Justin Time for Dinner

Early in the summer of 2009, The Riverside hosted the inaugural Hot Sulphur Springs Chamber of Commerce Meet & Greet. In a town of 400 people, obviously there were very few businesses, and perhaps the need even questionable for a Chamber of Commerce – two motels on Highway 40, the hot springs resort, two small diners (The Glory Hole and The Depot), the seasonally-open Dairy Dine, The Barking Dog Pub, a gas station/convenience store, a liquor store/video rental/fishing tackle/Laundromat, a mortuary and The Historic Riverside Hotel, Restaurant & Bar. Hot Sulphur Springs is also the county seat for the county of Grand, ergo; you had the courthouse, drivers’ license bureau, County Treasurer, Appraisers office, Building Department and the crown jewel of the public trust– the Grand County Jail, otherwise known as the DUI Hilton.

None of the aforementioned businesses were represented at the HSS Chamber Meet & Greet, with the obvious exception of yours’ truly. In place of the real brick and mortar town businesses were friends and neighbors who had small businesses on the side – Amway, Avon, Pampered Chef and Aveda sellers, four certified ‘life coaches’ and an income tax service, to name but a few. Mostly, it was a good excuse to get together and eat appetizers that we had prepared and belly up to the usually ‘not open to the locals’ bar at The Riverside; the appetizers were free, but the booze wasn’t.

One interesting thing about the get together that I noticed immediately – I’d never before seen any of these people frequent The Riverside as paying customers. A few I’d recognized from seeing them at the post office – located across the street from the hotel – but otherwise none of them had dined with us in our restaurant; you know, that room overlooking the river where we were trying to earn our living. This speaks to one of my major miscalculations when I was projecting revenue for our business venture; I’d made the incorrect assumption that locals would dine in our restaurant – nada, it didn’t happen.

One of the strangers that I met that evening was a tall, pleasant young man named Justin Tiem (pronounced ‘Time’). That’s right. Twenty-five years ago Mr. & Mrs. Tiem had a baby boy, and decided to make him the poster child for peer abuse, sending him out into the cruel world to be the eternal butt of one bad joke after the next. Really, what were they thinking? Justin was pretty good natured about it, even using the misspelling in the title of his business: his business card read:

JUST-IN TIME WOOD SERVICE, Justin Tiem, Owner. His mission statement, or motto, was “I’ll Put the Wood Wherever You Like!”

There was also a man who lived in our town with parents that named him Dick Johnson. Those long Grand County winters can have a crooked effect on the minds of its citizens.

In the land of eternal winter, the need for a steady source of firewood was profound. This profound need was ratcheted way up at The Riverside, as the two main rooms in the hotel had no source of heat – gas, electric, forced air or otherwise – other than two small fireplaces with non-functional heat-o-laters (blowers to disperse the heat). It wasn’t unusual to get up first thing of a frigid morning and find the inside temperature of the lobby to be hovering in the high 30’s. On killer cold nights I might leave an electric heater blowing, always weighing the notion of frozen pipes vs. the potential fire hazard; but then, I had insurance.

More often than not, the late nighters at the hotel would have expended all of the wood that was brought in throughout the day and night – that would generally be the reason people actually went to bed; no firewood, getting damn cold in here and way too damn cold to go outside and get anymore wood. Oh, and we’re out of beer. Most all of my days started with a trip through the bar, and out the backdoor to the woodshed – in a biting, dry cold that stung any exposed skin or appendage with the fury of a hundred angry wasps. It was the norm for early morning first light temperatures, December through February, on clear mornings to average -20oF.

The wood shed was roughly 10’wide and 14’ long with 7’ of clear headspace – that’s roughly 1000 cubic feet, which will house about 9 cords of wood. We filled that space to the brim both winters we owned The Riverside, with an additional cord or two stacked outside under a tarp. We used the outside wood first as the eventual snowfalls would make anything outside positively unattainable without the aid of a backhoe – I didn’t have one of those. All the wood stacked to the gills of that shed in late October was a little like a big paycheck – sitting full in the bank on day one, it seemed like a lot and looked like it was more than you could spend; come mid February, that wood, like the paycheck, dwindled down to pennies in your account, and you wondered how you were going to get to the next payday (spring and warm weather, in our case) intact.

Here’s one other little thing about that wood. It wasn’t the oak and hickory hardwoods of my Midwestern life experience; the kind that was a dense, heavy, slow-burning wood, generating hotter heat and prolific glowing coals. It was pine – dead pine, from the dead pine trees that dominated the Grand County landscape, courtesy of the dreaded pine beetle. Vast expanses of forests that were for centuries Christmas green from the curtain of a million Evergreens, Blue Spruces and Ponderosa, Pinion and Lodgepole Pines, were now dominated by the deathly ashen brown pallor of these heretofore regal Emerald titans.

There is good and bad associated with dead pine wood. The good is that it’s relatively easy to split, and Chef Danny, one of his buddies and I, chain-sawed into 18” lengths and split every stick of that firewood with a splitting maul – thousands of pieces of firewood, cut, split and stacked. That would have been an impossible feat for this fat old man were we dealing with hardwood and next to impossible for the youngsters. The bad news is that the easy to cut and split dead pine wood burned faster than a gasoline-soaked firecracker fuse. You would stoke a hot fire with three or four stout logs, and within 15 minutes, it would be as if you’d stoked the fire with heavy air – where in the hell did it go? On an average night, with guests in the hotel and hanging around the lobby, you could easily burn 40-50 logs in a 5 hour period. On a night when there weren’t guests in the hotel, in an attempt to conserve our wood resources, we kept the fire low, dressed in our warmest sweaters and froze our asses off. The others at the hotel cursed me on those nights, low and under their frigid, visible breath, as I was the keeper of the wood.

But I digress….back to our friend Justin.

To be continued......