“True or false?” I ask. “Coffee consumption is higher than it’s ever been. Americans drink more coffee than Canadians.”
“True,” he says, “on both counts. Now can you unplug the computer, please, and plug in the kettle? I’d like a cup of tea.”
“False. On both counts. Can you believe this? Coffee consumption in the United States today is half what it was in the 1940s. In 1946 these people were drinking forty-six-plus gallons each per year, compared with somewhere around twenty-five gallons today.”
“What happened in the Forties? Besides the war.”
“I’ll give you a clue: ‘Good to the last drop.’”
“Peak oil?” he says. “Hang-gliding?”
“No, you goose. Instant coffee.”
My father invented instant coffee. A clever man without much formal education but with a creative imagination and a practical streak, he came up with all kinds of things he never patented: cupboard doors that hinged upward so you’d never bump your head, fast-and-easy comma-shaped bathroom towel hangers, and coffee you could make in a second just by adding boiling water. For months, he perked pot after pot of strong coffee, experimenting with ways of dehydrating the brew without ruining the flavour. He was still at the sticky-goo stage when Maxwell House came on the market with its fine powder. It was an instant hit. Packets of Maxwell House were put in soldiers’ mess kits, and when they came home, that’s what they wanted on the breakfast table—and in the lunchroom and at their local diner. Far from being chagrined that some American company had beaten him to the punch, my father wouldn’t have anything but Maxwell House instant coffee in the house. “Those Americans,” he would say, shaking his head. They were even smarter than he was.
But why the downturn in coffee consumption since the 1950s? There was no equal and opposite spike in tea drinking: tea has held onto its steady 10 per cent. The difference was soda pop. In 1947, Americans consumed around eleven gallons per person; now that’s up over fifty.
Coffee hit its century low in 1995. Since then, it has been regaining ground, no doubt thanks to these drive-throughs. Today, 167 million Americans, 80 per cent of adults, say they sometimes drink coffee. The same proportion of Canadians claim an occasion cup of joe. But ask them if they drink it regularly, and 63 per cent of Canadians over the age of eighteen will admit to a daily habit, compared with only 49 per cent in the United States.
I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the notion of Canada as a nation of coffee swillers. Clearly coffee is an American drink—isn’t it? It was the mainstay of settlers travelling the Oregon Trail, one of the primary overland migration routes to the West. Not all the wagon trains that left Independence, Missouri, made it as far as their final destination in the Willamette Valley—some cut off onto the Mormon Trail or the California Trail—but those settlers who did littered the landscape with names that attested to their preference in hot beverages. On the map of Oregon alone, I find Coffee Creek, Coffee Lake, Coffee Butte, Coffee Gap, Coffee Chute, Coffee Island as well as Coffee Pot Island, Coffeepot Crater, Coffeepot Basin, and Coffeepot Flat, more coffee place names than can be found in the entire 3.8 million square miles that is Canada.
Still, it’s hard to argue with statistics and the Coffee News, the free weekly we picked up when we stopped for our daily decafs. Distributed at coffee shops in 225 cities in the United States every week, as well as in thirty countries around the world, Coffee News is the largest franchised publication in the world. With such hyperbole, it has to be American, right? No. It was started in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1988 by Jean Daum, a woman sitting alone during her coffee break with nothing to read but the sugar packets.
“How about a cup of coffee?” I call across the double double beds to Wayne. “I think we’re out of tea.”
I’ve set up a makeshift kitchen on top of the credenza: our two red plates, our travel mugs, the folding leather case with a single setting of silver flatware, a salesman’s sample from the last century that Wayne bought me at an antique store one Christmas, in answer to my complaint that the cutlery in most restaurants might as well be plastic for all the heft it has in the hand. Lined up beside the coffee, cream, and sugar are my oatcakes and Wayne’s Raisin Bran for breakfast, a couple of apples, the local hazelnuts I bought at the wine-tasting shop, and the last of the smoked chinook.
“Got any cookies?”
“Just oatcakes.”
“Coffee’s fine.”
The pound of Kicking Horse decaf we bought because it was roasted near the headwaters of the Columbia is almost gone. I make us each a cup with the Melitta drip filter we always carry, boiling water in the kettle that I borrowed from Betty. I think of the settlers huddling around their fires within the ring of their prairie schooners, of the Union soldiers stirring a few crushed beans into their tin cups of water. Those men received eight pounds of roasted beans or ten pounds of green beans with each hundred pounds of rations. Confederate soldiers were reduced to drinking chicory, so whenever the two armies crossed, there would be an active trade: southern tobacco for northern coffee beans. When they bivouacked at night, writes John Billings, a Union veteran, in his memoir, Hardtack and Coffee, “the little campfires, rapidly increasing to hundreds in number, would shoot up along the hills and plains, and as if by magic, acres of territory would be illuminous with them. Soon they would be surrounded by the soldiers, who made it an inevitable rule to cook their coffee first.”
I hand Wayne his coffee. I wonder if he knows the old Abyssinian proverb: When a woman gives a man coffee, it is a way of showing her desire. Maybe Anthony Capella made that up. I copied it from his novel The Various Flavours of Coffee, an erotic love story set in fin-de-siècle
London about a feckless dandy who takes a job with a coffee merchant and falls in love with the boss’s daughter. His only talent is his palate: he’s hired to create a vocabulary of coffee to rival that of wine—the hot nut aroma of a Java as water first hits the beans; the beeswax-on-leather aftertaste of a Yemeni mocha; the earthy, claylike flavours of coffees from Africa that evoke the stamp of naked feet on sun-baked ground.
Here in the American Northwest, coffee seems to be going the same way as alcohol in other ways, too. Drive-through espresso shacks have started offering hot girls along with their hot java. New joints are springing up that cater particularly to the male coffee aficionado:
Bikini Espresso, the Sweet Spot. The staff are all female, young, and pretty. The service windows are elevated so that customers can look in at the short skirts and high heels. Some of the servers take time to fling a leg over the serving bar or strike a Playmate pose. They flirt, blow kisses, and vamp for the customers. At Cowgirls, the barista may be wearing a pink see-through negligee with matching panties. I’ve read there’s talk of a Thong Thursday, a Saran-Wrap Saturday. Never satisfied with steak, they want their sizzle, too.
It’s only Friday. I’m wearing my silk dressing gown, and not much else. “You want honey with that?” I purr.
“Sure,” Wayne says, and puts down the crossword.
WE thought western red cedars were big trees, but when we cross into northern California we make the acquaintance of some true giants. Redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are a California specialty: few of them grow outside the state. In Redwood National Park, we leave the car and walk into the forest with our binoculars, though most of the birds are in the canopy, hundreds of feet above our heads. Only a few chestnut-backed chickadees and golden-crowned kinglets twitter in the lower branches. After a short stroll along what looks like an old logging road, we return to the car and drive to another parking area, where, when I open the car door, a Steller’s jay perches on it a few inches from my head and peers expectantly into my face. Its feathers are a brilliant, iridescent blue that pulses against the forest’s dark green. I try to figure out if it is