Lonesome Dove and a Dr Pepper

two great tastes that taste great together

On my block this summer, I came across some books spread out for a sidewalk giveaway, among them a weathered copy of Lonesome Dove. It was worn beyond the point of being accepted by any good used bookstore—a mass-market paperback that looked as if a past owner took its portability as a statement of purpose and carried it absolutely everywhere. This was clearly a book that someone had eaten a few meals with. I’d dismissed years of recommendations to read Lonesome Dove, picking it up in bookstores only to put it down, unwilling to commit to a 900-page Western. But for whatever reason, this battered copy on my street got me, and I brought it home.

I did not really consider reading it for months. And then I did, and like seemingly every other person who has come around to it recently, I suddenly did not want to shut up about Lonesome Dove. God. What a book! There is nothing I can say about it here that has not already been said many times over and far more eloquently. But what I will say is that it gave me a kind of reading experience that I had not had since I was a kid.

That meant reading as soon as I woke up in the morning and reading until I fell asleep that night. I’d find myself thinking about it during the day—annoyed to be away from the book for the purposes of working and socializing and otherwise living. I absolutely had to finish it and was a little scared of what I might find when I did: I kept forcing myself to go slower, reading sentences over and over to appropriately savor them, fighting myself for more time with the characters. Generally, I don’t love mass-market paperbacks for books longer than a few hundred pages; I appreciate a copy that feels a little more proportionate. But the format seemed essential here. Like the person who had it before me, who had so clearly loved it and put it on the sidewalk because he wanted someone else to find it and love it, too, I ended up carrying it with me everywhere. There simply did not feel like any other possibility here.

Bookmark is a scrap of paper I found tucked inside

For two and a half weeks, I did everything with Lonesome Dove. I read it with coffee and water and bourbon and tea and, of course, finally something relevant for the purposes of this newsletter, I read it with soda. And the day after I finished the book, maybe still thinking of Texas, I picked up a Dr Pepper.

This has always been a treat soda for me. I drink just a few per year, but every one feels critical, somehow. When I want a Dr Pepper, however sparingly that might be, I want only a Dr Pepper. I’ve always had a soft spot for its origin story: “He experimented with different flavors and ingredients at odd times,” an early company executive wrote of Charles Alderton inventing the soda as a Waco pharmacist at the Old Corner Drug Store in 1885. Which, of course, is more or less how every soda was invented. The flavor experimentation just went a little further here.

Alderton was more ambitious in this department than other pharmacists of his era, or maybe just more reckless, and he ended up with something that was not a cola or a root beer or a fruit soda or anything recognizable at all, really. How do you describe the taste of Dr Pepper? I can throw out some ideas, I guess, but I know they would only go so far. I can tell you that Alderton’s blend of 23 flavors supposedly includes sarsaparilla, caramel, ginger, and cherry, but that’s not how the final product tastes. If other sodas might evoke a pharmacist carefully measuring out select ingredients, one at a time, Dr Pepper calls to mind someone mashing all the buttons on a fountain at once. But somehow, unbelievably, in a good way.

The Waco that Alderton called home in 1885 was not so far off from parts of Texas that Lonesome Dove’s characters would have passed through in the 1870s. The settings match up well enough: A history of the drink titled The Legend of Dr Pepper / SevenUp, by Jeffrey L. Rondengen, sprinkles its first two chapters with details of gunfights and local prostitution activity. It was very much a soda of the dying Old West. Sipping it now, still wrapped up in the characters of the book that had accompanied me for all those other drinks of the last few weeks, I found myself wondering if Augustus McCrae could have ever tried a Dr Pepper. Alas: There’s just enough of a timeline gap for that to be impossible. Which is a shame, because he would have loved it, I think, but what a gift to have a character that you want to share a soda with.