Burl Pipe

Plainview, New York, 1971

What’s more pretentious than a 17-year-old smoking a pipe?

My favorite blend was The Balkan Sobranie, “a traditional mixture of rich Virginia, Latakia and rare Yenidje tobaccos.” It came in a classy round tin, as pictured.

But the pipe thing… what was I up to? Who was I emulating? Cary Grant? Hemingway? Gandalf? My life as an adolescent is a mystery to me. I know that I was a fearful kid, sometimes bullied (it’s hard to avoid bullying a pipe-smoking teenager), and that I often sought refuge in books. Lacking good parental role models, I latched onto literary figures from the past. Mark Twain fascinated me, as did Dr. Seuss. And Sherlock Holmes, of course, smoked a pipe.

But maybe it wasn’t the pipe at all. Maybe it was the tobacco, with its exotic notes of the Middle East and Turkey: pipe dreams to my teenage mind, seeding the ground for a life of wanderlust.

Later that year, I discovered a different kind of pipe. I soon gave up tobacco—and got my first passport.