The Magic of Pipe Smoking and a Thick Southern Drawl

You should listen to this man talk a few minutes. Quintessentially Southern. Historian. Contemplative. Free.

Harrelson certainly looks and sounds every bit the Southern historian he is in real life. Photo credit: Dr. Alan Harrelson.

You might ask why it took an expert in “Southern agrarianism” to make me evaluate my appreciation for slow, “leisure” time. You could say I had plenty of stimuli prior to that interview; that I had plenty of reasons to take a step back and consider whether I’d slid down the slippery slope of ambition and productivity; or that I could merely prove to myself that I needed to re-orient my thinking, after looking back the last few weeks at all the things I felt compelled to do that I didn’t want to be doing. But no, of course, I didn’t. And haven’t. Not with any sincerity or seriousness.

Then I listened to Dr. Alan Harrelson teach the world about pipe smoking—yes, with tobacco—and bourbon and our country’s lesser-known but pivotal history. Smoking a pipe, for Harrelson and thousands who follow The Pipe Cottage, is undertaken deliberately to slow everything down. Unlike cigarettes, first manufactured in the early 20th century for an increasingly industrialized society trying to get a quick fix from the nicotine, cigars and pipes are smoked without inhaling (inhalation is what feeds the addicted receptors in the body). This already presents the hobby as different—you’re smoking for taste and feeling, not to ingest a chemical or self-stimulate. On top of that, smoking a pipe in particular requires patience and allows no shortcuts, no matter (it seems) the kind of pipe and tobacco combination you choose. The tobacco is lose and requires loading and tamping of the “bowl” by hand, and by design you cannot simply suck out all the smoke in a couple minutes…nor can you talk a bunch while smoking one, turns out. According to Harrelson, whose personal collection exceeds 200 pipes, smoking a pipe engenders long periods of silence—for contemplation, relaxation, and reset. And perhaps as a bonus, to force your removal from an otherwise high-pressure pattern of self-destruction.