I’m a Virginia native, through and
through. In fact, I’ve never
before been off the East Coast of the States. How then did it come to pass that my ticket to Adelaide was
booked out of DEN? It’s a short
story, really. But, I’ll try and
drag it out.
In mid-January, Nate was having a
dinner at his home, the rustic little farmhouse adjacent to the Sunset Hills
property that seems to perfectly fit and indeed compliment that whole
poet/winemaker aesthetic he has going on.
The news had just been broken to me concerning my acceptance onto the
Bird in Hand harvest team, my entry to The Crush Squad, and I was giddy to
share the news and get some insight from Nate about the whole endeavor.
All the usual suspects were there,
and I was a bit late, having just gotten off work in Ashburn. I struggled for a minute with the
ill-fitting door that leads to the kitchen, finally bursting through and making
my entrance. Nate was busy
managing the various things cooking and stewing on the stove, and greets me
with a characteristic “Hey man.”
Sarah, who Nate is completely and endearingly infatuated with, and who
in turn is completely and endearingly infatuated with Nate, is of course also
there, and I get one of those lovely full-body hugs she’s so good at
giving. Scott, the assistant
winemaker at SSH and quite literally the
most interesting man in the world, gives me a hearty handshake as his
youngster, Devon, tears through the kitchen, chasing Lloyd the barn cat with a
toy monster truck.
Scott kneels and intercepts the
child. “Devon, do you remember
Daniel?” Devon and I get along
famously well, and I get a characteristic laugh/roar and a hug out of the kid. Jodie is there as well, Scott’s always
lovely and gracious wife, and gives me a hug before making off to go mind Devon
as he continues his wild streak through the house.
A young and pretty Latina girl in a
princess dress follows Devon timidly, occasionally cornering and petting Lloyd
before the cat stalks off. The
girl’s presence indicates that Quinten, the savant-level vineyard manager who,
as far as I can tell, is responsible for planting half the vines in Loudoun, is
here, as well as his wife and second daughter. They tend to stick to the living room, but I am waylaid from
making salutations by the drink being pressed on me.
Sarah is a wine distributor working
for the Country Vintner, a company that arguably has one of the best wine
portfolios in the commonwealth.
Hence: lots of good wine.
But, since I’ll be driving home, I decide to opt for beer this early in
the evening.
“Pumpkin beer?”
I’d seen a carboy of the beer
fermenting next to the woodstove in the living room a few weeks ago, and was
actually quite interested in trying it.
So, Nate pops a bottle of his homebrew and we watched as, over-heady, it
settles in my glass.
“It’s been doing that, and I don’t
know why.”
We discuss the beer for a
moment. We talk about the less
than overt pumpkininess the beer has, which Nate is somewhat perplexed by
considering the amount of pumpkin he’d used, and about the short lifespan of
these homebrews, three- or four-week shelf life, max. Nate shrugs.
“They just start to fall apart.”
There’s a rap on the glass of the
kitchen door, and I once again engage it, finally springing it loose so that
Lori and Jim Corcoran can enter.
Bubbly Lori and Bacchic Jim, who come bearing growlers filled with their
own beer. Lori is whisked into the
party, while Jim gets a dose of the homebrew. “It’s been doing that, and I
don’t know why.”
Ben Comstock, Nate’s childhood friend
and my cellar rat and drinking compatriot, is the next to arrive, and as a
party gift brings a 40oz. of Hurricane.
This is hilarious. And, not
far behind him is a girl, tiny and pretty, who I don’t know. But Sarah is excited to see her, so
there is some connection there.
Sarah and the girl, Caitlin, make a round of introductions, and we are
briefly introduced.
Eventually, the kitchen becoming
quite crowded, I make my way to the living room. Quinten stands up to greet me, and talks to me in his quiet
and conscientious way, with all his lovable inflections and speech pauses as he
mentally translates from Spanish to English and back again. Devon continues his tear, circling
throughout the house with his monster truck, making periodic passes through the
living room. He stops, once, and
guzzles a bottle of water so fast that he’s panting for breath when he finally
comes up for air. He continues his
streak.
Sarah, the longtime girlfriend of
Ben Sedlins, another vineyard guy, appears out of nowhere. She’s halfheartedly looking for Ben,
who’s around here somewhere, and simultaneously making her party rounds. It’s been a few weeks since I’d last
seen Sarah, back during harvest.
She’s been globetrotting around, working for a humanitarian organization
and working in Africa and Southeast Asia.
She’s big eyed and enthused about just about everything, but especially
about my Aussieland news. Ben had
done the same thing last year, and loved the experience, so Sarah is naturally
a proponent of the whole harvest abroad thing.
Our conversation gets interrupted
as Nate starts rounding us all up, and the whole big discombobulated family
sets out distributing plates and food, which in itself is an odd but hearty
ensemble, this being a potluck affair: fresh baked bread and eggplant lasagna,
curry and butternut squash soup, enchiladas, salad. Everyone is crammed into the dinning room around a few
makeshift tables, and all this works very well and is conducive to the intimacy. Free flowing wine and homebrew helps, too. Quinten repeatedly warns us about the
spiciness of the salsa his wife has made, assuming our delicate gringo palates
may be distressed by the heat.
We settle in, and somehow the
conversation turns immediately to our first concerts, and the storytelling
revolves around the table as we each take our turn relating tales of Bon Jovi
and Bruce Springsteen or whoever.
Dinner passes fast, and is only briefly interrupted when Devon makes
some completely out-of-the-blue comment about his shoes, and bursts into
tears. It’s actually quite funny,
but is a sign that the kid is tired and getting cranky, so Scott and Jodi
prepare to leave, and Quinten and his family do likewise.
There’s the cleanup, and with so
many people it gets done quick, even with a minor stumbling over each
other. We settle into post-dinner
postures, with a general migration to the living room and the wood stove where
it’s warm, especially if you’ve just stepped back in from your cigarette out
there in the biting cold. Quinten,
Ben, Jim and I linger a while at the table, Jim and Ben talking vineyard
management and Quinten and I mostly listening. But Jim soon gets tired, still recovering from his last dose
of chemo just a few weeks before, and he and Lori trigger an exodus by being
the first to leave. Those with
children follow them out, and our party is effectively reduced to half.
Action now is in the living room,
to which all persons and all alcohol are relocated. There’s general chitchat, and the record player is
cued. Nate’s got a pretty eclectic
vinyl collection, but The Walkmen’s exceptionally catchy “You & Me” is currently
playing. Comstock and Nate had
turned me onto the album during the harvest season and
even now, months later, it’s still in heavy rotation.
Here Caitlin, seemingly for the
first time all night, says something.
“This is the best song on the album.” Well, hells bells, it’s “Four Provinces,” which is indeed
the best track on the album. I
decide that I like this girl.
The night progresses, and we all
get drastically more drunk. Eventually,
the record player goes silent and, instead of flipping to the b side, Nate
breaks out a guitar, then Ben Sedlins reaches for a mandolin and Comstock
scrounges up an acoustic bass from somewhere in the attic. These goofy songs get played, Weezer
and Blink 182 and who knows what else.
Eventually, the whole thing devolves into a jam session.
Here, Caitlin again makes her
presence known. The girl has
lungs. Quickly, she steals the
show as everyone does this improve thing, the Sarahs doing harmonics and
occasional lines, and Ben Comstock occasionally but to great comic effect
throwing in a baritone “Where do you go, when ya go?” Which
doesn’t make any sense, but fits the mood pretty perfectly and sends us all into
hysterics every time he drops it.
I have no musical inclinations whatsoever, and so I sit back and take it
all in, nursing my booze.
At some point during the night,
Comstock leans in, and says to me, “You know, that girl Caitlin, she’s leaving
in a month.” Implication here: So
are you, Daniel. There could be a
connection. I had caught snippets of conversation, concerning Caitlin
leaving these general parts, but have no details.
Eventually, we’re mostly all too
drunk to function, and everyone starts dispersing for home. I am particularly drunk, and Sarah,
tellingly, says, “Danzig, you should stay here tonight.” Well, the choice between driving whilst
somewhat intoxicated or crashing on a couch isn’t much of a choice at all. Coincidence, here, Caitlin decides to
stay the night as well. We shoot
the shat for a bit, long after Nate and Sarah go to bed.
Turns out Caitlin lives and works
in Middleburg. And Middleburg is
almost entirely populated by middle-agers, well entrenched in the upper
echelons of society, who are concerned solely with equine activities and The
Hunt. The one possible exception
to this is the Middleburger’s obsession with and patronization of each other’s
artwork and handcraft bits. In
order to support the infrastructure of this arts-and-crafts economy, a
veritable army of nubile young women are employed to (wo)man the boutique shops
and art galleries of the upper class.
Caitlin, nubile young yoga chick that she is, is one such girl.
Eventually, I can no longer stay
awake, and when someone gives this candy-ass, Peter Pan-green silk blanket, I
wrap myself up and put myself down on the couch, falling asleep, obnoxiously, in my
contacts. Before I do, Caitlin and
I swap digits, contingent on me getting her a copy of “You & Me.” And then, I am out.
* * *
Caitlin and I stay in touch, sporadically,
and I see her once or twice in the next couple of weeks. Our paths cross at another dinner with
Nate, and one day I do deliver her a copy of The Walkmen album and we bum
around Purcellville on a Monday, which is the worst day to bum around small
town America; everything being closed.
And we get along well enough.
As my time in Virginia is drawing
to a close, so is Caitlin’s, and across a handful of encounters I’m able to
tease a few details out of the girl, concerning her own departure. Something about a long term
relationship ending, the stagnation of life in Middleburg, and an offer from
her parents to come back home to Colorado, to regroup. So, at the end of February, her dad is
to fly out to Virginia, and the two of them would drive her car and belongings
across the country back home, in Boulder.
Sad story, here: we get along decently
and we’re both at divergent points in our lives. But, so it goes.
Then, early Feb., I get a text:
“So, my dad can’t make it out to
drive back to Colorado with me. My
parents offered to pay for gas, food, and hotels if a friend came with me, and
to fly them back to the east coast.
Wanna go on a roadtrip? Lol jk.”
Well, I sit on this for a minute,
and tactfully compose a response.
“I feel like you’re being half-serious,
so I’m just going to put it out there: plane tickets to Adelaide are a lot
cheaper from the West Coast.”
Reply:
“I was being completely serious,
but put in the “jk” just in case I got rejected.”
And so, coincidentally, it does
work out. And we begin preparing
for D-Day.
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