(This post has been edited to correct the author’s dyslexia concerning numbers and dates. Thanks to TJ for setting me straight)
I suppose we might consider the breathtaking, cosmic significance of Oberon Day, and the joy of warm-weather beer arriving to crowd store shelves long before it should ever matter climactically, during a frigid March week, primarily because craft beer now insists on being just as vapid as the rest of corporate America.
But since this one paragraph already constitutes rhetorical overkill, let’s move on to what used to be the unquestioned highlight of spring, namely the illicit consumption of wretched swill.
Specifically, it was a long-anticipated spring weekend, planned for weeks amid bursts of testosterone-laden impatience. Nowadays, I can’t even pretend to recall the event “just like it was yesterday”; after all, 40 years have a way of tarnishing even the finest of photographic memories.
I can’t tell you exactly who attended the party, or whether it was held on Friday or Saturday. However, what can be affirmed with a fair degree of certainty is that not one of the participants bothered to take the night’s weather forecast into consideration.
We were lowly 9th graders in 1975, and it had been approximately one thousand years since April, 1974, when the Louisville area and large portions of the Midwest were wracked by epochal swaths of destructive tornadoes.
How pervasive were those 1974 storms? Later in summer of the same year, we were putting up hay near Georgetown, Indiana, where I grew up. I saw a rectangular black object by the fence row, and picked up a checkbook belonging to someone in Brandenburg, Kentucky, carried by the evil winds a full 30 miles as the crow flies.
On the other hand, none of the ’74 twisters actually touched down inside the borders of Floyd County. Maybe that’s why we were so youthfully oblivious in 1975.
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From its inception, we consciously intended the evening in question to be historic: The gang’s first (of what proved to be many) swill-soaked camping forays, out in the fields of the Floyds Knobs farm where one of my closest friends lived.
Caution was the watchword, and I directed my mother to drop me off at the foot of the gravel driveway that crossed the creek and snaked up the wooded bluff. I practically ran to the staging area between house and barn. For April, it seemed balmy, but as late afternoon clouds slowly rolled in, it began cooling.
We went to work on the campsite, behind a copse of trees and far enough away from the house to shield our activities from prying adult eyes. It seemed like miles at the time, and probably totaled two hundred yards, maximum. After arranging coolers of weenies, condiments and slaw, and stacking fuel for the bonfire, we hiked into the scrub, back down the bluff to the north of the driveway, where three cases of Falls City longnecks artfully had been hidden in the chilly waters of the creek by a friendly senior football player eager to spare a rising generation the miseries of sobriety.
He overcharged us, and we didn’t mind one bit. There was a pint of Cherry Vodka as backup – or maybe it was Yukon Jack.
—
The perimeter was secured amid threatening skies, and directly I was rewarded with my first genuine bout of Dionysian inebriation, a rite of passage facilitated by two beers, maybe three, and rendered barely tolerable only by the icy flavorlessness of the liquid. It was your grandfather’s Fall City, and it wasn’t to be confused with gold medals for excellence. Serviceability was the king of beers.
I never got close to the booze. The beer was enough to numb my teeth, bolster my confidence, and provide an escape from the persistent terrors of shyness, even if there were no girls on the scene.
Unwittingly, some semblance of tone was being established for future, constant reference.
As we drank, we remained utterly unaware of the elements, giving little thought to rising winds and droplets of rain heralding the storm’s arrival. However, a short distance away, my pal’s folks were paying very close attention, and with dusk and bad weather closing in, we saw the headlights from their pickup truck coming down the dirt path.
Drunken paranoia flared until we realized that they didn’t care one jot about our drinking. Never had, and never would, all the way through high school, and long after. Rather, tornadoes had been spotted in the region, and we needed to move the party – beer, burnt weenies, adolescent fantasies and all – to the barn, mere steps from the cellar, in case it got any worse.
We weren’t busted, after all. Had I been able to speak coherently, I’d have told them that I loved them.
Relieved, everyone piled into the pickup and collapsed onto the rusted metal bed, lying on our backs, staring up at the weird gloaming and swirling, clouded eternity. I swore drunkenly aloud through stinging raindrops that I could see tornadoes fornicating – except it wasn’t the exact word I used, but you get the picture. Maybe you had to be there. The others took me at my word. We had a long, drunken, two-hundred-yard laugh, and talked about it for months.
In the end, frantically coupling tornadoes didn’t disturb our consumption of the few remaining drops of beer, although the ensuing cold night made the sharing of too few blankets quite interesting. It was the era of Top Forty radio hits on the AM dial, and someone turned on the tunes, which repeated dismally, again and again, the same songs over and over, with it being too cold for anyone to get up and turn the damn thing off.
The next morning I was cold, dirty, hung over for the first time ever, and with the infuriating song “Chevy Van”* oppressing me, an unwanted ear worm of torment. We were offered fried egg sandwiches for breakfast, and I came perilously close to vomiting.
Dazed, filthy and queasy, but careful to keep heretical thoughts to myself, I questioned whether the campout had been sufficiently fun to justify a return engagement.
The day after that, I was hooked on beer for life.
* RIP Sammy Johns, (1946-2013)
