Double Issue Review: Old Dark Fired and Death in the Long Grass

Tobacco Cellar and Based Boys Books

Very few things in life fulfill the full extent of our imaginations. As children daydreaming about adult life or maybe adults dreaming about another life, we weave elaborate stories of “what it would be like," idealized and usually unrealistic. But sometimes, every once in a while, reality is the stuff of our most hazy imagination. Sometimes, you stumble upon a pure distillated essence, an overproofed example of Reality.

Mac Baren’s Old Dark Fired is the pipe tobacco you think about when you imagine pipe smoking. That is, if you are imagining the smoker to be a plains cowboy or the captain of an African packet steamer. The blend is rough and ready, in everything from appearance to smoking experience. Dark brownish-black shredded flakes that look for all the world like bits of beef jerky. And wouldn't you know it, they smell and taste like bits of beef jerky. This puts Old Dark Fired in a very exclusive tobacco club to be sure, as most blends are notorious for promising with aroma what they cannot fulfill in taste. But this stuff is, as the kids say, build different.

Light up a bowl for a punch of salty, tangy, barbequed meaty goodness. A blend that gives a squint to your eyes and pushes your hat back on your head. It's not trying to challenge you or show off, but it's not going to change for you either. Does what it says on the tin, old, dark and fiery. Because Super Meat Blend probably wouldn't have sold so well. This is the only blend of tobacco I have ever, even briefly, considered chewing.

The only choice for pairing this unapologetically manful smoke is the book at the top of my original Based Boys planning list. Death in the Long Grass by Peter Hathaway Chapstick is a reading experience that grabs you by the khaki shirt collar and will not let you go. One of the final generation of Great White Hunters to stalk trophy game in the Dark Continent, Chapstick collects his wildest stories into a hard-hitting volume subdivided by species. Yeah, PETA card carriers need not apply.

The florid purple prose carries its own beauty (nobody can describe the outdoors like Chapstick for my money) and the accounts themselves are compulsively memorable. But it is Chapstick's vividly inventive black humor that sets this volume apart. The first time you read about an elephant seizing a hapless man by one leg and "beating him to the consistency of furry guava jelly," you laugh out loud, because how could you not. Then you wince as the mental picture takes shape. Then you keep chuckling and read more.

Page after page of Rip-Roaring High-T Adventure, narrated with sharp wit and a storyteller's flair. Violence, danger, and savage beauty. Page turner is an overused compliment but it ought to be saved for books like this. You can instantly tell that each anecdote has been related over and over by Chapstick or someone close to him, around campfires and over bar tops. Heightened reality? Perhaps, in the way tales have grown through telling since Methuselah first took up angling. But I have a hard time caring about the specific provenance of each particular story as I'm busy experiencing them, right next to the author as we stalk a wounded leopard into thorny scrub.

Some of our other Based Boys selections are made with an eye to provide moral instruction or demonstrate manly virtues. But sometimes a book just needs to fire the imagination and get the adrenaline flowing. Chapstick was actually passed matrilineally through my family, recommended by both my mother's mother and father's mother before it became family read-aloud material in our household. What can I say, I've always had based grandmothers. There's a pretty universal appeal in an exciting yarn, and this is one of the best. Every young man should know the feeling of tramping through the outdoors in search of his quarry with a few rounds of latent death held metal-cased in his sweating hands. This is a book to introduce young men to the world of the outdoorsman in fine style.

The sun is lighting the horizon aflame as the day's trek loops back to the kraal and your clients fall out into their tents. Time enough to get the fire going before everyone settles in for an evening's relaxation. You're sore from head to foot but that's nothing a roll of biltong, a belt of the good stuff and a pipe full of Mac Baren's best won't fix. The savannah's night songs start in as soon as you can see the stars. Better load the 470 Nitro Express in case those hyenas get any nocturnal ideas. Looks like a nice, long evening.