Private Auction - My Morta
To go directly to the pipe's "Specs" page, click HERE
First, the Story -
Shortly after Emily and I moved from North Carolina to Brittany in 2002, I was faced with a variety of new challenges apart from the new language and culture. Our workshop was set up for making pipes in totally different methods than I used, and we had this bizarre new material, morta, to work with. I had already made some morta pipes but since they were about to become part of our major production, I needed to know a LOT more about the material. I made several pipes for myself as testers, for the sole purpose of being abused, over-smoked, and generally tested to find the behavior and secrets of the material. Among these pipes was this piece. It was a stunning block of morta with some of the most extraordinary and tight ring grain I have seen, but in shaping it showed a flaw - a thin fissure along the top of the shank. Since the pipe could not be stamped or sold, I opted to keep it for myself and test another idea with it, that of using a filler material with morta. Fills in briar are appalling things, but I was able to mix a sort of mortar made from ground morta dust in binder, which was the color of the morta itself and strong as cement. It also offered the advantage of never discoloring, since morta doesn't darken or change color with smoking and neither would the morta cement, so it was a much more tolerable fill than normal. Over the next two and a half years I smoked the pipe at least once every day, sometimes more, purposefully smoking it hot, changing tobaccos constantly, and generally punishing it to find the limits of both the material and my repair. Through all of this, it smoked excellently and never went sour (This was how I first discovered that morta could be smoked repeatedly without the soggy-pipe effect of briar) and became a favorite companion. We faced some very difficult times in our first years of moving here and this pipe was with me through it all, becoming a sentimental favorite in the process. For nearly three years I have been rarely seen without this pipe!
I was pleased that my morta cement held up through all of this. In the course of events, this pipe became something of a celebrity and appeared in both the summer 2004 issue of P&T magazine - pictured below:
and also José Lopez's excellent book "Cachimbos", shown here:
Through all of this, the pipe virtually never left my side, despite numerous inquiries to buy it from various collectors who saw it in the pictures. I chose not to sell it for two reasons - I wasn't fully satisfied that my repair would hold yet, and the pipe had too much sentimental value. After smoking it regularly for nearly three years, I finally became content that the repair was permanent despite my best efforts to dislodge it, and I planned to send it as a free surprise gift to a collector friend who we owe a great deal to for both financial and sanity assistance during our first difficult years in France.
Now, the kicker - THE morning that I planned to pack the pipe for shipping, I was cleaning it and noticed that, after three years of hard abuse, the morta repair had suddenly opened again! Rationally, I believe that this was probably caused by being left in the unheated workshop overnight, when the temperature dropped to 20 degrees F, but! This was obviously a sign from above, so I emailed the fellow in question asking his opinion of what to do with the thing, and he stressed that I should offer it for sale. By coincidence, we have been trying hard for some time to set aside enough extra cash to afford a small satellite dish so we can receive BBC, and finally be able to see news and a little basic TV in English (yes, I know it sounds silly to those accustomed to having 500 channels to pick from, but when you've gone three years without being able to hear your native language on radio or broadcast, just being able to understand the news becomes a sort of holy grail...). My hope is that this pipe might sell for enough to allow us to buy a little dish and have at least a basic link to a familiar culture again. If it will, I'll be happy - if not, I will still be happy since I can easily fix the fill again and smoke the pipe contentedly for many years to come. For what it's worth, it would be very difficult to find a more famed and "unattainable" pipe of mine other than perhaps the morta Bettafish (on the opening morta page, my first morta and still NFS) and my first Minaria-grade Talbert Briar (on display in our shop). It's weird the factors that make pipes desirable, sometimes...
To see the pipe and its specs, click HERE
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