Home Country

By Slim Randles

September 10, 2004

Slim Randles is a veteran newspaperman and outdoorsman, and is a registered outfitter and guide.

Both his novels and non-fiction books are based on rural living, and he has also been an award-winning columnist for the largest daily newspapers in Alaska and New Mexico. In addition to writing, Slim has paddled a canoe down the Yukon River, driven a dog team in the first Iditarod Race, built a log cabin 12 miles from the nearest road, was a roper and bulldogger in rodeo, trained horses, and packed mules.

He is also experimenting with new methods of growing fruit trees in arid areas. He has owned two small weekly newspapers in past years, and has been managing editor of a medium-sized daily as well.

His coonhound thinks he’s wonderful.

The Kiowa County Press will try to run this column each week as space allows.

A friend took me to a store that only serves fancy coffee with Italian names the other day. My cup of unpronounceable java ran about a day's wages for a fence builder and there was no refill.

I felt ... treated, I guess. But somehow it wasn't like having coffee. I mean COFFEE.

Real coffee doesn't come with recycled paper packets of pure organically grown brown sugar. Real coffee doesn't have tiny plastic cups full of almond-flavored cream.

Real coffee can be served in real coffee shops or in real kitchens, but mostly it is a blessed combination of water at a rolling boil in a blue-and-white and soot-colored coffee pot over a fire with real flames. It is made when the pot is pulled off the flames, and ten seconds later someone pours two hermans (a herman being a cubic fistful) of real coffee into the top. Then you wait for 27.2 seconds, give or take, until all but a few grounds hit bottom.

Now that's coffee with the hair still on. Coffee for making memories. Coffee that slaps your face and demands your attention.

And it doesn't cost as much as a new fly rod, either.

Brought to you by McRoy and Blackburn, publishers. Visit them at www.alaskafiction.com