Previously: 40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 76: A boy can dream – about beercycling (and a Requiem for Moose).
Authors note: My installments have gotten just a bit out of sequence. There are reasons for this, but neither you nor I really care, and I’ll reorder them later. For now, here is the two-part account of my second European trip of 1998, beginning in Spain and the French Alps; next time, the journey’s conclusion in the United Kingdom. Much of the following was originally published as “Being, pretending, and an outsider’s assorted daydreams (Fiesta de San Fermin, 1998)” in 1998, and refurbished in 2006. Editing and augmenting are to be taken for granted.
In 1998, I was away for a while.
The decade of the 1990s is about to mercifully disappear into the rearview mirror insofar as this narrative is concerned, and I feel the need to issue a purely retroactive alcohol consumption alert, which is to say that by midsummer of 1998, the dizzying peak period of my fermented beverage intake was quite roaringly underway.
This merely is a factual statement, to be reported alongside all other occurrences before and since. I’m neither ecstatic about it, nor apologetic. Things happen.
Roughly 90% of my consumption was beer. Of the remainder, most of it was wine. Spirits have never comprised more than a negligible sliver of my intake, primarily because they frighten me.
Those early package store employment days were a constant reminder of the way our hardcore liquor-drinking customers visibly deteriorated during my watch. Some of them died while I was there, and disturbingly, their obituaries often revealed them to be far younger than their appearance might have suggested.
The medical community is tapping insistently on my shoulder: alcohol is alcohol, Roger, and beer or wine in excess threatens one’s health just as surely as liquor.
I’ll consider an Alford plea, while maintaining the veracity of something the store manager Duck told me early during my employment at Scoreboard Liquors: nothing good can come from toting a liter of whiskey home each day, period.
Consequently, even the most Falstaffian of trenchermen (yeah, me) had limits. I’ve always been a problem eater, first and foremost. Nowadays, in my mid-60s, I hardly drink at all; when stress is overwhelming and the black dog won’t let go of my pants leg, I battle a constant temptation ― not to drink, but to load up on fried chicken, pizza, pasta with clam sauce, curry, and doughnuts.
In 1997 my first wife and I bought a small house down the street from the Public House, and I continued walking to work almost every day, as had always been my habit during our residency at the apartment. Exercise amid gluttony, I suppose.
Being freed from worries about impaired driving allowed a magical multiplication of shift beers. I almost never drank on the clock, just much of the time off it, and yet for me it wasn’t an issue to stop drinking. The gene governing addiction was located somewhere over there, adjacent to the seafood buffet.
Our pizza and pub business stayed reasonably prosperous, not that the three of us always excelled at managing it. My interpretations of P&L statements remained entertainingly variable, corresponding with a similarly-styled rudimentary ability to translate menu items at a restaurant in Germany, where I knew just enough to be dangerous; often I was right, but occasionally, thinking beefsteak was on the way, I’d receive sweetbread-encrusted fried cow udder instead.
And I cleaned my plate, anyway. It’s who I was, and what I did.
As such, with the year 2000 rapidly approaching, and with it my 40th birthday, even the man in the moon could clearly discern that beer had become the central focus of my existence, personally and professionally, leaving precious little time apart from books and bicycles for salutary measures aimed at broadening other interests or strengthening purportedly important aspects of my life — like being married, for example.
Concurrently, both husband and first wife drank a lot; one handled it better than the other; and neither party was imbued with the confidence or self-awareness necessary to seek answers; after all, they (read: we) were barely cognizant of the questions.
Instead of seeking professional mitigation to relieve anxiety and unease, I kept doing what came naturally: downing beers on the company’s dime, hoarding the cash I’d saved, and escaping to Europe for as long as I could.
My wife and business partner had come along for the first-ever motor coach tour in the spring of 1998.
40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 74: Down a rabbit hole, deep into the Belgian beer paradise (1998)
Now, only three months later, I made a forceful, cogently reasoned argument to the effect that my cousin Don Barry and his pals — not to mention those poor lonely bulls — desperately needed me to join them in Basque Country for the Fiesta de San Fermin. It is likely that my announcement took the form of a fait accompli, so planning began.
Don’s itinerary was set. He’d be heading toward Pamplona from the south of France in early July. I resolved to join him. Later we’d work our way to London via the French Alps and Paris.
Summer was always the slow time at the pub, anyway. That’s what I told myself.
—
It transpired that five foreigners ― three Americans, a New Zealander and a Frenchman ― found themselves sharing a bare-bones apartment in central Pamplona for the eight-day duration of San Fermin (July 6 – 14, 1998).
We encountered other “foreign” friends and acquaintances during the festival’s run (and running of the bulls): quite a few Englishmen, some of them aristocrats of the old school, others the obvious products of entrepreneurial Thatcherism, as well as Swedes, Finns, Germans, and at least one snowy-haired resident of Andorra.
There also were a good many of my fellow Americans. Careful screening was required to make sure they were knowledgeable and well-meaning, as I’m allergic to jingoists now populating the MAGA sewer.
I flew into Paris alone, made my way to Gare de Lyon for the TGV to Montpelier, and found myself in the company of dozens of upper-crust Mexican soccer fans, each bearing his or her weight in tequila. There was a simple explanation: they were in route to a World Cup match, excited and drink and friendly, also willing to share their elevated agave juice with clueless schmucks like me (I limited myself to a hospitable ration of two shots; see the preceding liquor store digression).
From Montpelier an ordinary train delivered me to Perpignan to the southwest, near the border with Spain and not terribly far from Barcelona. There I linked up with Don and his longtime buddy, the inimitable artist and bon vivant Warren Parker.
(2025 note: I’ve yet to tell the late Mr. Parker’s story. It is coming soon.)
Warren owned an amazingly ancient house in the town of Tresserre, where we spent a few days in training for San Fermin. In terms of Europe, it was still relatively rare for me to be in the company of people like Warren who had a car and could drive it, enabling expeditions into the surrounding countryside for food, drink and sightseeing, including an amazing afternoon in charming Collioure with its art colony and Mediterranean beaches.
Eventually our trio packed up the car for a five-hour drive from Tresserre, northward across the foothills of the Pyrenees via Toulouse to the Atlantic Ocean resort city of Biarritz, where we met aspiring expatriate Ray Mouton, a Louisianan who billeted with Warren at the Hotel du Palais.
Hotel du Palais, a “top hotel in the world” grade of domicile for high rollers, exceeded my budget. Still, we adjourned immediately to the hotel’s bar, where I recall being utterly scandalized by $7 bottles of Carlsberg.
Don easily could have joined the boys there, but he kindly recognized my relative state of impoverishment, and instead we booked a room at the ironically named Hotel Florida (Don resided in Tallahassee).
After two days of explorations in Biarritz, we emulated the protagonist Jake Barnes from Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) and drove across the border from France directly into Pamplona’s central Plaza del Castillo for al fresco drinks.
Our arrival preceded the fiesta by two days; Don and I subsequently left Pamplona on the morning after the festival’s final day. For the first and only time, I witnessed the atmospherics of San Fermin from start to finish, and sans exaggeration, found them absolutely fascinating.
As modern day interpreters of the Hemingway tradition, we took our obligations very seriously once the festival started at 12:00 noon on the 6th. Each morning, disregarding the pain borne of the previous evening’s excess, I’d set my watch to beep at 7:35 a.m., which gave me enough time to throw on some clothes, ride the elevator down to street level, dash up the block to the bakery on the corner, and snag pastries.
Meanwhile, Don was heating water for coffee. At eight, we all would gather around the living room table, sweeping aside the last evening’s cigar butts and bullfight ticket stubs, and view the running of the bulls (encierro) on regional television.
That’s right, on television. Before anyone jumps me for not running, I’ll remind readers that Hemingway himself never bothered with it. However, one morning I did make it out for a walk fairly early.
The crews were sweeping the streets and hosing them down. Many locals were preparing to dive into San Fermin for breakfast, and just as many were on their way home for a nap before hitting it again.
Later in one of the plazas in the old part of town I saw a little boy riding high on his father’s shoulders. Both were wearing white cotton pants and shirts with matching red scarves and sashes. One of the marching bands in perpetual motion during the festival was rounding the corner, and the child giggled in step with its discordant progress.
When the Gigantes (huge puppets on the backs of men) emerged from the same alleyway. The laughter stopped and his eyes grew wide in confusion. He held on to his father’s neck as if to choke him for bringing him into contact with these huge, strange figures. But soon enough he caught on, and mirth returned; modernity triumphed over primitive avatars.
Another time we were in a bar feasting on tapas (tasty bar snacks) and draining small glasses of the rather uniformly adequate Spanish lager beer. Everything that wasn’t bolted down had been removed. Clean but smoke-edged rectangles on the wall showed where pictures usually were, and scuff marks on the floor indicated the location of tables and chairs. All the furniture and décor remained hidden until festival’s end; at least the beers still were being served in glass, not plastic.
People were singing and dancing, and the bartenders were trading drinks and bits of food for pesetas in rapid-fire fashion. Spanish bar etiquette is a wonderful thing, even at the peak of San Fermin’s madness. Warren and his friend Reggie bantered with the workers in Spanish. Our bill was actually lower than it should have been. We objected, and the proprietor waved us off.
Outside, basking in the sunlight, it occurred to me that I had become “tight.”
Hemingway used the word freely throughout The Sun Also Rises. It means being intoxicated, perhaps a shade of pre-drunk, although stopping short of obliterated, inebriated, blotto, sotted, potted or sloshed. Papa’s characters debate the merits of being tight. They’re hardly ever without a drink. They’re hardly ever not tight. During the festival, tightness is a veritable epidemic.
In 1998, my favorite place for getting tight was the Meson del Caballo Blanco (Inn of the White Horse), a bar perched atop the city walls off a narrow street that sneaks into the maze of elderly buildings by the cathedral. The stone building housing Caballo Blanco was very old and dignified, and when one occupied the small barroom at ground level, it was like drinking in an old chapel, which it might well have been.
(In 2025, a bar and eatery remains there.)
During the festival, the contingent of Anglophone revelers and expatriates typically held several parties in the small pedestrian plaza in front of the Caballo Blanco, from which one could look out beyond the ramparts and into the valley (cover photo). Although the valley rapidly filled with housing blocks as the modern city expanded, it remained an excellent view, and it isn’t hard to imagine the scenic impact during Hemingway’s day a century ago.
Once, after one of these gatherings began to degenerate, Don, Warren and I slipped into the Caballo Blanco and began drinking beer.
Subsequently we enjoyed a few rations of Patxaran (in Basque; it’s Pacharán in Spanish), a liqueur native to Pamplona and the province of Navarra. Inexplicably, it wasn’t mentioned by Hemingway.
In inexact terms, Patxaran tastes rather like a wine-based schnapps flavored with anise and sloe berries. In 1996 I’d been introduced to Patxaran by Arthur and Maria Burton, a Brit and Spaniard who met during the Francoist era, with whom I shared numerous rounds of the liqueur along with black coffee.
Now that’s a localized speedball of a drinking ritual.
Standing at the bar of the crowded Caballo Blanco in mid-afternoon, stuffed with bread, salami and cheese from the party out in the plaza, cradling a Patxaran, all was relatively peaceful. Suddenly a group of Basque men from France began singing traditional songs in the obscure and lovely Basque tongue. Drinks were bought and exchanged as the singing continued. At some point, the day disappeared and I was in another place and time.
Yes, I was tight. We hopped from bar to bar in the old part of town. The rest is pea soup fog, into which San Fermin often devolves.
There are numerous stories to tell, like the “pig walk,” an excursion on foot to a restaurant specializing in roast pork led by the British wheeler-dealer and ex-Shakespearean actor “Sexy Rexy,” which included a long layover both coming and going in a bar called the Savoy, where I had the best gin and tonic of my life.
And, a trip up into the mountains with Arthur and Maria to the town of Aoiz, where we enjoyed an outstanding multi-course meal at the Beti Jai restaurant (I think) — for me, Truchas con Jamón Serrano (trout stuffed with serrano ham). It was one of a dozen fine culinary experiences during San Fermin rarely costing more than $25, with wine and service included, for quality you’d associate at twice the price.
We watched the ticket scalpers work in front of the bullring, dancers and singers in the parks and pavilions, and the long-suffering sanitation workers cleaning streets and hauling refuse. There were so many of these vignettes, and the vast majority of them were good.
Long ago I began this rumination intending to discuss San Fermin and the phenomenon of those quasi-expatriates who follow in the wake of Ernest Hemingway by returning to Pamplona each year. I was going to take the critical view and expose some for the phonies and boors they are, and yet I found my attitude mellowing at the memory of so many lovely experiences.
27 years later, there are somber reflections accompanying the realization that many of the older celebrants are no longer with us.
Most of the expatriates I met, most of whom wouldn’t actually live in Spain, were neither frauds nor boors. They merely enjoyed the festival in the only way they knew how, which for the most part was harmonious and sincere, and other times not. Generally they respected local culture, and were judged by locals accordingly.
In the end, perhaps the best thing about San Fermin was that by and large it still belonged to the people of Pamplona and Navarra in spite of the presence of legions of foreigners.
I would have liked to be one of the knowledgeable expats, although the fact remains that in four visits to San Fermin (1994, 1996, 1998 and 2000), I never totally surrendered myself to the euphoria. I was aloof, analytical, foreign, and very much on the outside looking in, as always an extrovert imprisoned by shyness.
Then again, most of the foreigners who come to Pamplona for the festival tended to be on the outside looking in, even those who prided themselves on preserving the Hemingwayesque “traditions.”
The older ones, whose numbers were dwindling even then, saw themselves as the inheritors of a noble heritage of the foreign presence in Pamplona, and the anointed guardians of this. To them, the youthful Americans and Brits partying in the streets ― wine stained, hormonal satyrs staggering past the dark huddles of Euro-trash ― were guilty of a neglect of proper understanding.
Except that this older generation didn’t always do what they might to share their inheritance, and I mildly disagreed with their viewpoint of young people, who’d be coming to Pamplona and discovering San Fermin for the first time without the aging legacy of Hemingway. After all, one arrival’s instruction is another’s straitjacket, and the ones who needed to know would find out.
Somewhere, perhaps in a campground on the outskirts of the city or in a flat downtown, where a dozen arrivals slept atop their packs (and each other), I detected the presence of a 22-year-old American who was about to step out into the madness and befriend a native, play with Pamplona’s children, eat mixed salad and bean soup, drink Tinto, descend into the chapel cellar for a look at the relics, learn a sentence in Spanish and two in Basque, kick around a soccer ball, and completely forget about the world outside Pamplona during San Fermin (mind you, these are pre-social media reflections).
In eight days, this new American devotee of San Fermin might entirely avoid meeting one of the classically trained aficionados, and be all the better for the omission. The latter eventually would become the former. I hope there remains a place for both, 25 years after my last appearance.
—
On the evening of San Fermin’s final day, as the week-long lunacy gradually settled into a cigarette’s post-coital reverie, Don and I arranged to meet Ray (“Ol’ Paco”) for drinks at the venerable Café Iruña, which featured prominently in The Sun Also Rises.
Ray had abandoned the high-stakes legal profession to become a writer, later authoring perhaps the most important American novel of recent decades that you’ve probably never read: In God’s House.
Lawyer who foretold church scandals writes his story, by Angus MacSwan (Reuters; Dec. 20, 2012)
Ray Mouton was a successful young lawyer in Lafayette, Louisiana, respected in the community and blessed with a loving family, when he received a call from a vicar in the Roman Catholic diocese for a lunch meeting on a fateful day in 1984.
The diocese asked him to defend an errant priest, accused of abusing dozens of children in a rural community. Mouton reluctantly agreed to take on the task.
What followed over the next few years was the uncovering of an institution riddled with pedophile priests on a national scale and efforts at high levels in the Catholic Church to hide the problem away.
For Mouton, it meant the end of his law career, health problems, and anger, depression and guilt.
After many years of writing from his self-imposed exile in France, he finally tells his story in the novel “In God’s House”. It is a harrowing read laden with sickening detail, but also for Mouton, a work of atonement.
“There’s not a day I don’t think about the children. When I was writing the book, whenever I wanted to quit, I thought about the victims and their families,” he told Reuters.
When I first made Ray’s acquaintance, thanks to Don, I knew little about the story he planned all along to tell. He was witty and engaging, and had taken on a role as keeper of the flame, respecting San Fermin’s traditions and writing about them for Anglophones. Ray neither suffered fools among expatriates, nor did he speak Spanish or Basque. He merely loved everything about San Fermin, and didn’t so much seek immersion as allow it to immerse him.
Ray floated along the periphery of San Fermin, pausing occasionally to offer a pithy comment, participating when he felt like it, and remaining alone when he didn’t. He was, and remains, a complete original, and I loved him dearly for his spirit of independence.
We were to have dinner together elsewhere, and only Ray knew the culinary destination. As quite possibly the only teetotaler ever to enter the city limits of Pamplona and survive to tell the tale, Ray subsisted on orange sodas; his arm was in a sling, as he’d been trampled during the encierro, not by a bull, but by a befuddled tourist.
Ray paid and tipped the waiter, and we began walking from the café toward the spot adjoining the city walls where a street climbs from the valley, leading past where the bulls are penned prior to their daily run to the bullring. The final bullfight had concluded, and the pens already were dismantled, a fact we observed while mounting a narrow cobblestoned walkway to the top of the rampart.
There we were greeted with a cool, mournful, cleansing breeze and a vivid orange sunset hugging the gray tops of the mountains, framed by the darkening, infinite skies above. Few lights had come on, conjuring a comforting illusion of nature. Pamplona was strangely quiet after the chaos; the city felt spent, and a tangible curtain could be discerned dropping.
It was a slow, deliberate stroll along the deserted city walls, tempting us to linger in the swirling air that carried San Fermin far away, to be refreshed for the following year. Ray guided us into a park near the citadel, and to a restaurant where we were the sole customers.
As the three of us ate, drank and talked, we heard the fireworks that brought San Fermin to a close. At that moment two parting glasses of wine, and one with orange soda, were raised in a toast to life and living. I’ll never forget it.
—
The rail journey from the Pyrenees to the French Alps required an overnight train trip of more than 20 hours (and at least three transfers) aimed at bringing us to the vicinity of Les Gets, a ski resort that draws its fair share of visitors for rest and recreation in summer, including Don’s longtime Finnish friends Henrik and Eva, who maintained a vacation house. I’d be meeting them at long last, after fumbling my chance to so in Tampere during my first trip abroad in 1985.
Unfortunately, when it came time to debark in Lyon for the most important connection to Cluses, near Les Gets, the Hoosier cousins dozed right through it, which brought us instead to Geneva in Switzerland.
Amid hasty route recalculations, it could be seen that an alternative route into nearby France existed, although the timings on a Wednesday morning required a trip across town to one of the suburban rail stations. We’d need to get there soon, or else wait half the day for the next available option.
I suggested splitting the cost of a taxi, and naturally so we walked instead; Don was grumpy, given the time-sensitive arrangements he’d made with Henrik, and the fact that we both were annoyed at the Lyon screw-up — and neither of us much liked using the telephone.
However it all worked out following an exculpatory forced march schlepping luggage through pristine Geneva, and in due time we met Henrik and arrived in Les Gets, a town that hosts a Museum of Mechanical Music; a festival it sponsored was underway, filling the streets with barrel organs and organ grinders, accordions, harmoniums, zithers and music boxes.
There is little more to say about the gorgeous French Alps in the summer of 1998. Our hosts were wonderful, the mountain weather sunny if unseasonably hot, and our daily hikes sublime, followed as they were by simple but hearty home cooked meals of salad, pasta and grilled meat accompanied by beer, wine and unfailingly excellent conversation.
In short, everything I loved about Europe, all at once.
Still, while funiculars rock, I can do without ski lifts and cable cars, which invariably encourage my inner acrophobic to self-medicate.
After three relaxing, recuperative days, we set off for London. Several of the Brits in Pamplona spoke lovingly about cask-conditioned ale, and I was eager to learn their language.
Next: 40 Years in Beer (Book II) Part 78: We just had to get to Merry Old England (1998).
Four years earlier in Pamplona:
40 Years in Beer (Book II), Part 55: Cerveza in the afternoon at Pamplona’s Fiesta de San Fermín
