323. The Darwin Evolutions
To begin in medias res, it’s all Marc Dominguez’s fault. If he hadn’t said he had not one but two B42 / Darwin Premiers and he was bringing them to the Texas Pipe Show last October, then you wouldn't be staring at your screen wondering whether or not to monkey around with this or skip on to something else. When I met him,Mark quite uncontrite about the whole thing, telling me I could have either one, $150. My choice. He would keep the other. What could I do? What would you have done? It was merely a matter, as Lord Nelson told Lucky Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander, of choosing the lesser of two weevils. I also blame K&P for issuing the B42 in the Christmas 2022 copper spigot. It was a work of high art, and without it, I wouldn’t have had the original release of the Darwin on my mind when Marc mentioned his pipes. As Truett Smith, SPC’s Merchandizing Manager, recalls, “In 2009, Peterson released the Darwin B42 shape in commemoration of the sesquicentennial of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The English naturalist’s seminal work was published in 1859, just 16 years before another Charles would join Fredrick Kapp in founding the longest-standing pipe manufacturer in the world: Kapp & Peterson.” Bringing home Marc’s B42 (HM “A” for 2011), I was amazed to see it had a fishtail mouthpiece with an aluminum tenon extension. Where was I during the pipe show? Somewhere else, obviously. The fishtail, of course, is all the proof we ever need that the Evil Empire can penetrate even the hallowed halls of the Kapp & Peterson factory floor from time to time: I shipped the pipe overseas to the Pete Geek axis mundi where it came under the skilled hands of Austin Quinlan, one of the great craftsmen in the factory. Here it is after his P-Lip tune-up: B42 Premier, HM 2011 While I was waiting (far too impatiently) for the return of the Premier, a slightly weather-worn Darwin De Luxe (HM “G” for 2017) came up on eBay, and without quite knowing what my hands were doing, found I’d ordered it as a make-do kind of pipe while awaiting the Premier: The DeLuxe Natural B42, HM 2017, after a bit of a clean up At this point I should confess these are not the first B42s to grace my rotation. In point of fact, these are Nos. 4 and 5. (We’re getting close to the doleful part of this memoir and you may want to have a tissue close at hand for what follows.) My wife and I made our first Peterson Pilgrimage in 2009, the year the Darwin was released. I have no recollection of having seen it in Grafton Street or at the factory or even thought about it. When it did finally register on Irwin’s fuzzy gray cells, I was a bit flummoxed, or to use the psychiatric term from the Diagnostic and Statistical…