I PLANNED TO WRITE TWO COLUMNS ABOUT BARBECUE and I’m not going to let a mere 6.0 earthquake deter me. Last week I summarized why I’m so obsessed with smoking meat and how I was planning a Saturday trip to downtown Napa to attend a barbecue festival.
The craft beer made me do it. I described how my newfound love of craft beer had led me to a renewed love of smoked meats. I bemoaned that craft beer and craft barbecue had yet to merge often enough for my liking, now that I like it.
Craft beer events might have barbecue available in a side tent, and craft barbecue events might have some craft beer on tap through happenstance. However, the two have yet to get double billed and double featured at the same gig often enough for my high standards. Or it could be that I’m just out of the loop. I’m going to keep searching and researching that union.
Based on the few barbecue and chili cookoffs I’ve attended, most quenched people’s thirsts with only one or two choices from the big-industry beers, Bud, Coors, Miller and such. It seems funny now that people would be celebrating variety in food, yet accept sameness in beverage.
I’m not a beer snob. However, I’ve seen how big-industry beer treats craft breweries in shady marketplace shenanigans. See the movie “Beer Wars.” Their shifty squeeze plays for transportation and shelf space is nothing short of bullying. I’ve decided to no longer support them separate from the taste of the brew.
Susan, my son Adam and a half dozen friends that I called and invited were all in downtown Napa on Saturday afternoon, standing exactly where the crumbled bricks and shattered windows fell crashing to the sidewalks a scant 12 hours later. In the grand glacial scheme of time and the microscopic movement of tectonic plates, a thousand local folks escaped potentially deadly bodily harm by only a few hours, and I did not invite a half-dozen close friends to their doom. I’m happy about that.
I would be bummed if they were all crushed to death and I escaped without a scratch, or maybe just a small scratch.
Like most, I was shaken awake at 3:20 a.m. and actually got to Twitter before the S.F. Earthquake Bot. It said the last big earthquake was 15 hours ago in Chile. I didn’t hear any car alarms or barking dogs. I was about to be puzzled when Bloop! The bot’s tweet appeared. Then came the flood.
Tweets began pouring in from people on the scene and news agencies around the world. I couldn’t swipe my finger fast enough to keep up with the pouring in of pictures and leads. We checked Twitter’s Discover screen for hashtags. American Canyon was at the top as the most frequent text in current tweets. Soon hashtags for Napa and earthquake floated up. Susan was awake with me, our lamp lights were on, and both phones and our tablet were flying. We Facebooked “We’re OK.” I fielded a flurry of East Coast text messages where it was morning, telling family members that we were fine. After a half-hour, like veteran Californians, we doused the lights and went back to sleep.
Funny, in the morning when we spent a few alert hours catching up on the quake, we didn’t once hear anyone say that those same streets were packed with at least 1,000 people just hours before the quake. I thought it was remarkable at least.
To round out my barbecue weekend, on Sunday I attended Benicia’s barbecue hosted by the Historical Museum out at the Camel Barn.
Newscasters warned us to expect aftershocks for the next seven days, and the chance of one being above 5.0 on the Richter Scale stood at 54 percent. But, come on. There’s nothing to fear. I was going to the Camel Barn. That monolithic structure is built like the Rock of Gibraltar. It is adamant and impervious. If it were laid across the San Andreas Fault, it would help hold the fault together. It has survived every earthquake California terra-infirma has thrown at it.
So, to squeeze in a few quick reviews, the Benicia event was mellow and relaxing. The Blues Defenders set up their stage around back in the beautiful sculpted gardens. I sat in the shade, said hello to friends and enjoyed my two treats while digging the blues. The blues is glue for the brew and barbecue. It’s a Triple BBB. Maybe Guy Fieri will start a new spinoff show.
The Napa event was a huge and harmonious convergence of the Triple BBB. It was one of those events where you can’t wait to come back and you haven’t left it yet. Perhaps it was that mystic union of variety in food and beverage and music together at last that rocked our world.
Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.
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