featured | Beer vs. Bread

I just thought to a drifting snowflake, “You’re a long way from home, little evaporated drop of seawater,” and in my mind I traced its path ahead. It would come to rest in a puff of fresh powder before blowing into the hardpack crust of a snowdrift sometime early tomorrow morning. Warm weekend weather would begin the melting process, but because of the drift’s density and the many layers of the drop’s compatriots above and below, our little drop wouldn’t thaw for two full weeks.

Finally finding its way to soil, our drop would continue downward to the water table even as its fellows are gathered up by plant roots to undergo the process of photosynthesis, respiration, and evaporation. Right here, just shy of the Continental Divide, those fellow drops would travel no further than the day winds carry their vapor, waking as morning dew to begin another day right in this very vicinity.

Our drop, however, feels the pull of gravity and the call of Mother Ocean, joining an underground railroad of similarly zombied drops, marching in steady percolation till they meet in flows and work their way ever downward through springs then streams then rivers and eventually the Golfo de California to Madre Pacifica. And there, of course, they will swim a while in the world’s largest gathering of their types. Then, one day, while lazing about the surface on a hot day, they will be whisked up into sea air and blown back inland toward these mountains which will gather them back up again as snow.

Of course water has no home. Each drop is one of the immortal Bedouins of the hydrologic cycle. Roaming the shifting sands of climate and ecology, they course their way through plants, geology, space, and time: blind hikers with no destination.

When alone in their travels, they are mostly silent, except for occasional soliloquies when they drop into a larger body of water or drip to hard earth from a ledge above. When joined by fellows, they find voice now and then, from the collective sigh of a mountain brook to the thrill of river currents crashing down the bank. And it is in the rare waterfall that our waterdrop feels a rush of gravity and community it has not felt since riding the waves back on Mother Ocean. Out there it was all moon-pull, wind spray, and current, amid a teeming highway of fellow drops; here in the seconds of the waterfall’s rush it’s a skydive of adrenaline, a rollercoaster of droplets who don’t scream till the bottom.

I’m reminded, somehow, of a petroglyph caught by the Warren Miller cameras somewhere deep in China for this year’s ski epic. The film suggests the region they visited in the Altai Mountains may be the new “cradle of skiing” (details in the second half of this 22-min. TV show, scripted by yours truly). To me, that petroglyph is evidence that humans, like snowflakes, have been making their way earthward in graceful arcs ever since we were nomads.

I’ll leave the archaeology to, ahem, archaeologists, but as I watch these thousands— no, millions— of crystalline adventurers out my window, I’m feeling the itch of my own ancestral petroglyphs.

Follow one flake and you see the industrious path of a worker bee, a route— even if it wanders— from one place to another. Soften your focus and you see flocks, shifting like sparrows, influenced by wind and gravity and physics and whim. It becomes less about getting from one place to another and it is then that I feel the way of the Bedouin pecked into my own DNA.

In other words, we are all flakes. Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Photos: by SteamboatDigs and courtesy of Warren Miller Entertainment

Once upon a time we were nomadic beings with opposable digits, roaming the earth for food. We thumbed our noses at lesser mammals but they couldn’t thumb us back, so we became lonely. Next we sought something higher to thumb our noses at … and thus began civilization.

The dilemma of “beer or bread” is an ongoing debate that makes anthropologists more interesting than our normal chatter. This much we know, or think we do: mankind started settling into sedentary life around 9,000 B.C., give or take a few millennia. Hunting and gathering wasn’t a bad way to accumulate the calories of sustenance people needed to survive, but settling down provided access to crops, specifically grains, which offered two important new perks: bread and beer.

The bread camp argues that the first rudimentary loaves provided a reliable food source to last through those brutal winters, dramatically helping survival rates. This, they say, was the reason people settled down and started raising crops and livestock.

The beer camp says life was nasty, brutish, and short both before and after the dawn of civilization. Some of them contend it is still equally nasty and brutish, but now extended, thanks to medical advances. Beer, they say, provided a respite from the struggles of survival. It offered lonely humans, kings atop their own egocentrically designed animal kingdom, a glimpse of something higher and more mysterious. In other words, they finally got good and drunk and had a little fun.

Of course I’m oversimplifying here, or perhaps utterly vandalizing, a long-respected academic debate. This blog— and this introductory entry— is really more a characterization of the tug-of-war within my own head: sustenance vs. transcendence, work vs. play, vegetables vs. dessert.

I’m not the first to set aside my 3-D eyeballs in order to try out this 2-dimensional outlook. The late Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist who never wore jeans, is arguably the first thinker to turn his social science into a binary art. Most of his work might seem too baffling for a casual read, for instance a CNN tribute a few days ago said his approach “makes difficult concepts more complicated, but also softens them and makes them more comprehensible.” If that makes any sense to you then you’re ready for his most influential work, The Raw and the Cooked.

Levi-Strauss contributed a fascinating arsenal of tools that we anthropologists now use to dissect and overanalyze the human condition. In essence he argued that there was wisdom to be gained by breaking down our culture (and really all reality) into its constituent dichotomies. Food is either raw or cooked. You are either grounded or airborne. People are either male or female.

Ask your neighborhood hermaphrodite: there are certainly limitations if you think this was meant to sum up all of life in one algorithm. It wasn’t. It’s merely a pair of 2-D glasses you can wear into this 3-D film we call life. Beer versus Bread is a pair of such spectacles. It may share with you a little glimpse of my world as a 15-year marketing professional, 5-year freelance writer, and 37-year human-in-progress.

Early, humble beginnings: a bowl of mush in a mud hut
A perfect sphere, perfectly clear, in a mess of gray gloppy porridge
The first bubble in the world’s first beer
In eons to come, from Cairo to Compton
Souring livers, fertilizing epiphany
One tiny bubble: potion or poison?
—by me, 2002

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of modern anthropology, died on October 30, 2009 at 100 years old. As a small tribute, here are his own words from 1955:

The world began without the human race and will certainly end without it.
—Claude Lévi-Strauss

I’ll drink to that. Thanks for reading. Cheers,

Photo by SteamboatDigs (a.k.a. yours truly)

Beer vs. Bread

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