I'm used to instant coffee, not by choice, but by adaptation. When I'm at home, I don't have a coffee pot, so I don't have coffee. But when I spent some time in Colorado with an unlimited supply of Kona beans- I drank several pots a day. Waking up at 4:30 to stoke the coal boilers, I'd get a pot going before starting the fires in the woodstoves. Then from 5:30 on, I'd sit with a Nalgene bottle full and watch the black night fade blue and eventually orange and pink. Finally the sun would come up over an eastern ridge near the Silverjack just about when someone was firing up the kitchen for breakfast. There were some great cooks living at the lodge where I was staying, and another half pot was the perfect finish to each home-cooked meal of the day. In the afternoons my friend Dick and I would cut wood a little further up the mountainside. Fall in Colorado is comparable only to fall in the hills and mountains of Virginia, and those golden afternoons bucking and splitting logs were the best memories of that time. As the fall wore on, the days grew colder and eventually we were working in a couple feet of snow. But the Kona beans never ran out and every afternoon we'd head uphill stuffed full of fried trout, green beans, fresh baked bread and cobbler- and we'd each carry a half pot of the black stuff with us.
But that was nearly eight years ago, and now I'm used to instant coffee because when we moved into this apartment we inherited, along with other odds and ends, a huge can of Nescafe. It's not as bad as the instant coffee I remember trying in the States, and gives a somewhat pleasant taste and a familiar aroma to a cup of hot water. However, unlike the Kona beans, my supply ran out two days ago and rather than interrupt my daily routine to go to the store (that's a Saturday task)- I dug through the cupboards to see what reasonable substitutes might be available. There was one pack of something called coconut coffee that was more like hot cocoa than coffee, a Maxwell House coffee bag that didn't produce much more than the requisite color, and tucked away in the back corner of a little drawer was a beat-up red bag holding the remains of a pound of Shenandoah Joe's Sumatra. Luckily it was already ground, saving me the trouble of hunting down a neighbor with a grinder, and all I had to do was be patient enough for the grounds to settle out after filling a jar with a few rounded tablespoons and some boiling water. It was delicious and a little later I had a second. Being, as I said, used to Nescafe- two cups of coffee in the mid-afternoon should not have been much of a problem. But this was not Nescafe and it was much of a problem. But not a bad problem- just a sleeping problem.
So here I am at 20 past midnight, full on a delicious second dinner of vegetable stew, baguette, and bananas, and enjoying John O'Brien's At Home in the Heart of Appalachia (thanks Smitty!) for the second time this spring. I guess it's better to be wide awake and enjoying sleeplessness than half-awake dreading the morning.
