kinship as much as anything was our mutual tenuous hold to the very bottom rungs of the lower middle class. We were always broke, possibly because slinging burgers paid so poorly, possibly because what it paid we spent on surfing gear, beer, girls, and gas to get to and from the beach every weekend. We drove two of the most scrofulous cars that ever existed, mine a rattletrap VW Beetle with a convertible top so ragged that I carried an umbrella in the car to protect my passengers from rain when the top was
up
. Jack drove a hulking white gas-guzzling Dodge station wagon, a kind of Li'l Abner land yacht whose rust-to-body ratio was perilously close to disintegration. I have a searingly clear memory of a Saturday drive to our surfing hotspot, our boards strapped jauntily to the top of Jack's wagon, and hearing a strange plopping noise coming from Jack's right front tire. I watched in amazement as an entire layer of the tire simply fell off—peeled away and tumbled bobbity into the roadside bushes like some road-struck rabbit. I waited for the blowout that never came. We made it all the way to the beach and back, a seventy-five minute drive each way, on that tire, its sidewall bristling threads like Paul Bunyan's razor stubble.

Thanks to Alamo, we had a far better car this time and we left the West Bank after Jack got off work, where he crunches numbers for an oil field supply concern, and drove, all tires behaving, some ninety minutes in the dark to the end of the road. Jack had heard there was a bar called the Cypress Cove Marina there. After stumbling around, passing a coast guard station and sprawling oyster-shelled covered parking lots where oil crews parked cars before hopping on boats for the Gulf, we found it. Alas, it was essentially a sports fisherman's bar and there were hardly any sports fishermen around, and those that were sipped Bud Light and talked quietly over a Top 40 jukebox. In fairness, the Cypress Cove seemed a pleasant enough place and it was, as far as I could gather, the very last bar you could drive to on the Mississippi River. But by this time on the River of Beer, I'd raised the bar for the Perfect Beer Joint quite high, and I was eager to avoid covering ground that seemed already too familiar. So we didn't linger.

Based upon observations of neon signs, we'd certainly noticed other prospects on the drive down. We found one of them around a sharp curve in the road not too far up from the Cypress Cove. Dry ground is a premium in this part of the world, with the marsh edging right up to the highway's shoulder in some places. It did here and the bar sat, looking mildly forlorn, in what looked like a giant, grassy mud puddle. The building was architecturally uninteresting but the neon sign outside was odd. It said: “Rock & Sake.”

I assumed the Sake in question was in fact the word for Japanese rice wine but why? I was having a hard time imagining how a sake bar had gotten plunked down into the marsh this far into the Bud Light-and-Gumbo Belt.

We parked the car and literally waded through a stretch of ankle-high water smelling of salt marsh, tiptoeing so as not to ruin our shoes, and bounded up short steps to a porch covered in Astroturf. By that time, ravenous mosquitoes had sprung from the marsh and were dive-bombing us with kamikaze zeal. We slapped them away with equal dexterity, having gotten lots of practice at doing this in our youth, and pushed through the front door.

Inside, we were greeted by what I can only describe as a multimedia and multicultural experience. A wide-screen TV broadcast videos of attractive Asian women acting very attractive and very sultry; meanwhile the sound system was blasting out a kind of salsa/hip-hop hybrid, and though it seemed very energizing, it was being played at a decibel level about that of a 747 at takeoff. Though it was tempting to run back out into the mosquitoes, we pushed toward an empty table, of which there were perhaps fifteen or twenty. Indeed, we noticed that, except for one other customer and three desultory Asian waitresses who had not yet seen us come in (and certainly had not heard us), the joint was empty.

We looked around and the decor and music reminded me of a food term I'd heard out in San Francisco when, in one of those trends that whirl through the restaurant world, Collision Cooking was popular. This was, by way of example, taking say, chicken lo mein and merging it with, say, chicken cacciatore to produce a dish that neither Asians nor Italians wanted to eat but that San Francisco yuppies couldn't get enough of. In this case, Bud Light posters blended in with vaguely Oriental flourishes like Japanese lanterns and things that seemed somehow Tiki.

I already knew there was no sake on the menu.

Eventually, we got the attention of one of the waitresses and she came over to take our order. She was young and looked bored and sleepy. Getting her attention didn't coincide with the lowering of the volume of the jukebox, however, so it took what seemed like several minutes of very loud talking, intricate lip-syncing, and gesticulating with arms to get across the somewhat complicated point that we wanted two Budweisers. They came and they were, I have to say, really cold.

Meanwhile, the music switched to something on the romantic side, sung, however, at the previous volume and in a language that I couldn't understand. And those Asian women were still cavorting attractively on the videos. I wondered if we had stumbled upon some exotic rendering of the Beer Goddess, though not a single beer flickered across the screen. Eventually, unable to even talk to each other over the music, we decided Rock & Sake was a mystery perhaps best left unraveled. It no doubt had aspirations, but being the Perfect Beer Joint I don't think was one of them.

Up the road a bit, we found a gaggle of pickup trucks and cars pressed into the parking lot of a place called The Den. We went in and at least there was life. The bar was about two-thirds full and a jukebox was playing, at reasonable volume, a favored local style known as swamp pop. It was clearly a workingman's bar; there were guys in jumpsuits of a kind that mechanics wear on offshore oil rigs and a few in headgear hereabouts called “welders caps”—essentially ball caps cut from wild floral prints and popular with the off-duty welding set. The Bud Light was flowing.