The Hotel: The Woodies

If you are new to The Hotel series, while each installment can be read as a standalone, there may be some value in having read the preceding entries.

To begin at the first installment, click here.
To go back to the installment prior to this one, click here.

I first encountered The Woodies in the breakfast area. I don’t remember the exact date or even the month at this point. It was some time ago.

I was sitting at the table I opt for with a ritualistic repetition. I call that it The Table of Great Perfection (TGP). I don’t even care that pedants will say “Ackkkkshually, something can be ‘great’ or ‘perfect’; but it can’t be ‘greatly perfect’.” Their thinking is bounded by their experience with lesser tables. They are to be excused for that.

If you drew a Venn diagram with three circles containing 1) a view to glance at but not be distracted by, 2) just the right amount of noise, and 3) just the right amount of motion, in the center of that diagram would be the Table of Great Perfection. And seated at it most mornings when I am at The Hotel, would be me.

My morning visits to the TGP generally follow a simple, reliable rhythm. First, I get coffee, then Dave, who oversees breakfast service, comes by and asks, “Can I set you up with anything?” to which I almost always reply with either “I’m good with coffee, thanks,” or “Can I have the yogurt thing?”

You will note, I made no mention of the bringing of a menu.

That is because – and I’m not trying to brag here - Dave and I have transcended that formality… and, yes, I am very much trying to brag here. Reaching the post-menu point in a dining relationship is an important milestone. Dave and I have reached it.

[If there is no Dave in your life, I wish you well in your search for one. Just know there is a Dave out there for you. And when you find him, he will bring you The Yogurt Thing.]

In full disclosure here, I may have sort of rushed Dave’s and my relationship along a bit to my own detriment. I ordered the same two things with such stultifying regularity, Dave eventually just assumed I’d order one of the two again and stopped bringing a menu. I don’t even know what else is on it. And having now transcended the bringing of it, I don’t want to sully things by asking to see it. Hey, if being limited to two choices is the price of being post-menu with Dave, it is a cost I will gladly pay.

Plus, The Yogurt Thing is quite good.

The only other thing I’ve ever ordered is The Hotel’s basic American breakfast of two eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns, and toast. I have ordered it maybe three times total due to a complicated internal algorithm of cost, an only middling appreciation of breakfast links, and an interest in convincing myself that I, at least occasionally, eat healthy.

The morning I encountered The Woodies happened to be one of the three times I ordered the American breakfast, and that is relevant to our story.

When The Woodies walked in, I immediately clocked them as having a distinctly ‘good ol’ boy’ air about them. The good-ol-boyest of the three looked over at my plate – now down to a couple of forkfuls of eggs and two-and-three-quarters of the aforementioned breakfast links - and said to the other two in a distinctly southern accent “Alright, it looks like they serve a real breakfast.” Apparently, the gentleman does not appreciate a good yogurt parfait. Duly noted. Hearty eaters, these fellows.

The three then took up a table across from mine. The good-old-boyest looked to be somewhere in his late 30s. The other two looked a little younger. Each had on a t-shirt with the logo of some small business - a builder or construction company or landscaper maybe - while the older one looked like he was on his way to a hunting trip: orange hat, camo t-shirt, and a pair of suspenders which clipped to worn pants and then arced slightly around a bit of a belly up over his shoulders.

The three of them ordered and ate quickly as if there was a site to get to and work to be done. The woodiest Woodie lingered behind and eventually got up to refill his coffee. With it now just the two of us and me situated at the TGP with its trademark proximity to the coffee urns, his trip for a refill all but obligated the two of us to exchange the rhetorical “Good mornings” and “How are ya’s” of glancing social proximity.

Being, as of the time of this story, only a person of amicable sociability at The Hotel rather than in my current station as documentarian of the place, I punctuated our rhetorical “Hey, how’s it goings” with a friendly “Where y’all in from?”

The woodiest replied “North Carolina” – which in no way added to my scant dossier insofar as he looked like his would be the first picture that would come up under a Google search for “People who look like they are from North Carolina.”

“Oh? Whereabouts?” I added. “I took a road trip through North Carolina a couple summers ago...”

He replied with what was either an area or a town and I will go to my grave not knowing which.

One thing I’ve come to learn about North Carolina as a state is that it apparently sees no particular value in naming conventions which readily distinguish one place from another. Whereas New York has Buffalo and Schenectady and Long Island, North Carolina has approximately 150 towns which all have ‘green’ or ‘pine’ in them. It has at least a hundred with ‘hill’ or ‘falls’ or ‘top’ in them. And it has a solid 300 which end in ‘-ville’.

Want to make someone think you have family in North Carolina? Just mash together some combo of those and you’ll land on either a place that exists or sounds like it could.

“You’re from North Carolina?”

“No, I just spent a lot of time at my aunt-and-uncle’s place up in Greenville Falls. You know it? It’s not too far from Hilltop… Out in Pine County.”

So, The Woodies were from North Carolina. I didn’t catch exactly where. Probably somewhere hilly and piney and green. Which is 2/3 of North Carolina.

The only thing I ascertained from our quick chat was that he and his colleagues had driven up for some kind of work and were going to be in town for a few days.

True to his word, by my next visit to The Hotel, they were gone… but then a couple weeks later they were back… and then gone again… and then a couple weeks later, they were back again… and this cycle went on for months. They’d show up, stay for 4 or 5 days, leave for a week or two, and then the cycle would repeat. In total, I reckon they must have stayed at The Hotel for a solid 2-3 months total in increments of only four or five days at a time.

I now know what they were up working on - and we will get into that some other time. You’ll be seeing the Woodies again.

For now, the synopsis is that they had an expertise which wasn’t readily available in the area. So, they were brought in to work in stretches and then they went back home to their families in between.

That summation is important because it serves as one more timber beam in the framing of this whole story:

Tomorrow marks the 247^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. When it was signed, London was a city of 700,000 and Detroit was an outpost of 700 – and it was considered part Quebec.

By 1950, London’s population had grown elevenfold while Detroit’s had grown twenty-three-hundred-fold.

There’s a reason why that is relevant to the story of The Hotel:

While technically, the country has existed for over 200 years, in reality, it spent the vast majority of that span coming to be.

And there is a reason why Detroit is a particularly relevant example to cite:

Less than a century ago, a single set of forces in the United States ushered in both a golden era in hotels and the meteoric rise of the automobile industry…

…and then the automobile brought that golden era of hotels crashing down.

The Hotel of my current affections is, in some ways, a throwback. It harkens back to a time before that crash. Come to understand how and you will understand this country and how it came to be this way in a whole new way.

The Woodies are part of that story.

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