I know all the coffee stops – East Montpelier, Plainfield, Marshfield, West Danville, and on into New Hampshire – and the price for a cup at each one.  If I’m diverting south to Bradford on Route 25, there are still more, but I always make it to the Waits River General Store just to have a quick chat with Bill MacDonald and urge the kids waiting for the bus there to stay in school.

There’s a strong ritualistic aspect to this exercise.  If I’ve left before breakfast, I know how far away I am from a McDonald’s – the other kind, not Bill’s – and plan to stop there for an egg, sausage, and cheese sandwich; a single sack of reconstituted home fries; and coffee.  Slip the credit card through the scanner, and out of there!  Times a-wastin’!  Back on the road again with the news or music du jour.  The now-sadly-defunct Back 40 String Band’s my favorite waker-upper.

Occasionally, in the unlikely event I’m not in a hurry, or even have some time to kill before meeting someone, I stop in for breakfast.  I have my newspaper with me in case there’s no one to talk to at a nearby table.  But there almost always is.  Early morning is Cave Time for guys in almost every village along the way.

There are usually two shifts of these informal fraternal societies.  The early shift gets there in the pickup trucks.  On cold mornings some of them leave their trucks running.  They generally get something to go, and then stand around on the front porch or parking lot in warm weather, or in cold weather, inside around the coffee dispensers.  They don’t stay long; gotta get to work!  You can hear their radios blasting in the cabs as they leave.

The second shift, an hour or so later, is composed of older guys as a rule, and as often as not they show up in the family car.  They have the look of retirement about them; but their habit of waking up early hasn’t left them.  So they congregate most often at a McDonald’s or a little local restaurant where they can sit down and talk for a while for the price of a cup of coffee and maybe a sweet roll.  They’re as hard to sneak up on as a flock of wild geese – somebody’s always got an eye peeled for anything interesting – and they’re easy to engage.  You can usually tell whether a mild insult is the way to begin; such as, “This all you do all day?” or “You guys waitin’ for the van to the Senior Center?  Just went by,” and you can be right at home in less than a minute.  But you won’t get your paper read.

Guys need cave time.  Always have needed it, since way back in...well, cave times.  They must; they’ve always found a way to get it.  They’re enjoying it at every McDonald’s or country store at which I stop – St. Johnsbury, Worcester, Littleton, Randolph, Lancaster, Gorham, or Rumford.  At some, the groups are quite large; at others, only two or three guys.  The universal default mode is comfort and unanimity.  We need a chance to make sure we’re still in at least near-accord with our affinity groups, to listen to the nuances of shared values in our stories, to swap reactions to the latest outrageous or hilarious news.  The solidarity of the group takes precedence over any heated differences.  Those occur in younger groups of men, where testosterone and competition still rage, or in pubs and bars, where alcohol sometimes stokes the flames.

I’ve enjoyed cave time for over fifty years in hunting camps, for 35 years during our annual bushwhack on skis in northern New Hampshire, around campfires at the end of a long day, on work crews during breaks for lunch.  There’s something infinitely soothing to a man’s ears and psyche in the rough rumble of other men’s voices.  The sound of an alto or soprano in the mix changes everything, and the comfort zone shrinks.  It’s not misogynistic to say so; it’s just a fact.

Surely the habit first developed around fires at least 40,000 years ago – ashes have been discovered in Neanderthal caves at least that old – when the men discussed the plan for the day’s activity or rehashed the events of a day of big-game hunting just finished.  Never mind that their language was perhaps less than rudimentary.  Language evolves to answer different needs.  That’s still the case.  You won’t hear the same sophistication at 6:00 a.m. in a Vermont feed store as you will in the English Department conference room at Dartmouth in mid-afternoon.  Each level suits the needs of its context.  You can imagine which, if given a choice, I prefer.

Our old hunting camp in the Adirondacks succumbed two years ago to heated differences between only two of its principals.  I’d been going there for half a century, and I miss it keenly.  No more slow hunting in the high peaks for deer that often appear to be half chamois.  But so it goes.  There are still a few caves around with some very nice guys tending the fires.