Coffee in Cannon Beach
After leaving my job and packing up our house earlier this month, I decamped with my sister to a little bungalow in Cannon Beach, two blocks from an iconic rock on a famous stretch of beach. As a now-professional vacationer, I left nothing essential to chance, which is to say, I brought along my own coffee supplies, wrapped in T shirts and summery cotton dresses: a pour over, filters, my favorite mug. I did leave the fussy little Japanese hand grinder in the storage unit in California, and dumped the remaining imported Mexican beans in the compost heap before leaving town. But I needn’t have worried; when we arrived at the bungalow (delight on every side: the garden! the fireplace!), there was a small gift on the kitchen table. The bag contained -- what else? -- coffee supplies: two mugs branded with the property management company’s logo and a vacuum sealed bag from a local coffee place, the Sleepy Monk. My sister, who does not drink coffee, laughed a little and said, one of the reviewers for the cottage noted in his review: you can walk to the Sleepy Monk! Which turned out to be true enough but between the beans, the bungalow’s serviceable coffee grinder and my personal supplies, I was in business. Because I was on vacation, I added a generous scoop of hot chocolate mix to my morning libation and felt — I admit it -- just so damn happy drinking my coffee.
Also that first morning, two other things happened: I went for my first run in Cannon Beach and I downloaded Michael Pollan’s new book to my Kindle, having just heard a podcast interview about the same (was ever a whiter line of text typed into an Apple device?). On my inaugural run, I passed another coffee spot, functionally indistinguishable from the Sleepy Monk, I believe called Insomnia Coffee Company. At the barely respectable time of my run, a line of rumpled and bleary middle-aged people, mildly doughy at the middle but wearing adventure-adjacent clothing, spilled out of the small shop and part way down the street. Everyone in line was studiously reading their phone, presumably Michael Pollan’s new book or maybe its review in the Times. And I thought two thoughts: first, geez, we are really all addicted, aren’t we? And, in rapid succession: don’t you clowns know how to make coffee? Make that first cup at home in private! Don’t subject the rest of us to this depressing scene.
Later that day I dug into the aforementioned Michael Pollan book which contains a lengthy treatment of caffeine. Saint Pollan says caffeine can be credited at least in part with the transition from the medieval world to modernity. The advent of drinks prepared with boiling water meant it was no longer necessary for everyone -- even children apparently -- to drink beer or cider all day long in the name of hygiene. Suddenly, non-alcoholic drinks were safe to consume, so not only were people sober, but now, starting with breakfast, they were consuming an entirely different psychoactive substance, one that instead of making everyone a little fuzzy, cleared the cobwebs away, increased focus, facilitated the kind of work that made the modern world possible.
The next day, curiosity piqued, we sampled Sleepy Monk coffee in its native environment. Similar to Insomnia, there was a line out of the small shop and half way down the block: old people, young people, middle-aged people with small children, dog people. I thought about coffee’s role in the industrial revolution as I waited. Here I am, on vacation, still drinking the drink of industry. The line moved maddeningly slowly and when it finally came, the coffee was hot and good and the pastries looked lovely. But the line seemed not exactly worth the difference between that coffee and the same beans, ground in the bungalow and stirred together with hot chocolate mix. So the following day, we skipped the Sleepy Monk. But either way I think Pollan is right about me and probably about a lot of us: the self I think of as myself is really my caffeinated self. Even on vacation.
