Mint Juleps and the Fates of Continents

“What is this, mint?” I asked as I picked a green sprig from the glass full of them sitting on the bar.

“Feel the stem,” Rebekah said, “if it’s square, you know it’s in the mint family.”

“That’s cool; I didn’t know that.”  I felt the stem – perfectly square.  “Yep, mint.   I wonder if they can make a mint julep.”

“That just means it’s in the mint family,” she reminded me.  “It could be mint, spearmint, any of those.”

“I see,” I said.  I caught the bartender’s eye.  “Can yall make a mint julep?” I asked her.

“Sure can,” she said.  “You want one?”

I told her I did, and Rebekah and I returned to talking about the book she was reading, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.  I’d read the first part of the book before I left it in a Waffle House one day, and I still remembered some of it.  As the title suggested, the book surveyed modern anthropological findings about pre-Columbian Native American culture.  It told of giant American cities: Tenochtitlan, it said, had running water and was larger than any contemporary European city; Machu Picchu was a thickly-populated and well-constructed city perched in a place that complex societal organization to build; Cahokia was the thriving hub of a continental trade network.

“If Columbus had never reached the Americas,” Rebekah asked, “do you think the Americas would have caught up?  Would they have become as developed as Europe?”

I told her I didn’t think so.  Technological development in the Americas faced some hurdles that development in Europe did not.  The availability of draft animals, for instance.  I paused to watch the bartender, who was pouring Jim Beam into a blender.  She reached for a handful of mint-family sprigs and dumped them in.  That wasn’t right – a blender can be involved in some phases of mint julep production, such as shredding the ice, but the whole concoction shouldn’t be just dumped in there.  The aesthetic signature of a mint julep is an intact sprig of mint, partially submerged but with some leaves waving languidly above the rim.  The glass wouldn’t fit in on the porch without them.

“That may be your drink right there,” Rebekah said.

And you don’t use just any bourbon for a mint julep.  Maker’s Mark is ideal, and although lesser bourbons are acceptable, Jim Beam was stretching it.  I’ve drunk mint julep at the Kentucky Derby, and my mother has made some mint juleps that could rival any mixed drink ever made, so I considered myself an authority on the subject.  At least compared to Montanans.  The bartender pressed a button and the blender started whining.

“Yeah, I think it might be,” I said.

At the time of the development of agriculture, there were only fourteen large mammals in the world suitable for domestication.  To be a candidate for domestication, a species had to satisfy each of several characteristics: the species had to be herd-oriented, non-aggressive, capable of reproducing in captivity, able to digest readily available foods, able to grow and reach maturity in a few years, and calm enough to live in an enclosure without panicking.  This idea came from Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.  Eurasia was host to several of these large mammals, including the water buffalo, certain species of camel, cattle and horses.  The Americas had but two: the llama and the reindeer.  Neither could help the North American Indians, since the llama was native to South America and didn’t reach North America until modern times, and the reindeer was restricted to arctic regions.  The American bison wasn’t amenable to domestication, as evinced by the failure of ranchers – modern or prehistoric – to domesticate it in the way that cattle or horses have been domesticated.  Try to envision, for instance, someone riding a bison or hitching it to a plow.  Because to be domesticable, an animal had to meet all of the several criteria.  Diamond had used some fictional novel to illustrate that principle; I couldn’t remember which.  But it was something to the effect that every functional family is dully identical, while every dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own unique way.  All the large mammals of North America, Diamond analogized, were dysfunctional for domestication in their own ways.

“Anna Karenina,” Rebekah said.

“Yeah!” I said.  “How did you say that second word again?”

She said it, and sounded like a word that would be hard to say with a southern accent.  The waitress brought a white slushy concoction with green flakes and set it in front of me.  I decided not to try and repeat “Karenina,” so I put the glass to my mouth instead.

Rebekah wasn’t too sure about my theory that pre-Columbian American cultures would not had developed in the way that European cultures did if left alone for a few centuries more.  She’s a graduate student at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota, and she teaches college classes on an Indian reservation around there.  Really likes her job, and really likes her students.  She feels like she’s made a connection to Native American culture since she started teaching there, and I guess she has.  Earlier she’d described, with some fascination, the ritual dances that some Native Americans still do.  She’d also said that many of her students lacked the advantages of typical college students – they were working their way through school, or had to take night classes, or struggled to find daycare for kids.  They didn't have, in other words, the advantages that I'd had.  And yet, Rebekah had told me, the tribe was pushing education, and enrollment was rising.  I remembered with a flash of pride that I was one-sixty-fourth Cherokee.  Or maybe it was one-one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth, I couldn’t remember.

There were some pretty good reasons to think I might be wrong about my theory that North American cultures, if left untouched, would not have advanced to European technological levels.  One of Europe’s developmental advantages was that domesticated species and technological advancements from Asia could travel to Europe relatively easily, since they could cross Eurasia at a constant latitude and thereby avoid major climatic stresses en route.  North America didn’t have that advantage: South American domesticates and technology had to pass through the Central American jungle – murderous mosquitoes, malaria, yellow fever, and all – before reaching North America.  In consequence, native North American cultures missed out on some pretty cool stuff.  The llama, for instance, never reached North America, and neither did the systems of writing developed by some South American cultures.  But what if Europeans had not ventured across the Atlantic in 1492, and had instead waited until 1992?  Surely llamas, writing, and other cultural innovations would have crossed between the Americas somehow, either overland or by sea.  That could have changed the game.

My mint slushy tasted good but, I reflected, that was more likely attributable to my notoriously easy-to-please palate than the quality of the beverage.  I slurped some of it.  You wouldn’t serve it at the Derby, but it still tasted like mint and whiskey – a good combination.  I was about to voice disagreement with Rebekah, just for the sake of argument, when she spoke up.

“Jeb,” she said, “you’ve got a mint leaf stuck to your lip.”

I wiped it with a forearm, grinned, and decided not to be so contrary.