Good Grape Wine Company

March 9 2007

A Glass of Wine and Arm Chair Travel Pt. I of III

Yesterday I read Jim Harrison’s essay in Kermit Lynch’s newsletter.  Titled “The Spirit of Wine,” Jim Harrison has an incredible gift for packing detail and a depth of meaning in a meandering first person narrative, not an easy task and he does this while offering up chestnuts like, “Wine can offer oxygen to the spirit.”

Today, Indiana feels like the first day of spring has arrived.  The weather is in the 50s, the sunshine has poked through nine weeks of clouds, and energy is almost stridently present in what just days ago was still a sleepy winter malaise.

As I sit and contemplate ‘oxygen to the spirit,’ I realize that friendship, wine, arm chair travel and warm weather gets me in the right frame of mind for shaking off the winter doldrums.

My wine mentor, Ed Vodrazka, known to most as ‘Easy’ is somebody who I’m happy to call a lifelong friend even though we’ve known each other for less than a decade. Easy also happens to be a wine lover of repute and a traveler of renown.  A legendary California lifeguard in the state park system, Ed was the first person that eased me into my wine journey and is also responsible for the fascination I hold for both A. Rafanelli and Caparone wines.

Ed is a gifted writer. He has written many of his stories from traveling into short story form.  On the heels of my reading a short story from Jim Harrison, and in the vein of arm chair travel, it seems only right that I highlight a story or two of his from New Zealand, a fantastic wine region.  Herewith, one of Ed’s stories, presented in three parts:   

The Adventures of “Easy”

The one thing I do exceptionally well is travel.  I am, by nature, a traveler.  It’s in my bones.  I discovered early in my life that I seem to have the ability to open doors and allow people to open their lives to me.  Being the son of immigrant parents, has helped me to be a bit more culturally sensitive to groups of people who may eat, sleep, speak, or behave foreign to me.  This sensitivity seems to extend across the varied lines of culture and age.  I feel equally ‘at home’ on the streets of Bangkok, the back alleys of Katmandu or in the line up with the surfers at Huntington Beach. 

I am a traveler.  These are the stories of my life.   

THE SMELL OF A RAINBOW
Things always seemed to work out best for me when I wasn’t busy trying to plan the steps ahead.  The more I allowed myself to remain open to whatever happened to come along, the more rewarding the total experience usually proved to be.  In keeping with this frame of mind, I found myself once again walking down a two-lane road with my small pack hanging off my shoulder and the morning sun gently warming my face.  I had no real goal for where I would end up, and the only choice I needed to make was to decide which direction I would turn when I reached the main road.  I chose to turn south, and continued walking with a consciousness as open as the bright green fields that surrounded me.

My first ride was with a young doctor who was playing Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps”.  It was a great way to start the day, and as luck would have it, he took me all the way through Auckland where I knew the rides would come easy.  From there I got a ride to Huntley (population about 10) with a sewing machine repairman and another into Hamilton with an old Maori fisherman.  Minutes later, a farmer picked me up in an old red pick-up.  He told me he was on his way to a wool trading barn on the outskirts of town and invited me to come along.  He had two large bags of wool in the truck bed, and said he had seven naked sheep back at home.  The barn was huge and business was booming.  I found it quite amazing to see all the farmers involved in the ‘middle’ part of the wool industry.  In considering a simple wool sweater, I had never realized how many hands were involved in the transfer of wool from the sheep’s back to our own.  I wandered back to the road and continued on, more or less heading south.  The scenery began to change with each new ride, as mountains rose up around the roadway.  The miles of rolling green fields behind us gradually gave way to shaded pine forests.  The air turned cooler and the skies began to fill with huge white cumulous clouds.  Once in the mountains, I walked away from the main road.  The narrower road gently wrapped around the hillsides cutting an aimless path through the vibrantly green vegetation.  Narrow bridges offered a chance to look straight down through the crystal running water of cold creeks and small streams.  The solitude and setting of the lonely mountain road was well worth the trade off of the less frequent rides.  Hours passed and I lost track of time.

It was springtime then, and the sun didn’t set until around 8:30.  Right around dusk a dark green car pulled over, and the driver offered me a ride.  He was an older man, with a sad but friendly smile wearing full length wading boots and a fly-fishing vest.  Greg Flood was a soft spoken retired farmer who rarely missed a chance to fish.  His wife had taken ill recently, and was convalescing in a local hospital.  He was on his way back from his daily visit to see her, and had stopped off to dip the line a bit on his way home.  He invited me over for dinner, and I gratefully accepted.  I was thankful for a bed for the night and hoped I could cheer old Greg up a bit.  He heated up some stew for supper, and then we went into the knotty pine den where we shared a few beers.  In the dim lit comfort of the wood walls and the warm fire, I sat back on the big couch and became an appreciative audience for an old fisherman who slowly began to share his stories.  In close to 50 years of fishing these waters, Greg had lived a fisherman’s dream.  His stories were quite enchanting to me and as he remembered each one, his smile widened and his eyes danced.  On my request, he broke out some of his gear.  There was an assortment of reels in velvet pouches and each rod had its own case.  He pulled out an immaculate split bamboo fly rod, one he had made over 30 years ago.  His assortment of flies numbered in the thousands, each one hand tied by Greg himself.  What impressed me even more was that he remembered exactly which fly he had used to land every great fish he had told me about. 

We turned in early that night.  As I lay in bed, I felt contentment in seeing how much the evening had cheered him up.  It was also rewarding for us both to realize that two guys like us, almost 50 years apart in age, could still become friends.  I closed my eyes and let his stories run around in my mind until I fell asleep. 
Needless to say ... in the morning we went fishing.

To be continued ...

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