A Man Crushed to Death by Grapes

During one of perhaps three (relatively short-lived) sober bounces during his adult life, my father expressed to me his dismay that some people suggested he might be an alcoholic.  “How can I be an alcoholic?” He asked somewhat incredulously.  “I only drink beer.”

Obviously, he did not want me to answer that.  In my father’s mind, alcoholics drank whiskey directly from up-righted bottles.  Real drunks smashed wine bottles against alleyway bricks.  They were not successful contractors.  They did not live alongside beautiful rivers in Western Montana.

I thought about that conversation with my father as I read a Huffington Post article about a man in central Spain crushed to death by grapes last week during the annual harvest in the wine producing region of Castilla-La Mancha.  The man apparently fell into a grape reception bay at a winery just as a truck unloaded over five tons of grapes in the same receptor.

A weird and somewhat horrific end for that poor man.

Thing is, my father was similarly crushed by grapes—at least by beer hops—but one at a time.  The beer killed my father little by little—drunken tantrum by drunken tantrum.  Like a frog in water slowly coming to a boil, he did not recognize his own demise. 

--Mitchell Hegman