Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road

by William Least Heat-Moon

  In Hayward, California, on the lower east side of San Francisco Bay, Tashmoo and I found Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub where founder Bill Owens, an affable and articulate man, told us, “The wave is the brewpub, and I’m on the crest, dudes.” In 1976 he won a Guggenheim for an influential book of photographs entitled Suburbia. Then he published Our Kind of People, and after that Working: I Do It for the Money. The collections of photographs earned him little more than respect for his artistry. As for his newspaper job with the Livermore Independent, he clearly wasn’t doing it for the money. “Look,” he said, “photojournalism has peaked. I got in on the dying days, the back end. Now I’m in on the front end of something. Now I can write checks that don’t bounce. In ten years there’ll be a hundred brewpubs in the United States, and you’ll see me in Fortune. Instead of shooting assignments on colored popcorn for them, I’ll be the subject. That’s the difference between back ends and front ends.”

  Owens began brewing a few gallons at home in the early seventies. At his fortieth birthday party in 1978, a friend said, “Let’s open a brewery,” so they looked at a couple of micros and decided a bottling line was too expensive and too complex. They abandoned the idea. Then, a year later, they heard about brewpubs opening all across England. In 1983, when the brewpub became legal in California, Owens set up a limited partnership, sold twenty-seven shares, and raised $110,000. “A good idea,” he said, “sells much easier and for more money than a good photograph.” He rented an old downtown building, once a camera store, gutted it, and built a tiny brewhouse in the back with a picture window so customers could sit, sip, and see their suds made. Owens scrounged equipment from a candy company, a food manufacturer, and a dairy, and with the help of an investor who worked on nuclear bombs, they tore up the floor and from the tanks to the bar they laid sixty-two feet of pipe—his entire distribution system. As much as anything else, those pipes, running the distance from a pitching rubber to home plate, allow him to compete with the industrials.

  In September of 1983, Owens opened the third brewpub in the United States, and the very first tank of Buffalo Bill he brewed went on sale. Four years later he doubted he’d ever dumped a batch, even if he should have. A customer told us, “That early stuff was out of the buffalo’s posterior. It had hoofs and horns in it. But now, he’s about perfected it. I’m a fixture here. My throat is part of the pipeline.”

  Owens brewed six barrels every Monday, about three-hundred barrels a year. “For a hundred-thirty-dollars’ worth of ingredients, I can make a profit of twenty-five-hundred dollars. My cost to make a glass of lager—and that’s all I brew now—that lager costs seven cents. I sell it for a dollar and a half. My profit on a bottle of commercial suds is forty cents.” Last year, half of his $200,000 income came from Buffalo Bill and the other half from sandwiches—and factory slosh.

  He wrote a book, How to Build a Small Brewery, which he sells over the bar and by mail, and he bought up two home-brewing magazines and consolidated them into a quarterly, Amateur Brewer. “Publishing doesn’t bring in money so much as it puts me on the map as a pioneer. It keeps me in touch with people in the industry.”

  He’d begun work on a second location and wanted to trademark the term brewpub in California with the idea of opening up a half-dozen of them, some in malls with the brewhouse in a front window to lure in strollers. He wanted to franchise. “My fun is promoting. If the television camera is here, I get out my big paddle and stir the mash. It’s not necessary to stir it. It’s just something graphic. Hey dudes, remember, I was a photojournalist.”

  He demonstrated how he performed his “photo-ops,” and as he did he said, “Look, everybody wants to be an entrepreneur now. I’m on the edge of the revolution—the making-money-and-enjoying-it revolution. A lot of microbrewers are purists. Ale is their holy grail. I’m not interested in that. You find chemists and chefs—I’m a chef. I think my truth is best. I do it the easy way—boil for an hour because my brewhouse timer only runs for an hour. I use pellet hops, but not malt extracts, and I don’t filter. My water is snowmelt from the mountains just like Anchor’s. But I don’t care if Americans have no idea what ale is. I don’t care if they’re afraid of it. I know that light rum outsells dark rum three to one, and I know that Americans want their beer cold, clarified, and carbonated, so I don’t make ale. I can’t waste time educating Americans about ale. Not my job. I’m interested in making my own kind of beer. This isn’t Burger King—you can’t have it your way here. You get it my way. I work by one rule: Don’t get complicated. Don’t build a Rolls-Royce factory to make a go-cart. And there’s one other rule: Take the profit off the top.”

  The Venerable, always ready to advocate for the Devil, asked, “Would you say you emphasize style of dispensing over the product?”

  “The style,” Owens said, “brings a customer in, but it’s the beer that has to bring him back.”

  South of Sacramento, near Interstate 5, we stopped in a bar overhung with ferns, clogged with stained glass and olde-tyme signs. We went in not looking for the perfect bar but for a working telephone. We knew that men who discuss the size of bubbles in a head of beer and who read patterns of Irish lace in an emptied beer glass, we knew those men do not come in bars like that one. Yet, we had a small hope for some bottle of an untried oddity tucked away. The offerings, of course, were Hobson’s choice. Maybe the wish to put a touchstone to those last days of golden glasses urged us, I don’t know, but we ordered our Hobson’s, our industrials. The Venerable scowled, hoisted his mug, took a hearty swallow, and set the glass down. He turned to me blankly and said, “Did I miss my mouth?”

  PUTTING LEGS BACK ON A STORY

  “A Little Tour” is the only chapter here I might call a memoir, although I hope it reaches well beyond me. Even before I wrote it, the assignment editor insisted I avoid most names and some events and many details, a curtailing that crippled the tale. The material remaining was so insufficient I nearly withdrew the piece, and maybe I should have. But now, years later, the restoration at last gives the story I’d hoped to tell about a journey taken two decades earlier. To hear those Mississippians talk again is strange and wonderful, something I didn’t imagine as I listened to them in 1961, and today it’s even better to imagine their voices speaking once more to some readers not yet present on earth when first the Oxfordians spoke.

  The copy of William Faulkner’s Three Famous Short Novels you will soon learn of, I can happily report, is still in my friend’s possession. Only recently, after a half-century, I was allowed to hold it again before having a second time to return it. But now I know it’s valued.

  A Little Tour in Yoknapatawpha County

  About a year before the United States Navy exacted its term of service from me in the early nineteen sixties, I had some days that belonged only to me, a time good for looking into a part of America I knew largely from books. So, age twenty-one, I persuaded a friend to take off with me from Missouri down into a place my literature professors believed didn’t truly exist: Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the mythical corner where William Faulkner set the action of his finest novels. He even drew maps of it complete with hamlets, homesteads, roads, rail lines, and rivers all neatly delineated and with labels like Old Frenchman Place which Flem Snopes unloaded on Henry Armstid and Suratt, and where Popeye killed Tommy. He enumerated the inhabitants (Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313), and he signed the drawing William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor. I believed if there was a map, then there was a place to match it in some way or other, and in my imagination I carried my own rendering of Faulkner’s fictional—and perhaps fictitious—county in north Mississippi. I believed it existed as I believed its author existed although I’d never seen either one.

  So Ollie (as I’ll call him) and I, in my Ford coupe, lit out for Faulkner’s county town of Jefferson—labeled on my filling-station map as Oxford, the seat of actual Lafayette County and about fifty miles south of the Tennessee line. Even though I could say Yoknapatawpha correctly (Yahk-
na-pa-taw-pha), I’d soon be corrected by a shopkeeper on pronouncing Lafayette: “Little Yankee fella, we say ‘Lah-fay-et.’ ”

  I’d just finished my final examinations and had a week before commencement in June of 1961; graduation in something called agricultural journalism was yet a year away for Ollie. He was slender, inclined toward the unstudious, amiable, and often on the hunt for adventure. His interest in Faulkner was matched by the number of the author’s books he’d read—zero—but I persuaded him to join me if not for the promise of pilgrimage then at least for the promise of discovery. After all, it would be easier than our earlier plan to bicycle to Cape Horn. I intended to meet the master, learn what kind of man he was, see his country; maybe I’d write something about how books arise from actuality and, in that peculiar turning almost miraculous, show how a different reality can proceed from fiction. Around and around it all goes, pulling us always deeper into the middle of things where lies the heart of existence and meaning.

  Ollie and I passed through Memphis and on southward into the Mississippi pines and hills to Oxford—Jefferson in my mind. At the center of town were the square and its courthouse burned by Union general “Whiskey” Smith and rebuilt ten years later. On the south side rose the slim, stone column of 1907 and atop it a Confederate soldier holding his rifle before him, muzzle skyward, the monument Faulkner’s character, mentally deficient Benjy, always circles three times in The Sound and the Fury. Standing on the square, I felt I’d actually seen it all before, and that confirmation of authorial description feeding imagination added an enriching element to books—good books—which remains with me still.

  The next morning, in search of characters and settings, we went out to get the feel of the square and its voices, and we walked the alley Joe Christmas runs down when he breaks loose from the law. Just south of the courthouse we came upon a café in a small building not from the time when the stone soldier was flesh and blood but the place looking as if it could have been. It was called The Mansion, the very title of Faulkner’s most recent novel. Did Faulkner eat there? Had he taken his title off the breakfast menu? Ollie and I went in. Here’s the gist of an entangled conversation over eggs and grits: Indeed, said the waitress, a jolly, blue-haired lady whose shape was something like a muffin, Mister Faulkner on occasion stopped by, but who could truly say where an odd duck of an artist came up with his titles? Why didn’t we go ask at his house? Did we dare?

  Rowan Oak, the name Faulkner gave to the antebellum home he restored at the edge of town (as it was then), looked like inspiration for the dust jacket of The Mansion. What’s more, in the gloom under the big cedars he had planted and in the damp from the surrounding woods, the place gave off the aura of that novel. Our little tour was moving along as my innocence assumed it would. Any minute the door would open, the master would listen to our wish, would invite us onto the veranda for a glass of whiskey, and (seeing our passion) would listen with keen interest to our questions.

  We knocked on the front door. We waited nervously. I reviewed my introduction. There came no answer. Thoughtless of any violation of privacy, we went around to a side entry and knocked again, louder. Ollie called out, “Anyone home?”

  His interest already slackening, he suggested we come back later, so we headed out of town on a rusty-dust road into Lafayette County, past wooden barns and hardscrabble farms with tenant shacks propped up by poles like aged men leaning on canes. It was a land where an old way of living, like the buildings, was about to topple; the next year, the first Negro (as the term then was) would at last be admitted to the University of Mississippi lying just west of Faulkner’s home place. By burning barns and cabins such as those, exploited sharecroppers had put the torch to the final days of a plantation system, and soon federal legislation would help do the same for an iniquitous class-system. If Faulkner’s books depicted such arson, they ignored desegregation coming from the outside.

  From those thinned and scattered woods—no longer forests—men, white and black, had exterminated bears and most of the indigenous peoples to leave a desolation only a desperate someone or an artist might productively use. That whole day, the filling-station map be damned, we traveled within Yoknapatawpha County, the place that didn’t really exist.

  In the evening we returned for fried chicken and corn bread at The Mansion, where we reported on our tour to a young waitress, Doris. She had heard of our quest from the breakfast lady and was amused that two boys would come so far just to see a writer. I think she liked our naive notion that we could “just waltz in and meet America’s most famous author.” Ollie suggested maybe we could hang out in the café until the master happened by. “Well,” she said, “I guess I’m the one to disappoint y’all. Mister W. isn’t here. He’s in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he’s teaching for a spell.” Such a possibility had never crossed my mind. She added, tellingly dropping the second-person plural to singular as she looked only at Ollie, “I see you’re real let down.” She paused, then, “I’ll tell you what, honey. You come around in the mornin. Bring him along if you want.”

  We went off to our quarters just down the hill and talked about my fatuous assumption. I tried to ease my disappointment by saying maybe Faulkner—the man—was in Virginia, but in many ways the writer was visible as all get-out right here in Mississippi—at least for someone who has read his books.

  The next morning we returned to The Mansion and found Doris. When we’d finished breakfast she came over, sitting down beside me but again looking only at Ollie. Here I must reveal that under certain conditions he had a slight stammer which could become almost theatrical upon his meeting an attractive female, and then the breaks and following plosives got ratcheted up to deadly effect. Surely enough, it worked magically on Doris. After he mentioned we’d be heading back to Missouri, she nodded and went over to the counter and rummaged beneath for something and returned with a pocket-size paperback book. It was Three Famous Short Novels, a recent collection of Faulkner tales, including “The Bear,” a tale I deeply esteemed, a story that made me want to be a writer. “You came so far,” Doris said to Ollie, “and for what? Well, honey, here’s a lil ol compensation.” She handed him the book.

  In disbelief I watched him flip it open to the title page. He read aloud the pinched handwriting, stammering only once or twice for her: “ ‘To Doris Vance, William Faulkner, 23 March 1960.’ ” During all this, she never once looked at me. She said, “Mister W gave it to me one day as a tip. He watched his money. I’m bad, I suppose, but I haven’t read it, and I guess I’m not likely to. If you ever meet him, don’t tell on me.” I was almost crazed to hold the book. Just touch it. Doris said to Ollie, “It’s yours, honey. Take it along with you so you have something to show for your effort.” Effort! His effort?

  My interior voice was screaming: What’s with this Ollie thing? He doesn’t know William Faulkner from Wee Willie Winkie! He thinks “The Bear” is an animal! Hasn’t read a word Faulkner wrote! I had to talk him into coming down here! I’m the one! I’m the one who reads Faulkner! Ollie doesn’t care about that book! It’ll be in tatters or lost before the year’s out! I’m the one with the library! This is rank injustice! Doris! Can’t you see?

  What I actually said was only to ask him to let me look at it. Doris got up, patted him on the hand, the one holding the book, and said, “Honey, you keep yourself out of trouble, now.” And that was it.

  We returned to our room to pack up, and already I was thinking how a college boy could easily disappear in these piney woods. There were a thousand places to hide a cadaver. The master knew how to get rid of a body. Hell, in one novel, he stuffed a corpse into the hollow of a dead tree. Ha! How about a stump for a college boy holding something not rightfully his?

  Before we got our gear together the next morning, there was a knock on the door. Outside stood a small man, trim, dressed for a woods conceived by Abercrombie & Fitch. Almost dashingly, he leaned on a splendid walking stick of twists and gnarls. “I’m Malcolm Franklin,” he sai
d. “Pappy’s boy.” Who? “Faulkner’s stepson.” Ollie had come up to look over my shoulder, but I skillfully blocked him from getting past me—just in case. Franklin said, “I hear you’re wanting to see the real county.” Whose real county? I thought. “If you have a car, we can take a look.”

  Franklin was thirty-six years old and, like his stepfather, of slight but wiry build. The family called him Mac. The next morning he took the wheel of my car, and we went off into wooded slopes that have, in Mississippi anyway, just enough rise to be called hills. The elevation of Carter Mountain, seven miles from Oxford, is 454 feet, the distance of a major-league home run. He said, “Pappy, of course, could tell you more than I can, but he wouldn’t do it. He’d find your visit less than cordial. Even on a good day, he’s indifferent to readers of his books. That’s just not what he cares about. You’d be an annoyance.” After a couple of warm and dusty miles, he added, “I’ve got less to tell, but I’ll tell you all of it.”

  We drove the county up and down, Franklin pointing out locations linked with Faulkner’s stories and sometimes giving his own relation to a place. Struggling to keep up, I took notes and snapshots where I could. He drove to the edge of the territory where “The Bear” is set, a holy land to me, although most of it now lay at the bottom of the dammed Tallahatchie River.

  He introduced us to family—aunts, uncles, cousins of his stepfather—and in each of them I looked closely for any sign of William. Mostly they were amused and not surprised by Franklin’s unannounced dropping in with a pair of callow, college boys, one of whom asked a few too many questions, but only an academic acquaintance of the master considered us dusty intruders and gave us short shrift. Possessed of the Southern capacity for stories, Franklin spoke of his stepfather honestly but without warmth. I surmised a friction, a pulling between them.