It was a very special moment in any young man’s life: buying his first pipe.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, 25-year-old Ben Darge stood at the counter of Iwan Ries, which bills itself as America’s oldest tobacconist, examining a selection of pipes laid out for his inspection. Darge was here under the influence of his friend Kent Aldrich, 22, who stood nearby, puffing away. Both are divinity students at Moody Bible College, and Aldrich was inspired to start smoking because many of his favorite Christian authors smoked pipes. It’s relaxing, he finds. Contemplative. Genteel.

“All the great writers smoked,” Aldrich said. “C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Tolkien. I’m an avid reader. I’ll sit out on my back porch and read and smoke.”

Pipe smoking, Aldrich insists, is making a comeback among young people, who are picking up a practice that was last popular in their grandfathers’ day, when men came home from work and relaxed with a pipe, slippers, and a newspaper.

“It skipped Gen X and the Millenials, but Gen Z is smoking pipes,” Aldrich said.

Behind the counter was Douglas Czajkowski, Iwan Ries’s resident pipe expert. Czajkowski keeps a rack of a dozen pipes at work, and often smokes on the job. In his red jacket, with a paisley pocket square, he looked and acted like a magician as he laid out pipes for Darge. He even had his own patter, telling tales from the smoking life.

“I grew up in New York,” said Czajkowski, who is 64. “Back then, you couldn’t walk eight blocks without seeing someone smoking a pipe.”

Today, Czajkowski estimates, there are 1 million pipe smokers in the U.S., making pipe smoking an unusual and private kind of vice. They consider the activity a hobby, not a habit. There’s a ritual to it, similar to the Japanese tea ceremony: packing the pipe, lighting it with a match, rodding it with a pipe cleaner. It’s a community with its own podcast, The Pipe Cottage. It even has its own terminology: walking and smoking, for example, is called “lunting.”

When Darge had picked out two pipes, Czajkowski showed him how to pack it — tight on the bottom, loose on top: “that’s your kindling.” Then he twisted a pipe cleaner into a disc, a pipe smoking hack he calls an “anti-Karen device.”

“If you’re out smoking a pipe and you have to step into a store, you can put this over the bowl so it’ll stay lit but it won’t smoke.”

Then he told a story about an encounter with a smoke-hating Karen.

“I went to Whole Foods — that was my first mistake. A woman was complaining about my smoke. I said, ‘Lady, the tailpipe of your $65,000 Lexus will do a lot more damage than my pipe.’”

I’m a pipe smoker myself, and I appreciate Iwan Ries because it’s one of the few public places I can engage in my hobby. I can’t smoke in my apartment, because my lease prohibits it. So most of the time, I lunt. (Another smoke-friendly establishment is Richard’s Bar in West Town, which openly flaunts the city’s ban on smoking in taverns. When I took my pipe there, not only did the bartender tell me I was welcome to smoke it, he set a metal canister in front of me to serve as an ashtray.)

A few days after watching Darge buy his first pipe, I returned to Iwan Ries to interview the owner, Kevin Levi. We sat down in two leather chairs in the smoking lounge, which was opened in 2008 to provide pipe and cigar smokers a safe space after the city banned them from bars and restaurants.

“Do you mind if I smoke while we talk?” I asked Levi.

“Go ahead,” he said.

So I lit up a pipe and sank into the seat, feeling like a character in a BBC drama about an  early 20th Century gentleman’s club.

Iwan (pronounced like Yvonne) Ries was founded in 1857 by German immigrant Edward Hoffman, making it not only the nation’s oldest tobacconist, but one of Chicago’s oldest businesses. Ries, the store’s namesake, was Hoffman’s nephew, who was brought into the business in 1891. Levi, 55, is the fifth generation of his family to operate Iwan Ries. Seventy-five percent of the company’s business is cigars, 25 percent pipes. Also, 90 percent of its customers are men.

“There’s not that many pipe shops anymore,” Levi said. (Indeed, Iwan Ries’s only competitor in the city is Up Down Cigar, in Old Town.) “In the last six months of the year, we’ve actually seen more people come in who are interested in starting to smoke a pipe. We’re doing more business in pipes than we were a year or two ago. Maybe there’s been some kind of underground thing on social media that these kids are seeing.”

Or, he speculated, maybe it’s because vaping is a practice similar to pipe smoking. 

“Since vaping came out, they succeeded in turning high school-slash-college kids off of cigarette smoking,” he said. “Vaping is a little more refined. I think if you want to step it up, as far as being more classy and refined, pipe smoking is your next logical step.”

Levi used to smoke pipes at work, but quit because his job is too hectic for the relaxation and contemplation that a good smoke requires. Now he only smokes cigars.

“I’m always so busy doing stuff,” he said. “You have to sit down, relax and enjoy it. It’s a ritual. There’s lots of tamping and pipe cleaning and things that go with it. I used to try to smoke a pipe when I was at work, and then I’d put it down, and I’d be like, ‘Where’s my pipe?’ I get too busy here.”

I asked Levi if there’s any truth to the assertion that pipe smokers live longer than non-smokers. He cited a surgeon general’s report from the 1960s that made that claim. Pipe smoking is the safest form of smoking, because the tobacco burns cooler than cigarettes or cigars, and smokers don’t inhale. Pipe smokers claim that they’re less stressed than the general public, but any added longevity could also be due to the fact that pipe smokers are more educated. The pipe-smoking profession Levi sees the most: lawyers.

It is true that pipe smoking is the least expensive form of smoking. After the initial outlay of a pipe, which costs around $100, a one-ounce pouch of tobacco costs $6 or $7, and lasts for 15 or 20 bowls. A good cigar costs $20, and that’s just one smoke. And cigarettes are taxed to death.

All this writing about pipe smoking has got me jonesing. I’m going to stop now, and go lunting. Happy smoking, everyone.