Henrietta Hay's Column

I wouldn't say that we are a little backward here in Happy Valley, but it did take us an awfully long time to discover the pleasure of coffeehouses. The rest of the world has known about them for a long while.

Everybody has some sort of an addiction, some more benign than others. For a most of my life coffee has been mine, I find that I can survive even my own cooking if I can have a cup or two of good coffee at the end of a meal.

My fondness for coffee started rather suddenly. I remember the first time I tasted it. It was on our first family trip to the Western Slope. My dad had a meeting in Collbran, and one in Cedaredge, two days apart. On the map there was this little wiggly line connecting the two towns, and it seemed the logical and certainly the shortest way to go. We took off from Collbran in the old Hudson, but before we got to the top of the Mesa it started to rain. And it rained. And the wiggly little dirt road got slicker and slicker. Eventually, as it grew dark, the Hudson slid off the side of the road and died. We had a tent, but the mud wouldn't hold the stakes, and steaks, which we could not cook because we could not make a fire out of soaking wood. The next morning when we were rescued, the rescuers got a fire going and made coffee. Ambrosia. That first sip on that cold, rainy morning may have been the high spot of my coffee life. Oh yes, as we took the long way around I had my first visit to Grand Junction, but we didn't stop for coffee.

One of the most important things I learned in college had to do with coffee. After much practice, I learned how to float cream onto a cup of what passed for coffee, sort of an early day cappuccino. I'll be glad to demonstrate in my favorite coffeehouse if you care to buy.

The word coffeehouse brings up all sorts of pleasant images. It may be a modern version of the cracker barrel in the old general store, where the good old boys stood around and discussed the weather and the price of hogs. In Europe coffeehouses have been around since before Columbus headed west.

But the modern coffeehouse is, I suspect, a major improvement. It first took root in Seattle. That's not too hard to understand, since the cold rainy weather there probably requires the same sort of creature comfort as Grand Mesa did that morning so many years ago.

The coffeehouse is a distinctive meeting place. There are others where people gather to drink and eat to hunt human companionship. But the coffeehouse smells the best, with a combination of coffee beans and brewed coffee. Then it can do great things for your taste buds. Starting with, hot, fresh espresso, they can whip all sorts of wonderful things with milk and flavored syrup. My personal favorite is a butternut latté, rich coffee, hot milk and syrup, all covered with foam. Add a pastry or two and you have a very distinctive ambiance, which tends to put people in the mood to relax and discuss anything from politics to the spotted owl to the Beijing conference to fishing conditions on the Mesa.

I like to think of the French philosophers sitting around a table drinking coffee and talking about whatever philosophers talk about. I try to imagine the first coffeehouse in Constantinople founded by the Ottoman Turks. Wonder whether it calmed them a little or just made them more fierce.

I met a professional woman one afternoon who dashed in after work for a few minutes to de-compress before going home to meet her in-laws. I often stop in for a latté to have a bit of human discourse after a day staring at a computer screen.

According to legend, coffee was discovered by a goat, circa 850. An Arab goatherd in east Africa noticed that his goat became frisky after chewing the berries from certain wild bushes. That was one smart goat. And humans learned from it.

I like the old Turkish proverb about coffee -- black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love.