The Tavern 732

John Steinbeck once addressed the instinctive chasm between stranger and local: “It is some years since I have been alone,” he wrote, “nameless, friendless, without any of the safety one gets from family, friends, and accomplices… it is just a very lonely, helpless feeling – a kind of desolate feeling… I soon discovered that if a wayfaring stranger wishes to eavesdrop on a local population, the places for him to slip in and hold his peace are bars and churches.”

“It is the wine that leads me on,” Homer wrote in The Odyssey, “the wild wine that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs, laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing… it even tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.” Almost three thousand years later Monique Truong, in “The Book of Salt,” corroborated the theme: “Alcohol, I had learned, was an eloquent if somewhat inaccurate interpreter. I had placed my trust that December night in glass after glass of it, eager not for drink but for a bit of talk.”

Captain Thomas Walduck, in a 1707 letter to his nephew, reflected on English culture.

“Upon all the new settlements the Spaniards make, the first thing they do is build a church, the first thing ye Dutch do upon a new colony is to build them a fort, but the first thing ye English do, be it in the most remote part of ye world, or amongst the most barbarous Indians, is to set up a tavern or drinking house.”

In a 1952 oration, Texas House member Armon Sweat announced in the Texas legislature his position on whiskey.

"If you mean whiskey, the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean that evil drink that topples Christian men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, then, my friend, I am opposed to it with every fiber of my being.”

“However, if by whiskey you mean the lubricant of conversation, the philosophic juice, the elixir of life, the liquid that is consumed when good fellows gather, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a little spring in the step of an elderly gentleman on a frosty morning; if you mean that drink that enables man to magnify his joy, and to forget life's great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrow, then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favor of it."

Author William Least Heat-Moon, in his acclaimed “Blue Highways,” repeatedly mentions the traveler’s salve for loneliness. “Where in hell were the old men who sit on porches and whittle, the ones you’re supposed to get directions from when you’re in the back of beyond? Since Salt Creek, I’d been working to keep the loneliness down...” He wrote on page 66: “…I’d been looking forward to a conversation in a café or tavern, but the cafés weren’t open, and there were no taverns.”

Page 67: “…I wished for a corner tavern with neon and a wooden bar, but I would have settled for a concrete block beer joint.”

Page 94: “…I looked along Broad Street for a beer to chase the heat and furnish opportunity for conversation.”

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Page 265: “What does the traveler do at night in a strange town when he wants conversation? In the United States, there’s usually a single choice: a tavern.”

The fragmented: the word “bar” is a synecdoche, a word in which a part refers to the whole. Dylan Thomas once defined an alcoholic as, “Somebody you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.” And Georg Trakl confirmed, “For whoever is lonely there is a tavern.”

As a road guy, I confirm the veracity of this all, but add one caveat: the quality of acquaintance found and conversation thus engaged is never guaranteed, which to some increases the lure. In Gallup, New Mexico, the sheriff showed up the first day of the press installation and instructed visiting installers which barrooms in town to avoid. The toughest and most dangerous, he warned, was the bar in the Eldorado Hotel.

I visited it the first chance I got.