Shamanic Convergence

By Dick Cantwell

Candles were burning in a circle. A half dozen or so of us sat around them on a crude plywood floor from which the carpet had been stripped, the texture of randomly patterned dried adhesive and the occasional raised nail head varying the splintered surface. A six-pack of empty Sierra Nevada bottles sat nearby, part of the contents of which had earlier been spat in my face by the Nigerian shaman, who was now whipping me across the back of my leather jacket with dried tobacco leaves. Not everyone had been so ill-used (or was it favored?). I had certainly been singled out. Was it because I was the brewer, or did he simply have it in for me? The leaves were gradually disintegrating as he flailed at my back; finally they flew into pieces. Taking up some of the candles, we all circumambulated the building in the rain as another authoritative participant, this one Native American, chanted. We went back inside, traversing each stair in the building and even going out onto the roof, from which a striking 360° view of downtown Seattle, Elliott Bay and the hills and neighborhoods to the east was displayed. Back inside now, for some singing, once again taken in hand by the Native man—“Cedar tree…” We were encouraged to act out the parts of animals in the forest.

What we were engaged in was a kind of blessing of the space into which we were in the process of putting a brewery and restaurant. The Nigerian shaman was a stand-in, actually, for a Native American man of power with whom one of my business partners had previously had spiritual dealings, and who would later perform his wedding ceremony, but who at the time was experiencing unspecified legal difficulties. I had met the intended shaman before, and while he had offered me something of a look of faraway scrutiny, he had seemed essentially good-humored, and hadn’t seemed to want to bust me down to private before building me up under his guidance. Or such was my interpretation of my situation as I submitted to the evening’s physical abuse. At any rate we were in the shaman’s hands.

As a home brewer I tried to think of everything. I set timers, ran tests, and kept track of everything that happened in the course of a brew. I alienated my brewing buddies by wincing whenever they touched anything, and alarmed myself by rinsing and sterilizing even things that didn’t matter, like the spoon I used to stir the kettle. I tried to maintain a word-for-word familiarity with everything I had ever read on whatever task I was undertaking, to the extent of having two or three books folded open to appropriate pages when first attempting ticklish things like enzymatic reduction or decoction. In those days it was Charlie Papazian, Greg Noonan and Dave Miller looking over my shoulder—wondering, no doubt, whether they didn’t have someplace they’d much rather be. It was a kind of invocation, an almost talismanic display of the effects of brewing scholarship; if at the time the DeClerck book had been in print it probably would have been on a special stand. But for all my genuflection and attention I was never so certain of the result that I didn’t each time say to no one particular, as I put a carboy off in a corner, something along the lines of “Well, I hope it turns out.”

So I was no stranger to humility where the processes of brewing were concerned, and acutely conscious of those who had gone before me, even if only by a matter of months. On my own I would probably not have enlisted the attentions of a holy man to feel right about the alignment of forces beyond my moment-to-moment control, but as it was of importance to my two prospective partners in the brewery-to-be, for me it was a gesture of faith in the legal bond we had earlier formalized in our partnership agreement to submit to whatever ritual our shamanic guide saw fit to perform. If that meant being beaten about the shoulders with tobacco and spat upon, I was faithfully on board. There would be time for analysis later.

We were a more spiritual outfit in those days, at least where our daily efforts were concerned. One of my partners amused the sub-contractors on more than one occasion by burning sage in the space, attempting to patch whatever holes in the aura there may have been. When a crow flew inside and battered itself to death against the glass between the brewery and the restaurant, he retrieved its body from the dumpster into which it had unceremoniously been tossed, and the three of us drove out of town along interstate 90 to a spot with access to a creek, where we set the body adrift, wrapped in a cloth of some significance. There were problems in those days with our kitchen manager, and when they were addressed we passed a stick to indicate whom among us respectfully and non-threateningly held the floor. The Nigerian made us a talisman of beads and wire and cowrie shells, and for a long time we moved it from the scene of one challenge to another, perhaps hanging from the manway of a fermenter or atop the hard drive of the computer designated the keeper of financial records. We still have it, but it’s been some time since it was called, super-heroically, to stop a locomotive or mutely arbitrate some ticklish bit of business-related diplomacy.

I don’t mean to sound like a skeptic. I can’t say myself whether I believe in any greater spirit swirling out there in the aether, and I’m even more uncertain as to whether such a theoretical force would bother to take any interest in what we mortals punily enact. I do believe, however, that a little humility and non-denominational genuflection is generally a good thing, especially as one or a group is embarking on a project involving one hell of a risk. Being a bit more specific in terms of address is not necessarily a bad thing, either, as long as there’s room at least for some interpretation. There. Now that we’ve established that we’re all non-gender-specific brothers, let’s move on.

The Nigerian shaman stayed in our orbit for some months after our opening, turning up periodically, now and then giving me that look. By this time the level of what I came to retrospectively term hostility had lessened. He even remarked once that as the brewer I was the holder of some power, a sort of workaday version, I suppose, of his own. Perhaps that was where the challenge had first originated. I was Kid Medicine Man, a sort of Teen Titan of fermentation, the wielder of some mystically-conferred zymurgical golden lariat, still however beholden to and in the thrall of those who truly apprehend and ply the sacred pathways. Eventually he left the area with his family to return to Nigeria, and as a minute parting gift I fashioned a talisman for him, made of the colored string and orange rubber rings used to close the inner sacks of Crisp specialty malts, some other things I can’t now recall, and a New York City subway token, for the journey. See? I was a bit more spiritual then, too, perhaps. Or maybe I just wanted to keep him guessing. Maybe it’s just a shaman thing.