Most of you are most likely familiar with the “Running of the Bulls” each summer in Pamplona, Spain, where tens of thousands of people pack the city for an eating, drinking, and dancing spectacle.  The highlight of this festival of San Fermín is when mostly men dressed in white clothes and red kerchiefs and sashes run the slippery cobblestone streets alongside and in front of a pack of ornery bulls.  It’s a tradition dating from the 14^th Century and made famous by Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 novel: The Sun Also Rises.

I had the opportunity recently to experience the scene myself.  No, I didn’t make a pilgrimage to Iberia; I merely pedaled to Dewey Beach.

Let me explain…

It all started because I’ve been re-reading Hemingway lately.  Between you and me, I’ve always found his stories boring.  Yet there’s this little voice in my head that keeps telling me I should like a writer who spent a lot of his time in bars and cafes and roaming the world with artists and bon vivants.

Hemingway once wrote that we all ought to make sacrifices for literature.  He went to England.  I decided to go to Dewey Beach.  Not to ogle half naked drunk boys, mind you, but for literature.  I was going to run with the bulls.  Then maybe I’d better appreciate “Papa Hemingway.”

The Running of the Bulls in Dewey Beach began sixteen years ago as a group house joke born of too much beer one night at The Starboard bar.  That first year, thirty-five people at a paella and red wine party chased two guys in a bull costume.  Today it’s a town tradition and thousands pack the Starboard and the surrounding bars for the July event.

Some of the revelers emulate true Pamplonian style and wear white pants, white shirts, and a red kerchief (properly called a pañuelo) tied around the neck. For the rest of the crowd, anything goes: red foam bull horns, Mexican sombreros, bull-fighting gear, Chicago Bulls t-shirts, flamenco outfits, and even super hero costumes.  I felt downright dowdy in gray shorts and blue seersucker shirt.

No Spanish inspired event is complete without a couple of cabezudos (big heads). These large paper mache figures generally portray royal figures or archetypes of a particular town.   Instead of making their own Dewey bimbo and bro big heads, The Starboard brought over a couple of the Washington Nationals cabezuos.  Yes, Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln joined an Elvis impersonator and a band to help whip the crown into a frenzy.  Not that they needed help.  A lot of people had started drinking at nine in the morning.

By the time I arrived at 11:30 am, the line to get into The Starboard was over a block long and snaking down New Orleans Street.  Guys in line were guzzling champagne and shot gunning beers in broad daylight.  Girls were flashing their boobs.  I saw my first vomiting at noon.

It wasn’t just a twenty-something crowd. Across the highway, an older crowd gathered to drink Bloody Marys and beers and watch the antics.  Their eyes brimmed with nostalgia.

Yep, the running is really about drinking, and it continued nonstop until 2pm when the cops halted traffic on Route One and permit the drunks to stampede across the highway and then down the beach a few blocks before heading back across Route One and on to The Starboard.

The grand finale occurs when the runners return to The Starboard for the bullfight, a mock battle between bull and matador performed to the chants of Olé from the crowd.  It doesn’t matter who wins, because as soon as either bull or matador is slain, everyone begins drinking again, which continues throughout the afternoon.

The Washington Post calls it a Mid-Atlantic Mardi Gras.

In case you’re wondering, I did not run with the bulls.  After a couple of Orange Crush cocktails, I was a tad too inebriated and too smart to deal with the hundred-degree heat. I watched, which is what Hemingway most likely did in Pamplona.  According to his grandson, Papa never ran with the bulls.  Not because he was afraid, but because he had shrapnel in his legs from the war which made running difficult.

Pedaling home, I reflect upon the hetero-spectacle I’d just witnessed and it begins to dawn on me why I never clicked with Papa Hemingway.  Here was a man who felt action was more important than reflection and that adjectives were for sissies. His writing feels hard-boiled, whereas I prefer something poached.

Hemingway, I realize, is a tad too straight and too lacking in panache for my taste, sort of like Dewey’s Running of the Bulls.

Link to Coastal Connection where host Brian Russo interviews yours truly about The Discreet Charms of a Bourgeois Beach Town.

With open mouths, hanging tongues, and toothy grins, the wooden tikis leer at me every time I drive past them.  Some of you have likely been on the receiving end of their sly glances too, and like me have probably wondered who is the artisan behind these mysterious gods on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere on Route One just south of Milford and north of Broadkill Beach?

When I had the opportunity recently to get better acquainted with this little bit of roadside Polynesia as the sidekick to a wild raven-haired friend of mine named Susan Elnicki Wade, I gladly gave up my Sunday afternoon on Poodle Beach to go along for the ride.  Susan, you see, is obsessed right now with tiki.  Major obsessed. She and her husband recently wrote a guide to crab decks and tiki bars of the Chesapeake Bay. So when I told her someone named “Tiki Murph” was selling tikis, tiki huts, and tiki bars over here on Route One in Sussex County, she got here as fast as she could.

During our drive north we sipped on one of those pre-mixed Malibu rum juice bags that she and her “bad mommy” friends favor on road trips and Susan filled me in on tiki culture, which began as a theme and grew into a fad.  It all started in the 1930s when a man named Don Beach opened a Polynesian themed restaurant in Hollywood, California. Trader Vic’s, a chain of South Pacific-inspired restaurants with its signature Mai Tai cocktail, soon followed, as did movies, including the 1937 Bing Crosby movie, Waikiki Wedding. Musicians began integrating Polynesian and Latin rhythms into their jazz.

The big boom, however, came after World War II when servicemen returned home with snapshots and tales of their experiences throughout the South Pacific, including James Michener who won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories, Tales of the South Pacific, which was the basis for the movie South Pacific.  All these influences romanticized the Polynesian culture and by the time Hawaii became an official state in 1959 it seemed like all of America was embracing the tiki culture.

By the late 60s, however, Polynesian Pop started to decline.  American kids turned their focus to Vietnam and began rejecting the frivolity of their parents’ generation.  Disco balls replaced tiki masks.  But not for long.  Like many things, fads skip generations.  Tiki culture made a comeback in the 80s, driven in no small part by hipsters re-discovering vintage bowling and aloha shirts and the emergence of a small designer in the 90s called Tommy Bahama.

According to my friend Susan, the tiki revival made its way to the Chesapeake Bay as restaurants looking for a way to entertain customers began string colorful lights and serving up Mai Tais, Zombies, and other classic Polynesian-inspired cocktails along with crabs and beer.  Palm trees started popping up along the waterfront and low and behold the tiki gods had found a new home.

How they got to Route One in Sussex County is another story, which we learn when we get acquainted with the one and only “Tiki Murph,” a real journeyman who has been carving totems, tiki huts, and tiki bars in Florida, New Jersey, and now Delaware for more than twenty years. He used to be in the produce business, but, as he explained to us,  “tomatoes spoil, tikis don’t.”  He’s also tried his hand in beer sales.

Tiki Murph carves his statues out of salvaged wood, a lot of which people give him for free. He also employs two painters, one works by hand and the other with an air brush. And while he sells some to bars and restaurants, he prefers to do business with the private collector.  Private collector?  Really?  He claims to sell enough tiki so that he doesn’t have to work in the winter when he hightails it to Florida.  His pieces aren’t cheap, ranging from about $50 up to $700 for a really big tiki totem.  The huts and bars must be over a thousand.

While Susan picked up a nice-sized tiki figure, I hesitated.  For some reason, the gods haven’t taken up residence in Rehoboth and I didn’t want to tempt fate. The closest we come to a honest to goodness tiki bar is Zog’s on the first block of Wilmington Avenue, and establishment that’s actually more Caribbean than tiki with steel drums, rum drinks, and an outside bar and deck. Susan says any bar with a thatched roof that serves rum drinks counts as a tiki bar, and she should know. I’m not convinced.

For the record, I was tempted by one particular tiki.  He was a handsome fella, a blonde with blues eyes and big white teeth.  In the end, though, I couldn’t picture him sitting happily in the middle of my rose garden or nestled among the hydrangeas.  Perhaps I just hadn’t sipped enough of that Malibu rum bag?