Hitchhikers, Beers, and Burials
By Ian Guevara
It all started with a hitchhiker. My love of beer, breweries, and adventure. A daring decision or a simple act of kindness, either way, it was a hitchhiker that sparked this passion. The summer of 2017 is the beginning of this adventure, one that has brought me a mixture of joy and catharsis.
2017 was a particularly hard year. My grandfather, the man who raised me and taught me life’s most valuable lessons, lost his battle with time. I thought he was going to outlive me, fueled by his love of busting my balls. But life often reminds us that we have to make sure to value that time we have with each other.
Mr. Groome (yeah I called him that haha) opened up my passion for the outdoors as a scout leader in my boy scout troop. Almost every summer of my formative years was spent swashbuckling through the Appalachians of North Carolina backpacking, camping, and rafting. I loved it so much that as I neared adulthood my falls, winters, and springs were filled with fever dreams of green canopies, ice cold creeks, and the distinct clambering of pots secured by bungie cords to external frame backpacks.
Mr. Groome passed away in January of 2017. It's hard to witness your hero struggle for two years, to watch that slow march toward the inevitable. You convince yourself that they’ll recover so you can have just one more summer in the woods. You pray that just one more time you can catch a whiff of a Havana Tampa cigar while trying to find the right spot for your tent. You hope to hear one last shot across your bow to cut your ego. But these are all fantasies, delusions that you have to reconcile to accept your hero’s demise.
That summer the boy scout troop decided to hike the fabled 60 mile trek that Mr. Groome had planned out and perfected for a better part of 40 years. He wrote a 200 page unpublished guide to this trip in 1990. I found it when cleaning out his garage and couldn’t help but giggle at his incredibly dry writing. The thought of finding it, reading it, then filling it with red marks just to push his buttons tickled me.
With the troop heading to North Carolina, I decided to tag along as its resupply coordinator, a role carefully crafted by Mr. Groome to maximize his two favorite things: helping scouts and relaxing in the woods. Most importantly, it served as an opportunity to climb Wesser Bald and spread a portion of his ashes across the scenery that served as a backdrop to our relationship.
Assisting me in resupplying the troop was my close friend Louis who was also a former member of the troop and whose life was impacted by Mr. Groome as well. Coincidentally, this trip also opened my life to hammock camping, but that’s a story for another time.
One afternoon after checking on the troop at one of the resupply checkpoints, Louis and I decided to climb Albert Mountain. Mr. Groome loved to meet the troop there. He would climb the shorter and easier side, set up his folding chair, light a cigar and wait for us as we trudged through one of the tougher sections of the trek. This move was legendary. I remember many times pushing through exhaustion only to catch the smell of a cigar, turn the corner of the trail and find Mr. Groome and Mr. Benny ready to shoot from the hip with a quip about how bad we smell or how long we were taking.
View from the Albert Mountain lookout tower.
Louis and I climbed the shorter and easier section reminiscing about these same stories. It's interesting how talking about a loved one like that seems surreal. It felt apropos that while we climbed through the clouds my mindset settled in the clouds as well. By the time we made it to the top I was feeling depressed. For a slight second I half expected to see Mr. Groome sitting there telling us that we have lead in our shoes. Instead we met a lone hiker named Andrew.
Andrew did not look ready for the trail. He was wearing jeans, a torn white tee, and what looked like a pair of Timberland boots not suitable for backpacking. He claimed that he had hiked near 100 miles in four days and was looking to make it to Fontana Dam, another 70 or so miles, in three days. He wasn't going to make it.
We shared a couple of American Spirits with him and he realized that if he continued his trek, his body would not forgive him. So he asked for a ride into town. The warnings of talking to and picking up strangers flooded my mind, what am I eight? Louis and I did have to meet up with the troop again to drop off water, but there was a creek by that shelter and they had water filters. Furthermore, I felt like this would be something Mr. Groome would do, help someone when they needed it, do a good turn and all.
Louis and I agreed to take Andrew, our weary traveler, into town. As we neared Franklin, Andrew asked that we stop by his work. We agreed and followed his directions. We turned the corner and there it was: The Lazy Hiker Brewery. It was serendipitous. To boot, Andrew was one of the brewers! He took us on a tour of the brewery, the vats, the smells, the kegs, the cans, everything. And there it hit me. Like a bolt of lightning to the brain. Like hearing “Dark Side of the Moon” for the very first time. I fell in love with breweries.
At first my palate was simply limited to cheap beer and the limited varieties of the single local brewery that existed in the New Orleans area at the time. These beers were not PBR or Banquet Beer. They were different, beyond anything I had ever tasted before. What is a Gose? What is a Saison? What is a Sour? A Kolchs? A Brown Ale? You know that scene in The Fellowship of the Ring when Merry and Pippen discover the beer comes in pints? That was my reaction to the beers.
The rainbow of colors fascinated me. Wait, you mean that beer isn’t relegated to gold or the brown of a Guinness? It comes in red, orange, light brown, dark gold? It has bitterness, sweetness, saltiness, sourness, other nesses? Pandora’s box was open and there was no going back. I had become Sisyphus, rolling that boulder up the hill, trying to taste every beer created, only for new combinations and new ideas to start my journey all over again.
In the five years since, I have made my way back to Western North Carolina, exploring its small towns, and enjoying its many breweries. And thankfully within those same five years, the New Orleans area has exploded with a plethora of breweries, many of which I’ve yet to explore. So now I begin a journey. One born out of my grandfather’s sense of adventure and his reminder to help others in need by giving a hitchhiker a ride home.
So join me on this adventure as I travel to different places, close to and far from home, finding different breweries, drinking their beers, and who knows what other side quests that may pop up along the way.
Mr. Groome and Ian
