“Take me to a station
And put me on a train
I got no expectation
To pass through here again…”
We used to play that every Friday night at Stinson’s in Austin. Me on upright bass. Jack Daniel on drums and vocals. It was The Michael Cross Peace, Love and Blues Band, and it was always Michael Cross, almost always Gabby on harmonica, and as many as ten other Austin musicians. There was little or no money.
No set list.
No practice.
No fancy outfits.
No plan.
No idea of who would show up.
And sometimes, no audience.
But it was sublime. If you were a professional musician, like Mike, it wasn’t a good way to pay the bills, but it was one of those magic things that happen in music towns all over the world. It was the highlight of my musical career because magic happened on a regular basis. Sure, we had trainwrecks, but who cares. It was making music, not playing or reciting.
And music is magic.
And one should always seek magic.
I found some.
I’m halfway up a mountain in a remote cabin at the bottom of an island off the coast of Australia. A cabin with no entertainment. Not much heat. A tiny solar-powered fridge and no WIFI and a lousy cell signal… But a Miracle Shower. The solar panels on the little roof power some sort of voodoo water heater that will give me a screaming hot shower, which usually doubles as a washing machine for my clothes.
And I can see a hundred miles from the front porch. Facing west, into the sunset. I can see multiple mountain ranges, bodies of water, the ocean, and at night, stars out of the yin-yang. Forest ravens yell all morning. I yell back. They’re amused.
I’m here writing about a distillery that’s full of magic.
I didn’t know what to expect when I came here for what I thought would be two weeks. I’m now on week four, and I’ve learned a few things.
Come up the mountain, build a fire. Maybe cook something simple. Put a pot on the iron stove and boil something. Open a can. Rip open a bag with a salad. Open a bottle of McHenry’s whisky or crack open a beer. A big silver jug of Holy Water is on the bedside.
And rewind life. Think about No Expectations. Replay a day in high school. Write a story in your head.
“Poncho was a bandit boy
Wore his gun outside his pants
For all the honest world to feel.”
I’m here to delve into other people’s worlds.
I did it in Scotland and Germany, and now I’m in Tasmania. Next week, I’ll do it further north for a few weeks, then I’ll get on a plane to Adelaide, on the mainland, then I’ll get on a train, which I visualize, but I may be totally wrong.
“Poncho needs your prayers, it’s true
Save a few for Lefty too.”
It’ll be a two-day train ride and probably wonderful and awful and everything in between. I visualize monumental vistas, interesting conversations, long hours to think and write, and make sense of that for which there is no sense.
“Am I on the right train?” I asked the German train lady, after hauling up all my earthly belongings in a mad rush, standing in that never-never-land between train cars.
She looked. And looked. And looked. The doors closed. The train started to move.
“No,” she quipped as she handed me back my ticket and walked away.
This thing I’m doing. Seeking out people who own distilleries, the people who were crazy enough to go try to make a living, support their families, and build a brand that the rest of the world will care about. I find these people on the interwebs. I email them, and most of them ignore me, but I’m persistent. Eventually, some will respond. We’ll talk. They’ll see something in my approach that makes sense to them.
Let this total stranger into our world, share this journey, and see what he comes up with.
I’ve become an eternal houseguest and get to live in their world for a while.
“Somewhere up beyond the great divide
Where the sky is wide
And the clouds are few
A man can see his way clear to the light
Just hold on tight, that’s all you gotta do.”
I go live in other worlds and lose my old world, as much as possible anyway. My job is to listen and translate what I see, smell, and taste. My job is to translate how someone else in someplace else, lives and give strangers a way to imagine that life.
It’s all wrapped, mostly, around whisky.
Which, on one hand, seems pretty damn silly.
It’s ethyl alcohol and flavored water if you distill the idea far enough.
“Everyplace I travel to I find
some kinda sign
That you’ve been through.”
But it’s a platform to stand on and understand the world from different viewpoints.
Thanks, Archimedes. Ya gotta start somewhere, so I start with whisky.
In the process, I’ve met some people I will always celebrate.
And maybe it’s flattering to have some smartass from Texas want to hang around and turn your and your life into a story. But there is no subterfuge here. I genuinely am interested and apparently other humans are interested as well. I’ve found that everyone I’ve spent time with has hit that epiphany at some point and had to go make whisky. I ask a lot of questions and find great stuff about their business and product that maybe they didn’t see. And hopefully, I can give people all over the planet an idea of that one little place on the planet that they may never wander into.
Whisky is a great reason for this.
It is full of a million little differences.
It’s not a bloody McDonald’s burger that’s the same crap in Brackettville as it is in Bombay.
And the world we’ve created is full of that enforced sameness. We thrive on it. It’s safe.
“Oh me oh myo
Look at Miss Ohio
She’s a runnin around with her ragtop down
Says I wanna do right but not right now…”
I’ve always looked for those little differences. Those flaws. That patina. Those worn marble steps from pilgrims in leather sandals. That worn paint on the car hood and ripples in old windows. I once had a pair of fancy black dress shoes, and the leather on the top was different from that of the other pair. I got them on sale and cherished them. We expect bland perfection. I cherish imperfection. And whisky is imperfect. Wine is too, I suppose, but I don’t know wine all that well, so I’ll stick to whisky.
Every batch has its character, and it goes into an oak cask with its own imperfections and the weather and humidity and rain and storms and, and, and.
It all adds up. And it’s always driven by some character who didn’t want to be a middle manager at Dell.
And I get to jump into airplanes and find a quiet corner to observe and absorb and translate, and I always manage to find magic in their magician lives. That magic stuff I find can help them keep doing what they do.
Which I’m grateful for.
I get to give them the stuff I learned after decades of doing this observation and translation for a dozen other industries, and they get a new mirror from space on what they’re doing.
“Ingred Bergman, Ingred Bergman
Let’s go make a picture
On the island of Stromboli
Ingred Bergman,”
I get to do this for months at a time.
Be a houseguest in another universe.
A bit like Ted.
My mountaintop cabin in Port Arthur has another guest. My roommate is a big huntsman spider. They’re Australian creatures and apparently fine houseguests.
He lives with me and observes and maybe has opinions. I like him.
I spent the other night at Bill McHenry’s place, watching their old dogs while Ali sang in Hobart and they spent the night there. I admit, I wondered if Ted would be OK without me.
I obviously spend too much time with Ted. He doesn’t hide. He just sorta finds a spot and doesn’t move for a few days. He’d been on the floorboard of the bedroom the last few days and had moved somewhere else when I woke up this morning. I’d left the window open, so he may have gone outside in search of breakfast. Or he could turn up anywhere in the house. I’ll keep an eye out for him. I aim to be as good a houseguest as Ted. Australians call them Wall Puppies. Bug Roombas. They leave them to their own devices. I worry that Ted might be hungry and maybe I should put him outside, but then I’d miss him. Maybe I’ll put him out when I leave. Maybe he’ll miss me, too.
The best way to absorb and understand is to have no expectations. Let the script write itself.
I joked yesterday that I’m a bit of Hunter S. Thompson, getting immersed in the Hell’s Angels to write a book.
There are parallels. He had to be a good houseguest. Like Ted. Be there, see the magic, and don’t interfere too much. Hunter eventually got on someone’s nerves, as I suspect Hunter always did, and he got stomped.
Jan Hinrichsen on Fohr Island told me he thought he was becoming nicer from hanging around me so much. I didn’t see it. He was awesome when I first got there, even though Frisian cultural norms don’t shake hands or have a word for paradise.
“Morning, Jan, it’s another beautiful day in paradise.”
Eventually, I got him saying it. Because it’s always true.
“Take me to a station
And put me on a train
I got no expectation
To pass through here again…”
Everywhere I’ve been on this strange whisky-tinged journey has been a place I want to return to, but I have to live with no expectation of ever returning. I’d go back to Fohr Island in a minute. I fell in love with Scotland and the villages that welcomed me. And I’m crazy already about Tasmania and plotting a way to return. I felt very much at home in all these places, yet utterly foreign at the same time. And because I had no expectation to ever pass that way again, I paid attention.
It’s actually a good way to live.
Expect to never pass through here again so you absorb and cherish every minute. They’re limited. Click, click click. Then it’s gone and you get on that wrong train.
And you look forward to being home again.
To that familiar routine. Get up quietly, slide the noisy door open gently. Go feed the noisy cats, make the coffee, open up the front door for that precious light, pour two coffees, cover one for Loree, maybe even put a little half and half in hers, and cover it to stay hot. Then she gets up, takes the dog out, feeds the dog, we’re in our chairs, like two old people happily in their respective thrones, have our coffee, do our morning things, dog or cats in laps, watching the birds in the birdbath, the deer wandering and let the morning congeal. That relaxed morning routine that you look forward to when you wake up.
This new universe, I’m being a Ted in, makes that comfortable, well-curated world seem so far away.
But it’s OK. It’s a yin to a yang. Feel that part of the soul that craves the untasted flavor so you can go back to the cherished mornings.
No expectations.
Keep moving, keep tasting that new flavor, and only expect surprises and a return to comforts that will carry those new ingredients.
No expectations. Expect it.
But it can get dark.
Over my lifetime, I’ve immersed myself for months at a time in worlds other than my own, and there will always be times when you crave that home comfort. The people I cherish, the routines, all are simply not wherever I am, so one makes do. I turned 21 in Europe on a three-month walkabout, and in the middle of it, I had a wonderful dream that I went home for a weekend. Just went home. Replayed my home routine, and it was wonderful, and I woke up in a ratty pensione in Italy somewhere and realized home was on the other side of the planet, so keep pushing through the thick air into the next unknown.
Just before I left, Loree and I had finally decided on a new set of chairs. Our old mission-style recliners had finally given up. Leather all cracked. Brackets broken. We eked out a few more years with covers over the cracks, but it was time. It took us a few years, and we did the leap and ordered two Eames chairs, custom covered in a light avocado green with rosewood backs. The most stylish chairs on the planet, and they’re on their way from the manufacturer to our treehouse in Texas, and a month into a three-month walkabout, I open the pictures the maker sent of our chairs when they were just built, plastic still on the legs.
And I imagine having our coffee in the morning, looking like AI-generated supermodels in an AI-generated mid-century modern model home.
Not, no expectations there. Lots of expectation and fat, lazy time. Embrace it at home and out walking the earth.
I’ve come to realize that there is something driving this need to spend fat, lazy amounts of time in other places, other cultures, without expectation.
Fat, lazy time.
When Loree and I were raising our kids, Maxx and Marlo, I always had the vision of finding a village in France and taking them there for a month or two every year. Same village. Learn the lingo. Same house. Get to know the same people. Step outside our Texas world and truly live in another.
But we never did. We did a lot, but never that recurring dream of an alternative universe where you walk to the cheese shop, the bread shop, and the butcher and feel the comfort of home in an utterly foreign place.
And I’ve always regretted it. It just seemed too hard to pull off at the time, but we could have done it, and we should have. So, advice. If a dream is nagging you and you don’t do it because it seems too hard, do it. It’s really not that hard, and you’ll end up doing it anyway.
Fat, lazy time without expectation. Let the kismet of wandering fill in the blanks you haven’t imagined yet, and take good notes because you might not be back.
“I got no expectation
To pass through here again.”
So pay attention.
The comfy chairs that I’ll sit in when I get back to Texas.
