Sunday, November 01, 2009
The Month That Was - October 2009: The month was loaded down with proof that getting old ain't for sissies. I visited Binghamton, New York -- a fine example of an upstate NY college town -- and got in a day trip to Watkins Glen State Park, and did this having forgotten my camera. Then, on two separate occasions I managed to wrench my lower back to the point where walking or bending to tie my shoes required that I take huge doses of Vitamin I (ibuprofen) in preparation. This defeated a plan to do the Great Turtle race on Mackinac Island. Mind is going. Body is going. Soul is already a lost cause. Yet, I live to blog another day.The Other Upstate
Book Look: The Blue Lantern, by Victor Pelevin
The Python (Monty) Story
There's No Town Like MoTown
Harvest Rainbow The Other Upstate: The task was to meet Kate and Anna for a college evaluation visit, although it was really more of an Anna wants to see her boyfriend visit. The target was Binghamton, NY, about halfway between the east and west state borders, just over the southern border from Pennsylvania. Leave on Friday return on Monday. Driving to Binghamton is about an 8.5 hours chore. You can cut through Ontario or hug the south side of Lake Erie, either way it's about the same distance. I chose to skip the added complications of a border crossing with its passport requirement and sneering suspicions from the U.S. Customs grunts, so that meant an extended time on the Ohio Turnpike.
If there is a more tedious, mind-numbing road to travel in the United States than the Ohio Turnpike, I can't immediately think of it. It is a flat, straight toll road that crosses the width of the state. It offers no scenery to speak of. Generally, once on it, you stay on it so as to avoid any toll gates until you have to exit. There are official rest stops every 30-40 miles -- not bad ones as far as official rest stops go; they are clean and functional and do not horrendously overcharge their captive audience. And that's all there is. If you don't have Sirius, you'll wish you did. It's not a painful experience. It's better than sitting on the tarmac at some airport while to toilets overflow or any number of other potential horrors a traveler might encounter. It's just a persistent reminder that even at its best travel involves long stretches of boredom. The Ohio Turnpike puts that boredom in your face with a vengeance.
Just after Cleveland, you exit the Turnpike and drive for another hour over conventional highways and then through the tiny panhandle of Pennsylvania that borders Lake Erie and finally into New York State. I have driven through New York before. Twice, I think, but in both cases it was literally a matter of barreling through to some destination in Massachusetts. Having now trolled through its heart and wandered about, I see upstate NY as very similar to upstate Michigan. I would refer to them both as having Lake Culture. Of course, there are more lakes and fewer mountains in Michigan, but the lifestyle similarities are striking. It starts with a good sized state that has corners and pockets of urban activity on the peripherals. In Michigan there is Detroit at one corner and Chicago just outside the other. In NY there is NYC/Philly and the Rochester/Buffalo/Toronto region. In both cases, these populations feed into an extended array of quaint, semi-rustic towns loaded down with B&B's and vacation rentals, nominally centered around lakes. Lake Culture requires four distinct seasons, each bearing its own outdoor recreational opportunities -- hunting, camping, canoeing, swimming, boating, skiing, biking, hiking, etc. Then there are the telltale seasonal sensations: hot chocolate around the hearth in a ski lodge or the crackle of ice beneath your boots; the smell of newborn grass in the rain and the sense freedom of the first time you can leave house without your coat; the plunge into a cool freshwater lake on a ninety degree day; the flash of harvest colors followed by the scent of burning leaves. In New York they call it "upstate"; in Michigan we call it "up north". Same thing.
Binghamton proper seems like a fine little college town. Sort of half picturesque and half suburban strip mall chic. There doesn't appear to be too much going on except the University and its own little eco-system. It is situated a little over an hour's drive of the sublime Finger Lakes region. The Finger Lakes are a handful of long thin lakes splayed out over west-central New York. The region is loaded down with state parks, wineries, old-school colleges (most famously Cornell), and quaint towns and villages with historic districts: Lake Culture. We only had a few hours to explore so we made for Watkins Glen State Park.
Not really having any idea what to expect, Watkins Glen SP blew us away with a rim trail of striking cliff overlooks leading down into an eerily beautiful path carved into the rock, running deep into a stream-cut gorge surrounded by walls of heavily layered rock and winding past willowy waterfalls. It made want to punch myself: just after crossing the border into Ohio I realized I had forgotten my camera. That's right, Mr. 500-photos-a-day found himself at a site of extraordinary natural beauty without his Nikon. I was reduced trying to take snaps with my phone camera. In lieu of my usual photo set, I can only offer an image search on Bing. The whole Finger Lakes region is on my target list for future summers, though.
Back in Binghamton that evening we walked across the street to watch the Michigan football game, happened into another Wolverine fan, and ended up drinking beers and swapping Wolverine lore in an Applebee's the middle of upstate New York. You never know, eh?
That was it. Up the next day to grind out the reverse drive home. If find myself hoping Anna ends up going to school at Binghamton. I could show up on the weekend for visit, wander around the dorm in sandals and white socks just to embarrass her, then head up to the Finger Lakes for a little Lake Culture. Sounds like a plan. Book Look: The Blue Lantern by Victor Pelevin: Pelevin is probably the last prominent writer that emerged from communist Russia. His earliest published works nearly coincide with the fall of The Wall and the nine short stories in The Blue Lantern capture characters thrust into unaccustomed and hopeful circumstances, but with the darkly fatalistic weight of communist futility still dominating their minds. In other words, they are very Russian. But that's not to say they are dreary or dire. There is a playful absurdity to them -- partly because Pelevin falls solidly in the magic-realist category -- and there is even a sense of fun, although always we are pulled back to a hollow end.
Workers go about their grinding daily business only to discover that they are actually dead. Transsexual hookers and sailors play a game of chess with potentially deadly consequences. A shed (yes, a shed) has a life story and therefore a consciousness and dreams of freedom. The most endearing story is "Hermit and Six Toes," about two creatures struggling to break free of the limits imposed on them by others of their kind and by the gods. The gods turn out to be humans. The most wickedly wry is "The Tambourine of the Upper World" in which witchcraft is used to raise foreign WW2 dead from the grave as husbands for Russian women trying to get citizenship abroad.
By simple description, many of the stories will sound heavy-handed, and conceptually, many are. But Pelevin is a skilled dramatist so instead of feeling bludgeoned with symbolism and allegory, you end up enjoying the final Twilight Zone twist. I would read more Pelevin if I didn't already have a six foot tall reading list. In some ways he reminds me of one of my favorites, Haruki Murakami -- the deft use of the mystical; the sympathetic characters who experience the collision of the personal and the philosophical. And both have captured the fancy of the inquisitive youth in their home markets. Recommended. The Python (Monty) Story: IFC ran a five-part documentary on the Pythons in honor of their 40th anniversary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer's Cut), and it was wonderful. It featured interviews with all the surviving members and it was an absolutely joy to re-live all the old skits and movies. I have scrupulously avoided watching them for the past quarter century or so because I was afraid of how they would age. I needn't have feared. They've aged pretty much as you would expect. The shows were uneven, but the first two movies still rank in the top five funniest movies ever, with Life of Brian being the Python pinnacle.
Some of the more personal aspects of the Pythons were fascinating to learn of. For example, I always thought of them as a kind of close-knit bunch; dearest friends from the outset, like Lennon-McCartney or Seinfeld-David. Not so. While they seem to have had good working relationships, they were not the best of friends, generally going their own way outside of work, and they did have their (temporary) falling outs. I never realized how much the two Terrys were the driving forces behind the movies. For some reason, I always had it in my head the Idle and Chapman were sort of the grand poobahs of the troupe, with Cleese as the main face. I suppose that shows how dedicated they were to getting things right rather than personal promotion. No individual egos really showed through.
And God bless John Cleese for knowing when to end things. It was he who wanted to end the original series when he saw things were getting stale. He left the troupe and the remaining members did another half-season before realizing he was right. He also didn't really want to do the Meaning of Life which was distressingly uneven. Again he was probably right they would have been better off stopping after Brian (although the world would miss Mr. Creosote). Related to that, Cleese also did only 13 episodes of the utterly brilliant Fawlty Towers then stopped, just letting the work stand and its reputation grow over time. Knowing when not to go on is a rare quality in a world with 20 god-awful years of The Simpsons and Law and Order.
What is perhaps underappreciated about the Pythons is what astoundingly good actors they were. You can't tell me you aren't expecting a vein in Cleese's neck to burst while offering training for self-defense against fresh fruit, or Graham Chapman to have a nervous breakdown on the spot in the this job interview. For my money, Palin was the best of all. The variety of characters he played in Life of Brian was a tour de force of comic acting. They did, perhaps, have the advantage of both writing and acting. Comedy is such a sensitive and subtle thing that I suspect in many cases what is funny in the writer's head cannot adequately be described in words -- it's a matter of nuance and timing -- so by portraying their own creations they were able to get the characters pitch perfect. If they had produced some dismal melodrama rather than absurdist comedy these guy would be hailed as artists of historic importance.
In the end, what comes through most from the interviews is the personalities of the Pythons. To a man they were unbelievably smart, witty, engaging, and cleverly rebellious. Each had specific qualities that contributed to the whole -- Idle had musical and business sense, Gilliam had the visuals covered, Jones was the fervent driving force, Chapman and Cleese had star quality, Palin was the affable, do-it-all guy. The confluence of such people is a lightning strike and as they themselves point out when the question of reunions comes up, it can't be repeated; only noticeably mimicked.
Don't over think it. Just kick back and rediscover. Monty Python is not dead, or even pinin'. It's as fresh as it ever was. There's No Town Like MoTown: I'm back at it. Pummeling away at the city of my birth. Kicking Detroit when it's down may seem ungentlemanly, but it's been down for 50 or 60 years so exactly how long should we wait?
Despite everything, Detroit still has its cheerleaders. This is especially true in sports journalism. Deadspin.com understands. They catalog all the ridiculous stories in recent months about how the spirit of Detroit lives on through the plucky, marginal successes of whatever local sports team they happen to be covering. The city may be going down the toilet, but we can still feel good about themselves because of our sports teams. This is the cheap, millimeter-deep trope that makes sports journalists believe they are writing something "important" or "relevant". My favorite line is in one of the comments: "Sports teams play an integral role in stabilizing cities. Few people realize Hartford actually ceased to exist after the Whalers left." Snort.
I blame Mitch Albom for this endless stream of blubbery, sentimental baby talk. (I could, and may one day, write a book about how headslappingly awful 99.3% of all sports journalism is.)
Of course, even our "righteous franchise", the Tigers (as described by Sports Illustrated), managed to crash in the end, blowing a seven game lead and ending up losing a sudden death playoff against the Minnesota Twins who had no reason to play well at all what with coming from a strongly viable city that isn't mired in depression.
The best comment on the Tigers situation came from the profane and hilarious twitter feed "S**t My Dad Says": "I wanted to see Detroit win. I've been there. It's like God took a s**t on a parking lot. They deserve some good news."
Meanwhile we nearly had a riot downtown over Hope-and-Change handouts when there weren't enough applications for everyone.
"People fighting over a line; people threatening to shoot each other -- is this what we've come to?"
...
After the applications ran out, some scam artists were selling photocopies of the originals for $20 each. They were doing a brisk business, even though the white original forms state clearly on the bottom: "Do not duplicate -- Must Submit Original Application."
Volunteers from the city of Detroit Planning and Development Department eventually handed out yellow photocopies themselves. Intended as temporary assistance to avoid homelessness, the stopgap help will be doled out after private agencies hired by the city ensure applicants meet program criteria.
"I'm not even sure the government will accept those applications," said volunteer Pam Johnson. "But it's almost like they had to pacify people. There was almost a riot. I mean, they had to call out the (Detroit Police) Gang Squad. I saw an elderly woman almost get trampled to death."
In Detroit we provide slideshows of our near-riots. Perhaps they should have handed out Mitch Albom columns instead.
And still, people try. Over at Jaunted (as good a travel blog as you will find; I have in the past contributed to their sister site Hotel Chatter) contributing editor Chanize makes a heroic effort to portray Detroit as a city with "a bad rap" and convince you it might be worth a visit. Clearly a journalist with ethics, Chanize doesn't tell a lie, and is therefore destined to fail in this task. Let's read between the lines in some choice quotes.
Even Hollywood has infiltrated the city, filming shows like HBO's "Hung," and making movies like "Red Dawn" and "Gran Torino" on its streets.
Hollywood has only infiltrated the city because they have been paid to do so by Michigan taxpayers. And to no good end, it seems.
Those still raising their eyebrows over Detroit are usually older folks still channeling 1967 riot memories...
Really? The '67 riots are what everyone is channeling? Not the world-renown murder and violent crime rates that have been pretty much persistent for the last, oh, 40 years?
Yes, Detroit is a bit messy--one street can sport beautiful new buildings, but a block away lies a condemned property awaiting its fate--either remodel or eternal eyesore.
Just "a bit messy". It makes it sound like all that's needed is for someone to pick up their dirty socks and run a Hoover through the city.
Get the skinny on "The D" by taking "The Good, The Bad and The Hopeful bus tour from Feet on the Street."
Let me guess: narrated by Mitch Albom.
The three-hour adventure visits the downtrodden East Side area, but makes a stop at the beautifully bizarre Heidelberg Project-an outdoor art statement of urban plight.
Chicago has Millennium Park and we have an outdoor art statement of urban plight. Aren't you glad you spent your vacation here?
Sounds silly, but in this town it doesn't hurt to make sure your rental car is an American model, if just to blend with the crowd. Rent a Hyundai and you risk getting it smashed. Just kidding. Sorta.
That, my friends, is Detroit in a nutshell. Soil your own nest. React with indignation to those who haven't. Violently act out. Rinse, Lather, Repeat. They barely build cars in Detroit anymore, yet people still behave like this.
Bear in mind, all this is in an article extolling the virtues of Detroit. And Chanize does list some decent things to see and do, but not a single one of them is anything remotely memorable. For that matter, not a single one of them is a reason to get out of your chair, never mind hop a plane. Of the millions of places around the world, and the thousands of places in the U.S., and the hundreds of places in the Great Lakes area, there is simply no reason to visit Detroit. But she gets an A+ for effort. Which brings me to:
Our advice? Ignore the naysayers and head to Michigan.
My pet peeve. Detroit is not Michigan. Equating Detroit and Michigan is like equating the Bronx and the Adirondacks. You should definitely visit Michigan. It is especially beautiful right now. Just don't go into Detroit. We don't, and we live right here. Harvest Rainbow: I finally got around to doing something I have been meaning to do for the past couple of years and that is spend a day wandering around my neighborhood here in lovely Dexter, Michigan, capturing the fall colors. You can see the results at Smugmug. Even I am impressed by the vibrancy. Now that I have Windows 7 loaded up, I can put together a rotating background of my favorite photos. Feel free to do the same.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
The Month That Was - September 2009: Jacket weather. That's where we are now. It's time to face up to the fact that summer is gone. I have no regrets. I got out quite a bit this season bit on the bike and in my running shoes. I went mountain biking in Moab, ate lobster in Maine, swam in the warm Atlantic in Florida and the chilly Lake Michigan in Chicago (below). Not bad at all as wrap up the fourth decade of my life and as preparation for the 50th winter.As you can tell if you look at the photos of from Chicago on Smugmug or by doing a key word search on "painting detail" you see that I have gotten in the habit of taking photos of smallish sections of much larger paintings. Not exactly sure of my motivations here, but I think it's giving me a new perspective on some of this, and possibly assisting me with my image composition skills. Also, I needed to broaden my subjects beyond landscapes. Sorry if it's not to your taste.
Lots on books and TV this month. Which reminds me, if you find yourself having trouble keeping books and TV and movies in perspective, please check out this recap of Kurt Vonnegut explaining drama. It's a lesson to take to heart.
Chicago Summer's End
Book Look: The Elephant Vanishes
Book Look: Sum -- Forty Tales from the Afterlives
What You're Reading
Doing Donuts in the Garden
Toob Roundup Chicago Summer's End: (Photos on Smugmug.) I may have to make Labor Day weekend in Chicago an annual event. I love Chicago. What could be more awesome than to be trolling up and down the lakeshore past restaurants and parks and museums and beaches and Wrigleyville in the soft, waning summer days? Nothing immediately comes to mind.
**Travel rant warning! Skip ahead about 4 paragraphs if you want to skip it. **
Another awesome thing about Chicago: it's four and a half hours by train from Ann Arbor. For me, that's a fifteen minute drive to the free parking at the train station, climb on board without paying to check my bags, ride the rails to Union Station in Chicago, grab a cab to my hotel (usually 5-10 minutes, less than $10). That's it. On the train you have ample leg room, no seatbelts, you can leave your seat for the bathroom or the snack car anytime you want, your gadgets can be powered up and used at all times. You can arrive 10 seconds before the train leaves if you want. If you miss your train, they just put you on the next one -- no worries.
Now contrast that with the experience of flying to Chicago. A 35 minute drive to a $9/day airport lot, arriving an hour early just in case. Hop the parking shuttle to the terminal. Pay to check your bags. Show your credentials to a security goon. Remove laptop and liquids from your carry-on. Strip off your shoes and belt and tuck any other metal into your carry-on. Stand around in your socks with your pants falling down because the idiots in front of you waited until they were to the metal detector before they started removing their jewelry and the shoes of their kids. Pray to God you didn't forget anything that would make the alarm go off. Re-dress and reverse everything you just did on the other side. If you're lucky you now get to sit around for a half-hour until your plane boards. Queue up as quickly as possible to get on the plane or else you'll be caught without an overhead bin for your carry-on. Squeeze into a seat with no legroom and don't you bloody move until you are permitted to under penalty of TSA strip search. Offer a silent pledge of your soul to not get caught sitting on the tarmac for hours. Get a plastic cup with 4 ozs of ice and 1 oz of Diet Coke. You have about a 10 minute window to use the tiny restroom should you need to, unfortunately all hundred or so passengers have the same window. Sit down and stay put again for landing. Reiterate the offer of your soul to the airline gods to get to the gate without an incident. Sit in baggage claim for a half hour getting hypnotized by the empty carousel. Take a $60, 45-minute cab ride from O'Hare to your hotel.
Flying saves no time, cost many hundreds more, and crushes your soul. Comparisons like this just really make me seethe at the air travel industry and bureaucracy. If we had high-speed (say 300 mph) cross-country rail service the airlines would be out of business and airports would become ghost towns.
I stayed at the Palmer House Hilton in the Loop, just a block from the Art Institute/Millennium Park/Grant Park and two blocks from the lakeshore. The Palmer House is the sort of place anyone who is anyone would stay in Chicago...if it was 1930. The lobby is amazingly beautiful -- baroque reliefs, dark wood trim, glistening chandeliers, ceilings fifty feet high -- and if you get a renovated room, it will have very tasteful d‚cor. But it is still an old, old building; normal tone conversations in the next room are crystal clear.
The pretense of high luxury breaks down quickly. The service policies are cynical. I got in about Noon and was told that a room was ready but it would cost me $20 if I wanted to check in before 1pm. The room is ready, but you are giving me the choice of waiting around an hour to enter it, or paying you $20? That's not hospitality, that's a shakedown. I waited the hour. And of course, as is the case in hotels everywhere these days, you are nickeled and dimed for everything: health club access, service charges, and, worst of all, internet connection. Internet access is available via wi-fi in the lobby and wired in your room. For $15 a day. Or you can use the terminals in the business center for .60 cents a minute (a penny a second). I don't know how to describe charges like that as anything other than cynical. I was going to cough up the $15 one day but the plug on the cable in my room was damaged and it couldn't hold a connection. I went down the desk the next day to have the charge removed, which was done immediately, but my request for them to send someone up to replace my cable was ignored, so I spent the weekend off-line.
My advice is to skip the Palmer House. It is not expensive and the combination of low price and the luxury presentation seems to make it a bargain, but the fa‡ade crumbles quickly. There are better hotels in the price range.
***End travel rant.***
But all this is blather. I should be talking about the coolness that is Chicago.
As is the case in most of my city visits, I spend the first afternoon/evening re-familiarizing myself with the lay of the land. On my feet I headed north on State from the Palmer House, passing Portillo's -- a tourist oriented spot famous for its Chicago dogs and Italian beefs.
A brief aside about food. There are three forms of paradigmatic food in Chicago: Chicago-style deep dish, Chicago dogs, and Italian beef sandwiches. Let's look at them in turn, from most to least famous.
- Chicago style deep dish pizza was invented in the 1940s at Pizzeria Uno. (In the 1980s Uno was franchised, including a branch in Ann Arbor where I spent most of my student years tending bar.) There have been many imitators over the years, but as it stands right now there are three other competitors for loyalists and a fourth that is breaking some new ground. The three other killer trad deep-dish spots are Giordano's, Gino's East, and Lou Malnati's. If you ask folks around town where to go to get the best pie, you will usually get one of two answers: Gino's East or Lou Malnati's (often just called "Lou's"). In my experience you will hear Lou's most often, at least at the moment.
All of these pizzas are of the same style. The crust is like pie crust, the vegetables are fresh and cut in thick chunks, and the sauce -- which is what makes these pizzas to my senses -- is sweet and tangy and hits the palate with a real wallop.
The new ground is being broken at Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company where they use basically the same ingredients but form the pizza into a pot pie rather than a big honkin' deep dish. It has a growing following of folks who are truly in the know, but it's away from the Loop/Mag Mile/Rush street tourist centers and it's a bit of a hoof from the closest El stop. - Chicago dogs, sometimes erroneously called "red hots", require detailed construction. The dog itself must be all beef (style points for Vienna Beef), and it must be boiled or steamed, not grilled. It must sit in a poppy-seed bun, which is also steamed. From there you add mustard, relish, chopped onions, as you would to any dog. Next you place on top two tomato wedges, a kosher dill quarter spear, and a couple of chili peppers, although in the context of a Chicago dog, they are always referred to as "sport peppers". Lastly, you add a dash of celery salt.
There are hot dog vendors everywhere you look in Chicago. The most famous spot is Hot Doug's which is off the beaten tourist tracks. In the heart of Chicago, Portillo's is the place or perhaps Jim's Original if you are south of the main activity centers (it's right near the University of Chicago). - Italian Beef sandwiches are the simplest of the three. From the description it can sound like little more than a beef sub, but that's very, very wrong. An Italian Beef, formerly called a "Dago Beef" before we became politically correct, starts with sliced beef that has been wet roasted in a juice or broth that contains various spices but at a minimum, oregano and garlic. The beef ends up about medium rare and is served on a sub roll with the cooking liquid poured right on top. It's like a French dip with the dip poured on it already, but the dip itself is succulently spiced. It is topped with sweet peppers and served. Simplicity itself, but when the beef is top quality and just barely approaching medium-rare, your tongue will unfold like a flower with each bite. I love these things.
There is little consensus on where to get the best Italian Beef. Portillo's comes up again, and in fact, many places where you can get a good Chicago dog also serve a good Italian beef. Interestingly, I have found that the Italian Beef served at the little snack shop at the end of Navy Pier does a fair job.
OK, so that aside wasn't very brief, and probably not very relevant since I didn't eat at Portillo's; it was too busy. Nor did I have any of the three paradigm foods during my visit. But it is a cool thing about Chicago so any excuse will do.
Rather than Portillo's I stopped to eat at The Wit. The Wit is a new (or newly renovated) Hilton Doubletree hotel that by some fluke has become a hipster hot spot. Actually, it's not a fluke. It's partly because of the boutique-ish design of the place, but mostly because of the awesome rooftop lounge, with its big comfy chairs and terrific city views. The food was only decent but I can see where it would be quite the scene from happy hour through late nights. Conveniently, The Wit is a Hilton property so I can definitely put it on my short list for spots to stay next time (I'm a Hilton Honors program devotee). Not sure how I feel about the scenesters, though. They might end up annoying me after a while.
From there I trod north toward Rush Street, an area that comes alive at night with clubs and bars and open air restaurants and the fun flows through the streets. Alas, it was only late afternoon and I lose more and more interest in such fashionable locales with each passing year, so I curled over to Michigan Ave and headed back south through the glitter of the Magnificent Mile all the way south to Millennium Park.
I could spend an entire day in Millennium Park. It is the focal public area of Chicago and contains two of the most awesome pieces of city sculpture you will find anywhere. First, the Crown Fountain -- two 50-foot tall obelisks facing each other, with water cascading down them into makeshift waterfalls for kids to splash around in. What really makes it special are the faces rear-projected on the obelisks. They are just faces of average Chicagoans animated through some subtle changes of expression and occasionally pursing their lips and spewing a stream of water from their mouths. I defy anybody not to smile at the sight of this.
Second is the Bean, or Cloud Gate -- designed to look like an enormous drop of liquid mercury. Its shape and position end up creating fascinating, fun-house style views of both yourself and the skyline surrounding you. I love how it's intended to use the skyline as part of the artistic effect. I defy anybody not to stop and stare and take some snapshots at the sight of this.
Less arresting but more intriguing is the Pritzker Pavilion. It is essentially a steel, mutated clam shell stage, designed for concerts and other events. Beyond the seating is an expansive lawn and the whole area is covered by a lattice-work trellis that has the curious effect of placing gently-curved gridlines across the skyline for a view that causes your eye to focus more closely on sections of the skyline, like tightening up the aperture of your camera.
I strolled a bit and enjoyed the park, and people's reaction to it, then settled into the Park Grill (the restaurant inside the Park itself) for dinner as the sun was dropping. There are indoor and outdoor portions to the Park Grill. The outdoor portion is somewhat raucous and serves mostly sandwiches and upscale pub grub. It's a fine place for socializing but they have a habit of turning the music up so loud your teeth vibrate. It's a good spot for a drink during a Cubs/White Sox game when they are in the hunt, but otherwise there are better options. Let's face it, the place is tourist central -- and it's reflected in the prices. Inside is more of a fine dining set up. I grabbed a seat at the inside bar and ordered up a reasonable dinner of duck and squash ravioli. Not bad -- a little bland, maybe. I probably should have stayed on the hunt for something more interesting to eat, but I was there, and it was getting on, and I was hungry.
Most importantly, I emerged from Millennium Park fully re-familiarized with Chicago.
The next day was devoted to cycling. One of the most jaw-droppingly cool things you can do in Chicago is bike along the lakeshore. (This is why it is important to visit in the warm months.) The Lakeshore bike (and jogging) path runs from Hyde Park down on the south side, north past the museum campus, on past Grant Park and the Art Institute, continues up to Navy Pier, keeps going to Lincoln Park and further north from there not quite reaching Loyola University. I would guess it's between fifteen and twenty miles, all of it along the lakeshore with the exception of a short stretch near Navy Pier.
On busy weekends it can seem like the entire city is out pedaling or jogging. I picked up a bike from Bike and Roll near Millennium Park and headed for points north. The first stop is Navy Pier. Navy Pier is touted as the single most popular tourist point in the nation. I'm sure by some definition it probably is. And it can seem like it on a busy weekend. There are about nine million things to do on Navy Pier -- all geared to tourists and all too expensive. There is the big Ferris wheel and hot air balloon rides if you're up for seeing the entire city in a glance. Food courts, restaurants, crap shops, an imitation Cirque du Soleil, beer garden, miniature golf, etc. The best bets here are the boat tours, especially the dinner cruises where you can check out the skyline at night or the fireworks shows every Friday and Saturday. The most interesting is almost certainly going to be the architecture cruise which follows the waterways inside the city with a narrated low-down on some of the more interesting buildings and city history.
For me, Navy Pier was just a convenient stop for an overpriced bottle of water before I pushed further north. Next stop was the North Avenue Beach. About a mile or so up from Navy Pier the beach broadens and turns into Chicago's miniature version of South Beach centered around a large building that contains the usual beach facilities -- restrooms, snack bar, etc. -- but also rents out beach volleyball courts and other summertime doo-dads. The second floor is given over to a somewhat rowdy beach bar called Castaways. This is party central in summertime Chicago; live music and soft sand. Lake Michigan is tolerably warm in late summer as long as you don't stay in too long, and the cream of Chicago's young adults are all out tanning and playing beach volleyball (rather seriously in some cases), I saw a couple of boot camp fitness classes going on. It was idyllic, only marred by the knowledge that these were summer's waning days.
Another brief push north took me through Lincoln Park proper and over to the Lincoln Park Zoo. It's on the small side, but it's a little gem provided you are happy with a pleasant stroll and not looking for a comprehensive wildlife experience. Heavy on primates, and a good selection of "big creatures" -- lions and tigers and bears... And, strangely, it's free admission. Yet more Chicago coolness.
North one last time and then off the lakeshore path down Addison to Wrigleyville. There is a reason everyone loves the Cubs and despite what you may have been told, it's not for the love of Wrigley Field. Having attended a game there (on a previous trip, the Cubs were on the road this time) I can say unequivocally that there is little to love about Wrigley Field. It is, like the Palmer House Hotel, a relic from a bygone era, and quite explicit evidence that the good old days weren't all that good. It is an uncomfortable experience to watch a game there, provided you can even see it as there are plenty of obstructed view seats. Its facilities fall far short of modern standards of service and, quite frankly, it can be smelly. The only reason to like it is sentiment, of which I have none. I would take a modern park any day -- modern stadiums have benefitted tremendously from the need to compete with sitting at home in a recliner with HD and Tivo.
But what no other park can match, as far as I know, is Wrigleyville. The area surrounding Wrigley field consists of sports bar after sports bar punctuated with some souvenir shops. (There is also an El stop right in the heart of things.) Many of the bars open up the windows and you end up with an entire neighborhood full of good timers casually following the game. I stopped for a late lunch in one of the pubs. Just a smattering of folks were around because the Cubs were out of town and out of the pennant race. Still, it was easy to see the neighborhood as the source of the special feelings everyone has for the Cubs, despite their century long drought.
With the afternoon running down, I sped back to the trail and aimed south, retracing my path, eventually passing Millennium Park and stopping at Grant Park for a quick dash through the Chicago Jazzfest. Unlike their Bluesfest, Jazzfest is not all that spectacular. They get a couple of name acts -- although I will allow that there are very few "name acts" in Jazz anymore -- but they mostly pepper the line-up with "serious" jazz musicians which means the audience will be marginal. I wandered around a bit but nothing caught my eye or ear, so I set to pedaling further south.
The next southerly stop is the museum campus, consisting of the Adler Planetarium, the Field Museum, and the Shedd Aquarium. I zipped around a bit but as it was getting late I decided to push on and leave the museums for tomorrow. Just south of the museums stands the imposing Soldier Field, home of the Bears, sitting quietly awaiting the start of the NFL season. I continued south a ways further. With time, you can go even further south, eventually reaching the Hyde Park/U of Chicago area, but I didn't get that far. The sun was making a run to the horizon and it was starting to get a bit on the chilly side, plus I had a half-hour ride left to get back to the bike rental shop. The ride north afforded magnificent views skyline with the oblique lighting from the setting sun. I dropped the bike off at dusk; happily tired having covered close to 25 miles.
In fact, I was so enamored of the active, lakeshore life that I did it again the next day. This time in my running shoes. I threw some swimming gear into my day pack, laced up my Nikes, and hit the lakeshore path north the next morning. I got two or three miles along when I encountered a tiny little beach plot that was fenced off from the path. Passing it at cycling speed the day before I didn't realize it was a dedicated dog beach. I thought I was having fun on the lakeshore, but there is nothing more joyous than a pooch jamboree in the surf. No tennis ball, stick, or Frisbee was left unretrieved.
I could have spent the whole morning watching the dogs, but I had some swimming to do. I turned back south eventually reaching a smallish beach just to the north of Navy Pier called Ohio Beach (it's roughly where Ohio St. intersects Lakeshore Drive). What's unique about Ohio Beach is that a few yards off shore it's about 5-6 feet deep and that depth extends along the shoreline bulwarks for what is probably a full mile. That makes it perfect for open water swim training, as evidenced by the triathletes swarming around in their wetsuits. Me, I only had my swimming trunks, but I figured I'd take a shot at trying to keep up.
Now, I am not a novice swimmer. I knock off a mile or so with regularity in the pool at my health club on a weekly basis, so this shouldn't be too bad right? Well it turns out open water swimming is a more than a little different from pool swimming. First off, it's a bit nippy. The water temp was about 68 which, if you are without a wetsuit, is not cold enough to drive you out, but just cold enough that you can't really "get used to it". It also requires an especially long time to warm up. And it turns out that Lake Michigan lacks the nice smooth surface of a pool that allows you to turn and breathe without inhaling water. I verified this on multiple occasions. It was a full twenty minutes into my swim before I finally found anything resembling a nice natural stroke. Once I felt like I was finally going smoothly, I looked to my right to see an old man in a wetsuit clipping along like a metronome, passing me as if I were a Yugo on I-94. Maybe I am a novice swimmer.
After a full 45 minutes of hard swimming I was back at Ohio Beach doing something more appropriate: laying in the last of the summer sun to dry off, looking up at the skyscrapers just across the street, lamenting not knowing when I would have this feeling again. Then back on my Nikes for the final mile and a half or so back to the Hilton to clean up.
To give my poor body a rest, I hopped a cab down to the museum campus. In all honesty, I find non-art museums uniformly unimpressive. This is especially true of science museums, which tend to be less informative, entertaining and current than a half hour special on the Science Channel. In Chicago, the non-art museums are four-fold; they are: The Shedd Aquarium, The Adler Planetarium, The Field Museum, and The Museum of Science and Industry. Planetariums can put on good shows, but I was tired enough that I was afraid I would fall asleep in the dark. I have twice been to the Science and Industry Museum, once as a child and once a few years ago. It is -- not to put too fine a point on it -- dull. My first choice was the Shedd Aquarium, where I have never been, but there was an enormous line to get in (and a line to get in the line to get in) that went out into the sidewalk and along the street. So I settled for the Field museum, a place I have been numerous times.
The Field Museum has general themes of natural history and archeology and what, in a more open-minded time, could be referred to as anthropology, although now I'm sure we'd call it cultural studies or some such tripe. There are regular top-quality exhibitions, usually around some historical theme. At the moment the exhibition was called "Pirates!" providing background and stories of real live swashbucklers. It looked good, but I can't offer a definitive judgment since it was sold out.
A problem many non-art museums have is one of political correctness. They simply can't touch on hot button issues and if their displays don't summate with declarations of fealty to progressive philosophy while being careful to provide lip service to the loyal opposition, they will find themselves in some fresh hell of popular grievance. In history museums this tends to manifest itself in breathless prose about the spiritual validity and moral quality of any failed, backwards culture that has ever existed. (Except Nazis; it is always safe to malign Nazis.) In science museums this manifests as extended lectures on global warming and extinction and pollution and how filthy and despicable human beings are. Case in point -- a current show at the Adler Planetarium is described as follows:
Since the beginning of time, the people of Africa have used their knowledge of the sky to meet their physical needs for survival, build their societies and shape their spiritual lives.
Skywatchers of Africa is a fascinating exploration of Africa and the cultural uses of the sky that developed over thousands of years. The show highlights the diversity of African cultural astronomy and celebrates our shared human experience.
Dark energy, extra-solar planets, supermassive black holes, 11 dimensions -- fuggetaboutit. Astronomy is about honoring primitive African culture.
I'm snarky about all this, but I certainly don't expect things to be otherwise. Museums respond to their incentives and their incentives are to be like this. That's just the world as it is. It makes one aspect of the Field Museum all the more interesting. You see, the Field Museum got its start during the times of Teddy Roosevelt, when conservation basically meant shooting and stuffing animals for display. And the Field Museum is loaded down with shot and stuffed animals -- many are probably left over from Teddy's day. I suspect the kids going through the museum rarely ask where they came from, probably assuming they are just some form of special effects. That's good, because God forbid some poor soccer mom has to explain how these critters came to be in the state they are in.
Among the holdovers are the stuffed and mounted bodies of the man-eating Lions of Tsavo, who killed and ate dozens of people and caused an extended shut down of British expansion into central Africa a little more than a century ago. The mountings are not that impressive anymore, due to the shrinkage that comes from taxidermy, but it's nice to see the progressive world is unable to steamroll absolutely everything in its way.
If you're up for a good adventure story I highly recommend the account the activities of these lions as written by the officer who eventually killed them after a number of harrowing attempts, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, by J.H. Patterson.
Also, if you're up for more man-eater lore, the Field museum also has the stuffed carcass of the largest man-eating lion on record, the man-eater of Mfuwe. In the early '90s (1990s) this bad boy was snarfing up villagers in Zambia, who found that they couldn't do anything about it because hunting lions was restricted. Yes, that's right; the poor schlubs had to basically let this lion feed on them until some white Bwana came along who was willing to pony up for a hunting license to kill the thing. There's a post-modern man-eater story for ya.
With the museums closing, I strolled back to the Hilton, cutting through Grant Park and the Jazzfest once again, and once again hearing nothing all that compelling. It had been a full day. I slept deeply to say the least.
So I was down to my last day, with a train departure scheduled for 6 PM, I slept in and checked out at 11, leaving my bag with the bell hop, and performed one of my personal Chicago rituals: a breakfast smoothie from Jamba Juice before making my way to the Art Institute.
The big new thing at the Art Institute is the Modern Wing. Designed by famous architect Renzo Piano, it stands in stark contrast to the weighty, windowless behemoth to which it is attached. It is certainly modern -- all aluminum and glass and right angles. It is covered partially by huge green awnings to provide shade, but that also allow for skylighting. Inside the airy, natural light and pale wood trim provide a sense of openness and lightheartedness, again in contrast to the gravity of the old building. It's a very nice space, but it misses on counts of integration. It doesn't seem to enhance the experience of viewing the art in any way beyond providing a little more space, and compared to the exceedingly well integrated sculptures of Millennium Park just outside, it doesn't really add to the cohesiveness of the area. It's nice; nothing to be disappointed in, but not all that special.
Old or new, the Art Institute is one of my favorite places on Earth. I spent some time snapping photos of painting details, which has become an odd habit of mine. People give me weird looks but it's good in that it makes me regard the paintings more closely. I had previously paid little attention to In the Sea, by Arnold Bocklin, for instance. Looking closely at it I found the characters to be not just spectacularly creepy, but downright ugly, making me wonder whether he sought out ugly models to make a point. Anyway, you can check out Smugmug for the visuals. And yes, you can't visit the Art Institute with seeing La Grande Jatte.
Before I knew it, it was time to start home. I stopped for an early dinner at Pizano's Pizza and Pasta, a place I had never heard of before but was conveniently located in the Loop on my way to get my bags. Although I only grabbed an appetizer of sausage and peppers, the place is clearly a source of tastiness. They do have the expected deep dish pizza, but they also serve entrees that are prepared well over to the traditional Italian side of the spectrum featuring homemade pasta, rather than just reworked pub food with tomato sauce and garlic touches. Good place. Goes on the list for future visits.
The rest was simple. Grabs my bags, cab it back to Union Station, and a wonderfully uneventful train ride home. Thank you, Amtrak. I was in bed by midnight, vowing to make more frequent use of Chicago next summer. Book Look: The Elephant Vansihes, by Haruki Murakami: The stories in this collection are about confusion. As with all good short stories, it is a shock to the system that triggers the action, and in this case that means bringing this confusion and chaos on to the scene. Given Murakami's predilection for magic realism it is not surprising that in all but two, the shock is something paranormal.
That is not to suggest these are dire and dark missives. Some can be quite lighthearted and charming. Some are opaque. All involve workaday Japanese going through the motions of modern life. They laconically describe their days --shopping for meals, sitting in dull meetings, sipping coffee, reading newspapers, etc. Then something strange happens. Ghostly figures appear and watch the static on TV; a dwarf arrives who can dance like an angel; an unusual memory sends a couple on a crime spree; a beloved sister brings home a boyfriend who burns down barns; an elephant disappears into thin air. Through these, we see the workaday types surrender themselves to strange longings and fears that they themselves don't really understand. This from the titular story:
That was the last time I saw her. We talked once on the phone after that, about some details in her tie-in article. While we spoke, I thought seriously about inviting her out for dinner, but I ended up not doing it. It just didn't seem to matter one way or the other.
I felt like this a lot after my experience with the vanishing elephant. I would begin to think I wanted to do something, but then I would be incapable of distinguishing between the probable results of doing it and of not doing it. I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me. Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomena to strike my eye in a strange way. It's probably something in me.
Even the lighthearted stuff is just a bit unsettling.
The stories I found most affecting lacked the magic realism and the source of the shock was more human. In "Sleep" a woman is afflicted with insomnia, but uses the time to pursue interests beyond her current role as a housewife. Her view thus expanded, she grows to despise and resent her husband and son. In "A Family Affair" a free spirited bachelor who lives with his sister is thrust into re-evaluation when he realizes her new boyfriend, utterly conventional and straight-laced, should be admired rather than reviled.
In evidence throughout is Murakami's signature style of using innocent prose to describe convolution and complication. For the most part it works, until it doesn't. Resolutions, when you get one, are not exactly fluid. Often the stories seem to end by hitting a wall.
If you are a Murakami fan, you should read The Elephant Vanishes; you'll appreciate it. If you haven't read Murakami, this is not the place to start. It is safe to say he is a vastly better at novels than short stories. Book Look: Sum -- Forty Tales from the Afterlives, by David Eagleman: A collection of forty very short (2 or 3 pages) speculations on the nature of the afterlife. These tales are all over the board, they might be based on speculative physics or some form of reincarnation or socio-biology or quasi-Christianity. The results can be anywhere from humorous to thoughtful, from The Twilight Zone to The Matrix.
In format, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives owes a debt to Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, from years ago -- a large number of short pieces, almost like blog posts, but nicely refined and engagingly written. The result is a good casual read that may promote some interesting thought. It's a little light on substance to be called mind candy; maybe mind fluff is better. It's worth a look; I'd wait for the paperback, though. What You're Reading: Let's get away from what I have been reading and talk about what you'll be reading. The WSJ has come up with a list of the hot books either recently released of coming soon. By hot books, they mean the publishing industry is going to gamble big money on these and try to come up with nefarious schemes and mind control techniques to make you buy them.
The article hits all the coming fiction and non-fiction. You can't read everything (unless you're Tyler Cowen), so here is my shot at pre-screening some of the fiction.
The Lost Symbol , Dan Brown: "Harvard symbologist and Vatican nemesis Robert Langdon returns in Dan Brown's sequel to his bestseller The Da Vinci Code." I would be willing to bet that I observe at least thirty people reading this book on every leg of every flight I take between now and the end of the year. I'm pretty sure that if I had some kind of extra-dimensional science fiction glasses I would see aliens sucking their brains out with a straw.
The Year of the Flood , Margaret Atwood: "Margaret Atwood's post-apocalyptic novel begins in the aftermath of a natural disaster that wiped out most of humanity, fulfilling a prophecy by a latter-day religious leader named Adam One. Survivors include a trapeze artist who is trapped inside a sex club... Ms. Atwood has written a one-hour musical theater piece to accompany the book, which will be performed during her book tour." With each passing day, I see more proof that it is simply not my world anymore.
Nocturnes , Kazuo Ishiguro: "Five pieces of short fiction by the Booker prize-winning author of "Remains of the Day" are thematically linked by music." An author many speak highly of and whose name is often mentioned in the same breath as "Nobel." His reviewers claim his novels center on human failings and his characters rarely achieve resolution. That appeals to me, but every description I have read of an Ishiguro plot is horrifically depressing. Too depressing even for droll comments.
Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby: "Pop music figures heavily--once again--in this latest novel by Mr. Hornby... The book's heroine, Annie, is having doubts about her boyfriend Duncan, who is obsessed with a reclusive folk singer." Love to Nick Hornby, purveyor of top quality lad lit. Even if it turns out to be nothing all that new, just a retread of About a Boy or High Fidelity, it's still a better way to spend your layover than frickin' Dan Brown.
The Wild Things, Dave Eggers: "Fans of Maurice Sendak's iconic children's book Where the Wild Things Are are bracing themselves for Dave Eggers's new take on the story--a novelization, based loosely on the children's book and published by Mr. Eggers's imprint McSweeney's, plus a big-screen version, which he co-wrote with director Spike Jonze." Celebrity author, beloved of hipsters, teaches us all how to sell novels in the 21st century. Eggers is Coldplay to Dan Brown's Jonas Bros. Or something.
Chronic City , Jonathan Lethem: "Jonathan Lethem... takes Manhattan with his new novel, Chronic City, which features a listless former child star whose astronaut girlfriend is trapped in space. There's also a tiger on the loose, a mysterious chocolate smell engulfing the city and a menagerie of colorful characters, including the brilliant but paranoid Perkus Tooth and the petite, irascible ghostwriter Oona Laszlo." Great, but where's my one-hour musical theatre piece?
The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk: "The new novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author is set in the hedonistic world of Istanbul's Westernized aristocracy. Mr. Pamuk explores modern Turkey's identity crisis through the story of Kemal, the son of a wealthy family, who falls in love with a store clerk." Pamuk is the proto-typical Nobel Prize winner: a non-Westerner with a lifelong devotion to fiction writing, a very active and explicit socio-political sense (with specific concerns about the oppressed), and a bit of a prickly personality. That's a lot of baggage to bring to a novel. Anyone with even the slightest cynicism has to wonder if his renown and awards are products of his fashionable politics. He may be a great writer, but for me it's too much work to separate the writing from the reputation.
Last Night in Twisted River, John Irving: "Mr. Irving's 12th novel starts in 1954 in a New Hampshire logging settlement and spans five decades. The plot is set in motion when a 12-year-old boy and his father become fugitives after the boy mistakes the constable's girlfriend for a bear and bludgeons her with a frying pan." True story: I once got a rejection letter from an agent saying "You're writing reminds me of John Irving, but I just don't think I could sell it." If my writing reminds you of John Irving and you can't sell it, why the hell aren't you working at McDonalds?
The Humbling, Philip Roth: "In Philip Roth's 30th book, a washed up stage actor in his 60s laments his loss of talent." Really, dude? Really? Are you actively seeking abuse?
The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov: "The draft of Nabokov's final novel will hit shelves more than 30 years after his death, following his son's decades-long deliberation over whether to publish the novel or destroy it in accordance with his father's wishes." I love Nabokov, but I don't want to read this. I'm semi-praying for it to suck so I won't be tempted to stomp on his last wishes. Please, first read Lolita and Pale Fire, then decide if you want to flip a posthumous bird at Vladimir by buying a copy.
In truth, if I ever read any of these it won't be for years. Any hype whatsoever will automatically disqualify a book from my reading list for a minimum of five years. You are different, though. You are susceptible to the nefarious machinations of the book industry. These books are what you'll be talking about over Zinfandel and Baba Ganoush at your next dinner party, that is if you actually have friends that read. Doing Donuts in the Garden: P.J. O'Rourke reviews a trio of books about three days of abject asshattery that happened in upstate New York 40 years ago. How can you resist? Toob Roundup: Haven't talked about TV in a while. Probably because there was so little to talk about. Summer featured some horrible TV. But things are looking up.
True Blood -- Ugh. This would be a second rate show on broadcast TV but everyone thinks it is more than it is because HBO allows unlimited gore, profanity, nudity and sex. Sadly, the gore is lame, the profanity is common, the nudity is pedestrian, and the sex is dismal. Worse, the dialog is wooden, the characters are hollow, and the whole shows just seems like nothing more than a supernatural angle on Alan Ball's I'm-Gay-And-Christians-Are-Stupid identity validation trope. Sadly, it's already renewed for another year. And now they have a soft drink tie-in. To repeat: Ugh.
Entourage -- remains a tissue-thin little romp. It certainly doesn't make me think, but more importantly, it doesn't even make me feel the need to form a critical opinion. The Piven is still awesome. If anything, it would be more appropriate for one of the USA "characters wanted" series than HBO. Speaking of which...
USA Network detective dramadies -- A few years ago, out of the blue, USA network started absolutely nailing these substance-free, highly-contrived detective yarns; post-modern versions of the 1970s and 1980s detective genre. They essentially by-pass anything resembling a coherent police procedural and instead create engaging, charming characters played by teams of quality, charismatic actors with excellent comic timing and personal chemistry. If you are going to make mindlessly entertaining TV, this is how to do it.
- Monk -- the flagship, now in its final season. I recently read that Michael Richards (Kramer) was the first choice for the lead role. That would've sucked astoundingly and aborted everything that has followed. Tony Shaloub is a great actor and deserved all the Emmys he got for this. Still, Monk was not my favorite; I tired of the OCD gags quickly. But it was a rousing success overall, as evidenced by the celebrities lined up to do cameos in the final season.
- Burn Notice -- utterly inane but one of the funnest shows around. I've written about this before, but the leads Jeffery Donovan, Gabrielle Anwar, and The Chin himself, Bruce Campbell, have the best chemistry imaginable. Moves fast, zero substance, fun characters. This is the apex of the USA formula.
- Psych -- I just started watching this one. It is the one with the least pretensions toward seriousness and it features some of the best one-line gags since Sid Caesar.
House -- On regular broadcast TV (if there even is such a thing anymore), this is the only show I've been watching for a while. It is a complete waste as a medical drama and would be unwatchable were it not for Hugh Laurie's portrayal of the lead character (and increasingly Robert Sean Leonard as his sidekick Watson...er, I mean Wilson). The show has always been a one trick pony, and I predicted a flame out for it many years ago on that basis, yet they've held it together. Now, however, there may be some cracks showing. This season started with House in rehab, desperately trying to exorcise his personal demons. Once again, I shall predict the shows demise. They appear to have hit the wall with the latest theme of House becoming more normal and seeking some sort of happiness. The show fails if he becomes that, or they turn it back into what it was and, finally, the one trick dries up. (I have given way too much thought to this.)
Dexter -- Showtime's headliner. A new season just started for the world's most lovable serial killer, this time his enemy will be John Lithgow (who is eye-gougingly naked in a few scenes in the opener). The storyline is a little clich‚d with a retired FBI agent in a quixotic search for the killer that got away. And Dexter trying to keep up with his new baby while finding time to kill (get it?) is blunt-instrument irony. But Dexter has always been a top quality guilty pleasure and it looks to continue as such so I won't miss an episode.
Mad Men -- the only currently running show that can rightfully be considered excellent drama is now in season three and straddling a fine line. I'm sure it is very tempting to let the workplace drama take center stage, but that would mean puppeteering the characters instead of having them develop. Even easier would be to hammer home the social change themes, but really, does anybody need another lecture on the mythology of the '60s? The show needs to be about Don Draper's and, to a slightly lesser extent, the other characters' personal development. This season has been entertaining as hell, but I get the sense that the plots are drifting a bit, as if they are not exactly clear on what to do next with these personalities. The answer is figure out where you want the characters to finish up, determine how to get them there, and set an final episode date to enforce discipline -- two more seasons, three more seasons, whatever is needed for Draper and crew to their endgame and not an episode more. I have complete faith the (series creator) Matt Weiner can and will do this.
Apart from that, I'll just briefly observe that my esteem for Breaking Bad, currently on hiatus, has been rising and I may have to elevate my judgment from great entertainment to great drama if it keeps going. Also, in terms of candy, I am tempted to start watching Californication, which comes on right after Dexter. The one episode I have seen was a hoot.
At its best, TV is vastly superior to movies, and has been so for quite a few years now. I have a free pay-per-view movie coming to me from Comcast and I can't bring myself to risk wasting the two hours, even at no cost.
All this high volume toobage is temporary. Once I settle into my next revision of Misspent Youth or attach myself to another writing project, my viewing time will plunge. Still, a guy's got to have extended veg time now and then.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
The Month That Was - August 2009: From a personal perspective the big achievement this month was getting through a revision of Misspent Youth. I am now comfortable with the idea that it is good enough for publication or, more accurately, it will be good enough for publication once it is further refined. The story is complete. The words are all written. My concern at this point is the structure. The timeline is lopsided in the early activity takes place over weeks and the later activity is condensed into a couple of days. Additionally, there are rapid and numerous changes of POV and there about ten characters to track. This is more complicated than anything I have written before and the structure of the chapters and divisions have a great importance. So my new goal is to nail down a workable structure then turn it over a beta release to some trusted eyes. There is much work to do, but I finally feel positive about its eventual release.The other wonderful thing that happened this month is that I finally recovered from this horrendous ankle injury that was keeping me from doing any sort of running all summer. I was never really sure what was wrong, either a bad tendon tear or a stress fracture, but whatever it was I literally could not do anything that required me to push off my left foot with any force. Walking was OK, as was biking, but running or jumping were right out. This had continued for nearly four months. I tried everything short of doctors to get it rehabbed -- stretches, muscle activation therapy, ultrasound. I was seriously despairing of it being permanent and just another indicator of my mortality. Finally, I started using a foam roller to massage and loosen the muscles and either that worked or it luckily coincided with it healing naturally. Anyway, I am back to running again (and doing box jumps for that matter), although I am building very gradually. I had hoped to get up to doing the Mackinac Island 8-Mile run next month, but that may have to wait until next year. Still, I can feign immortality again, and that counts for something. Even if I did finally break down and buy a pair of reading glasses.
Noob of the Road
Hacker Smackers
Plane Foolishness
The Michigan Death Spiral Continues
Florida Reboot
Flick Check: Star Trek
Book Look: With the Old Breed
Travel Rewind: A Nondescript Quasi-Unknown Demi-Paradise Noob of the Road: Apropos of nothing but my late life appreciation of road trips we have none other than Paul Theroux -- who has traveled throughout the world, from some of the more remote and undeveloped areas to great sprawling Asian cities, from railing across continents to sailing across oceans -- now in his sixties and taking his first road trip across the U.S. having seen pretty much none of his own country.
In my life, I had sought out other parts of the world--Patagonia, Assam, the Yangtze; I had not realized that the dramatic desert I had imagined Patagonia to be was visible on my way from Sedona to Santa Fe, that the rolling hills of West Virginia were reminiscent of Assam and that my sight of the Mississippi recalled other great rivers. I'm glad I saw the rest of the world before I drove across America. I have traveled so often in other countries and am so accustomed to other landscapes, I sometimes felt on my trip that I was seeing America, coast to coast, with the eyes of a foreigner, feeling overwhelmed, humbled and grateful.
Yep. Nothing compares to flyover country. Theroux did it wrong to some extent, barreling through the nation at a breakneck pace. He acknowledges this, saying that he didn't really see places long enough to do anything but make a list of where he wants to spend a proper amount of time. That would be awesome. If we suddenly got a slew U.S. travel stories from Theroux, I think we'd all be grateful for his road trips.
Open offer to Paul: drop me an email and I'll design you an epic itinerary. Hacker Smackers: Generally, I find it despicable when journalists take it upon themselves to spin supposed "news" into judgmental tracts. Such hubris and arrogance is deeply ugly and consummately slap-worthy. That's why I am moderately ashamed of myself for taking such glee in the Smoking Gun's high-handed take down of a group of cyber-vandals known as Pranknet.
Pranknet is a loose affiliation of monumental losers, pinheads, and convicted child molesters, who communicate in some chat room then go off and coerce innocent people into foolish acts by preying on their good and unsuspicious natures. For example, they seem to get a kick out of calling some place of business over the phone and convincing them to set off their fire alarm systems. Sometimes they run into particularly gullible marks and convince them to do especially humiliating or hurtful things. Often they just post fake Craigslist ads and deluge unsuspecting strangers with calls and visitors. Basically, they're a pack of infantile jerk-offs.
Anyway, Smoking Gun did some exhaustive research on this group, eventually unmasking them and turning all the evidence over to the FBI. Then of course, they wrote it up for publication making no attempt to hide their outright derision and loathing of these pathetic clowns. And I was surprised by how satisfying I found the venomous tone of the article. Maybe it's the way the Pranknet types virtually strut around all smug and self-righteous. Maybe it's the way they convince themselves that the people they hurt are really just "sheep". I couldn't help thinking they deserved it.
More standard coverage of a more interesting hacker comes from Rolling Stone. (Who knew Rolling Stone magazine still existed?) This prankster was old school and actually used the telephone. He had to because he was blind. Like the mythology goes, being blind he developed some kind of super hearing. He could control telephones and even switchboard networks by whistling at proper frequencies. He could hear and distinguish the tiniest sounds. He could imitate any sound or voice he heard. It's like something out of a comic book. But sadly, he used his superpowers for evil -- like organizing police raids on the houses of anyone who wouldn't have phone sex with him, a process he called SWAT-ing.
Unlike the Pranknet group, this guy is doing time. He foolishly continued his shenanigans after his 18th birthday and discovered adults get treated very differently than misguided teenaged nerds who play on their disabilities. Despite that, he doesn't seem all that regretful.
In both cases, the word that comes to mind is Comeuppance. I'll allow myself a little sanctimony, just this once. Plane Foolishness: Longtime readers know that as a result of numerous personal experiences I have deemed Mesa Airlines to be The Worst Airline in the World. I won't rehash the stories, but let's just say that if you are ever unfortunate enough to have a flight scheduled on Mesa and you end up only severely inconvenienced, you can consider yourself lucky.
So one day my eye lands on a headline: "Schedule Fatigued Pilots Who Fell Asleep". It seems the two man crew for a short hop flight in Hawaii between Oahu and the Big Island -- on Go! Airlines -- decided to catch some Zs while the plane was on autopilot.
Controllers tried unsuccessfully to contact the crew by radio and watched the jet fly to a navigation point and turn toward Hilo's airport without descending. Two other airplanes also tried to contact the Go! crew.
The jet flew 26 nautical miles past Hilo at 21,000 feet before the crew awoke 25 minutes after their last radio transmission. They contacted controllers and landed safely.
A contributing factor was the captain's previously undiagnosed severe obstructive sleep apnea, a condition that likely caused him to experience chronic daytime fatigue and contributed to his falling asleep, the NTSB said.
How comforting to us frequent flyers. But I left out the best part. The part that made me jump up and shout "Yes! Yes! I knew it!"
Go! is a unit of Mesa Airlines.
I've read it ten times now and I'm still just sitting here nodding my head.
In other news, as a follow-up to my disastrous trip back from Moab on US Airways, wherein they absolutely hosed me over a cancelled flight, I happened upon this story about airlines being fined for hosing folks who get bumped or have their flights cancelled. An interesting stat: In the first six months of last year (2008) the Dept. of Transportation received 50 complaints from US Airways passengers who received insufficient compensation. The DOT, in turn, fined Useless Airways $140,000 for their transgressions.
Now let's see. Let's assume for every complaint the DOT received there were 50 others who, like me, just tried to get compensation from the airlines and gave up after being told to talk to the hand. And let's assume every hosed passenger saved US Airways an average of $100 in compensation (vouchers, refunds, whatever). That means US Airways had 2500 non-complaints (50 non-complaints for each of the 50 complaints) for which they save $100 each, for a total of $250,000. Since they were fined $140,000, they came out ahead by $110,000. Seems to me shafting your customers is worth the risk.
This is me turning into a conspiracy crank before your very eyes.
Oh, and one last airline observation. I am sick and tired of getting hip checked in my aisle seat every time some wide load flight attendant lumbers through the cabin. If you're going to design planes with those narrow aisles, at least give us proper stewardesses who could fit between the seats without greasing up their thighs. The Michigan Death Spiral Continues: No, I can't seem to leave the follies of my home State without comment.
The ongoing operation of the "new" General Motors proceeds in a universe of surreality. A case-in-point being the machinations around the Orion plant. While making plans to return to some semblance of financial viability, GM execs decided it was best to close their problematic plant in the northern Detroit suburb of Lake Orion. It simply wasn't a profitable operation. But wait -- you can't possibly put those workers out in the streets, think of the cost to society! Best we keep the plant open and running, says the UAW -- which also happens to be the biggest GM shareholder. So deals are cut and arms are twisted and the great State of Michigan offers GM a Dr. Evil-esque one billion dollars in tax cuts (because the bailout money they've already received wasn't enough) to keep the plant open. Now the plant can be profitable, right? Well, no. You see the money is to be used to re-tool the plant to build tiny little econoboxes that adhere to the desire of the federal government (the second biggest shareholder in GM) for fuel efficiency -- despite the fact that such vehicles have never, even at the height of gas prices, sold enough to make money in this country. So the "new" GM business plan is:
- The Orion plant needs to close since it does not make money.
- The State of Michigan coughs up 1 billion in tax cuts so it can stay open and not make money.
- The Federal government says thanks, but you have to build the cars we want not what will sell, so it will always not make money.
- Profit!
Maybe they'll make it up on volume. How long before I can write off my portion of the bailout as a tax loss?
On the other hand, there is at least one example of someone dealing with reality rather than surreality. A consortium of Credit Unions has developed something called Save to Win wherein you get an entry in a raffle for a grand prize of up to $100,000 for every $25 dollars you deposit into your savings account. Now, a few moments thought will quickly reveal the absurdity of this. Your chance of winning is so small that you are almost certainly better off taking the time to find a higher interest rate than the somewhat low one offered by the program. But thoughtful people are not the target of the program. Easy money seekers are the target. The short-sighted are the target. People who simply do not have the intellectual wherewithal to do contingency planning are the target. The bank gets cheap assets (deposits on which they pay a lower interest rate). The suckers, er, customers get all tingly over a possible big payoff, but they also get something else -- money in the bank for a rainy day, although they won't have any appreciation of it. Absurd, definitely; but brilliantly rooted in reality. Nice to see that for a change.
Meanwhile, the City of Detroit wallows in its own persistent hell. The school system isn't just a total failure at education. It is corrupt beyond description, violent as a third-world hell-hole, and now, effectively bankrupt. Some choice quotes:
"The school system also has been rocked by corruption. A few years ago, an audit revealed that Detroit's school system misused more than $46 million on insurance and other contracts and was forced to sue venders [sic] to get some of its money back. Two of the system's employees were recently indicted for allegedly embezzling $400,000 from the school system over the past couple of years."
"In June, to stem pay-check fraud, [emergency financial manager Robert Bobb] required that employees pick up their paychecks in person. Paychecks for 257 suspected "ghost" employees--people who had improperly been getting checks--went unclaimed."
"In June, seven students were wounded in a shooting near Cody Ninth Grade Academy just two weeks after 16-year-old Tenecia Walter was shot in the chest shortly after leaving class at Denby High School. Earlier this year a gunfight broke out in Detroit's Central High School and last year a student was shot and killed walking home from Henry Ford High School."
"Detroit schools have lost 60,000 students."
"This is why [bankruptcy expert Ray] Graves and others see little alternative to declaring bankruptcy..."
How could things get like this? Well...
"In 2003 the state, under pressure from the Detroit Federation of Teachers, turned down a gift of $200 million from philanthropist Robert Thompson that would have established 15 charter schools in the city."
"In 2006, the union illegally went on strike, killing a plan to force teachers to take a pay cut to balance the system's books."
"[The Detroit Board of Education] is seeking a court injunction to block private companies from running district high schools."
Did you even have to ask?
Strangely enough, as bad as Detroit is -- and it's very, very bad -- if left alone to succeed without regulatory boards and layers of bureaucracy, some people have found a way to make something of the place. Specifically: Farmers. Imagine that. The return of rural Detroit. If left to their own devices, these folks could probably go whole hog and have barn-raising parties and build one-room schoolhouses where kids actually learn something. But what would the Board of Education say?
The article is a bit confused, especially in its implied ideas about economics. The thought chain is that since there are no longer grocery stores in Detroit and everyone has to shop at convenience stores, people eat atrociously and are severely unhealthy. If they farmed their own food, they could simply feed themselves and live holistically (whatever that means). That's not how farming works; it's an industry and the way it would help is by making use of the arable land that Detroit has in abundance now that everyone is abandoning their homes. This builds income for people who can then support the existence of profitable grocery stores so they can get a well rounded diet. But the hippie-commies at Guernica magazine have the right general idea which is to allow creative and clever people make use of the available assets rather than let everything sit in decay because it's impossible to get the bureaucracy to act without some kick back involved. Sadly, I think the only real question is how long it will take the powers of the City to find a way to crush them.
But just so I don't end on a sour note, we Michiganders who are staying have some good reasons. Florida Reboot: (photos on Smugmug) You sit at the gate. The passengers are all loaded and belted in. The plane is fueled up and ready. The crew is ensconced in the cockpit. Yet you sit at the gate. You are waiting for parts. Not parts for your plane, but for another plane that happens to be at your destination. So you sit for an extra half hour because your first duty as a passenger is to mule spare parts for Northwest Airlines. Despite the hundreds of dollars you paid for your ticket, your vacation is not their priority; they are just giving you a lift because it happens to be convenient. Just another day as Northwest's bitch.
The whole trip was not shaping up as planned. I was going to fly into Orlando, barrel across the state to the Gulf coast to visit family in Sarasota, then barrel back across the state to the Space coast -- Cocoa Beach, specifically -- to catch the shuttle launch and enjoy some ocean time. Well, shortly after I had locked in my reservations, the shuttle launch got delayed a week. So much for that. Then my mom went into the hospital a few days before I left. She was out by the time I got to Sarasota and nearly fully recovered. (Frankly, at age 84, it's remarkable how healthy she is and how sharp she is mentally.) And any flight to Orlando is going to be filled with rugrats, and rugrats are known to be little germ factories. Sure enough, lying in bed my first night in Florida, a killer head cold descended upon me; the kind where you can feel the phlegm sloshing around between your ears. (Yes it's gross. Deal.) So my Florida vacation began with my planned activities hosed, and both me and my Mom under the weather. Weather which, by the way, was heat indexed well into the triple digits every day. The humidity was truly oppressive. Honestly, the place was like a sauna.
However, I would not be much of a traveler if I let such little annoyances slow me down. That's why God invented nasal spray and air conditioning, I suppose. After getting family duties situated I found myself with a free afternoon in Sarasota and used it for a visit to the Ringling Museum.
Although I have been to the Ringling Museum several times, it's been a few years since my last visit. Time was, the Ringling was one of the premier art museums in the South. It still is, I suppose, but its development hasn't gone as I would have hoped. The first thing that I discovered is that the price has gone up. You used to be able to get into the museum for $8 and I think there was one day of the week when it was free. No more. $25 to get in. That is more than MOMA or the Met in New York City. Ye gods!
I am not opposed to the price per se. My problem is that the money doesn't seem to have been spent on the Art museum. The grounds, which are extensive and are like a little city park in themselves, seem better maintained and manicured. The Ringling's Gatsby-esque historic home, Ca d'Zan, is nicely restored and worth a tour. A fine dining establishment has been added (that should be self-financing, though). But it looks to me like most of the resources have gone into the circus museums (with an expansion coming in 2012) which are the least interesting part of the complex to me. Why not devote more to the Art museum? The collection does not appear to have changed at all since I first visited probably 20 years ago.
That is not to say that the collection is short on fine works. It is loaded down with wonderful old masters and bits and pieces of other things. But the lighting is troublesome. It is often a struggle to position yourself so as to avoid glare. It's bad enough that it really interferes with viewing. There would a good place to spend some money. The museum courtyard is filled with stunning casts of classic bronze sculptures and is a remarkable space in itself, but like the museum, though well maintained it hasn't seen any improvements.
Griping aside, I spent a fine if somewhat sweaty afternoon wandering the grounds past lily ponds and flower gardens, then back around Ca d'Zan overlooking the bay. I cooled down in the museum taking some time to fill my camera here and there. Even at $25 it's a good way to spend the afternoon. A calm oasis in the midst of ever more crowded Sarasota. If find I have a special attraction to the place, having used it so often over the years as an escape zone whenever I'm down that way. I give it a slightly hesitant recommendation.
After one more dinner with the family, I rose the next day and darted across the state from Gulf to Ocean. After a little over three hours I was pulling into Cocoa Beach.
Compared to places like Sarasota, Naples, Miami Beach, even Key West, Cocoa Beach is a bit downscale. It's a beach town more along the lines of Key Largo or Ft. Myers Beach or Panama City Beach. (I'm getting positively encyclopedic in my classification of Florida cities). I can see why it is a popular destination for families, though. A cheap flight into Orlando gets you within an hour's drive. You can find a nice inexpensive hotel right on the beach (Doubletree in my case), many even have kitchenettes. There are plenty of cheap eats around. All sorts of little beach stores on every corner, surmounted by the original and sprawling Ron Jon Surf Shop. Kennedy Space Center is a short drive away for a day tour. You can easily run up to Daytona Beach if you need a redneck fix. And there are water parks and miniature golf and all that sort of stuff. You can lounge by the pool or take a chair out to the beach while the kids raise hell. Great way to spend a final week of summer vacation, provided you can handle the heat.
In fact, I was here on exactly such a trip as a child over 35 years ago. Actually, I was a little north of here in a lesser known place called Ormond Beach. What I remember best from that trip is spending what seemed like hours doing nothing but flopping around in the warm surf, wrestling the breakers, and the feel of the sandy bottom that stretched out endlessly into the ocean. And that's what I found again. The warm, buoyant salt water, the waves crashing around me, the smooth sand -- it was the Atlantic Ocean I remembered from childhood, and to this day I am quite clear on the visceral experience.
And while I was on the theme of reliving memories, the next day I took a two hour run up the coast to St. Augustine, another activity from that childhood trip, although one I don't have any specific recollection of beyond the knowledge that it happened.
St. Augustine is a nice spot. The mythology indicates it's where Ponce De Leon discovered the Fountain of Youth. It is also the oldest existing European settlement in the U.S. It fits in the same broad classification as Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA -- a city that exists for its own history, although I don't think St. A is terribly attentive to historical fidelity. Some very old structures have tacky little signs and displays and some look like they have been turned into souvenir shops. In fact, St. A has a fairly concentrated commercial zone. Not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just not as genuine as somewhere like Charleston -- never mind Savannah, the queen of detailed restoration. Of course, St. A also has a fine Florida beach which the other two can't remotely claim. St. A is basically for strolling about, and that's what I did, checking out the fort and wandering the picturesque streets, eventually settling in for a late lunch of crab tacos al fresco. And, naturally, filling my camera. A nice little day trip.
For my last full day in Florida I thought about dropping the nearly $80 for a day pass to the Space Center. But then I thought otherwise. I'll wait for that until I can get to see a rocket launch. Better I should get in the water again, so I headed out to Cape Canaveral National Seashore. A long, long stretch of undeveloped coastline, thought to be the longest on the Eastern Seaboard, running along a barrier island, CCNS gives you the soft sand Atlantic beach but with a definite sense of isolation. Bordering the interior sound, there are some short walking trails in various places. I took one called Seminole Rest, essentially a little park tucked out of the way on the mainland. It was really just a short paved walk, but there are a couple of interesting historic structures, and I have never seen so fiddler crabs in my entire life. They swarm like ants along the shoreline and onto the trails, darting into the water when they sense your approach, balancing the risk of getting stepped on versus getting gobbled by fish.
From there I took the longest possible way around to get to the beach area through the city of New Smyrna Beach, which is what I get for driving around without a map. Entering the shore from the north entrance, the road leads south along the island with five designated stops with parking and beach access. As I passed these they didn't seem too crowded so I figured I may as well go all the way to the last one which, as might be expected, is exactly what everyone else thought. I had to circle a couple of times but I finally managed to squeeze into a space. And despite the cars, the beach didn't seem very crowded at all. Looking north I think I spotted a couple of folks far in the distance otherwise it appeared deserted. To the south lay the truly remote beach -- Klondike Beach -- which is only accessible by foot and extends many miles until it connects up with the road north from the south entrance. Not that I was going to make it all the way, but I figured I'd walk a while in that directions. Well, a few hundred yards down there was a small encampment of people with beach chair and umbrellas. Since this place is about all about isolation I wasn't sure why they had all decided to drop their beach towels in the same spot until I got closer. It wasn't just their beach towels they had dropped. It was their bathing suits. I had inadvertently stumbled on a nude beach.
I'm struggling for what to say next. First off, yes, I did whip off my trunks and go for a swim. I would never have sought this out on purpose, but when in Rome... and so forth. Second, I did not laze about on the beach; once I was done with my swim, I left. Third, part of the reason I didn't hang around is because nude beaches are majorly populated by wrinkly out-of-shape middle-aged men who enjoy wandering around with their giblets on display. The upside is that as a wrinkly in-shape middle-aged man, I must have looked like a friggin' Adonis. But really, if I wanted that sort of visual, I'd just join a local country club and hang out in the locker room. Fourth, I decided every parent should require their teenage daughters to spend an hour at a nude beach. It would give us the rest of us some eye candy, and the poor girls would immediately renounce men and enter a convent.
I guess it's another notch in the bucket list -- albeit a very, very minor one. A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again. I would not hesitate, however, to spend more time at CCNS and the associated Merritt Island wildlife refuge. It's a gem in that overly touristed area.
And that was pretty much it. A quiet drink by the pool back at the Doubletree (fully clothed), then up the next day for the flight home -- after an obligatory stop at Ron Jon's for a t-shirt. The flight back had to be one of the easiest of my life. No delays at all. I literally walked off the plane in Detroit on to a waiting terminal shuttle then immediately on to a waiting parking shuttle. I think I made it back to my door in Dexter from Orlando in about 4 hours. Stunning.
I do enjoy my Florida explorations, even in the middle of August. I actually prefer the middle of August as no one else in their right mind would put up with the heat and humidity. I have at various times in my life trolled throughout virtually all of the State. It was good to relive a bit of my first trip to there. Although I tend to think of traveling as something that I came to later in life, as I look back, it now seems the with respect to Florida this habit was formed in my childhood and has been ongoing ever since. Perhaps after more than 35 years it was just time to start over from the beginning. Flick Check: Star Trek: During the worst of my sick evenings in Florida I resorted to the in-room movies and paid a ludicrous amount of money to watch J. J. Abrams' Star Trek reboot. The plot itself is basically the same re-hashed dreck of all the old school Star Trek movies. Some familiar group of people go around saving the galaxy from some contrived danger or other all the while giving cartoonish self-narration as they go. All the old bollocks is there. Declaring this or that to be impossible, but using inane, pseudo-scientific gobble-dee-gook to save the day when someone shouts "Just do it, mister!" with authority. Information is withheld and revealed irrationally; preposterously timed to enhance tension. Characters aren't so much developed as puppeteered. You know: all the usual drivel. For that matter, it's no different from 99.999% of action movies of any stripe.
And yet, I found it oddly watchable and even enjoyable at times. Weeks later, I'm still not sure why. It had a good sense of humor. It moved quickly. The young actors hired to replace the old warhorses were exceedingly well cast -- in a mindless movie such as this, casting is at least 50% responsible for its success. Maybe J. J. Abrams just knows how to do action really well, on a level that I can't quite explain. Or maybe it was the cold medicine.
In any case, it's a good one to check out once it comes to cable, but it's not worth paying any money for. Unless your head is densely packed with mucus and you are stuck in a motel in a Florida town that essentially closes down once the early-bird specials are over. In that case you can spend thrice the going rate and not feel cheated. Book Look: With the Old Breed by E.B. Sledge: You will be spared nothing in this startling WW2 memoir. Eugene Sledge, "Sledgehammer" to his compatriots, served with the Marine Corps in the Pacific and saw action at Peleiu and Okinawa. Sledge's memoir begins when he forgoes officer training and enlists so he won't "miss the war". In the early chapters we are treated to boot camp and other training experiences then, suddenly, as if descending into a nightmare, we are following him on to the beaches at Peleiu, lost in the fog of war -- the chaos and the paralyzing fear. The overwhelming sensations of the beach landing would stay with him his entire life. As he states,
Everything my life had been before and has been after pales in the light of that awesome moment when my amtrac started in amid a thunderous bombardment toward the flaming, smoke-shrouded beach for the assault on Peleiu.
The Peleiu battle turned out to be particularly deadly, having the highest casualty rate of any WW2 battle. Sledge doesn't hold back in giving a full account of the horrible inhumanities the Japanese committed and how the Corps built up a deep hatred of them. Nor does he gloss over the occasional shameful acts of his fellow servicemen, including the removal of the gold caps from the teeth of dead (and in one instance, not yet dead) enemy. In fact, the memoir is especially conspicuous in that Sledge, while hitting on many historic or political hot buttons, does not seem to have any axe to grind. The point of view is purely personal which makes the book hit all that much harder. And there is zero sense of ego or arrogance. Sledge was a simple mortar man, rank: Private First Class, throughout the battles. I don't think he received any battle commendations, not even a Purple Heart. He was there, did his duty, suffered and exulted, and is now telling the story.
And the story is complete, even beyond the fighting. There is the horrendous sanitation; the relentless pestilence of the tropics; the drudgery of hauling barrels of water and crates of ammo around; the inescapable, stifling stench of the dead everywhere; the dealings with officers good and bad; the terror in the black of a moonless night, hearing a Japanese raiding party assaulting his friends in the next foxhole over. Riveting and mortifying.
After a brief respite following Peleiu, he was again shipped off for another island landing at Okinawa, this time as a combat veteran with both greater confidence and greater trepidation. He tells sad tales of the new recruits who had clearly been rushed to the line, lacking training and receiving little sympathy from the vets. Okinawa, while not as deadly percentage-wise, went on for a very long time almost pushing Sledge to the breaking point. He had observed men who snapped under the pressure -- it was not uncommon. Fearing that may be his fate, he silently makes a vow to himself. "The Japanese might kill or wound me, but they wouldn't make me crack-up." After having read along with his descriptions of his experiences to that point, that simple statement resounds with boundless courage.
Throughout the ordeal, Sledge finds sources of strength: in God, in himself, in his training, but most of all he feels the source of victory was the esprit d'corps -- the brotherhood and bond between him and his fellow Marines is what kept him and the fight going in the heart of darkness. One suspects that after years of reflection, and acknowledgment of the cost, Sledge feels something akin to gratitude: gratitude for surviving, and for finding faith in his comrades-in-arms and strength in himself that he could carry throughout his life.
The HBO crew behind the astounding Band of Brothers mini-series is preparing a counterpart about the Pacific battles based in part on With the Old Breed. If they get it remotely close to right, they'll be swimming in awards. Travel Rewind: A Nondescript Quasi-Unknown Demi-Paradise (August 2006): (photos on Smugmug) A few years ago I had the chance to take a brief Caribbean vacation to Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI), a place most people have never heard of, never mind seen on a map. It is a group of nondescript islands south of the Bahamas. And when I say nondescript, I mean that in the sense that there is virtually nothing about TCI that stands out. They have a string of beautiful and expensive reports along an exquisite beach, just like dozens of other island groups. There is good diving and fishing, just like dozens of other island groups. And that's it. Literally. The most telling description (as you will read below) came from the shuttle driver on the way to the resort: "Welcome to Turks and Caicos. Tourism is about the only industry we have here so thank you for visiting."
Well it turns out TCI did stand out for one thing: government corruption. It was so bad that Great Britain came in dissolved their government and took over the administration of the islands, which they were legally able to do since TCI is a crown colony. In a moment of unintentional (but not unexpected) comedy, TCI's former leaders expressed outrage and declared themselves occupied by foreign invaders. The people of TCI had other opinions; specifically, they were overjoyed to be rid of their "elected" leaders and back under British rule.
(Just as a side note, in an effort to raise the unintentional comedy to new heights, Slate magazine took the time to determine if Canada was next.)
I think I can safely guarantee you that nobody in Her Majesty's government, nor any of Her subjects, wants anything to do with Turks and Caicos. They have a full plate already without having to worry about supporting and managing some island outpost. Nothing would make them happier than to get TCI off the books forever. Personally, I suspect there are drugs involved. TCI offers a lot of opportunities for plane stopovers for drug smugglers and I don't doubt TCI's leaders were in cahoots with them.
Whatever the case, it makes for a nice long intro to this travel rewind.
Turks and Caicos (TCI) is a chain of islands in the Caribbean; just south of the Bahamas and just north of Haiti. There is little industry or economic activity beyond tourism -- in fact, on the way to the hotel, the driver dryly offered, "Welcome to Turks and Caicos. Tourism is about the only industry in the islands so thank you for coming."
TCI is of British extraction, like Bermuda or the Bahamas or Grand Cayman. However one of the oddest things I learned was that for many, many years there has been discussion and debate over whether it should become a Canadian province. Apparently there are strong ties to Canada and the question has come up in the parliaments of both places. Typical of the damn Canadians, always trying to expand their empire.
From what I could see, most islanders have little interest in politics. There does not appear to be any significant poverty, although I certainly wouldn't call the island wealthy in the sense of a Grand Cayman (never mind Bermuda). But they may be getting there.
For the time being there is a certain dichotomy. There are a huge number of top flight resorts -- including some of the best in the world, such as the famous celebrity hang out Parrot Cay and the requisite Beaches and Club Meds and so forth -- the overwhelming majority of which are situated along Grace Bay on the island of Providenciales, or Provo. Grace Bay is rightly renown as one of the most beautiful beaches in the world -- a multi-mile crescent of powdery white sand and calm, crystal clear waters. I stayed at a place called The Palms, which I originally reviewed for Hotel Chatter, but here is the gist of my somewhat bi-polar resort experience:
According to some reviews at Tripadvisor, visitors to The Palms on the island of Providenciales in the British territory of Turks and Caicos are met at the airport by a Cadillac Escalade. Sadly, this was not to be the case for me. Along with a quartet of fellow travelers from the same flight, I was met by a pretty standard looking transport van. It was a nice enough van, but my inner pimp-daddy was sorely disappointed.
The Palms itself is far from disappointing. It is a strikingly beautiful resort; very refined -- there is no bombast or gaudiness to it, just an unmistakable air of quality. Your arrival initiates a thoughtfully designed process: You are dropped at the open air lobby and your bags are whisked away by a porter. You are handed a tasty passion fruit beverage and led on a brief guided tour of the property starting with the elegant and perfectly landscaped courtyard, beyond which is the manor house, a stately colonial mansion of old that now contains the main restaurant, Parallel 23, featuring a patio for alfresco dining and a nice comfy lounge. The five buildings beyond are the residences and you are guided up to you room for your in-room check-in.
The standard rooms are all suite-sized with a balcony (or patio) on which to appreciate the beautiful evenings. There are two bottles of Fiji water and plate full of cookies waiting for you, complimentary. Everything looks fresh, clean and new. More water and treats are delivered with the nightly turn-down. (The profuseness of gratis bottled water is important because the water as it comes out of the tap is gag-inducing; probably desalinated.)
The five residential buildings surround the pool on three sides. The pool is a beauty: formed in a curvaceous, meandering shape that envelops a hot tub and a swim up bar-and-grill eventually ending in infinity. It is nicely appointed with lounge chairs and umbrellas with attendants to raise them. More entertainingly, there are four "pods", or circular day beds, that are the target of fervent attention. They are highly desired but not reservable. You can spot type-A personalities as they dash out of bed bright and early to deposit belongings on them as a territorial claim, and jealously guard them throughout the day because if they are left alone for an undefined length of time the attendants will give them away. Comical how some people escape to paradise then immediately seek out their habitual stress level.
Beyond the pool is the legendary Grace Bay Beach and it is as fabulous as its reputation suggests. A multi-mile long crescent with powdery sand and crystal clear water tinted slightly green and turning a deep turquoise beyond the shallows. The sea is warm, buoyant and calm.
The Palms has it all, and it seems to work extremely well as long as you stay within the resort. Many guests -- perhaps a majority -- will do just that. It's when you have to interact with the outside world that things can get dicey.
I had it in my head to explore the island a bit (and maybe find a less expensive place for dinner) so I stopped at the concierge desk one morning to inquire about a car. They told me a small car could be had for $39/day. Great, I said, I'll stop by after breakfast and finalize arrangements. Of course, it was not to be so simple.
After breakfast I was told that there were no small cars available, but Avis could rent me a jeep for $69/day. I found it strange that in the off-season there was not a small car to be had on the island. I also found it strange that Avis, which typically has a policy of giving you an upgrade for the same price if the car you want is not available, would not then offer me a jeep for the lower price. Neither of these observations seemed to incite any action on the part of the concierge beyond a shrug. I strongly suspected a game of soak the tourist was being played, but my options were to call around the island on my own to see what I could work out or just deal with it. Since I only wanted the car for a day, I chose to just deal with it and asked them to have Avis bring over a jeep for me at 3pm.
Come 3pm, no one from Avis was to be seen, so I checked with the concierge who told me that instead of Avis, they had arranged for my jeep to come from a place with the professional sounding name of Scooter Bob's. Hmmm, I wondered whether they had gotten a better price for me there, but there was no representative from Scooter Bob's there either. Apparently, Scooter Bob just dropped off the jeep and the left the key with the concierge.
It was very surprising to get handed a key without having anyone even check that my license was valid, never mind get a credit card number. The concierge just guessed that Scooter Bob would make arrangements with me when I was done. I was given pause when I noticed the keychain had the word "mayhem" printed on it. I was given yet more pause when I saw the "jeep" -- a clapped-out Geo Tracker, with no rear window, no a/c, a manual transmission, and a nicely lit "check engine" light. The word "mayhem" was printed on the front in stick-on lettering. Luckily, all this shabbiness was offset by the brightly polished chrome wheels that were probably worth more than the entire vehicle.
I had to laugh. It was if someone asked Scooter Bob for a car, and Scooter Bob asked the gangsta wanna-be teenager down the street if he could borrow his ride. At this point I was in roll-with-it mode so I managed to get around for the day in "mayhem" -- it is not a big island and you can't go over 40 mph anyway.
The next day I dropped off the key with the concierge and suggested they have Scooter Bob contact me when they get there to pick it up. The concierge (a different person than the day before) was surprised that they had not taken credit card info from me when they dropped it off. It was my turn to shrug.
I never got a call from the concierge or Scooter Bob. I mentioned it again at checkout the next day, but nobody had heard from Scooter Bob and nobody seemed to feel an urgent need to follow up. I wasn't sure what was going to happen, but my shuttle was leaving and, well, if Scooter Bob was concerned about getting my money, I figured he would ask The Palms to get in touch with me.
Imagine my shock when upon my return I discovered a charge for $79 to my credit card from "Holiday Rentals" which, presumably, is Scooter Bob's legal name.
Now, despite the abysmal incompetence of their concierge staff, it is not technically the fault The Palms if Scooter Bob wants to soak me for the clapped-out piece of crap they referred to as a "jeep". That's for me and Scooter Bob to work out. What is a huge black mark against The Palms is that they gave my credit card information away to a third party without my consent! That is an egregious violation of my privacy and security. I am stunned that a hotel of such seeming quality would do such a thing.
I don't quite know what conclusion to draw on The Palms. The fact is, apart from the rental car fiasco, everything was top notch and I suspect most people would never run into the troubles I did. Reviews from guests tend to be way over to the positive side of the scale. The concierge issues could be chalked up to a garden variety bad service experience that happens from time to time. But I cannot accept them handing out my credit card number without my authorization.
The Palms may be a sweet place, but I'm left with too many open suspicions to be certain of that. Other things equal, I would suggest staying elsewhere.
The resorts seem to be the extent of the usable development. Beyond them, there is one little area on Provo that has the usual touristy crap shops and bars, but in relation to the number of resorts, it is tiny. There are numerous condo and condo-hotel combos in the process of being built on the Eastern end of Provo and, as I understand, on the other islands, but most seem to be "in-process" at this point. No doubt there is a massive time-share bubble in the early stages of expansion. [[update: It didn't take a genius to call this housing bubble early. -- dam]]
For the most part, the islands still exude something of a Caribbean backwater air. People run their little shops, go to church on Sunday, sip their somewhat watery beer and just live it day-to-day like in a Jimmy Buffet song. One guidebook suggested being extra careful on the road when merging into the roundabouts because they were relatively new to the island and the natives weren't all that comfortable with them. There are no stoplights. The cell phone company Digicell was giving away t-shirts by the side of the road and the party they were going to throw to announce their arrival was the talk of the islands.
Provo is far and away the most developed of the islands but even there major shopping areas as marked on maps may turn out to be a packet of four or five shops including a gift shop that went out of business and a little seafood shack with a hand-scrawled sign that says, "Back in 30 minutes" on the door. Like an idiot, I took a Hobie Cat out on the bay one afternoon without a lanyard for my Ray-Bans. Bye-bye Ray-Bans. I swear I spent an hour and a half driving around looking for a little gift shop that had a cheap, $10 pair of sunglasses; the kind of things you find on any corner in most tourist destinations.
Is the island beautiful? Not especially. There are some lush green areas, but it is mostly scrub. The beaches and the water are beautiful. As I think about it, it is easy to draw a ton of comparisons between TCI and Grand Cayman. Both places are of British extraction, but cater almost exclusively to U.S (and Canadian) tourists. Both have one very long and exceedingly beautiful beach around which most of the tourist activity is centered. And both have a main island without any particularly easy way to get to the other islands in the group short of a commuter flight (and when you ask about visiting the other islands, people can't understand why you would want to). It's hard to escape the conclusion that Provo is Grand Cayman ten years ago. And I suspect it is on the same development path. I would take Bermuda over either.
Although there is no reason you wouldn't enjoy yourself, I just can't see a compelling reason to pick TCI over more accessible and less expensive vacation spots (barring a yearning for some specific dive or fishing sites). The resorts are as good as any, so if you just wanted to hang in the resort, you'd be fine. But there are similar vacation spots that are easier to get to and still provide you with that sort of vacation.
For a limited amount of time, you can probably still scare up an off the beaten track trip by staying clear of Provo (maybe venturing over to Grand Turk [[update: Grand Turk is a haven for cruise ships now -- dam]]. The people were unfailingly friendly in that laconic way of Caribbean out-islanders. You can even find gems on Provo, like the Tiki Hut at the Turtle Cove marina, where a medium rare burger is over to the rare side (as it should be) and the fisherman exchange exaggerations at the bar.
I did enjoy my time in TCI, but my gut emotional reaction was one of discomfort. Perhaps because there was so little to explore. I was happy for a couple of days in the resort, but when venturing out there was so little to do and see that I almost felt trapped. (I would have killed for a casino or a good sized hiking trail.)
No doubt it's personal taste. Like I said, TCI is just fine and if you choose to go there you'll likely enjoy yourself. But if you're looking for a tourist center, Grand Cayman or Paradise Island is better. If you're looking for a something more sophisticated, Bermuda can't be beat. If you are looking for something more remote, someplace like the Grenadines are popular -- actually I hear Saba is the hot new off the beaten track Caribbean island. TCI just doesn't stand out enough.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
The Month That Was - July 2009: The past month is dominated in my mind by Things I Did Not Get Done.I did not finish Lanark by Alistair Gray, although I reserve the right to get back to it. It is nicely written, intriguing and original -- but slow, slow, slow to develop, and after two of the four books I'm still not sure whether it's taking me to any form of enlightenment. Plus, it is a lot of work; the themes and connections can be quite subtle. It begs the question, how much work should you have to put into reading a novel? I had to set it aside, because I have so much I want to read and limited time left in my life. I swapped it out for the WWII memoir With The Old Breed by E. B. Sledge which I can pretty much guarantee I won't have any problem finishing. Wow. More on that next month.
I did not use up my free pay-per-views from Comcast and thereby rid myself of the need to sit through any more disappointing movies. I had three left and I managed to use two; the Flick Checks are below.
I did not get all my desired travel planning done. I set things in motion for a run down to Florida to see family and to continue my explorations around that State (although after I made plans with the intent of catching a shuttle launch, they changed the schedule on me). But I also need to hit Chicago to see the new Modern art wing and some of the stuff going on in Millennium Park. I did some prelim then I balked at the prices (Chi-town has gotten quite expensive); it's still an open issue. I also realized I haven't been down to New Orleans in a couple of years and it might be worth a visit. And there are a couple of good plays going on over in Stratford, Ontario. And Labor Day is coming up... You get the idea.
I did not get the pedals changed on my bike. I have been trying to gain some basic bike maintenance and repair skills -- slowly, because I am a slow learner. I also have an old beat up Bridgestone with moustache handlebars in the garage that I have my eye on fixing up, so I am trying to gain knowledge and pick-up skills where I can. Well I had the need to swap pedals on my main road bike, and sure enough, I could not get the pedals off. No amount of force would do it. Now I'll have to bring it in to my local bike mechanic for this simple task. An inauspicious and somewhat embarrassing start to my potential new hobby.
I did not get this site redesigned, although I did clean up the column to your left. And light finally broke through the cracks in my cement skull and I am going to start including Amazon links in the posts, not just the sidebar. Plus, I increased the font size a bit so I can continue to delude myself that I don't need reading glasses.
I did not get the first revision of Misspent Youth done (although I am close).
Tempus fugit, eh? I need to drop Tempus like a clay pigeon.
Cellular Groan
Flick Check: Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist
Flick Check Paul Blart: Mall Cop
Kennebunkport
Book Look: Percy Jackson & The Olympians
The Webscape
Travel Rewind: Found: New Land (2008) Cellular Groan: Not to start off on a bad note but I just witnessed a new low in manners. It's one thing to take a conspicuous cell phone call in a public place. It's quite another to do it on speakerphone. In the locker room at my health club -- very crowded -- some guy was sitting on one of the benches getting dressed while taking a call on speakerphone. Folks are trying to have conversations, watch the TV, or do whatever, and here he is carrying on about this or that holding a two-way conversation loud enough to interfere with anything else. An absolutely stunning display of oblivious self-regard. Apparently the conversation couldn't wait until he put his shoes on and one of his hands freed up to hold the phone to his ear, which would have been obnoxious enough. If there is any justice, this guy will be unable to get a signal in Hell when the time comes. Ye gods, what a douchebag.
I have since been debating what to say to the guy if he ever does it again. "Ye gods, what a douchebag," is not appropriately subtle. I may just inject myself into his now public phone conversation. Suggestions are welcome.
And while we're on the topic, PC World just did a handy comparison of smartphones and their all-access plans. People (supposedly adults) pay anywhere from $130 to $160 per month so they can twitter their facebooks while driving. That's more than I dish out for my T-mobile pay-as-you-go plan in a year. Makes me wonder how many people defaulting on their mortgages have an iPhone. Flick Check: Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist: A fair movie that springs from a naively precious but genial script. It doesn't skimp on teen movie cliches but, the casting is a triumph and saves the film. Michael Cera is excellent as the smart and kindhearted gomer (his signature role). Much better that the toilet humor and sexual innuendo of virtually all other teen movies. Only of real value if you are in the throes of adolescence and need a dose of everything-is-awful-but-there-is-still-hope-and-fun-to-be-had medicine. Which is fine -- it's a valid, money-spending demographic, right? For the rest of us, it's worth a stop when channel surfing. Flick Check: Paul Blart: Mall Cop: Inane, but at least it's comfortable in its own inanity. A fat fool of mall security guard with delusions of a law enforcement career turns into Bruce Willis from Die Hard when bad guys kidnap his girlfriend and his daughter. Stupid gags ensue. Kevin James does a good job of being an overweight, good-natured, well-intentioned, hopeless loser with deadpan sincerity, but he can't carry off being an action hero, even from the standpoint of satirical absurdity. There's a good laugh or two in there, but it's not remotely worth watching unless it's 3AM and you can't sleep and you just need to zombie in front of something distracting and mindless. Blart is nothing more than what it is, which isn't much; but at least it's honest. Kennebunkport: (Photos available on Smugmug) As if to slap me down, after my rants about car rentals for the last two months, I picked up a Mazda 6 (fine, fine car) in Boston using nothing but the Alamo kiosk. Took all of five minutes. Good on ya, Alamo. With Misses Kate and Anna in tow, we exited north out of Beantown on our way to the Maine coast stopping for lunch and some minor exploration in Salem, where it's all about witches.
A downpour put the kibosh on much of the strolling around, but we did get to the Witch Museum, one of the dumbest tourist attractions I have ever encountered. It consists of a 45-minute animatronic history lesson on the witch trials. Some interesting info, but on the whole, decidedly lame. Worse, it is all intended to club you over the head with politically correct maxims. You see, it turns out witch hunting still goes on today. We find out the communists were treated like witches. And racial prejudice is form of witch hunting. And now gay people are witches because of Aids. That's right, we are all Cotton Mather now. Although we no longer hang witches, we do write mean-spirited op-eds and tell hurtful jokes. But it's the same thing, really.
You pay eight bucks for a pathetic, out-dated display and to be smothered in East Coast elitist sanctimony. Avoid the Salem Witch Museum. It is awful. It's not just a waste of time and money, it's insulting and condescending.
In fact, you'd probably do well to avoid Salem entirely. It is a type of town I am very familiar with. It has a gimmick that keeps real estate expensive and the economy steady. It attracts the sorts of people who donate to all the proper environmental causes yet rationalize their gas-snorting, oversized SUVs because, well, they'll had valid reasons not to get a Prius. They will prattle on ceaselessly about diversity, but they are all pretty much identical, except of course in their case it was just chance that brought them together, not bigotry like everyone else. It's a fair bet that they are all remodeling their historic houses to have post-modern kitchens and Asian-styled sun rooms that are never used because they are too busy sipping lattes in between Pilates class and shuffling their above-average, award-winning little achievers to their developmental activities. You may know of a site called Stuff White People Like, where they skewer the contemporary shibboleths of progressive upper-middle-class Caucasoids. Well they could easily include Salem in their list. The town is loaded down with such people, and being from Ann Arbor, I know 'em when I see 'em.
On to Kennebunkport where we settled into the oddly named Nonantum Resort, which Misses Kate and Anna immediately referred to as very " Dirty Dancing." Having never seen the movie, I can't corroborate. But I can say the Nonantum is a fine enough beachside resort. It is a majestic looking old wooden building and I expect it requires constant structural attention, which it clearly gets. Along with being old -- eh, I mean historic -- comes noise; loud neighbors cannot be ignored. But even on the weekend of the 4th, we only had one bad night, despite a huge wedding reception on the 3rd and a fireworks celebration on the 4th. I have to say the service was top-notch in virtually every way. There are all sorts of little pluses: a nice little snack bar by the pool, kayaks and bikes available for rent, free snow-cones on the front lawn, rocking chairs on the porch for parking your butt while sipping your favorite adult beverages, etc.
We had time to stroll into town for dinner at Alisson's Restaurant on the first evening. The central shopping area is what you would expect of a coastal resort town. Nice little restaurants, lots of t-shirt shacks and souvenir shops, and various candy and fudge and ice cream stops. It's a pleasant walk up and down the inlet. The town is pristine and freshly paintied and pedestrians have the right of way. Just the perfect sort of place for Biff and Muffy (or perhaps Thurston and Lovee) to walk the Golden Retriever with their sweaters tied around their shoulders. (Kennebunkport leaves upper-middle-class in the wake of its Hinkley sloop.)
As with just about any town on any ocean, there are fishing opportunities, so the next a day after a brisk morning walk and some lunch at a deli that featured profanely named hot sauce, we chartered a boat and set out to become Bassmasters. Didn't quite turn out like that. We originally planned to go out and hook some bait fish first, but according to the radio scuttlebutt, the bass were biting on chum, so we headed right over to a popular spot not too far from the Bush compound. In fact, Captain Bruce suggested we may even see George the 1st out on the water. On the way out we passed an enormous motor yacht which Cap'n Bruce said belonged to a Republican Party bigwig and the elder George often had dinner on the boat when it was docked here. On deck were a set of nice young ladies scurrying about in their bikinis. Being a Republican boat, I'm sure they were just the nieces of some blueblood, home from school for the holiday. Had to be it, right?
Anyway, we hit the fishing hole and chummed ourselves silly without a single bite. After an hour of this we sacked the chum and headed to deeper waters to snag some bait, but even that was only marginally successful. Even using the fish-finder to guide us we seemed to snag as many lobster buoys as herring. After an hour or so of that we headed back to fishing hole and, even with live bait, we got skunked. Cap'n Bruce was more disappointed than we were; he said it was his first skunking of the season. Snagging some bass would have been awesome, but the fact is, we were just happy to be out on the water and engaged in some serious relaxation. It was the only sunny day of the trip and we got ourselves nice and crispy by the end of the day.
That evening, despite being told to abandon hope without a reservation, we were able to walk down the street and snag a table at Mabel's Lobster Claw for dinner. A proper lobster, perfectly steamed, opened manually, and no frickin' bib. This is why God created the Maine coast.
The next day, the 4th of July proper, we rented bikes. Normally, Nonantum keeps a few bikes available for their guests but they had no helmets and decided that liability concerns forbid them from letting us use them, even though we hadn't intended to wear helmets anyway. Instead, they arranged for a local bike shop to set us up with rides free of charge (see what I mean about great service). From the bike shop we pedaled through winding wooded roads to a nearby village called Cape Porpoise which is little more than a general store and a post office, then back around through the verdant neighborhoods to our hotel.
It's easy to see that Kennebunkport is rife with old money. The smaller houses along the waterfronts are perfectly weather beaten, as if these folks had been here years before the influx of the bluebloods. Move somewhat inland and the houses become enormous, sized for the extended families of New England aristocracy to come and spend a couple of months in the fresh air. (In Maine you get about three months total of decent weather - mid-June through Labor Day.) Many of these estates are almost completely obscured by old growth trees on all sides, with private property signs at the edge of the driveways. No new-development McMansions here.
Almost 25 years ago, Paul Fussell wrote a famous book about social class in America called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Some of it may be a bit out of date now, but I recall that in his taxonomy of classes, he referred to the lowest and highest classes as "bottom out-of-sight" and "top out-of-sight". At the very lowest end of the spectrum are people who are hidden from our daily lives for the most part -- they are sleeping in refrigerator boxes and eating out of dumpsters. We occasionally see (or smell) them but they are not engaged with society on any meaningful level. Ironically, this trait is shared with folks on the very top end. They are constantly on guard against, and perhaps a little fearful of, the world, knowing they will be treated differently and judged differently, and will be susceptible to the prejudices and jealousies of the less wealthy. So they build walls of servants and security and surround their homes with thick foliage that you can't see through. Kennebunkport is full of top out-of-sights.
In contrast, the Bush compound is anything but out of sight. It sits on a spit of land extending out into the Atlantic open on three sides to the water and without much flora of any sort. You can walk by, within a few hundred yards, and watch everyone going about their activities, you can even use you camera zoom to get an up close view. The vulnerability of place has to be a Secret Service nightmare. Interestingly, there are markers a few hundred yards off the shore around the home indicating that you are not to go any closer, but Cap'n Bruce hadn't batted an eye when ducking inside of one of them on the way back to port the day before. The compound itself consists of a handful of brown, not terribly attractive buildings. It's nothing all that notable, but another point Fussell made was that those who are true bluebloods have no desire to flaunt. Gaudy shows of wealth are for the Upper Middle Class wanna-bes.
During a break I took the opportunity to cruise around town a bit while I had the bike. Needless to say, the place was filled to the gills with weekenders. Swinging south across the river from our home cape are the primary public beaches in the area. Now, let me just say that the beaches in Maine are not remotely what I would call attractive. After all, it's Maine -- you were expecting St. Barts? The sand is muddy colored and the run-off from the river darkens the water. Yet, under the heading of Everything is Relative, at a whopping 72 degrees with cloudy skies and the constant threat of rain, the beach was filled with folks clad in swimsuits and sprawled out on blankets. The water had to be frigid, but a few brave souls were dashing into the waves. I'm sure they were enjoying themselves, but it just made me wish for Florida.
Our last dinner was al fresco, at Grissini's, a decent Italian spot in town. Back at the resort they were finishing up a big Independence Day todo, with the local orchestra playing classics and showtunes and patriotic music. At dark everyone sat back in lawn chairs to watch the fireworks. It was all small town mid-summer perfect.
The next day it was up early and back to Boston for our flights. It was about as nice a holiday weekend as you could imagine, but all in all, I don't see anything in Kennebunkport, that I couldn't get in upstate Michigan with perhaps even a bit less...what's the word I want?...intensity, maybe. Of course, if you're in New England, it probably works the opposite. And pulling apart a genuine Maine lobster in a genuine Maine beach town is a savory experience not to be missed. No complaints. Book Look: Percy Jackson & The Olympians: A five-book series, this is clearly designed as a candidate to step into the shoes of one Harry Potter and it may just achieve that given that a movie is planned for 2010.
The genesis of the Percy Jackson series starts with author Rick Riordan's son, who was diagnosed with both ADHD and dyslexia. Riordan was a teacher of Greek mythology and he would tell his son all the old tales, but he ran out eventually and his son clamored for more so he began making up new ones. Thus he created Percy (Perseus) Jackson as a paradigmatic dysfunctional youth.
Percy, like Riordan's son, is saddled with ADHD and dyslexia. His mother is struggling to support his family including his abusive, evil leach of a stepfather. He has gotten expelled from just about every school he's attended. Percy is about to discover that all his issues all stem from the fact the he is a demi-god. It turns out the gods of Ancient Greece are actually still around an operating in the world and he is the son of one of them. High adventure, coupled with maturation, follows for five books eventually culminating when Percy turns 16 and fulfills a Great Prophecy.
It summarizes like typical formula kid lit, and it is, but it has some good modifications. The hero, Percy Jackson, is not a goody-goody dweeb like Potter. Not to put too fine a point on it, he's a smart ass. He can be snarky, glib, sarcastic, and generally has a strong tendency to crack wise -- all of which adds humor and tends to get him into trouble, but it will help your standard-issue pre-teen identify with him, because they are all like that too.
More interestingly, there is a decidedly pro-Western Civilization theme, and it is U.S. centric in settings, primarily Manhattan. For example, we come to learn that the Greek Gods existence is intertwined with Western Civilization, and that Mount Olympus migrates to wherever the most powerful center of Western Civ happens to be at that time in history -- Athens, Rome, London, etc. -- in this era, it's over Manhattan. (You get there from a magic elevator in the Empire State Building.)
There are also bits of wry commentary here and there. For example, when asked, "If Mt. Olympus is over New York, then where is the entrance to the Underworld?" the answer is "Los Angeles, of course." San Francisco, it turns out, is the point of origin for most of the truly scary monsters who try to conquer Olympus and the gods. Even more: author Rick Riordan, the teacher, has some fun by turning the riddle of the Sphinx into a multiple choice test that is graded by machine. When the machine is destroyed the Sphinx decries having to grade all those tests by hand.
Of course, it's important to remember that this is kid lit. Contrivance, shamelessly obvious plot manipulation, beneficial coincidence, and Deus ex Machina are part and parcel with the proceedings. It would be death to an adult story, but kids won't care, provided their disbelief is appropriately managed for entertainment's sake. There is also minor, and somewhat out of place, subplot of childish environmentalism, but again, it's for children. These are small complaints.
More importantly, Riordan keeps things moving. Note that none of these books are of Rowlingsian length. The fact that there are five, well structured, fat free books versus seven somewhat rambling Potter tomes is a big plus for Percy Jackson in the kid lit wars. Also, it contains the single most important quality kid lit can have these days: No Frickin' Vampires. (I am so sick of vampires.)
There's good stuff in here for youngsters, lesson-wise. The kids have to grow up and make decisions in the absence of certainty. They have to live with their decisions and learn that just because they made good ones doesn't mean everything will always work out. They have to accept their own mistakes and still try to move forward. They have to live with imperfections, bad luck, and compromise while making the most of the world as it is. They also have to accept that, although there may be respites, the struggle never really ends.
Plus, it is exposure to Greek myth and history brought to life, which may trigger intellectual curiosity. And there are settings all over the U.S., from DC to the New Mexico desert, which may trigger a healthy bit of wanderlust. Good, positive stuff. Highly recommended as books that they can be shared between kids and parents to the benefit of both.
The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)
The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 2)
The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 3)
The Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 4)
The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book 5)
The Demigod Files (A Percy Jackson and the Olympians Guide) The Webscape: I don't really consider this site a blog any more. When I think of blogs I think of the old style blogs where you would find interesting articles around the web and link them up with a few snide comments. That's what this place was many, many years ago. In fact, I used to get a fair amount of readers because I was alphabetically listed atop the Yahoo index of blogs (Yahoo index was big, before Google and search). Now there are so many different ways to get actual "logs of the web" -- RSS, news aggregators, twitter trackers -- that it really makes no sense for me to contribute to the background noise by trying to "pre-surf" for you. Links to popular/urgent/controversial web content circulate so fast now that by the time I picked up on it, it would be old news.
It used to be that the Dancing Baby animation and "All Yuor Base Are Belong to Us" would become points of commonality for web culture and you were one of the cool kids if you were already on top of all that when it finally trickled into the somewhat more tactile world of broader pop culture. Now there is no such thing as separate web culture, it is fully merged with broader popular culture. In this world, old school blogs are as quaint as fax machines.
As a byproduct of all this, the web world is awash in the same level of noise and nonsense of any other medium. The trick when surfing these days is not to find curious bits of entertainment or news that are ahead of the curve, but to find high quality thoughtful posting; things of intellectual or critical value that you can really sink your teeth into. In that respect, the web is no different than any other source of communication. So let me recommend five "blogs" where I regularly find thoughtful posts. Were I still an old school blogger, I bet 80% my posts would come from these places.
First and foremost is Overcoming Bias. From Professor Robin Hanson, this is an attempt to do just what the name says, overcome bias in understanding the world. He will take the most basic ideas, simple things that you (and me, and him) have always accepted accepted as natural and rational, and delve deep inside of them to see that they are often not remotely rational but indicative of subcutaneous assumptions that we have so thoroughly assimilated that we don't realize it. But he does not identify them to call them false or perverse. He angles for understanding the source of the assumptions, to identify the points of human nature that bring them about.
Not surprisingly, Hanson is rooted in the behavior theories of Economics, a field wherein one makes quantitative predictions based on assumptions about human behavior, and thus, one is forced to identify what human behavior is assumed to be and question the assumptions if the prediction is measurably wrong. But Hanson has broadened his scope. Here is a sample quote that starts out as a review of the kids movie Dragonball Evolution.
Let me suggest that humans are much like story characters. Since others like us better if the story of our lives seems to fit with standard human ideals, we try to appear to so fit. But since it is expensive to actually fit these ideals in great detail, we instead manipulate our cheap surface words and acts to give a loose appearance of a fit. The expensive details of our lives, however, instead better fit the non-ideal necessities of who we really are. None of this works if our hypocrisy is too obvious, but thankfully we tend to cooperate to squint and avoid seeing each others' non-ideal realities.
You are a character in the story of your life. Evolution has formed you so that you, mostly unconsciously, craft the character you project to be likable and interesting. The crafting of this image is done via manipulations that are just good enough to not force most folks to notice them. Perceptive folk may notice them more, but usually also know they will not be rewarded for calling our mutual charade.
Even so, I choose to try to see through our deceptions, to the less ideal, dramatic, and sympathetic people we really are. And I hope to live to tell about it.
I want to emphasize that this is not an everything-you-know-is-wrong-you-fool or a the-human-race-is-a-self-deluded-lost-cause site. It is serious intellectual inquiry, without (as far as I can tell) a specific social agenda or any attempt to claim moral righteousness. It is not quick and easy reading for coffee breaks, and you shouldn't visit if you are happy in your internally-defined world (I say that without judgment, thanks to Hanson). But if you are looking for explosive mind candy, this is the place.
2 Blowhards is actually about 4 or 5 blowhards, I think, operating a group blog. They come from various walks of life; all of them refer to themselves as "art buffs". The site is just rife with the fascinating sort of outside-the-mainstream articles that you would not get were it not for the Web. Excellent design commentary on everything from architecture to automobiles, and a fine appreciation of the low-brow as valid art. Also, I think the blowhards are my age or even a bit older, which adds to their stand-out takes on the perpetually twenty-something Web.
Arts and Letters Daily is the only one of these sites that completely eschews original content for the good old "pre-surfing" mentality from the old days. Arts and Letters Daily is like a trusted old friend, every day (except Sunday) you get three new links to articles of interest, any area of the humanities is eligible, introduced with nothing more than a sentence or two. It has been such for many years. Don't ever change.
Marginal Revolution is the blog of economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok from George Mason University. Both are renown in their field but Cowen, who does most of the posting, is widely known as the author of such pop-Econ books as Discover Your Inner Economist and Create Your Own Economy. They occasionally get bogged down in econ wonkery, especially during big financial dustups like the mortgage meltdown or Obamacare, but they are at their best when stripping behavior-oriented topics of interest down to their basic incentives and motivations rather than getting swamped in polemics. Even better are Cowen's posts on what he is reading (just about everything it seems) and his travels -- there are usually hidden gems in those links. Note, Cowen also maintains an ethnic food blog which is a good stop if you are wondering where to eat in the DC area.
Terry Teachout covers a wide spectrum of arts -- theatre, painting, music - for various journalistic outlets including the Wall Street Journal. He is also a biographer of H.L. Mencken and Louis Armstrong and, just recently, an opera librettist. He blogs on such a varied set of arts related topics that I wouldn't try to list them all, but the big draw here is the deeply personal sense of enthusiasm he brings to his posts. Although I have differed with his opinion more often than not about our few common artistic experiences, I get whisked along with his eager appreciation of the arts he consumes. It is true that passion is paramount in writing, but when you mix in clarity and crispness of prose, as Terry does, then add a sense of the personal, what you get is irresistible. Whenever he writes glowingly about a play, I feel the urge to hop a plane to NYC or Chicago or wherever to see it, and feel like I've truly missed out when I don't follow through. Travel Rewind: Found: New Land (August 2008): (In honor of my trip to Maine, here is a previous trip in that direction, this one much further. Photos are on SmugMug.)
I was rather surprised that many of my friends didn't know where Newfoundland was and weren't really sure if it was a stand-alone country or a province or region or what. It was then I realized that I am a geography geek. In fact, I think I have been most of my life. As a child I loved maps and even now the walls of my home are decorated with antique maps from the mid 19th century, so my instinctive response was to furrow my brow incredulously: How could you not know where Newfoundland is? But I'm the weird one, not them.
Actually, the first question they asked was if I was bringing back a dog, because when you say Newfoundland, everyone thinks of the dog. For the record I saw no Newfoundlands or Labradors in the province of Newfoundland & Labrador. I did see something they called a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, which looked so much like a scraggly mutt that I thought the locals were pulling my leg.
The island of Newfoundland is part of the province of Newfoundland & Labrador which is one of a group of Canadian provinces on the Atlantic seaboard that are generally referred to as the Maritimes. They include Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick -- you've heard the names but you can't quite place them on your metal picture of the globe. I took to saying: "Head towards Maine and keep going. If you hit Greenland, you've gone too far." I leave it as an exercise to the reader to go to Google maps and look it up.
Oh, never mind, I'll do it.
To get to Newfoundland one flies 3+ hours on a very nice Air Canada jet from Toronto -- you know where that is, right? These very nice jets have personal video systems built into the seats, even in coach. They also seem to have more legroom than most coach seats. I like Air Canada. One arrives at the airport in the capitol city of St. John's. Note the possessive. St. John (no apostrophe s) is the capitol of New Brunswick; St. John's is the capitol of Newfoundland & Labrador. So the man from capitol of New Brunswick looks and the man from the capitol of Newfoundland and says, "Owned!" (Heh heh heh. I crack myself up.)
Enough cuteness. The plain fact is St. John's kicked my ass, or at least attempted to.
Arriving at night in an unfamiliar place usually makes for some minor driving difficulty. In St. John's this is magnified by the fact that they seem to have a deep-seated aversion to straight lines. There is not a more convoluted set of vectors in any city in existence. Couple that with street names that can change from one block to the next for no obvious reason and hills that are dauntingly steep and you can imagine what it's like to get around at night, in the pouring rain, with only a cartoon map from the hotel as a guide.
Still, I made it down to the Water Street -- St. John's is, essentially, a college town and the waterfront area is the point where all the cool restaurant and bars and shops are -- clothed in my woefully insufficient jacket to search for a bite to eat. After a good 15 minutes of wandering around in the wind and rain looking for a special place that just cried out "Eat here!" I moved one street inland to George Street which is famous for pub crawling. George Street is thought to have the most bars and pubs per square foot in the world. (Oddly, they celebrate Mardi Gras in October here. I have no explanation for that.) Turns out the driving rain can put a damper on such activities and the street was pretty much deserted. I was soaked and chilled enough to be susceptible to the sign outside Kelly's Pub which claimed the world's best fish and chips. It was a standard pub type spot, which is just fine. Happy, back-slapping people at the bar. A hockey game was on the big screen. There was a guitarist alternating traditional Maritime folk music with '70s easy listening hits. And the chips that came with the fish was actually poutine.
No matter how you say it, you are pronouncing the word poutine wrong. Depending on your source, you will be instructed to pronounce it poo-teen or poo-tin or poo-sin or puts-in. This is intentional. The idea is that unless you are confident in your pronunciation, a local will be able to safely correct you and perhaps have a bit of fun at your expense. Everybody needs their little victories. If, however, you feel the need to stand your ground, just pick an obscure city from the other side of Canada from your location and say they pronounce it like you do:
You: I'll have an order of poo-tin.
Smarmy local: It's pronounced poo-sin.
You: Not in Saskatoon (or Gander, or Yellowknife) it isn't.
Sick burn on the hoser. Alternatively, you could just order French fries with gravy and cheese curds, which is what poutine is. It should also come with dose of Lipitor. When you order fish and chips and at Kelly's Pub you get about a pound and a half of poutine and three sizable pieces of richly battered fish. I honestly had enough to feed a family of four on my plate. Such portion sizes are appropriate if one is laying in some extra insulation against the Canadian winter, I suppose. I ate about a quarter of my poutine, and two pieces of fish after I scraped off a layer of batter. The fish in St. John's, and anywhere in Newfoundland for that matter, is bound to be fresh. Fishing is what they do. Sadly, it rare to see it in any form but surrounded in thick batter. What I had was quite tasty, though.
I don't like folk music. The version of folk music traditional to Newfoundland also has roots in sea shanties -- the drunken howlings of sailors who have been too long away from home -- and Irish music -- the drunken howlings of Irishmen who have been too long away from sobriety. Strangely, neither of these features altered my position on folk music. I have no doubt that the fellow singing in Kelly's Pub was quite skilled in this genre, but I would have preferred for a more soothing background. Fingernails on a chalkboard, for instance. I made for my car, got drenched again on the way and headed back to my hotel, telling myself I needed to pick up some rain gear. An inauspicious first night.
The following day I was on my way to Cape Spear. It was here I realized that I was a pre-season traveler. A lot of minor attractions simply weren't open or were operating on limited hours. Most such places were sparsely peopled and often I was on my own. Although it was technically well into spring, I didn't see a high temp beyond 60. I was stupidly following the general travel rule that northern destinations go in-season between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Well, Newfoundland is north enough that most travelers don't get here until June. That's fine with me, I prefer off season travelling, although it does cause some limitations.
Cape Spear is the easternmost point in North America; the earliest of the many lighthouses along the Atlantic coast. The grounds have been restored to their condition as of about 1839, which is more picturesque than historically interesting. Separately, there are the remains of fortifications from WW2; artillery and a supporting set of storage rooms and tunnels that stand in industrial-style contrast to the pastoral restorations of the lighthouse and surrounding buildings. Like everywhere in Newfoundland, there are walking trails along the water.
You could spend a very pleasant afternoon wandering about, maybe even bring a picnic lunch and a bicycle built for two, although beware the strong winds and potential for raining at the drop of hat. Realistically, you can cover Cape Spear in 90 minutes at the most. I went in the morning but I suggest hitting it in the PM, when the sun shining out toward the sea, giving you nice oblique light against the coastline.
Following Cape Spear I made a dash back through the heart of town to Signal Hill. Signal Hill is probably the premier tourist attraction in St. John's. It is very close to the waterfront area I spoke of but do not underestimate the effect of the elevation should you try to walk there. It's a pretty walk, from town to Signal Hill, but it's not remotely a gentle stroll. You'll pass by cozy, postcardy row houses (going uphill), pass a couple of hotels (going uphill), eventually reach the visitor's center (going uphill), then it gets even steeper as you make the climb to the top. I drove.
I made it to the visitor's center just in time to catch the firing of the noon gun, a mid-day tradition from days of yore maintained for the la touristas. Inside the visitors center there are the usual display of historic documents and artifacts. There is also a small theatre with a movie describing the history of Signal Hill and, by extension, St. John's and Newfoundland. Usually these presentations are cheesy, but this one is exceptionally well done. Set up as a conversation between a local historian and Newfoundland officer who actually manned Signal Hill when it was a military installation. They tell all the local stories and relate the history from the battles between the French and British in the 18th century all the way up to the time when St. John's was haven for shipping convoys in WW2. One of the last stories is the tale of a passenger ship that was torpedoed and sunk by a German u-boat. It turns out one of the women killed in the sinking was the wife of the Newfoundland officer narrating the story. Very good job at bringing history into the present.
From the visitors center it is a short winding drive up to Signal Hill proper. At the top you see...well, it's hard for me to say because the fog was so thick I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. That is only a slight exaggeration. I was nervous walking from my car across the parking lot because I was certain no other drivers could see me. I circled the structure at the top of the Hill, from whence you should be able to see stunning views of St. John's, but it looked like existence had been erased; like an episode of the Twilight Zone where you have been thrust into an alternate dimension and you can only see objects in your immediate surroundings so you wander aimlessly in the void hoping someone will come along and teach you the uplifting life lesson you need to learn before you return home.
Since I couldn't see a thing, I figured the wisest thing to do would be to hike out along the edge of the cliffs.
From the Signal Hill parking lot you can follow a path that takes you over a stretch rock-strewn wasteland to the cliff edge, where you can look over and see nothing but gray. That is an eerie feeling. It is like coming to the edge of the Earth. The world just stops: beyond this point there be dragons -- or possibly Rod Serling. The trail then leads lower long the cliffs and the fog begins to clear a bit. Down here you can tell that on a clear day, you could see forever. Cast your gaze east and there is nothing but ocean until you hit Europe. To the West is the Town of St. John's where you can see the big cargo ships laying in port and the colorful expanse of the city spreading off into the distance.
The trail then continues, sometimes a bare path, sometimes a wooded walkway. Eventually it starts to narrow until it becomes only a few feet wide and winds along a sheer rock face. One treads carefully along this stretch, since a misstep would bring certain death on the craggy rocks hundreds of feet below. Fortunately, some kind souls have thought to hammer lengths of stout chain into the rock face, which is the only measure of safety you have. If you are as lucky as I am, you get to be precisely halfway across this stretch, hanging on to the safety chain with one white-knuckled hand while clutching your expensive Nikon DSLR in the other when it starts to rain. Hard. I tucked the Nikon in my inadequate jacket and inched my way along as fast I could. Yes, I really did need to pick up some rain gear.
Having survived that gauntlet, the trail wound around Signal Hill and back towards the outskirts of St. John's, eventually coming upon a small residential area at the foot of the hill where exists one of the strangest things I have seen. The hiking trail, this official trial defined and maintained by the government, passes over someone's front porch. In fact there is a sign that says "trial continues across porch" or something to that effect. It's not a government building, it's just some guy's porch. You walk across and see him through the window not five feet away sitting at his table eating lunch or something. Truly bizarre.
At this point the trail ceases to be a trail, and winds through one of the those cozy, clapboard neighborhoods that are everywhere in Newfoundland. St. John's is so completely unnavigable that I took a wrong turn, but the folks are so friendly that almost instantly a salty old coot leaned out his open door and pointed me in the right direction which brought me back to the road I had previously driven up to get to the top of the hill. As I slogged back uphill, now soaking wet and chilled to the bone, the fog got thicker and thicker. Meanwhile cars are barreling down the hill at me unable to see a thing until I manifest in their vision like Rod Serling appearing for the final summation. I don't know which was more scary, the hill road or the cliffs.
Eventually, I did reach the top and sat in my car for a moment and reflected on one of the strangest few hours of hiking I have ever done. Then I looked at my watch. Seventy-five minutes. It felt like it took me all day, but barely more than an hour had passed. I drove to the mall and bought a rain jacket.
A few words about the physical anthropology of Newfoundlanders based on keen observations at the center of all modern life: the mall. Newfoundlanders are not pretty. That is not to say they are not attractive, in a fresh outdoorsy sense, but they aren't much for style or appearance. Need someone to hold your lifeline while you grasp a ring buoy for dear life in blustering seas, no problem. Need help getting your truck started when it's double digits below zero, a Newfoundlander is your man. You can see this in their stoic jaws and weathered hands. Looking to get past the discriminating doorman at that hot Vegas nightclub? Not so much. But more importantly there is a clear tendency towards rotundity (perhaps a bit too much poutine). Even more so than in the States, and that's saying something. A visit to the mall makes this plainly obvious.
The next day I dashed north out of St John's to catch the ferry to Bell Island. To get to Bell Island you take a car ferry, which I had never done before. A car ferry is basically a little floating parking lot for cars, with entry at the stern and exit at the bow (or vice versa). You are guided on to the boat and into a space, then you are free to get out and wander around the boat as much as you like. There's a lounge and a concession stand. As you pull into dock, you simply hop back in your car and drive off, quick and easy.
I don't know what to make of Bell Island. It appears to be a sort of vacation cottage community, although I'm not exactly sure what the attraction is. Maybe it's the convenience of having access to St. John's on relatively short notice yet still gives the feel of island level isolation (although looking for island level isolation from Newfoundland may sound redundant). What it offers over and above some of the smaller seaside communities around near St. John I can't see, apart from the inconvenience of having to take the car ferry anytime you want to get something the handful of shops and stores and the island don't provide. Still, it has its full share of Newfoundland coziness and is a fare spot to troll about or sit and admire the sea view for a while.
It was time to begin my traversal of the island (Newfoundland, not Bell). The next morning I was headed west along the TCH (Trans-Canada Highway), essentially an expressway that goes in a relatively straight shot right across Newfoundland. The plan I had was to turn off the highway once each day and explore up to the end of the little fingers that extend into the ocean from the jagged northeast facing coast. A couple hours out of St. John's one reaches Terra Nova National Park. I figured this was as good a place as any to turn off, and I drove through the park but Terra Nova wasn't really up into the fingers. I'm sure there were very interesting things to do there, but I drove on through and kept heading seaward until I reached to town of Salvage.
Salvage, as far as I know, is not in any guide books. At a glance, it is pretty much indistinguishable from any other the hundreds of other fishing villages along the same coast. I drove through town until the road, literally, ended. It turns out that the end of the road is the start of a hiking trail. The trail led up a steep cliff to a lookout providing excellent views of the village below and the surrounding islands. On the way up I overheard a family coming back down wondering whether something or other was "worth trying to find." When I got to the top I realized what they were talking about. Further seaward was a higher peak, also with viewing platform on top.
If that family could get there, I could get there. Unfortunately it wasn't entirely clear how to get there. I caught up with them at a fork we each went off on a different path -- mine eventually dead-ending on a river bank after a few hundred yards. I back tracked and caught up with them sight-seeing at the point where the path went by an old cemetery. I explained that the other trail promptly dead-ended and plowed forward, leaving them to their grave trolling. The trail wound through woods, then across long stretches of rocky cliff areas, uphill all the way. The trail was quite well marked and the weather was bracing. Sometimes following trails can feel like a struggle, especially uphill, but for some reason I found this one invigorating; as I approached the top I was bounding up the chiseled rocks. At the very end there is a brief scramble to the viewing platform and you are rewarded with a vast 360 degree view including on this day a slew of smallish icebergs.
In time a woman appeared who had clearly come up via another trail, dressed in warm up gear and looking very much like someone on a fitness mission. Then the family eventually caught up with me and we all had a nice little conversation. Upon hearing I was from the distant land of Michigan USA, they commented that I was pretty far from home. Yes, I was. There is appoint in any trip long enough to call an escape where you know finally feel like you've gotten away. I call it the vacation moment. There looking over Salvage, I was surely on vacation.
After covering more of the TCH, I ended up in the town of Great Falls-Windsor for the evening, staying at the nicely maintained Trailways Inn. I struggled a bit to find the place and was a little anxious when I did, noting that it was located on the second floor of an old building over a martial arts studio. But it was clean, quiet and functional, reminding me a bit of an old boarding house with a comfortable lobby area with sleeping rooms that opened right on to it. The Wi-fi worked. I slept well.
The next day's off highway excursion was to the town of Fleur de Lys. By now I was well away from St. John's so the towns were morphing from vacation cottage communities to more remote villages. Fleur de Lys is a key archeological site and apparently has a large soapstone quarry nearby as a big economic force, but like the rest of Newfoundland, it is working hard to develop infrastructure for itinerants such as me. My brief visit Fleur de Lys was notable in that I was now far enough north that the pack ice had yet to completely dissipate. It also contains a curiosity called Sherrie's Island. It's basically just a 20 ft. square rock in the bay, but some creative soul built a little bridge to it and place a bench and a couple of little trinkets to make it into a microscopic park, of sorts. Cute and clever, in an eccentric sense. There is also a plaque commemorating the death of one Dougie Walsh, a young boy who drowned some years back. In the quiet, remote little village it must have affected people deeply. It made me feel like an alien from some crass planet where such events are of no concern to your neighbors.
By the end of the afternoon I had made my way past the gateway town of Deer Lake and was finally at Gros Morne National Park, the jewel of Eastern Canada. The road through Gros Morne twists along at water level among cliffs and peaks. Around every corner there is an amazing view; the sort of thing you might see in a brochure for just about any "up north" outdoors vacation. Seriously, you could drive through Gros Morne and over the course of a couple of hours, have enough stock photography to supply the travel and outdoor sports industry for years to come. Except you can't let yourself get too mesmerized by the sights. If you do, the moose will get you.
Home in Michigan we have deer, which are the source of a fair number of auto mishaps -- dents and fender smashes -- but they usually get themselves killed in the process. Moose, not so. Moose are humongous SOBs. Like some kind of great Pleistocene holdovers. This is your actual warning sign. Note in that illustration that the moose looks distinctly unperturbed, but the car now resembles an accordion. It is a commonly spoken of possibility around Gros Morne that were you to hit a moose with your car, it would just piss him off. One suspects these are not myths and legends designed to impress tourists.
Shortly after entering the park, I spotted one about 30 yards off the road and a quickly slowed down and hopped out to take a picture. As I have previously discovered yet apparently haven't stored in my head, animals in national parks show little fear of cars, since cars are almost universally deferential to them as they cross the roads, but hop out and try to get close for a picture and they flee at top speed. Mr. Moose high-tailed it into the woods. I feared I may have lost my shot at a good moose pic but as I was to find, Gros Morne is crawling with them. I would estimate in the two full days I spent in Gros Morne, I probably had ten or fifteen sightings -- always from the road, never on foot. There were hiking trails where I would see moose tracks in the dirt looking like they couldn't me more that a few minutes old, yet I never encountered one mano y mooso. Probably a good thing, that.
There are a few small villages within Gros Morne. I have been mentioning all these little fishing villages where summer cabin style homes are going up, I cannot imagine a more perfect place for a summer cabin than inside Gros Morne National Park. At one point while winding along the main road I stopped at a pull-off where I could look across the bay at a village about a mile or so away on the far shore. The village was Norris Point, and from my vantage, the one building that really stood out on the far shoreline was Neddie's Harbour Inn which, it so happened, is where I was staying.
Neddie's Harbour Inn is a real beauty of a place. Sized larger than a B&B but smaller that a motel, Neddie's doesn't really fit in with the rest of the Gros Morne accommodations which tend towards the rustic. Let me correct that: it looks like it fits in externally, but inside it's fresh and new. Neddie's is recently built and designed with all the modern conveniences. They have gone to great lengths to use local materials -- virtually the entire building is made from a beautiful light toned local birch. The place is filled with locally made furniture and decorations and art works. Like everywhere else, Gros Morne is facing gentrification. There will be a point where, though remote, Gros Morne becomes fashionable. Money will be coming in, as will the petite bourgeois. The question is how will it be handled. More on this later, but if it is handled as well as Neddie's -- there will be no worries. Plus, the wi-fi works.
My time in Gros Morne suffered a bit because it was still preseason. The boat tours, kayak rentals, and many of the local eateries still hadn't re-opened for the summer. One more week would have made all the difference. For example, Neddie's has a restaurant but it was not yet opened for dinner (a decent breakfast was available every morning though). The nearest village with restaurants was Rocky Harbour, which contained about four diners, two of which were closed, one of others was open but completely unmanned. Anyway, it doesn't matter because there is no good food, just sustenance with a smile. I took to eating pre-made sandwiches from convenience stores.
A byproduct of this was the silence. I don't think I have ever encountered such thorough silence at night. No footsteps in the hallway or distant conversations or cars creeping across the gravel. Not even crickets. It was so totally quiet my mind generated an eerie TV-horror-story dream that the sun had winked out and the world was cast into total apocalyptic darkness that literally caused me to sit up in bed and lunge for the nearest lamp. I cannot overstate how weird that is for me. In my entire life, you can probably count on one hand the number of dreams that I have remembered after awakening. Suddenly, here on the edge of the frozen north I have a vivid nightmare that I remember to this day. Yes, I was very far from home.
Still the point of Gros Morne was the hiking and the hiking was beautiful. The wind howled and the temps were chilly, but there was a real freshness to the trails this early in the season and very little traffic. The killer hike is to the top of Gros Morne Mountain which was not available. That trail is closed until July in deference to the breeding of some protected species or other, so I narrowed more choices from what was left.
I had two full days and the first day was overcast and windy but I managed to get in two excellent treks. The first was the Green Gardens Trail. Gros Morne is often referred to as a geologists dream because of the immense variety of, well, dirt and rocks and other sorts of geological things. I have no idea what that's all about, but I can attest to the variety of the landscape. When you start out on the Green Gardens Trail, you might as well be in Death Valley. What little vegetation there is, is simply scrub. The barren land slopes gently upward soil is reddish and dry looking. Then, literally within a couple of hundred yards, you are trodding through a thick boreal forest. The trail winds through the forest for quite some time eventually turning along the cliffs at the shoreline; a volcanic shoreline that could easily have been transplanted from somewhere on Hawaii. It's a striking transformation.
Along the shore cliffs there is a wide grassy area that affords plenty of opportunity looking out at the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A bit further on, there is a very steep and rather tenuous looking set of wooden steps leading down to the black sand beach. The beach is strewn with volcanic rocks, some very large and oddly formed. Here's a hint should you ever find yourself at this point on the globe, if you walk down to the opposite end of the beach from the staircase, you will come to a crevice in the cliffs. Rock hop through the crevice and you find yourself in a little green garden with a perfectly picturesque waterfall at the far end. It's as if someone just decided to carve out a pretty little sanctuary in the middle of some dramatic volcanic shore. Awesome.
The afternoon hike was a bit more pedestrian. The trail to Lookout is less dramatic. It starts at the park's Discovery Centre and ascends steeply to the top of Partrigdgeberry Hill, where you get the best panoramic view of the park, per the general consensus. The view is a knockout; it gives a real sense of the beauty of the park. And you also get a reminder that spring comes late in Newfoundland -- even with June a day or so away, there is still a fair amount of snow on the ground.
The next day, my only other full day in Gros Morne, it was supposed to be bright and sunny. It wasn't. It rained all day and I was in no mood to hike around in the rain. Far north of Gros Morne, on very northernmost tip of Newfoundland is the point of the oldest European settlement in the New World -- L'Anse aux Meadows, the point where a small pack of the Norse set up shop roundabout a thousand years ago. It would have been my next choice but it was about a five hour drive each way and the other thing I was not in the mood for was ten hours on the road, although I must admit I somewhat regret that now. It would have been a cool place to see. But I did get in the car and drive north out of the park, promising myself to stop anywhere interesting provided the rain stopped. It didn't.
I did get a couple hours north to a little speck called Port Au Choix, which is famed for its native burial mounds, which I didn't get out to look at because of the rain. However, Port Au Choix, Newfoundland now stands as the furthest north I have even been in my life. In honor of that, I stopped at a Subway for lunch. This Subway, located in a "gas bar" (a gas station/convenience store/diner) was closing -- going out of business. As a lifelong U.S. citizen it is virtually impossible for me to imagine a Subway sandwich shop going out of business. It's like hearing about a McDonald's or a WalMart failing. Just doesn't happen. Yet, despite the fact that there is not another place to eat within miles, this Subway was going under.
The economy of Newfoundland and Labrador has been steadily improving over the past 3 or 4 years but understand: Improving means the unemployment rate dropped from its historic standard of 16%+ to 13%+. Province GDP picked up in the last couple of years, but that is almost solely due to an increase in mining and drilling activity in the wake of energy price increases. Population peaked in the early '80s and has slowly diminished over the last 10 or 15 years. There are less than half a million residents. And so, Subways can close as easily as they are opened.
Although not quick enough to save the gas bar Subway in Port au Choix, money is coming to Newfoundland, and not from oil and gas. In addition to a brilliant outdoorsy existence, Newfoundland has something else that can't be manufactured: friendly people. And this is not fake friendly, as in the Caribbean, where everyone is self-consciously listening to reggae and chilling out and oh by the way are you interested in a time share? These folks are genuinely open and happy to see visitors even if you aren't peeling off tip money. Although, I admit to being taken aback when a gas bar cashier said she loved me.
Actually "my love" is just a casual appellation used by many Newfoundland women. "Will that be all for you, m'love?" It's a little disconcerting at first, but then you come to realize that it pretty much says everything that needs to be said about Newfoundlanders. And it's all delivered with accents that are part Bob and Doug Mackenzie and part Willie the Groundskeeper from the Simpsons. It makes you want to give them a hug. It makes you feel welcome as a visitor, as opposed to welcome as a full wallet, which is rare for a tourist.
On my way out of Gros Morne the next day I stopped at a very short costal trail near the lighthouse for a final, brief walk in the woods. After enjoying the coastal view for a bit I turned around to head back and found moose tracks on top of my footprints. There had to be a moose in the immediate vicinity, I hadn't been walking very long. I started to look around for one, not sure if I actually wanted to succeed. Potential headline: "Idiot Yank gets Moose Hoof Enema to Start the Season." But the fact was I couldn't see it. The thing had to be within a hundred yards of me, and a moose is roughly the size of a Volkswagen, yet I could not spot it. Perhaps it was the mythical Ninja Moose of Gros Morne. Lesson: I wouldn't last five seconds in the wild.
Then, all too soon I was back on the TCH heading in the opposite direction. In every vacation of length there is a point where you see the end in sight. It was time for me to make my way home. The reverse trip back to St. John's was the same as the trip over: a daily exploration to the shore. The first day was a turn off into the town of Twillingate which -- without remotely intending any disrespect -- is virtually indistinguishable from the myriad other fishing villages that are becoming cottage communities all up and down the coast.
In these villages we begin to glimpse Newfoundland's future. Lonely Planet named Newfoundland one of the top 30 travel destinations for 2008. Fodor's named it one of the 7 places to go in 2008. Newfoundland is making a push into the travel and tourism industry, and it is steadily growing. At the moment things are still rustic most everywhere except St. John's, but I strongly suspect it won't last long. In my home state of Michigan people who have disposable income have been acquiring vacation cottages and homes in the northern parts of the state for years. The same is true in New York State and New England. Based on the obviously new cottages going up in these small villages I wouldn't be surprised if, 10 years from now, the hot place to have your summer home will be Newfoundland.
I would love to buy a cottage in Newfoundland for all the disingenuous reasons anybody else would. I would buy one, preferably in Gros Morne, spend a couple of summers there, and then complain about how all the new arrivals are ruining the place. Folks like me will pay premiums for that genuine Maritimes experience. But the more of us that show up, the more the experience will get watered down. Now, I am not of the opinion that just because I like Newfoundland as it is, the people should suffer double digit unemployment and stagnant economic prospects for all time just so I can have a little fantasy land to go to for a couple of months in the summer. The trick is to find the right balance that brings financial advantage without turning Newfoundland into an Atlantic Canada theme park.
One town that taking a good shot at it is Trinity, my last daily exploration. At first glance it seems like just another one of the picturesque villages I have run out of adjectives for. But there's something else going on. It's cleaned up and properly prepared. The street signs are of a type. Most of the buildings seem to have been freshly painted. There are a larger than average number of little gift shops and B&Bs. In most Newfoundland villages, tourism support amounts to a hiking trail and an overlook and maybe a small information centre. In Trinity, they seem to have accepted the idea of the entire community selling the tourist. Think of it this way, an indie filmmaker would pick Bell Island or Twillingate or Salvage for his locale. Hollywood would pick Trinity. It was selected as a Traveler's Choice destination by Trip Advisor, and has its own website dedicated to tourism.
And it's very well done. The scenery across the water to the lighthouse is a charmer. There are little coves and inlets to explore, both on foot or by boat. Looking for a long weekend in a picturesque, romantic place -- Trinity is a good choice. Trinity, I would guess, is the barometer for Newfoundland's future. Stop by in ten years and if it's turned into a cheesy crap shop chaos, you will know they have failed.
Back in St.John for one last night before leaving. I settled into the Battery Hotel near Signal Hill -- remember the one I had such a harrowing hike around about 10 pages ago? Or rather I tried to settle in. At first they put me on a floor with a bunch of high schoolers on holiday -- it was clear I would get no sleep, so I got moved to a different room where the walls were so thin I could hear everything going on in the next room, and I mean everything, so I asked for yet another room. (Note that the desk clerks were unfailingly polite about moving me twice.)
I finally got a quiet room and discovered the wireless didn't work. I fail to understand why Neddie's Harbour Inn in Gros Morne, which consists of a few rooms hundreds of kilometers from anything resembling industry and surrounded by mountains, and the Trailways Inn in Great Falls-Windsor, a one-woman show which consists of a handful of nice, clean rooms over a martial arts studio, can have functioning wireless, but the Battery Hotel, a top end conference hotel in smack in the middle of the province capital St. John's with dozens of staff on hand, cannot keep their wireless functioning. When I asked about the weak signal, I was told that the problem may be that "too many people were using it." No, moron, that's not how wireless signals work. Ye gods. Welcome back to the world.
Should you visit Newfoundland? At this point in its life, Newfoundland works perfectly for folks in search of gentle exploration. If your perfect vacation is a quiet, friendly place that's all about spotting icebergs, or whale watching, or wandering around in the fresh air before settling in with a good book for the night, you should go. Now. Are you looking for city excitement and shopping? There are much better places. Looking for beaches water sports? Skip it, unless you enjoy wearing a survival suit. Got kids? Maybe. Make sure you are there in season and stick mostly to the National Parks for all the activities.
As for me, I'll be scanning the real estate listing for Gros Morne. I need to get there early so I can complain like a local when the rest of you show up.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
The Month That Was - June 2009: A lot of clean up and miscellany this month, including four travel rewinds, backtracking through my recent, pre-Moab trips out west. I'm slowly weeding out the Scurrying About section in the hopes of eliminating it as part of a minor site rework. I should start tagging all my posts. I should also think about adding Google Ads. And enabling comments - maybe. I have a few other ideas. If I get more than one done it will be a miracle.No "Book Looks" again this month. But coming in the future are Lanark, by Alistair Gray; The Lightning Thief and (maybe) The Sea of Monsters, by Rick Riordan; The History of Art, by Paul Johnson; (possibly) more Nero Wolfe. You will not find a more eclectic reading list than mine.
I had also promised three more Flick Checks from my Comcast freebies, but I didn't get to those either. In truth I have come to have a knee-jerk dislike of movies. I can't tell if it's old-age crankiness or just intolerance for poor drama, but I rarely see a film that I find qualifies as even passable entertainment anymore. It's tempting to say they just don't make like they used to, but the fact is they never made them like they used to, it's just taken me a long time to see how bad they always were. I should write something more cogent about this phenomenon. Another thing for the to-do list.
Honestly, the bulk of my free time this month went to combing through the 600 or so photos I took in Utah and photoshopping them into acceptable shape. I am happy to say, that my photo library on Smugmug is looking really good. I'm proud of some of that stuff, not that it has any real value to anyone but me. I suppose I could look into naking them available for stock photography. Every paragraph is ending in a new project. Alas.
10th Circle of Hell: Renting a Car
Life After Motown
Music in My Ears
Those Weren't the Days
Travel Rewind: Southwest Passage (2008)
Travel Rewind: Death Valley Days (2008)
Travel Rewind: Head for the (Black) Hills (2007)
Travel Rewind: Way Out West (2006) 10th Circle of Hell: Renting a Car: Just as a follow-up to last month's mini rant about rental cars, I looked into the whole insurance angle a bit. Selling you optional insurance is high on the nickel-and-dime list for car rental agencies. Neophytes to the auto rental process may not realize that they will get asked if they want to spring for insurance, perhaps assuming that their personal car insurance covers them. Nope; unless you have a very unusual sort of policy that I don't know of.
There are usually three kinds of insurance they ask about: Collision damage, Personal accident, and Liability. Buying this coverage from the rental company for these can easily cost an excess of $40/day. It's outrageous and generally it's pure profit for the company. (It's also one of the things that really holds up car rental lines, folks who didn't know this question was coming and have no idea what to do about it.)
Probably the best answer for this is comes from your credit card. Many cards (but certainly not all, check before you assume) automatically insure you if your pay for the rental with that card, thus enabling you to decline the optional insurance. Usually it's only the Collision and Personal Accident, not Liability; but that's good enough for me. Still, it's not like you're completely in the clear. The card company only acts as secondary insurer, meaning any other source of insurance comes first. So you are likely to have to jump through any number of paperwork hoops to get reimbursements. One card, Diner's Club, actually acts as primary insurer in these cases so there would likely be less paperwork.
Apart from not covering liability, the other thing that may not be covered by your credit card is Loss-of-Use: the theoretical amount of money the company lost because they couldn't rent the car while it was being repaired. The chance of a company actually having a loss like this is small. But if you have an accident you can pretty much count on getting slammed for this too. Some credit cards don't cover this at all. Some will cover it provided the rental company will show them that they had a certain usage rate on their cars during the period of the charge (say 85% or something like that) to demonstrate that they really did lose money by not having that car in service. But, the problem here is that some (most) rental companies will simply not open their books.
So how's that for a fine mess? You get in an accident. The rental company charges you say $500 for loss of use. You credit card company says they'll pay it but they need to see the usage log from the rental company. The rental company says no, that's against our policy, so your card company won't pay it -- tough luck. By the way, the rental company doesn't send you a bill; they just hammer your credit card for these charges right away and let you go through the trouble of fighting it if you've got the willpower. In truth, I expect if you want to dispute anything the rental company charges you that credit card insurance won't cover, you can likely plan on calling a lawyer and heading to court.
Let me state quite plainly that any rental company that will hit you with a loss-of-use fee then refuse to verify it is an outright swindler. Seriously, there should be class-action suit or some kind of legislation that requires them to at least verify that they had a loss of use if they are going to change you for it. If I owned a congressman I would sick him on this. Imagine the political benefit of demagogueing this rapacious behavior by an industry that everyone already hates to begin with. Can you say "re-election"?
Apart from the scam aspect of all this, another problem is how much learning you have to do to get this done efficiently and cost-effectively. The quagmire of rental insurance, credit card coverage policy, loss-of-use policy -- coupled with questions about buying gas up front, hourly/daily/weekly rates, etc. -- means you have to rent cars often enough to have made your mistakes and learned your costly lessons before it sets in. This is just another example of how the travel industry has taken a straightforward service and disfigured it into a nightmare. All because of what? Fear of liability? Onerous regulation? Distrust and suspicion? Greed? Stupidity? Whatever that case, it obviously isn't working since bankruptcies are rife in the auto rental industry.
So what should you do when you rent? What does your card cover? Which companies supply log books for loss-of-use charges? The best description I have come across is in an SFgate article by Ed Perkins. It discusses what cards cover what and what rental companies open their books. Looks to me like I'm doing fine using Amex, although Diner's Club might offer some marginal benefits. Also, my main rental company is Alamo, which apparently has a policy of providing supporting logs for loss-of-use. It seems I may have blindly stumbled into some reasonable choices.
Here's the problem: the article is from 2007. Is it still accurate? It's not like headlines are made when one of these companies changes a policy out from under you. I guess the only thing to do is check for yourself. Having a simple, reliable answer would be just too easy. If you only rent cars once a year, and then only for a short time -- you may as well just buy the rental company insurance rather than waste however many hours trying to sort this all out. Maybe that's why the travel industry ends up with these twisted policies. The beat down succeeds in the end -- you pay.
Of course, if I did open a vein and pay for the optional insurance I might bang up the car a bit before returning it just to get my money's worth. Life After Motown: Last month I made the offhand comment that the auto/housing crash is going to accelerate the depopulation of Michigan, especially the urban and suburban areas. This didn't bother me all that much other than it might the likelihood of my taxes being jacked up to cover revenue shortfalls. That was thoughtless of me, though. The other cost is the loss of my friends as their jobs vanish and they move away to more financially friendly locales. This was rammed home recently as the University of Michigan -- the monster employer in Ann Arbor, in case you couldn't guess -- has started RIF-ing people wholesale. (RIF = Reduction In Force. Suddenly everyone around here knows that acronym.)
In some ways this is not surprising. The University is horribly managed and the ranks are loaded down with fat. Stories I have heard from friends about the total disregard of value and the entitled mentality of folks they work are head-shakers. And it's really no surprise. Many, many folks actively sought out University employment over the years because, while the pay was not all that great, the benefits were amazing -- including 200% 401K matches, 6 weeks vacation, etc. -- and as an essentially public institution, the assumption was that you could count on secure employment. Long time employees often referred to it as the Golden Handcuffs -- you might have a strong desire for better pay and sunnier climes, but you just couldn't see giving up the indirect benefits. Productivity was not a goal here.
Naturally, short sighted management eventually catches up to itself and bites its own butt, so now the RIF-ing is in full swing. Equally naturally, the short-sighted management that got them in this is doing equally short-sighted RIF-ing. Favoritism, tribalism, and outright whim are used without shame in wielding the axe. You would think the smart thing to do would be to take the opportunity to trim the fat, but no. The fat percentage will remain; just the overall scale will be reduced.
It's a fair bet that precisely the same dynamic is going on at General Motors. The University will survive of course, and may even come to thrive in a world of Obamacare, due to its tremendous medical research capabilities and the associated grants. They'll also raise tuition while cramming more and more freshmen into gigantic lecture halls with grad student Teaching Assistants. Without such options GM is more questionable, their only fallback option is the taxpayer.
Whatever the case, all that is getting settled is the rate of decline. Michigan's economy is not getting better any time soon. Possibly not in my lifetime. That's not to say it won't be good to live here. It might even be better for those of us can hold on, which is what I was trying to say last month. I just hope my friends can hold on along with me.
The History Channel is currently running a 9-part series called Life After People. The concept is to speculate on what would happen to the world if suddenly all the humans disappeared. It's interesting in a hopelessly depressing sort of way and features some nicely done graphics showing how nature slowly takes over all the previously populated areas.
Here in Michigan, we get to see this process in real time. And, as proof that even in this fecklessly bungled State we can occasionally get a unexpected outbreak of common sense, someone is turning this phenomena into a determined strategy in Detroit's weak sister, the City of Flint. Now that's a smart way to downsize.
"The real question is not whether these cities shrink -- we're all shrinking -- but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."
I find the fact that this guy has not been tarred and feather by sentimental journalists (like Mitch Albom) astounding. Could there actually be some realistic constructive change going on in this State, instead of just another PR campaign?
Other places are going rustic in smaller way:
More than 20 of the state's 83 counties have reverted deteriorating paved roads to gravel in the last few years... Reverting to gravel has happened in a few other states but it is most typical in Michigan.
Could be dirt bike heaven. And even more tellingly, some folks are living off the land:
Beasley, a 69-year-old retired truck driver who modestly refers to himself as the Coon Man, supplements his Social Security check with the sale of raccoon carcasses that go for as much $12 and can serve up to four. The pelts, too, are good for coats and hats and fetch up to $10 a hide.
...
Hunting is prohibited within Detroit city limits and Beasley insists he does not do so. Still, he says that life in the city has gone so retrograde that he could easily feed himself with the wildlife in his backyard, which abuts an old cement factory.
He procures the coons with the help of the hound dogs who chase the animal up a tree, where Beasley harvests them with a .22 caliber rifle. A true outdoorsman, Beasley refuses to disclose his hunting grounds.
"This city is going back to the wild," he says. "That's bad for people but that's good for me. I can catch wild rabbit and pheasant and coon in my backyard."
...
A beaver was spotted recently in the Detroit River. Wild fox skulk the 15th hole at the Palmer Park golf course. There is bald eagle, hawk and falcon that roam the city skies. Wild Turkeys roam the grasses. A coyote was snared two years ago roaming the Federal Court House downtown.
I can't help but think of Jed Clampett. As you might expect, the splendid and beautifully written Detroitblog was on top of this theme long ago.
Some blocks have been cleared entirely of housing over the years, one house at a time, until nature runs rampant, untrammeled by human endeavor, leaving nothing but telephone poles that still carry electricity past open fields with no machines to power, no homes to light.
It's the astonishing evidence that an entire neighborhood, and the society that it held, can vanish, with most traces of its presence wiped out in a matter of a few years, returning to the natural state in which it began.
As much as all my wailing on this topic might seem dire and cynical, I am actually optimistic about life here for those of us who can manage to stay. For the rest of you, well, do come by and visit when the weather is warm, but you're probably better off living where you are. Music in My Ears: I write a lot about what I watch and read, but I rarely seem to write about what I listen to. My listening habits are somewhat diverse.
In the car I have Sirius, and I have rarely strayed from the channel 25, Little Steven's Underground Garage (Caution: Auto-playing sound! Turn your speakers down.) The best description I can think of for the music is that it is (generally) any rock and roll that is avid and enthusiastic while not being not affected or high-concept. You might hear an old Kinks song, then something from a Scandinavian garage band, then doo-wop, then an old Delta blues song, then the Clash, then a semi-kitsch Nancy Sinatra, then Otis Redding, then a Beatles outtake, then the Ramones, and so on. It has two great qualities that you can't usually get -- it isn't obsessed with commercial success, and you never know what to expect. Unique in radio, as far as I can tell.
When I'm working (meaning writing - not day job) at home or on the road with wi-fi, I find myself tuning into Pandora. A brilliant concept -- you enter the name of an artist or song you like and it searches through its database of music and starts playing similar songs or artists -- with dead simple execution: you simply go to the site, enter the artist/song and the music begins. It stores your selections as "radio stations," of which you may have up to one hundred. It's available to you anywhere there is an internet connection, including your iPhone (and presumably Android and Palm Pre, if not now, soon) which would be the only reason I'd have for a smartphone at the moment. Their own description of the service gives you an idea of what their target is. (They have an equally capable competitor called Last.fm, which has been snapped up by CBS, I think.)
At the gym, I listen to Trance. Trance is a sub-genre of electronica. It features very regular, driving beats and hypnotic melodic forms (I won't call them actual melodies because, in my aged mind, a melody is something you can hum), preferably without vocals. The point it is to sort of get lost in it, which makes me sound like some kind of hippie, but it's what I want at the gym -- to just get into an energetic rhythm and lose track of time as I work out. Yes, it's weird. Anyway, I really don't know the inside scoop on Trance other than a few big names -- Oakenfold, Digweed, Tiesto -- which probably mean nothing to you. They don't mean much to me either. The artists in Trance are DJs who remix the works of others into the Trance genre. The best thing about this type of music is that you can download extended mix sets, often up to two hours long, as single MP3s for free from any number of sites. New Mixes was one of them; although it appears to have died back in April, there are still downloads available. Other sites such as djmixes.net also provide links to free mixes although you have to jump through a few hoops, such as registration, and deal with slow download services. These sets are often only radio quality (because they often come from radio shows) but they are legal and free and good enough for the gym.
In any other circumstances -- such as flying or generally being out without my laptop or wi-fi -- I just listen to my Zune which contains, just about every sort of music you can imagine, from Bach to Sonny Rollins to Fountains of Wayne to Aaron Copeland to Louis Armstrong to Ursula 1000 to Steven Reich to Southern Culture on the Skids to Diana Krall, and a smattering of audiobooks to boot. Most of this has come from ripping used CDs and snagging el cheapo downloads from Amazon (they have a lot for free, and you can search within genre based on album price). I wish I could give some kind of rhyme or reason behind this mess but there is none, except perhaps ADD.
So there's some context for when I start doing music reviews. Those Weren't the Days: Apropos of nothing in particular, I highly, highly, highly recommend a remarkably insightful 6-part series on a school year in the lives of middle schoolers, 13: Life at the Edge of Everything.
Read any news story or profile of school kids and invariably you walk away with the idea that they are all hopeless victims of a harsh uncaring society, and inevitably will be led by thoughtless parents and overworked administrators into lives of crime, drugs and degradation. That is, of course, a load of bollocks.
Middle schoolers today are exactly like middle schoolers when I was that age. The kids portrayed here are, for the most part, sharp and healthy. Their parents are all loving though, at times, hapless and helpless. The teachers are caring. The kids are all at the point where things are getting serious with the opposite sex, but they still spend time watching cartoons. They are both overwhelmed and energized by fear and possibility. They twist and turn, fighting to pass their classes and please their parents amid the distractions of their social lives and the need to re-invent themselves constantly. The portrayal is pitch perfect.
This is an old article, from about 6 years ago, (interestingly, the time frame is almost exactly the same time Miss Anna was 13) and it is one of the finest pieces of journalism I have ever read. Set aside some time to read through all six parts. Once you start you'll want to go through to the end -- I guarantee. Nobody gets killed or overdoses or even drops out -- although there is a brief, oblique mention of a pregnancy, it seems fittingly out of place. Nothing lurid happens. No horrible tragedies occur. It's just life, beautifully described. Travel Rewind: Southwest Passage (2008): (This month's rewind theme is journeys out west...pictures are on Smugmug) I wanted it to not rain. I needed it to not rain. My last four excursions (New York, Chicago, Mackinac Island, Newfoundland) were all marred to varying degrees by rain. A fifth would not do. So where do you go when rain is unacceptable? The desert. Duh. The plan was to fly into Phoenix and make a big looping road trip through the heart of New Mexico, stopping in multiple national parks, then circling along the border to Tucson where I'd spend a few nights in a spa then on back to Phoenix to fly home.
Other than snagging a perfect aisle exit row seat, the flight out was completely uneventful. Sadly, when I went to pick up my reserved convertible from the lot, there was not a ragtop in sight. I felt pretty stupid when the pimply teenage attendant at Alamo had to explain to me that the Pontiac G6 is a hardtop convertible. He did everything but say, "I realize they didn't have these back in your day." Critical note: the G6 has a much nicer engine than the Chrysler Sebring that I expected to get, but it is no better constructed. Another note: Modern convertibles have zero luggage space with the top down. In the open air, the only thing I could fit into the trunk was my laptop bag. I keep forgetting this and my bags end up riding shotgun. This is another thing that was different about convertibles back in my day.
The temperature in Phoenix shortly after midday was well into the 90s -- exactly what I was looking for. As I cruised northeasterly out of Phoenix the scenery slowly morphed from standard cityscape to the desolate desert vistas I have become so familiar with from my trips to the West. The sky got broader, landscape opened up before me, rock towers demarked the horizon. As my elevation increased, I unwound and enjoyed inhaling the dry, crisp, thin, cool, perfect air as I motored along.
First stop: Holbrook, AZ. Holbrook is on the border of the Navajo reservation and its population appears to be heavily Native. The commercial base however appears to be dinosaurs. All along the main strip you see replica dinosaurs of some form or other, usually brontosaurus for aesthetic reasons. This is due, I suppose to its proximity Petrified Forest National Park, which was on my schedule for the next day. For me, Holbrook was all about teepees.
In Holbrook there is a rather famous, roadside attraction-style motel called the Wigwam. At the Wigwam, the rooms are all in teepees. Seriously, instead of pulling your car up to your motel room, you pull up to your own personal teepee. OK, it's not a actual teepee -- it's a little building shaped like a teepee that contains a very basic motel room that hasn't been renovated since the '60s, but still. Cheap motel or not, what kind of person would pass up a night in a teepee?
The check-in process is equally quaint. The nice young lady at the desk informed me that she would only be around until about 9:30 that night, so if I had any questions I needed to sort them out before then. And there wouldn't be anyone around in the morning so just leave the key in the room. I spent the last of the sunlight taking some photos of the place -- it's loaded down with old cars in various states of disrepair, just for effect -- then crashed early in my teepee.
My plan was to rise no later than 6:30 Pacific Time (in AZ it's actually mountain time unadjusted for daylight savings) and 7:30 Mountain Time (in NM) to avoid any jet lag on the return trip. So the next day I was up and out of my teepee with the rise of the sun, more or less. I was, I believe, the first one to reach the Petrified Forest that day.
I entered Petrified Forest National Park from the south after an absolutely beautiful ~15 mile early morning drive through the desert. As National Parks go, Petrified Forest is not outstanding. Although there is an enormous quantity of petrified wood spread all about often containing fossils -- it is really more of geological or paleontological interest; there are better parks for sightseeing. There are several short hiking trails; the one I took lead to what appears to be the remains of a cabin made of the petrified wood. It is in fact Agate House, a modern attempt to reconstruct a local-style pueblo. An interesting project but clearly abandoned now, presumably in the interest of historic accuracy. (Note for future reference: I did briefly get lost on this half-mile in the open desert trail. That should not surprise you.)
A single main road winds latitudinally through the park. I entered from the less busy south entrance. As you approach the north entrance you come upon the Painted Desert, which is where the majority of the sightseeing in the park occurs, what with it being right off a big freeway. Painted Desert is very striking giving the same impression as the Badlands of South Dakota give, though on a much, much smaller scale. It was here I discovered that I have become a National Park snob. Years ago I would have thrilled to the landscapes in the Painted Desert, but now I think, "Nice, but I've seen better." I don't know if this is a positive development.
The road from there into New Mexico and Santa Fe goes through Navajo country. Which is to say, there are endless miles of crap shops selling downscale fast food, gas, and "genuine" Indian carvings and dream catchers. And casinos -- can't forget those.
I scheduled a couple of nights in Santa Fe, for no other reason than Conde Nast Traveller magazine keeps rating it in the top 3 or 4 most beautiful cities in the U.S. Judged as a whole, and including the surrounding areas, they may have a point. I bunked down at the Inn of the Governors, an ace establishment if there ever was one. A bling-free little compound tucked just outside the city's main plaza, I of the G is a very hospitable place. Free breakfast: a full buffet, not a tray of stale pastries. There's a nice little pool/courtyard just off the lobby. The lobby itself is homey and quiet with lots of comfortable furniture and has computers out for public use (the wi-fi doesn't extend to the rooms). Two bars/lounges. An indoor/outdoor restaurant. Free tea and sherry in the afternoon. Free parking. Fine service. A really terrific spot, and about a three block easy walk to the historic plaza.
The first thing you notice about Santa Fe is the architecture. It is full-on southwest pueblo style -- enough flat-roofed, squared-off, earth tones to last you a lifetime. I think it's an open question as to whether this style of architecture is beautiful. In the eye of this beholder it is not particularly so. In fact, now is as good a time as any for me to say I was not really thrilled with the whole southwest aesthetic. All that silver and turquoise gaudiness; the "native-influenced" blankets and carvings -- it's all too affected. What's worse is that everyone and their half-witted uncle claims to be an artist. Slap together a set of turquoise earrings on your kitchen table and you are instantly a cohort of Picasso. The other conceit that is given way too much leeway is that the crap they sell in these shops is genuinely Indian. The blankets with geometric patterns, the pottery, the dream catchers -- those little twirly things that are supposed to ward off evil spirits -- often come with a certificate to verify that they were actually made by actual Indians. Of course the Indian who made it is just moonlighting from his career as a mid-level IT executive, but hey, it still counts, right? Sure, and I slept in a "genuine" teepee.
Look, I don't blame these folks for supporting such fantasies. They do it because there is a market for it. And that market consists of people like me from back east who want to show off all the Southwest/Navajo/Anything-but-Eastern-Time-Zone culture they soaked up on their last vacation out West to liven up their dinner parties. It is pretty clear that a majority of the visitors to this area are comfortably well-off middle-aged couples either on the brink of retirement or already there, looking to decorate their empty nests or possibly buy one out here in the high desert air. I don't mean to be cynical of such people -- I may be happy to be one sooner than I think -- but I find the overt commercial reaction to them to be absurdly pretentious.
For their part, the locals seem to carry a similar skepticism, at least if nobody is looking. After settling into my room I snagged a bar stool for dinner (to sit at, not eat) and a bit of Sunday Night Football at the nearby San Francisco Bar and Grill (good fresh food) and chatted up the bartender a bit. I asked her what she thought I should do during my one full day in Santa Fe; she said people do three things in Santa Fe: shop, eat out, and go up into the mountains. I said I'd probably pass on the shopping part, and her reply was, "Are you sure? You can never have too much turquoise." She recommended a tapas restaurant on the other side of the plaza for the food and drink part, and that I head up Artists Dr. (see what I mean about pretentious) to the top of the local mountain as there were hiking paths all along the way in Santa Fe National Forest.
The next morning I started to take her advice and head up Artists Dr., but I needed to find some gas first which required me to head out on the road north, and going east on Artists Dr. was going to have me looking directly into the rising sun which kind of defeated the purpose, so instead I continued north and made my way up the High Road to Taos.
While I may be skeptical of Southwest culture and architecture, there is no denying the striking beauty of the land. The High Road is a winding, soaring ride up into the mountains through a number of little towns in varying economic states -- some are obviously the choice of highly moneyed retirees, others are little more than collections of ramshackle "artist" shacks. Either way, it seems certain that every one of them is up here for the inspirational surroundings. Up here, the earth tones are all swamped by the green of the thick forests, reminiscent of back home in upstate Michigan, except with towering mountains.
Taos proper is like Santa Fe's more stylish little sister. The bistros are more unique, the boutiques more eclectic, and the faux art is more affected. But the central historic plaza is, like Santa Fe's, still a nice place to wander about. Wherever you are in Taos, the scene is dominated by the view of the Taos Mountains to the north. At the foot of those mountains stands the biggest tourist attraction in Taos (at least, when it's not skiing season), the Taos Pueblo.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site and the last occupied Indian pueblo in existence, the Taos Pueblo is a fascinating thing to see. The encampment and the grounds leading up the mountain are sovereign Indian land and used by the local tribe to try to maintain as much of their historic cultural ways as possible. (Despite the proximity to Navajo land, I don't believe this is a Navajo tribe, but a group simply referred to as Pueblo People.) It consists primarily of two large multi-story structures surrounded by many smaller dwellings, all of which are made of mud. The mud is made from the local ground and mixed and layered into the walls as it has been for over a millennium. (Evidence suggests these pueblos may have been standing since about 1000 AD, about the same time the Norse were taking a shot at a colony in eastern Canada.) It is the longest continuously inhabited place in the U.S. The engineering required, using little more than stone tools and buckets of water, is really astounding.
Another interesting fact: 90% of the pueblo residents are Catholic. This is a holdover from Spanish colonial times, though the "Catholicism" has really become a conflagration of traditional Catholicism, aboriginal Indian traditions, and manufactured myth -- Saint Jerome has become San Geronimo, and such. Still, in addition to the native mash-up ceremonies, a traditional mass is still held every Sunday at the church on the pueblo grounds.
Visiting the pueblo is easy, but don't forget your wallet. It is $10 to get in and another $5 camera fee if you want to take any pictures. You can take pictures of anything outside the San Geronimo chapel, but you are strongly advised to ask permission before you take the picture of any tribe members. This is, of course, simply good manners, but I came to suspect, for reasons that will become clear, that it also meant the tribe member being photo'd would expect a tip, so I stuck to shooting the scenery.
There are free guided walking tours every half-hour or so, which I can recommend. Our guide was very knowledgeable and friendly. She also reminded us a couple of times that guides work on a volunteer basis and that any remuneration came from tips. The dwellings also double as stores from which the tribe members sell their "arts" -- jewelry carvings, pottery, native flatbreads, etc. This would be the killer spot to buy your "genuine" artifact. When your neighbors show off the turquoise jewelry they got at a roadside stand along with a certificate of authenticity, imagine the look on their faces when you trump them with a clay pot that came from an actual inhabited genuine Indian pueblo, although you'll need to pay the camera fee and tip the tribe member if you want a picture to prove it. But it's worth it for the sick burn.
At this point, I'm going to go on for a few paragraphs about Indian cultures and it may raise some hackles. Feel free to skip ahead.
The Taos Pueblo is an odd dichotomy. It exists as a way for Indians to keep their traditions alive, and it clearly serves that purpose. The architecture, as I mentioned, and the lack of amenities (no running water or electricity), the clay ovens for cooking, the half feral dogs wandering around, the partially-functional attempts at self-sufficiency are all very much in evidence. But then there is a side of it that is blatantly about the money. Everything and everyone has an angle on your wampum. It's like Disney in miniature. At the Mouse House you get to experience child-like magic, and at the Taos Pueblo you get as genuine a Native experience as you can get -- in either case you hope you won't notice the decrease in your net worth.
This is me being cynical again, isn't it? Well, I guess I'm just cynical. Some of the things our guide mentioned struck me as telling. First, she mentioned that the local native language (the Taos language) is never written down. It is passed along generation through practice and osmosis and is, in fact, generally not even spoken in front of outsiders. I can think of nothing that would doom a culture faster than not writing things down. Were it not for people learning to write things down at some point in ancient history, we would all still be living in adobe mud huts or grass shacks. We would be toothless by the time we were 30, provided we lived that long because our life expectancy would probably be less than that. Science and literature would be non-existent. Yet for some reason the Pueblo People feel this is a facet of their culture that merits preservation.
Fair enough. I am of the belief that whenever possible, everyone should be able to live exactly the way they want. But nothing naturally exists in a bubble. And the fact is that if you are going to maintain a tradition that is so thoroughly detrimental to your continued existence your probable outcome is grim. You are going to get hammered by every other culture that has no such limit on their vitality. It may be a violent destruction, or it may not. You may just get completely overwhelmed by the progress of your competition. But whatever the case, you are going down. Whatever injustices were incurred in the treatment of Indians over the years, they are in fact living the best possible outcome for themselves even had those injustices not occured. The best outcome a primitive culture can hope for is to build a make-shift bubble and hold out as long as possible. That is essentially, what the Taos Pueblo is: a fantasy land in a legislated bubble. And it's not even a well-sealed bubble. Of the 1900 residents, only 150 live permanently in the Pueblo. The rest keep homes elsewhere in and around Taos, and all of them spend time outside the compound where there is hot running water, penicillin, power tools, McDonald's, and all the other by-products of a culture with a tradition of writing things down.
All this I write in a reaction to the elevated opinion most multi-cultural mavens have of Indian culture, as evidenced by how important it is that a "genuine" dream catcher have a certificate of authenticity. Indian culture is certainly interesting and worthy of anthropological study, but let's face facts: it is a primitive culture. It is good to have certain relativistic view of cultures, but it's very mistaken to believe primitive and advanced cultures are of equal value for humanity as a whole.
I'm glad that the Pueblo Indians have this little bubble not because there is anything particularly holy or noble about their rituals, but simply because it is what they want to do. I'm sorry that the people living this way have to put on a song and dance for Brahmins from the East Coast seeking to interact with genuine primitives, but the time of primitive cultures is long passed and it's not coming back. Their fantasies will need to be financed, as evidenced by the Taos Mountain Casino just outside the Pueblo. The Casino is what is truly genuine -- genuinely human.
And as negative as that sounds, should you find yourself in Taos, I strongly recommend you visit the Pueblo, tip your guide well, and judge for yourself. Or better yet, try not to judge either way. People should be judged personally not sociologically (even turquoise-flaunting Brahmins, I suppose).
On with the trip.
Exiting Taos, on the way to the low road back to Santa Fe, one crosses the Rio Grande Gorge suspension bridge, the second highest suspension bridge in the U.S. Frankly, it's more than a little scary. There are parking lots on either side and a thin walkway should you want to cross it on foot, although there is no barrier between the walkway and the traffic rushing by (there is a guardrail to help prevent you from falling into the gorge 600 feet below, thankfully). The real freakiness comes when a big semi barrels across. As it rushes past your face you feel the buffeting of the wind, and the bridge beneath your feet wobbles and vibrates; every cell in your body reminds you that it's a long, long way down. You quickly turn back to your car and head off.
The long stretch of highway between the bridge and I-285 back to Santa Fe consists mostly of empty ranch land, although it also seems to be a favorite of eco-sphere dwellers. The north side is pockmarked with alien looking structures all designed for sustainable living of one variety or another. It put me in mind of the landscape from Mad Max -- desert rats eeking out an off-grid existence. Although instead of prepping for battles in the Thunderdome, I'm sure these folks all have PhDs in ecological science and buy their windmills off eBay.
As I've dwelled on before, most southwest "art" is simply craft with pretense, but there is some actual art going on. Just north of Santa Fe, if you turn off I-285 onto Bishop's Lodge Road, you will pass the delightful Shidoni Foundry and Gallery where there is a wonderful sculpture garden and gallery to peruse. There is lots of vitality in the works here, as a quick walk through the garden will attest. This is a very successful example of taking the creation of art (and craft too) and integrating it with a personal experience. You can see bronze pours if you come at the right time. You can picnic in the garden amidst the sculptures. Very cool, and a much better way to spend a couple of hours than, say, hitting all the shops in The Plaza.
Following Bishop's Lodge Road back towards town, I once again came to Artist's Drive, and this time, with the sun well over to west and out of my eyes, I made the climb. It is as advertised -- a remarkably beautiful drive with numerous roadside overlooks and well mapped and described trailheads. I stopped about three-quarters of the way up at a point where you could look out over the desert with Santa Fe laid out before you just as if you were looking at Google Earth. I had second thoughts as to whether I had done the right thing by heading up to Taos as opposed to spending the day here. There is no right answer. Following the road to the peak where there is a ski lodge, I began to see why folks like living in Santa Fe so much and why it is always referred to as being so beautiful. It has nothing to do with the overarching adobe-ness. It's all about the land. I took all day for me to get there, but eventually I was charmed by Santa Fe.
Back in to town with the sun just below the horizon, I made my way to the Tapas restaurant recommended by the bartender from the previous night. It was closed so I settled for a tasty stuffed poblano and a nondescript margarita, indifferently served at a plaza joint called Ore's. It was, to say the least, a full day. The next morning I headed south out of the cool high desert and back down into the scorch, wishing I had one more day to spend in Santa Fe.
The road south out of Santa Fe is an endless, ruler-straight strip of asphalt through the desert. It's easy to see why people would see mirages in such circumstances -- there is simply nothing else to see. Mile markers are your only companions. There is very little traffic and enormous distances between signs of civilization. This is not a place you want to break down. I remember having similar thoughts when driving some of the lonesome roads in Wyoming and South Dakota, but here the danger is compounded by heat and lack of water. Despite this, I find the barren Chihuahuan desert as beautiful as the lush high desert. (Or for that matter as attractive in its own way as the bays of Newfoundland, or the beach in Naples, or the neon of Times Square.) After two or three hours of flat high speed running, a city springs out of the desert fully formed. This is the community of Roswell.
Decades ago Roswell revolved around Walker Air Force base which was decommissioned in 1967. Since then it has lived off of relocating retirees, various small manufacturing concerns, and aliens. Little Green Men loom large in Roswell's legend -- inflatable ones stand outside the shops, the street lights look like alien heads, and smack dab in the middle of Main street, in a repurposed movie theatre, sits the UFO Museum and Research Center.
The UFO Museum starts off with much interesting info about "The Roswell Incident", which has served as the outline for so much bad sci-fi over the years that there is no way to describe it without cliche. A rancher spots falling debris, discovers a large metal object, calls the military out to investigate. Military holds press conference saying they have no idea what it is -- some kind of flying saucer, maybe. Then, after extensive "investigation" the military declares it to be a weather balloon, and anyone involved in the matter is hushed up.
Believe it or not -- and I didn't until I visited the UFO Museum -- there is a good amount of documented evidence for this, and I say that as a deep skeptic. Looking at the documentation, it does seem to me that something strange landed in the desert outside Roswell, and that it may have been hushed up. I don't think that it was aliens, because I don't believe in aliens. I suspect it was a military experiment, probably innocuous, that was overly secreted because of the Cold War paranoia. But, oh my, what followed on: abductions, ancient astronauts, Bermuda triangles, bending spoons, Close Encounters, X-Files -- every crackpot in the known universe piling on and creating so much noise that even if there was something to uncover, its long since past believability whatever it is.
But should you find yourself in Roswell, I do recommend the UFO Museum. It's cheap ($5), fun, and manned by good-natured believers. There is a movie room that has either documentaries or alien movies going at all times. Plus, a gift shop. Disclosure: I bought a t-shirt. And I'm not ashamed.
The next stop was roughly an hour south at Carlsbad. Just as one enters Carlsbad, on the right there is a sign for the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park. Since it was too late to get to the Caverns for the evening, I stopped and was quite glad I did. It's a choice little nature park, and it's exactly what its name suggests. The Welcome Center is loaded down with exhibits and hands-on artifacts. Through the winding trail on the grounds you pass by numerous planted areas with appropriately identified flora, intermixed with animal exhibits including bear, wolf, a reptile exhibit, and more birds than you can say "Hellooo Poly" to. (They recently even got a giraffe. The animals are mostly rescues.) If it lives in the local desert, they have it here. Situated on the peak of a high hillside, it has great views or the surrounding area. Five bucks to get in and it should be more. It's just another one of those little finds that make western road trips so interesting.
Carlsbad is loaded down with chain motels catering to Cavern visitors. I picked a clean-looking Super 8 at random and bedded down. Interestingly, the couple in front of me in line asked if they could see the room before they checked in. It's a Super 8 -- bare walls, no toiletries, no alarm clock, TV from 1973, generally depressing -- not exactly sure what you want to see ahead of time.
If I did believe in aliens, I would strong suspect they were behind the construction of Carlsbad Cavern. Up until this, the most bizarre natural landscape I had ever seen was Bryce Canyon in Utah, which is a pretty freaking strange place, but I would readily sign on to a conspiracy theory that the Roswell incident was the result of aliens coming to work on their Earth headquarters in the cave in Carlsbad. It is nearly inconceivable that this place is natural.
The entrance is a really big hole in the ground with cave swifts darting in and out constantly. A steep, paved path leads down into the darkness. Your eyes adjust to the dim lighting in short order as you look around the impressive first cavern, which is dominated by the smell of bat guano. After a brief walk through the first room you move on along what is called the Natural Entrance route. I cannot overstate what a terrific job the Park Service has done with this place. The path throughout the cave is paved, making it accessible to wheelchairs, the self-guided audio tour is rich in info but most impressively, the lighting is amazing. It probably goes without saying that absent lighting the cave would be pitch black -- completely devoid of any light -- something very few of us will ever experience. What the Park Service has done is added some of the most subtly perfect effects to softly highlight the astonishing rock formations but not interfere with the uncanny natural eeriness of the cave.
The Natural Entrance path is a little over a mile long, ending in a flat-ish area where there is, believe it or not, a snack bar and gift shop. Yes, you can have lunch hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the Earth. From there you follow another trail, this one called the Big Room route which leads, not surprisingly, into The Big Room. The Big Room is over eight acres; you could fit six football fields inside. And I simply cannot come up with the words to describe the awesomeness of the stalactites, stalagmites, rock formations, crystal clear pools, great domes, hidden rooms, terrifying pits -- if you have a bucket list, you need to have Carlsbad Caverns on it. It's that simple.
And that's just the basic self-guided walking tour. As with Santa Fe, I needed more time. During the summer nights, there is a bat flight program. Each day at sunset about 400,000 bats come swarming out of the cave looking like an enormous pillar of smoke. And there are "wild tours", semi-strenuous ranger guided tours into unpaved, natural parts of the cave. I seriously misunderestimated (thanks W!) the indescribable coolness of Carlsbad Cavern or I would have scheduled another day. I had to live with my couple of hours in the Natural Entrance and the Big Room and then hit the road so I could get myself lost hiking again.
My stop for the next night was to be in Las Cruces and the road there passes through the Guadalupe Mountains -- a decent enough National Park that, if it weren't surround by more astonishing ones, would be the center of attention. (Again my National Park snobbery rears its head.) As it stands it's more of what I would think of as a "wilderness area" than a National Park with specific natural attractions. After a quick glance at a map on the wall in the visitor center, I picked out a four-mile hike that I figured I could knock off in a couple of hours and still get me settled in to my hotel in Las Cruces by dinner time.
Let me confess that, despite enjoying the activity, I am almost certainly the most incompetent hiker ever to lace up a pair of trail-runners. The trail to Devil's Hall is mostly standard wilderness stuff, but there is the grasshopper issue. At this time of year they sun themselves on the trail and leap out of the way at your approach, except they seem to have little control over their direction and you can easily find yourself in a hail of grasshoppers, like getting pelted with little rocks, especially if you are walking into the wind. And let me tell you, there are some big-ass grasshoppers out here -- inches long. Subsequent investigation revealed them to be locusts, up to 6 inches long.
Eventually the trail leads to a fairly steep bit of scrambling over a rock field to a dry river bed. At that point the map says to turn left. Being the most incompetent hiker ever, I didn't have a map. I turned right. After about 15-20 minutes of fighting through what became increasingly clear was not a trail, I turned back. No big deal really, but after wasting so much time on the wrong turn, I did lose my shot at finishing the trail before I had to get back on the road.
On the way back I crossed paths with a couple of other hikers who told me to watch my step as I scramble back up the rock field because they had spotted a rattlesnake. Great. So I fashioned myself a make-shift walking stick as a snake-fighter if needed and made my way back to the rock field. Only it turns out that it's harder to find the path over the rocks to trail than it was to go from the trail to the rocks. So here I am, bounding randomly about in a fairly steep rock field looking for the trail, struggling to keep my balance with each leap, all the while with the knowledge that there was a rattlesnake hidden in some little crevice waiting to fang me at my first slip. I should not be allowed in the wilderness. Ever.
Not to spoil the ending, but I did make it back to my car without needing a snake bite kit and got on the road to El Paso. Traveling from Carlsbad to Las Cruces one passes through El Paso in the far western little shelf of Texas. The only thing that was memorable to me about passing through this region was the extended line of auto salvage yards on the outskirts of the city. Just miles and miles of them. Apparently, thanks to NAFTA, folks are buying up used American sedans and exporting them to buyers in Mexico, who prefer the cheap full-sized cars and SUVs to the overpriced subcompacts that are pushed by Mexican new car dealers. Commerce can be as complicated as nature.
Take a slight northern curl out of El Paso and you are back in New Mexico and coming to rest in Las Cruces. Las Cruces seems to be a decent place, but without a truly stand-out trait. It mostly comes off as a nice clean suburb that supports a University, a few festivals, a historic plaza (which wasn't terribly impressive), and a sweet mountainous backdrop. It just seems like a decent sort of place to live, or in my case, bunk down for the night at a Hampton Inn.
The next morning I hit the last of the long string of National Parks on my list, White Sands, which as it turned out required a minor amount of backtracking to the northeast. At the top of the mountain range just outside Las Cruces there is an area to pull off the highway and take in the scenic vista. Probably the coolest thing about this rest area is that it is guarded by a ballistic missile. You can pull off the road and picnic in the shade of it, if you want. This is symbolic of the area because the road to White Sands cuts through a missile test range. There are signs everywhere saying that it is government property and trespassers will be subject to waterboarding, tax audits and other horrors.
Observatory at the missile range
On both sides of Las Cruces, including just before the entrance to White Sands, you will find Border Patrol stops. Everybody gets pulled off, a chap in a uniform takes a quick look inside and behind your car, asks if you are a U.S. citizen (although requires no proof) and then says "Have a nice day." I question how effective this is, but it was inoffensive.
White Sands is a National Monument, not a National Park. I do not know the difference, but White Sands is a pretty cool place -- in fact, the description of it in Google Maps states, "This looks like a pretty cool place." It's like turning off the road and finding yourself on the set of Lawrence of Arabia. White Sands is exactly what the name says -- towering dunes of white sand. The sand itself is gypsum and like all sand, it gets in everything, especially your shoes. I didn't hike through the park -- I just took a drive and hung out for a while to take photos. But I did notice that sledding down the dunes is a popular family activity. Definitely worth an hour or so stop.
And with that, I bid adieu to the land of green mountains, clay pueblos, scorching deserts, spooky aliens, killer missiles, creepy caves, soaring sand dunes, rattlesnakes, poblanos and plazas. New Mexico is one of a kind. To a lifelong Michigander, it is a strange place with eccentric ways. I hope we meet again soon.
The last leg of my journey was a few days at Miraval Resort in Tuscon, AZ, where I have stayed before. It was quite a change from the Super8s and Hampton Inns and teepees. No more 5-hour drives and truck stop hot dogs. Miraval is as luxurious as it gets. Pull up to the door and they already know who I am, what room I will be in, what I liked from my last visit. I popped open the trunk and my bags were whisked off to my room without me even asking. The nice advisor at check-in handed me my key, my complimentary water bottle and tote bag, and my nicely presented itinerary, and made sure I didn't have any questions. I walked through the lovely grounds to my room, getting my bearings as I went. My bags were already delivered and waiting. I opened the safe and put my wallet, laptop, and cell phone inside. I was now officially separated from the world. I'm told there was a presidential campaign or something like that going on. Apparently there were places in the world where people had such concerns, but the bedding I was sleeping on was soft as silk and about four feet thick.
In travel industry parlance Miraval is what is known as a "destination spa". You can think of a destination spa as an all-inclusive resort but with the additional bonus of a broad array of scheduled activities (from mountain biking tours to astronomy sessions to photography classes to rock climbing to...), traditional health, fitness and beauty treatments, coupled with more self-help-ish services, all rolled up into one very luxurious package and topped off with incomparable service. Tucson actually features two such places -- Canyon Ranch and Miraval. I have been to both previously and this time I chose Miraval because a) it was a mite cheaper, and b) Canyon Ranch is dry and I like me a glass of wine with dinner.
Whenever I visit such a place I feel duty bound to try something new. This time it was mountain biking. Miraval has three levels of mountain biking classes. The beginner's class, which I should have been in because I had never mountain biked before, occurred the morning before I arrived. The intermediate one was scheduled for my first full day so I told myself, "How hard can it be? I've road-biked plenty. I'm Joe fitness. I'll just sign up for the intermediate." So come 6 AM the next day I was blowing out my lungs trying to pedal my through 5 inches of soft sand and bounce over rocks while crawling up a steep incline along a tiny trail barely wide enough for my pedals with deadly cactus on each side. As the saying goes, my ego was writing checks my body couldn't cash. Needless to say, the pack dropped me on the first hill.
You see, there are some basic things you need to know to mountain bike. Number one, from what I learned, is that you need to accept that you will be going over obstacles. You cannot avoid everything no matter how hard you try. You have to accept the jarring and take it properly (slightly off the saddle to minimize impact). If you try to dodge everything you will burn yourself out with frustration. This is what I did.
The fact is that once I got over that first hill, I had a blast. I would go trail riding again any day. It's like being a kid again (except when I was a kid we wouldn't have used helmets), barreling around like a madman complete oblivious to danger and damage. Because Miraval is Miraval there are multiple guides with each group to accompany people of different skill levels. Once I got a good feel for mountain biking I was able to out run the guide that had hung back to handhold me up the first hill and, in fact, I was feeling pretty fresh when we finally finished to tour. And despite my early travails, I didn't fall once, so I count that as a moral victory. But the shame of being dropped and nursemaided at the outset like that hung over me. I had to spend some time by the pool working on my tan before I was able to let it go.
In the afternoon, I took a photography class. Nicely done, and small enough that everyone could get their specific issues addressed. Everyone had DSLR (although I'm pretty sure my Nikon D70 was the oldest model) and we mostly wanted to know how to move from being little more than point-and-shoot masters to something more intricate. The teacher not only showed us things in general but also specifically on all our cameras (she seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of them, the controls must be similar across manufacturers). We were scheduled to do a hands-on afterward, but rain interfered with it. Yes even out here in the desert, rain managed to take its little dig at me.
At a destination spa, your reward for all this activity is a massage, which I like to schedule for the end of the day. And one of my favorite massages is the Thai massage. In Thai massage you are clothed, preferably in something loose like sweatpants and a t-shirt, and it is less a massage than an extended and very rigorous stretching session. A good therapist will quickly identify your flexibility/muscle tension trouble-spots and push them hard. I highly recommend it over standard-issue relaxation massages if you are one of those types that is uncomfortable with listening to new age music while some stranger oils you up. But I emphasize, it can be very rigorous.
The next day was my last full day of vacation, and it started with another early morning effort, this time for something called Zen Boot Camp. This was a fitness class, just like any of sorts of boot camp classes you see advertised everywhere these days -- basically, gym class from Junior High, but without the dodgeball or wedgies from bullies. It was a decent workout, but I have to admit I didn't see where "Zen" came into play.
Given the non-stop activities of the last week, and because this was really my final shot at doing nothing, I spent the bulk of the day reading by the pool. It was wicked, wicked hot -- pushing triple digits -- but I thrived on it. The pool at Miraval is constantly patrolled by uncountable little dragonflies of a brightly polished blue. They dart and hover over the water and into the surrounding gardens. It a mesmerizing sight -- completely hypnotic. In time you slip deeper and deeper into relaxation. The sun is melting you. You hear the occasional sound of someone slipping in and out of the water. Every now and then a brief breeze comes up, drifts over you, then vanishes as quickly as it came. You lay your book aside and lay still, not quite at the edge of sleep. Ah, yes -- there's that Zen thing after all.
By high afternoon I was fully cooked. I dragged myself into the spa and cleaned up a bit, then went off to write for a while. When sunset came I took a last walk around the grounds, this time to exercise what I had learned in my photography class. The day ended with another massage, this one a more traditional deep tissue variety, and then off to sleep in the thick comfy bed for one last time.
On the last morning, before checking out, I scheduled a body composition analysis which has to happen pretty much just as you roll out of bed. A body comp analysis tells you, in theory, how much muscle and fat you have and where it is distributed. I was anxious to do this because all summer I have been working very hard to lose weight. Since May (5 months ago) I have cut my calories way down and upped the intensity of my exercise. In the course of that time I estimate I lost about 20 pounds, which is no small feat for a man of my age.
The body comp analysis involves standing on a scale-like device and holding some special handles while electricity is pumped through you and resistance measured. You feel nothing during this. Afterwards you are handed a breathing tube and told to sit still and breathe normally for ten minutes while the machine figures out how many calories you expend on a daily basis while at rest. You would be surprised how long ten minutes is when you are doing nothing but sitting still and breathing.
The results of all this were mildly disappointing. I have in fact lost twenty pounds. My weight is within acceptable parameters, although at the high end (I'm a little over 5'9" and I weigh 165). Interestingly, both the fat and muscle content of my body are above target. I'm not entirely sure what that implies and how I can have both more fat and more muscle than average. Maybe my vital organs are undersized? I expend 2000 calories a day just sitting around doing nothing, which is what I expected. The final suggestion was that keep my caloric intake to about 1600 until I lose another ten pounds of fat. Ugh. After all my effort this summer, I basically get a "Thanks, but not good enough." Frankly, I think those machines are off. No way am I ten pounds overweight. Probably for the best, though. If I keep eating light I'll be better off whether I lose more weight or not. I guess I am officially on a diet for the rest of my life.
And that was that. I loaded up my bags for one last dash through the desert with the top down, and before I knew what hit me I was back in Phoenix boarding my flight home. I wanted to go back through New Mexico. I wanted another day at Miraval. Instead I was on a full flight in the last row, aisle seat, where I was privy to the privy activities of most of my fellow passengers. Welcome back to the world, buddy.
Planning the next trip commences immediately. Travel Rewind: Death Valley Days (2008): (This month's rewind theme is journeys out west...pictures are on Smugmug) As usual, we start in Vegas. There was a time when I was totally content to hit Vegas and never leave the Strip. You can get away with that for a handful of long weekends; there is that much to discover on the Strip. But in time, the Strip becomes like a second home -- you know what you want to do, you know where you want to do it. It's still a lot of fun, but there is little adventure and nothing all that new to discover.
The good news is that Las Vegas is also the hub for an enormous number of outdoor opportunities. Red Rock Canyon and the Valley of Fire are literally minutes outside town. The paradigmatic side trip is to Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon, a couple of hours away. Previously, I have used Vegas as a springboard for a run up into Utah to Zion and Bryce National Parks. This time the target adventure was to be Death Valley. To be precise, three nights in Death Valley bracket on both sides by two nights on the strip.
First up was a couple of nights at the new Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino. Thumbs up, generally speaking. Nice rooms. Excellent location. Reasonable prices. But bear in mind, it's a something of a budget choice. The Mandara Spa desperately needs work, and the pool is nothing to write home about (no problem in the winter), and there are no especially great restaurants on the grounds. But there is a shopping mall attached that contains a brand spankin' new Trader Vics, and there is a decent lounge just off the sports book. It's not in the stratosphere, but I wouldn't hesitate to stay there again (in winter). I was there the week after their grand opening and got a mid-week rate below $100/night and a $40 gas credit, which you can get even if you don't have a car (go figure).
Before I get to heart of my trip, the post-Death Valley Vegas days were spent at Wynn, which was beautiful and luxurious as you'd expect, but I'm less enamored of it than before. Partly because the package I purchased included a resort credit, which I asked three times if I could use toward spa services (I needed a massage really bad) and each time was told yes, only to find that when I checked out some else tell me no, it was for food and beverage only. It took me making a minor issue of the mess to get it straightened out. Poor performance by Wynn management on that one. The spa itself is very good, but not as appealing as the one over in Caesar's, where I would have gone if I didn't think I had the credit.
Also, while I know Wynn is expensive as all get out, sometimes they really go over the top. I was sitting at the bar outside the sports book watching the end of the football games and having a bite to eat. I had to finish writing a column that evening so I wanted to get some caffeine before heading up to my room. I asked the bartender for a Diet Coke to go and I got a sixteen ounce plastic cupful for $4.25. I would have taken the fifteen minutes to walk across the street to get one from the mall just on general principle if I knew that was the cost. Good grief. It's one thing to have super-expensive restaurants and services, it's another to ratchet up the price like that on every tiny little thing.
So I am moderately down on Wynn these days. The one I want to check out once the weather gets warm is the new Palazzo, the add-on to the Venetian, but that can wait until summer. One last note: I had an excellent sushi dinner and sake at Japonais in the Mirage, a nicely styled Japanese spot. I may have add that to the restaurants in the know-what-I-want category (along with Olives and Mesa Grill).
On to Death Valley...
While we're on the topic of hotels, the lodging situation in Death Valley bears some description. If you can plan far enough ahead, there is a beautiful resort-style property right inside the park called Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch Resort. If you can get a reservation and can afford it, I can think of no better base of operations for trolling around Death Valley. I stopped in for lunch one day and it was like stepping out of a savage wilderness directly into pristine luxury. If I go back, this is where you will find me.
There is also Stovepipe Wells Village, which I didn't get a chance to explore but looks like another nice spot right in the Park proper. The problem I had was that these were all booked up. The next options are motels in a handful of little towns scattered around the rim of the park. I ended up spending three nights in a Motel 6 in Beatty, NV. Beatty doesn't consist of much more than a hard scrabble crossroad with a couple of gas stations, motels and a diner-level restaurant or two. But it's about as close to the park entrance as you can get (maybe 20 minutes or so).
My first room at the Motel 6 had no heat. They moved me to a smoking room since that was all they had available the first night. They got me sorted out finally for the second and third nights. A Motel 6 is a depressing place. They bring a new meaning to the word budget, no little bottles of shampoo, no HBO or on-demand movies, they don't even have $10 prints of generic landscapes for the walls.
But I can't complain too much about Beatty. The proximity to the park was what I was in need of and the hardscrabble setting was charming in a desert wilderness sort of way. If you are willing to drive a little further each day to get into the park, I would suggest staying in Pahrump; a silly name but a good little suburb about half way between Vegas and Death Valley. Frankly, I think you could do a lot worse than invest in real estate in Pahrump. It is set up to be a prototypical bedroom community for the Vegas middle-class workers -- and we all know how Vegas is booming. [[update - wouldn't that have been a smart investment? - dam]]
Enough peripheral talk. Let's get to the Park itself.
Over the past couple of years I have visited a number of national parks and have come to deeply appreciate the national park system. They are invariably well run and managed as far as I can see. It is an immeasurable benefit to have these places available for exploration and enjoyment. God bless Teddy Roosevelt. Of all the parks I've been to, it's hard for me to imagine a place that could offer more varied geography than Death Valley National Park.
I should probably mention at the outset that the one place I really wanted to visit in Death Valley, I didn't get to. The thing that triggered the idea of a Death Valley visit in my mind was something called The Racetrack. The Racetrack is a place where large stones have slid across a dry lake bed and left a trail in the ground behind them. No one has ever seen one of the stones move and there are varying theories as to what's really going on, but it makes for some delightful pictures. You can read about it or just look at the pretty photos.
As I was casting about for a destination, I serendipitously stumbled across two articles about The Racetrack at almost the same time from very different sources. I decided that it was a must see, so I made a point of renting a good-sized 4x4 SUV in Vegas because all the guides I read said you need a high-clearance vehicle to cover the 20+ miles of poorly maintained dirt road to get there. But, once I got to the park, I talked myself out of it. I'm still not sure if a made a rational decision or if I chickened out.
I stopped at the ranger station in Stovepipe Wells to get the lowdown on things and plan out the two full days I had to explore. I mentioned to the ranger that I wanted to go to The Racetrack and he immediately grimaced.
"What kind of vehicle do you have?"
"A Chevy Trailblazer."
"Does it have off road tires or street radials?"
"Street radials."
"You probably shouldn't do it. The vehicle has enough clearance, but the road there is not standard dirt and gravel, it's covered with sharp volcanic rock. We get blow-outs every day."
Now, I initially assumed that was probably a line they feed everybody to keep the masses of people away. But the more we talked, the more sincere he sounded. Also, before I left, I overheard another person asked the same question of another ranger and he got warned to have a good spare tire and jack available if he was going to attempt it.
I immediately went out to the truck and verified that I had a full spare tire. But the odd thing was, I couldn't locate the jack. I'm sure every Chevy Trailblazer comes with a jack, but I just couldn't locate it. I reached in the glove box for the owner's manual and discovered it was missing. Thanks, Alamo. So I paused for a moment to weigh my next move. I had three points of concern.
1) The Ranger said it was a bad idea. Not really a big concern because, I would be cautious and I suspect there was a tiny bit a discourage-the-wankers policy involved.
2) I wasn't sure I could change a tire. That was a bigger concern. If I did get a blow out, and the jack location didn't present itself, I might find myself trying to flag down some help, or stuck in some other embarrassing position. A larger concern, but still not necessarily a deal killer.
3) I was driving a rental and, in all probability, whatever rental agreement I signed forbade off-roading. If something happened to the truck, Alamo would not be pleased with me and it might end up costing money.
Any individual one of those wouldn't have stopped me, but the combination of the three caused me to back off. As I write this, it is a month later I still have pangs of regret over the decision. I'm just not sure I wasn't being a wuss. In any event, I put it on the save-until-next-time-and-make-sure-you-know-where-the-jack-is list. As it turns out, though, Death Valley has so many great sights that I had a full trip of adventure anyway.
The first brief stop was at Harmony Borax Works, a little ghost town-like spot where borax crystals were processed and shipped off in wagons pulled by teams of 20 mules back in the time of prospecting. For those of you old enough to remember when borax was used as a cleaning agent, there used to be commercials for "20-mule team Borax." Now you know the source.
Further south past Furnace Creek things start to get scenic. The first viewpoint was Zabriskie Point; a very popular spot judging from the crowd. It put me in mind of many of the viewing sites in the Badlands of South Dakota -- a vast rocky canyon surrounded by bizarre multi-colored rock formations.
Further south, and a good climb higher, is Dante's View. I passed a few cyclists trying to make this climb which amounts to probably thirty miles one way from an elevation that is effectively 0 up to almost 5500 feet. They did not look happy. Of course on the way back it they probably didn't have to do much pedaling so maybe it's not that bad.
Dante's View is not the highest peak in the park (that would be Telescope Peak over on the Western side at 11K) but it's broadly considered to have the best view. The outlook is vast. You can see huge swath of the actual valley portion of Death Valley, including Badwater (the famed lowest point), all the way to the mountainous regions of the north. The infinitesimal cars scurrying along the road below give you a good sense of height. The ridge in the area affords a decent little hike and 360 degree views. There is supposedly a 4-mile hike you can do from the outlook to nearby Mt. Perry but according to the park guide I had it was considered a summer hike only. Not only that, it said the length is 4 miles but there is no trail for the last 3.5 miles. So it's really a half mile hike then you just have scramble any way you can over the next 3.5 miles. Um, pass.
One outstanding feature of Dante's Peak is that it is bloody cold. Down on the floor of the valley, temps were approaching 80; up at 5500' I had my winter coat on. I'm guessing it was down into the low 40s. I'll bet Dante's View is popular as a place to escape the triple digit summer heat.
I retraced my path back to the Furnace Creek Resort for lunch, then swung back south again on another road, this one through the valley proper. First stop, the Devil's Golf Course.
No, it's not really a golf course. But it's certainly true that for an avid golfer, eternal damnation would likely take the form of an endless round on this course. It is a vast expanse of hardened salt mounds and spires. Walking is treacherous, and slip could easily result in an ugly laceration on the razor sharp edges. There are probably more painful things than getting a hand or arm sliced open by a salt spike, but I can't think of one at the moment.
Back on the road south again, headed toward Death Valley's flagship site, Badwater -- the lowest place in the Western Hemisphere. Before we get to that, let me just say that there were an enormous number of foreign tourists here. Tour busses full of Asians, for example. At least a third of the Caucasians were non-English speakers, and not all Spanish either; I caught both Italian and French in the mix. I'd have to assume that most of these folks were on side trips from Las Vegas -- they likely rented a car for the day and made the dash over to Death Valley, with just enough time to hit two or three highlights. I find that very cool. Even though you are only a couple of hours outside Vegas, Death Valley and the surrounding area are genuinely "Old West" in feel. It's a great area of the country for visitors to see, especially those from the more urbanized and crowded nations.
Back to Badwater. There is a little platform and introductory placard to read, then there is just a broad open lakebed. I expected there to be some monument or something out in the flat that had been placed at exactly the lowest point, but no. I gather that pretty much the entire basin is on the same depressed plane vis-…-vis sea level: -282ft. A couple of hundred yards out there did appear to be some sort of structure everyone was walking towards, but it was just a pile of rocks some previous visitor had erected. Yet, like lemmings the crowds all made their way towards it, me included, stared at it for a few seconds, said to themselves, "It's just a pile of rocks somebody put here," then turned around and walked back. Alrighty.
It was quite a difference in temperature from up on Dante's View. Here, in late November, it was up around 80. In addition to being the lowest point, it is also the hottest point in the U.S. The average high in July is 115 degrees. The highest temperature every recorded was 134 degrees back in 1913, which is also the second highest temperature ever recorded on planet Earth.
By now the sun was getting low. Actually the sun wasn't getting all that low, but in the canyons and valleys it drops behind the mountains before 4 pm. The place to watch the sunset is a spot called Artist's Palette. It is accessed off a 3 or 4 mile long loop off the main road, so I turned on to it while heading north back to the park entrance. The first spot I came to was a decent looking overlook. The sun was preparing to set behind a ridge to my left which was throwing its shadow on to a cliff side to my right. Lots of folks were hanging around with their cameras, so I waited about ten minutes for the sun to drop behind the ridge. It was a nice view of a great sunset, but there are a million nice views in the park, but I didn't see the colors promised by the Artist's Palette. Hmmm.
I got back in my car and headed further north only to discover that I wasn't at Artist's Palette. I'm not sure where I was because, as far as I can tell, the overlook is not on the park maps. I eventually stumbled on to Artist's Palette at the next stop further north. Luckily there was a tiny bit of sunlight left and I did get a good idea why they call it Artist's Palette. All the varied, earthy hues that make up the hills are available in one place -- sea greens and pale yellows and about a hundred different shades of rust reds. Great to see, but it needs to be better identified.
Earlier in the day, when the park ranger sensed my disappointment at his suggestion to not attempt the route to The Racetrack, he offered me an alternative, quasi-off road adventure: Titus Canyon Pass. So the next morning my entrance to the park was over the dirt. Along the main road into the park from Beatty, there is a turn off onto a viciously washboarded dirt road heading northeast. It is a one way route of 20 or so miles, so once you're committed to it, there's no turning back. It is an excellent adventure.
After a while, the flat, dusty washboard starts to wind upwards, along precarious cliffs and switchbacks affording some terrific views and some fun -- if tense -- driving. You probably don't want to do this if you are afraid of heights. Once up into the hills you will eventually come to the ghost town of Leadfield. Not much of a town, just a couple of left over run downs. Apparently at one point it was actually large enough to have a post office. It's one of a handful of convenient stopping points on the Titus Canyon Pass and you'll likely strike up a conversation with the other drivers. Since it's one way with no passing, cars tend to get bunched up together and end up making all the same stops at roughly the same time. I was alternately ahead of and behind a group of twenty-somethings from France who had, somewhat incredibly, decided to try to run this route in a Chrysler PT Cruiser. At every stop one of them got out and looked underneath the car for damage, but for the most part they seemed unconcerned, although I am sure the next people who rent that car may be in for a surprise. Another Chevy Blazer driver and I wondered if they were brave or stupid, finally settling on "just young."
After climbing the twistys, the character of the road changes again and you suddenly find yourself on flat road seemingly carved into an enormous rock canyon; impossibly tall granite walls on either side of your car. It is dark and a bit chilly from the lack of sun and even a bit claustrophobic at times. But as interesting as driving through the narrow slot of between monolithic canyon walls is, more amazing is the extent to which the geography has changed over the course of the morning's journey. Kind of like Death Valley itself, it goes from one extreme to another -- and back again. When you exit the canyon you are back on the standard flat desert plain of the valley. There you can queue up for the one restroom and marvel at the French kids who made it all the way through in their now dirt covered PT Cruiser.
(Aside: I now officially have the notion in my head of a PT Cruiser as a rugged vehicle. Back when I was in Kauai, I took my rented PT Cruiser convertible over a multi-mile stretch of rugged dirt road and sand to get to a secluded beach. Sadly, Chrysler is not making them anymore. I shall mourn their passing.)
From the Titus Canyon exit it's a brief drive up to Scotty's Castle. Like any self-respecting desert, Death Valley has oases. One of them has been turned into Furnace Creek, which I have already spoken of. The other was sequestered back in the 1920s as a good spot for a vacation home by a very wealthy life insurance bigwig named Albert Johnson. Notice it's not called Albert's Castle, or Johnson's Castle. It was actually named after a con man who claimed to live there, not the man who commissioned and owned it.
It's an interesting story. Apparently Walter Scott (Scotty) was a legendary con man who convinced Albert Johnson to invest in a non-existent gold mine. Eventually, when Johnson arrived to discover he had been swindled, instead of being angry, he struck up a sincere friendship with Scotty. In time Johnson came to love the Valley and had the castle built as a vacation home naming it Death Valley Ranch. Scotty took the opportunity to tell everyone that it was his house and probably used it in any number of swindles. Again, instead of being angry, Johnson was merely entertained. Thus it came to be known as Scotty's Castle. Johnson kept up his friendship with Scotty throughout his life, eventually building a smaller place a few miles away for Scotty's personal use. Not exactly the way I would have treated someone who conned me out of many thousands of dollars, but the rich are different.
Designed as a Spanish style estate, with the requisite gardens, pools and stables, Scotty's Castle seems to have been erected in the middle of nowhere, which in fact it was back then. It is the sort of home that folks build when they have a ton of disposable income and are looking to create an iconic base of some sort. John Ringling did this in Sarasota. If you have ever seen the movie Giant with James Dean and Rock Hudson, you'll recall the image of the beautiful mansion built in the middle of a barren prairie. That's what Scotty's Castle brings to mind. There seems to be a desire by these people to make one final statement of who they are what their place is in the world. As if to say, "This is it. This is has been what it's about all along. I'm finished now. I'll just stay here and try to be happy." I'm sure we all have that desire at some point, but it's the rich who can follow through.
These days there is a guest center where you can snag ready-made sandwiches or other basic convenience store food for lunch, and a gift shop. It's the closest thing to a tourist site in the park. You don't get inside the main house other than through a tour, which runs every hour. There are also tours of the underground tunnels where you can see the mechanical ingenuity behind keeping the house functioning; no small task considering it is in the middle of one of the most unforgiving and inhospitable climates in the world. A short trail uphill takes to a high point where Albert Johnson is buried, and where you can get a good feel for the surrounding area.
One last thing about this area: it is the only place I saw anything resembling mammalian wildlife in the park. As I drove up, there was a coyote just standing impassively in the middle of the road. Cars were going by, slowing down for a look and he was just standing there as they passed. I expect he had been fed from cars previously (bad tourists!) and was probably looking for a snack. I pulled off into the parking lot, grabbed my camera to see if I could get some shots, and as soon as I got within thirty yards he was off. I should have remembered from my visit to the Black Hills that park wildlife generally has no fear of cars, but will head for cover if you try to approach them on foot.
On to my final stop, Ubehebe Crater. About three millennia ago a volcano erupted here, leaving a 600 foot deep crater. One side is covered with deep black volcanic sand that you can sink into over your ankles. There is a path around the circumference and a couple that lead down into the center of the crater. The trip down is a piece of cake; the only effort required is to resist gravity from pulling you into a full sprint. The center is a flat, hardened surface and standing in the middle is like being on stage in a gigantic natural theatre-of-the-round. You glance up at the rim and that's when it first occurs to you that you will pay for that nice easy trip down.
So you wander briefly in the center of a volcano. The side opposite the ash path down is craggy rock with all sorts of nooks and crannies to explore. I slipped under a little overhang and realized that, if I was prepared -- meaning if I had worn the right clothes and not been trailing my Nikon DSLR along for the ride -- I could probably have scrambled at least half way up the crater without too much trouble. I'd be willing to bet that a moderately skilled rock climber could take it from there all the way to the top.
So. Wander around a little more. Isn't that an interesting rock formation? There's some scrubby plant life over there. La-de-dah. Oh and look, sunset comes early inside a crater. Alas, can't put it off any longer, I guess...
There are two paths back up to the rim and it's hard to tell which is steeper from the bottom. I just headed back up the one I came down, since it would leave me closer to my car and I figured they were probably about the same. I figured wrong.
Every step I took up amounted to only a few inches of progress as a yard-long stride ended with a two foot slide back into soft volcanic ash followed by a struggle to extricate my sunken foot. It was brutal. Very similar to a former trek I took through Sleeping Bear Dunes in Northern Michigan except that while this was only a single ascent, it was steeper and higher than any individual sand dune. About halfway up I stopped and turned back to see people easily walking up the other pathway. I exchanged looks with the guy in front of me and both of us said, "wrong path," in unison. It wasn't just the steepness, it was the effort required to make any forward progress in the ash. I contemplated turning back and restarting up the proper path but I am not one to give up easily on a fitness challenge. I slugged it out to the top, my torso heaving desperately to fill my lungs. If you ever find yourself in the bottom of Ubehebe Crater, take the path on your right on the way out. Trust me on that.
And that was about it. It was time for me to leave Death Valley and make my way beck to Vegas and, subsequently, home. For the moment though, I sat on the hood of my car overlooking the ash field surrounding the crater and re-hydrating. The sun was setting and it was getting nice and cool. The moon was rising to create a final photo op. The valley floor extended southwest further than my laser corrected vision could see, bordered by mountains on either side. Over my right shoulder was a sign marking the way to The Racetrack. I still regretted not getting there, but something tells me I'll be back. Next time for sure. Travel Rewind: Head for the (Black) Hills (2007): (This month's rewind theme is journeys out west...pictures are on Smugmug) I could have spent a couple hundred more dollars and flown into Rapid City SD, putting me within a brief drive of the Black Hills area. Instead I chose to save the money, fly into Denver and drive up 6 hours from there. Given the price of gas, I doubt I saved much money, but I am so glad I did it that way. Before we get to that, though, my requisite travel rant.
Apart from the fact that turbulence was so bad that I twice spilled my Diet Pepsi all over myself during the flight, I have little to complain about air-wise since I was able to snag a last second exit row seat. It was a 2.5 hour flight and I was more or less dry by the time it was over. So far so good.
Then it took Northwest a full hour to get the bags on the carousel in Denver. And I would probably still be waiting if some Good Samaritan hadn't noticed that the bags were coming out on a different carousel that the one indicated on the screen. (I can't blame Northwest for not announcing the carousel change because, after all, it's just what we'd be expecting.) Then there were so many people waiting for rental car shuttles that it took three busses and 25 minutes before I was able to squeeze into one to get to the Dollar car rental center. Then it was 45 minutes standing in line at the Dollar office, before I even got to the rental desk.
My 2.5 hour flight landed at 10am and it was another 2.5 hours just to get my bags and pick up my car. Unreal. If anyone is listening, this is why the travel industry is so deeply hated. Every airline and car rental employee knows what's coming on any given day, it makes no sense whatsoever that the simplest things should turn into an 11-letter word that begins with "cluster."
Why do I bother to gripe? It's not like it does anything but give me the delusion of a just revenge. I vow to stop with the travel rants. There is no point in subjecting you to them for the sake of personal catharsis. [[update: where have you heard this before? - dam]]
Anyway, as soon as I got to the car rental desk things got better. I had arranged for a convertible PT Cruiser, which they didn't have so they upgraded me to a Sebring convertible. With Sirius. Sweet. Well, the Sirius thing was sweet. The Sebring is a remarkably crude vehicle for this day and age. But the top went down and that's all that mattered to me.
The road from Denver goes straight north up through Colorado into Wyoming. It was sunny and hot in Colorado and, once outside the Denver traffic, I was enjoying cruising along topless (the car, not me). As you make your way north of Ft. Collins, things start to change. You are no longer in industrialized Colorado. This is the Real West. Eventually you cross into southeastern Wyoming and hit Cheyenne. I stopped for lunch and it was my first clue that the little towns around here were not the scions of convenience they often are back in Michigan. Cheyenne is a something of a hard-scrabble town. It's rough around the edges, though it's trying to gentrify like the rest of the country. You'll see dark and dirty bars and thrift shops right next to an art gallery or a day spa. Nothing is gussied-up in anyway, which is very cowboy of them.
I parked downtown (and put the top up) and took off on foot to find a friendly chuck wagon. As I reached the center of town the deluge started. Thick sheets of rain. I ducked under an awning to watch the nearly deserted streets of downtown Cheyenne as they got drenched. A strange feeling that came over me: How in the world did the circumstances of my life ever lead me from a lower-middle class birth Detroit to a point where I was standing under an awning on a street in Cheyenne, Wyoming during a thunderstorm nearly 47 years later? It was a good thought -- I now had distance from my routine life, which is kind of the point of travel. As the rain subsided somewhat I took the opportunity to dash into a local restaurant whose name I can't recall but whose servers struck me being overachievers when it came to flare, scarfed down a cheeseburger that had been cooked into submission, and headed off into deeper Wyoming.
Remember the final sequence in Castaway where Tom Hanks is out in farmland, roads extending off in into the distance and not another car in sight. That's what Wyoming ranch country is like: austere, craggy grasslands extending into infinity, framed by amazing thunderstorms -- just like a director would have ordered up from Special Effects -- saturating the plains in torrents of rain. Occasionally the scene is peppered with a lonesome, ramshackle building or a scattered herd of cattle, but that's about it. Other than the immeasurably long coal trains chugging back and forth, it probably looks pretty much as it did 150 years ago.
Apart from a single stretch of interstate in West Texas that has a speed limit of 80, 75 is about the highest limit you'll find in the U.S. (the days of unlimited speed limits in Montana are long gone) and that is what the limit is in this area. It underscores how much space there is in the West. You can easily find yourself in a spot where the next town is a 70 or 80 miles away. They need high speed limits because there is so much ground to cover. If you wanted to, I'm sure you could safely cruise at around 90+ on the endless stretches of flat straight roads. I don't think I saw a cop the whole trip once I left Colorado.
Once you enter South Dakota, things get mountainy and twisty again. For all their beauty, travel-wise the Black Hills is stuck in the 1970s. But that's probably how everyone wants it. There are no good restaurants to speak of and why should there be? There are three audiences here -- plain-talkin' local cowboy types, bikers left over from the Sturgis rally, and road-tripping families -- none of them are particularly interested in fine culinary experiences. Accommodations are almost entirely of the motel variety, which makes sense. Everybody who doesn't live here is on a road trip and hasn't made reservations because every day is going to be hit or miss schedule-wise, and it's not like your eight-year-old is going to appreciate turn down service. As a result, towns like Custer and Hot Springs and Keystone don't really have the quality and refinement of your average small town in Michigan or some other coastal area. They are merely convenient stopping points.
My motel, the Chief Motel, in Custer, SD, was typical. Pull up to the door, step out and ask the nice man behind the counter for a room. You knew he'd have one because the vacancy sign was lit. Get your key and park right in front of your door. I had forgotten how convenient motels were. No parking valets, no bellhops, no concierge. Focus shifts from service to cleanliness and functionality. The Chief Motel did fine: exceedingly friendly and helpful proprietor; clean as a whistle. It has a nice pool/hot tub that I never availed myself of. You get a coupon for a two dollar breakfast at the diner down the street. The only chink in the armor was non-functioning wi-fi, but I have come to expect wi-fi to function at about a 50% rate in all levels of hotel. And besides, I was probably the only one who even noticed.
There is what might be termed a "downtown" area of Custer -- about a block and a half long with a handful of shops and cheapy restaurants, but nobody comes to the Black Hills for a casual stroll down Main Street in a quaint little town. People are here for the parks and monuments. If you rise early you can do two monuments and a park and be back in time for dinner. I know, 'cause I did.
First up was Crazy Horse. Positioned as a paean to Native American culture, it is a quixotic project originally assumed by one man, Polish immigrant and Mt. Rushmore assistant Korczak Ziolkowski, back in 1946 and continues through his family to this day. When finished, the Crazy Horse memorial will dwarf Mt. Rushmore. It will consist of a single mounted figure of Crazy Horse heroically pointing off into the distance; currently it is only a big face carved in the mountain that can be seen from far, far away. It's taking so long to finish for a couple of reasons: 1) it's truly huge, and 2) it is financed entirely through private donations. Apparently they turn down any government money for fear of losing their purity of focus. They have no specific timetable or expected completion date; they just keep working. The Ziolkowski clan is obviously focused on the journey rather than the destination. If they ever do get it finished it will almost certainly be a wonder of the world.
The project's introductory video -- shown in the very nicely done visitor's center/museum -- is much better than most. The story of the early stages of development, when the sculptor was working on it alone, make him seem like the lead in a Werner Herzog documentary. The odds were staggering, the task daunting, but he seems to have been quite sanguine about the work for work's sake. It's really a great story.
At Mt. Rushmore -- an older, richer, and more renowned monument -- the presentation is much slicker. Rushmore has to be one of the most photographed places on earth. It's very dramatically designed with an amphitheatre built near the base and obviously ready for various shows and presentation. At the base of the mountain is a pathway which you can walk around and see up all the president's noses. Despite the fact that everyone has seen Mt. Rushmore in photo and film a million times, it remains an impressive sight. Well, it is once the sun burns away the clouds. For about the first hour I was there, the low hanging fogginess completely obscured any view of the faces.
As impressive as it is, Rushmore seems unfinished in a way. The base of the mountain is covered in a cascade of rocks that were stripped off in the sculpting process. Also, Washington is the only figure who has much more than a head. I understand that the original design had torsos for all the presidents, at least that's how the scale model is shown in the (on-site) sculptors studio. Still, Rushmore deserves its popularity. And popular it is. You'll need some patience until everybody gets out of the way of that picture you want. Toto, we're not in Wyoming anymore. Bonus: The high volume of tourists justifies an ace on-site cafeteria -- possibly the best food in the Black Hills.
You can exit Mt. Rushmore by traversing Iron Mountain Road and end up in Custer State Park. Iron Mountain Road is a beauty -- winding through the forest, past overlooks, single lane tunnels (honk to make sure no one is coming through from the other side), and pigtail bridges (shaped like a corkscrew). If you've been to Maui, it's kind of like the Hana Highway in miniature.
Once in Custer State Park proper, the main thing to do is follow the Wildlife Loop, approximately 20 miles of two lane road through the heart of the park and past bison, pronghorn antelope, and prairie dogs. But the first animals you meet are burros. They are certainly feral, but almost completely tame from a life of being hand fed by tourists. They stand in the middle of the road, blocking cars and sticking their heads in the window in the hopes of being offered a snack.
Beyond the burros you'll cross paths with a herd or two of bison. From a distance there is little difference between them and a herd of cattle. Move closer and they tend to get skittish. Walk within 50 yards and the tension builds; the dyspeptic looking males begin to stare you down. Best not to push the issue. The Pronghorn antelopes are somewhat more solitary and a lot faster. They won't bother to wait until you are in range, they just take off at rough twice the speed limit for cars, occasionally taking huge leaps over uneven terrain. Likewise, the prairie dog communities react en masse to warning chirps from their sentries and duck into their burrows in a heartbeat.
What I'm saying is getting a good pic of these critters would take a load of patience and a lot of luck. Ironically, the only way you can readily get in close proximity is in your car. They have learned not to fear cars -- probably because of the low speed limit and the fact that they can count on the cars to stop dead in deference to their lazy shuffle across the road. So if you happen upon the critters near the edge of the road, you can stop and take snaps from your car without spooking them. Once you get out, unless they are burros, they'll be off.
One of the nice things about travelling west is that everything is time shifted to the AM. Wake up at 8 by your internal clock and you find it's only 6, so you get the impression of having an extra long day (which you don't really have because you run out of steam a lot earlier too). I was up early the next day heading east to the Badlands.
The gateway to the Badlands is the town of Wall, SD, wherein you will find the famous commercial enterprise known as Wall Drug. Now, I am not one to decry a nicely done tourist trap. I am totally OK with a block or two of crap shops that feed off tired travelers that are in need of a place to stretch their legs, a souvenir spoon, and a clean, well-lighted bathroom. If they are important enough to people that they will stop for them, then by all means, build a town around it. That's what they did in Wall. They built the enormous Wall Drug, and across the street sit a handful of t-shirt shops, cheap jewelry stores, and dark and dingy bars of the sort in which they specialize in South Dakota. That's the town.
Wall Drug takes up about a full block and is the ultimate cathedral of chintz. But everyone stops there when touring the Badlands and Black Hills, and everyone buys something. In my case, it was a small bag of stale trail mix and a bottle of water in case I found a decent hike in the Badlands. You see? I saw right through the tourist trap fa‡ade and they still ended up with some of my money. Like a two-bit call-girl, Wall Drug may be tawdry, but it's got what you need, and it's where you are.
If there was a single star of the Black Hills it would be Badlands National Park. I can only describe The Badlands as otherworldly. You get the sense that you are on the set of a sci-fi flick. In comparison to the other rocky outcrop parks I've seen, I would say they are more dramatic than Zion in many ways -- less rounded, but the same sort of color stratifications -- and though they are not quite as alien as the bizarre formations of Bryce Canyon, I believe they cover a larger area. There are a few relatively short hiking trails. For a quickie hike try Saddle Pass which is not so much a hike as a short scramble up a steep and rocky path to the peak of a particularly high out-cropping.
Plan on spending a goodly amount of time in Badlands National Park. The main road through it has many scenic overlooks and you should stop at most of them. There are amazing sights around every corner. Unless you have a couple of cars or are looking to cover many miles, hiking is mostly out and back kind of stuff, which is only half satisfying. The Badlands would benefit from a shuttle service. If I return I'll plan on bringing a bike so I can leave it at one point, hike for an extended length, then bike it back to my car.
Leaving the Badlands I took the road less travelled (it doesn't go past Wall Drug) and swung south of the park and through Buffalo Gap National Grasslands.
The Grasslands stand in direct contrast to the Badlands. Just a monotonous sea of grass. 'Sea' is the correct word. The horizon is nearly unbroken in all directions, just as if you were out on the ocean out of sight of land. It would likely drive some people mad to have effectively no visual cues to break up the horizon for an extended period. I found it eerily fascinating. I was struck by a desire to pick a direction and start walking. I was put off from this by the rattlesnake warning signs.
Barreling through the Grasslands on a two-lane blacktop you get a very strong sense of isolation unlike anything you can get back East. I think, in the span of two hours, over the course of well over 100 miles, I saw about three other cars. I saw one person far off in the distance on a tractor, and I saw another walking amidst a small herd of cattle carrying a rifle. That's it. And it can get even more deserted should you choose to turn down any of the numerous dirt roads, many of which lead through the Lakota Reservation. Every time I go out West, I am awed by the vastness.
The next day I was to reposition from my motel in Custer to a place in Deadwood, about 90 minutes north. Instead of the direct route I chose to take the long way around and circle back through Wyoming to Devil's Tower.
Devil's Tower, is the landmark to end all landmarks. It would be strange-looking even if it was surrounded by similar geologic features, but standing as it is, solitary and towering over everything around it, it looks like some strange flight of imagination. As if some impossible large child filled his plastic bucket full of sand, and turned it upside-down, leaving a near perfectly cylindrical obelisk with a flat top. It is immediately clear why Spielberg used it in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The Tower has a nice circular path around it which permits you to take pictures of it with variously angled sunlight. I must have taken fifty in the course of walking the path, none of which do it justice. The attention of most observers eventually gets focused on the rock climbers. It turns out, you can climb this monstrosity. The method of doing so involves shimmying up grooves the run up the side. As the world's worst rock-climber, I was deeply impressed.
I would guess that if you were trying to draw boundaries, Devil's Tower would be about as far west as you would go and still be considered to be in the Black Hills region. It's a couple of hour's drive from the main areas in South Dakota and, as usual, you find yourself going through little towns, the most notable of which is Sundance, WY, from whence the Sundance Kid got his name: decent place to stop for gas and a snack; nothing out of the ordinary for the region, however. Next stop Deadwood.
At first glance, Deadwood seems to be nothing but low-end casinos and dive bars -- which is probably exactly what the prospectors who came here 120 years ago thought. It's a small town and you can walk up and down the entirely of Main St. in the span fifteen minutes, as a result most everyone comes in for a day trip or a quick overnighter to drink in the history and drop some coins in the slots. But looking deeper, it reminded me of a poor man's Savannah in that it is a city clearly dedicated to its past. Restorations are done under the watchful eye of a committee, with an eye toward long-term constancy. In fact, the stated intent of allowing casino gambling was simply to generate enough of a revenue stream for restoration and renovation.
Like the entire region it is lacking in decent restaurants -- that is to say, they are none. But there are plenty of serviceable options and unlike other towns in the Black Hills you can wander the street in the evening and find stuff do -- in other words, you can get out of your car. Short of staying in Rapids City, I think that makes Deadwood the choice location for exploration of the Black Hills and beyond.
I stayed at the Celebrity Hotel, which I can certainly recommend. Somewhat out of sync, it is a Hollywood themed hotel in the heart of the Old West. They've decorated with some cool genuine Hollywood displays -- Magnum's car, Bond's suit, etc. Good friendly service; a rooftop deck so you can make like Al Swearingen and keep an eye on the town activities; free wi-fi. The rooms are clean and functional and continue the Hollywood motif (mine was Audrey Hepburn themed; I slept under a Breakfast at Tiffany's poster) with the added benefit of towel heaters in the bathrooms. Nice. Recommended.
The next day, on the spur of the moment, I decide to drive to Montana. Funny thing about this trip is that all the driving didn't bother me in the slightest. There was nothing resembling "traffic" and the scenery was beautiful. I had Sirius for my companion. I just stopped anytime I felt like it. The act of driving actually became relaxing. As a result, I was looking forward to the 4 hour drive from Deadwood to the site of Custer's Last Stand.
The journey along route 212 (as opposed to the big freeway) goes through two Indian Reservations -- Cheyenne and Crow. Indian reservations are depressing places. Like everything else in the rural West, they are ranch or farmland punctuated homely little centers of activity including a gas station, convenience store, seedy-looking bars, repair shop, etc. And while there are no signs anywhere in the region of affluence or luxury, on the Cheyenne Reservation this center of activity is clearly deep in poverty. There are smashed windows and other signs of vandalism. Much is in general disrepair. The cars are decrepit.
The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument is a little island of federally administered ground in the Crow Reservation. Presumably because of the tourist trade surrounding the battlefield, the area immediately nearby appears a little more modern and developed than the Cheyenne. There is even a KFC situated at the point where Custer made his deepest drive into the Indian army in his attempt to escape.
I find the events surrounding Custer's Last Stand and the aftermath to be utterly surreal. At that point in time, the various Indian tribes were getting hammered. The best they could hope for was maybe a successful raid now and then, meanwhile in any sizeable engagement or in any long-term context, they were just getting demolished militarily -- not to mention by famine and illness. Then a series of events occurred that got many tribes to unify into one fighting force, they converged at Little Bighorn and had an unprecedented total victory over Custer. You would think it would occur to them that maybe this was the way to do things. Maybe by unifying they would have vastly more military, diplomatic and political power. Perhaps not enough to win the war, but better than what they got. But no, they celebrated their victory and then said, "You know, this is nice and all, but it's time we got back to getting the snot kicked out of us everywhere we go. Let's split up." Meanwhile, you have Custer, who by all accounts was a tedious, pretentious little prick and only a middling-at-best commander, suddenly becoming great hero and a rallying point in the Indian wars.
A century or so passes and it only gets weirder. Custer falls out of favor as popular interpretations start focusing on his shortcomings. The Indians are now the good guys, but it's really hard to sell military heroism when you outnumber your enemy by something more than 20 to 1, so instead we re-characterize the Battle of the Little Bighorn in a larger context as a gloriously doomed, last ditch effort of the Indians to "defend their culture." From start to finish, the whole process is a paradigmatic exercise is spinning historical events to grind your axe. It's lunacy worthy of a Paddy Chayefsky screenplay.
In contrast, the Memorial grounds themselves are blissfully peaceful. This is probably because they are essentially a cemetery. There is roughly an acre or two of (mostly local) veterans interred on the grounds, while many of Custer's soldiers have headstones placed where they fell.
Of course, you always go to high ground to make your last stand, and so the view from the monument is quite expansive. It's probably not better than any of a dozen or so views I had experienced in the previous couple of days, but it was a sunny day, there was a nice, soft breeze, the visitors were all subdued and low-key. I sat quietly on the grass, looking miles off into the distance, and appreciated just being in Big Sky country and, once again, thinking about how, nearly 47 years ago, I got on a path that led me to standing on a hilltop meadow in southeastern Montana.
I was down to my last full day and it was raining intermittently. My plans for a day hike or a trail ride were dashed. Instead, I hung around Deadwood mostly; visited the official Deadwood Visitor Center and Museum and did a bit of urban hiking through town up to Mount Moriah Cemetery where Deadwood notables such as Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock are laid to rest. Most people drive up or take a tour bus, but if you are reasonably fit, there's a better way. North of town center there are a set of stairs (called the City Steps) that lead you up through a wooded area and let you out in a residential area above the main town. From there you need only wander up a couple of devilishly steep side streets to the cemetery. It's an interesting walk through residential Deadwood but, I repeat, quite steep.
Admission to the cemetery is one dollar. It's a pretty and peaceful place and, if you time it right, when the tour busses come by you can overhear the lively presentation from the tour guide. At one end of the cemetery there's a nice overlook that lets you look down on Deadwood and out over the surrounding hills.
At the other end is a path that climbs high up the hillside to one lone gravesite, that of Seth Bullock and his wife, who are held in special affection by the residents of Deadwood. Bullock was truly a man of his time. As a prominent resident of Deadwood, which was a point of confluence for anyone who was anyone in late 19th century America, he is one of those historical characters who seems to be only a degree of separation from most of the important events and personalities of his day. He lived in the middle of the great movement to "revenge" the massacre of Custer. To him, Crazy Horse was a real person, and potential threat to safety and fortune. One of those faces on Mt. Rushmore was his good friend, Teddy Roosevelt. When he saw bison, he saw food. He likely toured the Badlands without the benefit of stale trail mix and bottled water from Wall Drug.
From Bullock's grave the path seems to go higher, possibly all the way to the top of the surrounding peaks. I didn't take it. I like that I left a higher peak to be climbed. Just in case my path leads back here someday. Travel Rewind: Way Out West (2006): (This month's rewind theme is journeys out west...pictures on Smugmug) Like the pioneers before me, I headed West -- Nevada specifically; a little time in the desert, a little time in the high country. Just like those hardy souls who packed up their wagons looking for the future, so I followed the sun in the name of high adventure. Of course, my wagon had a flight attendant and free booze.
Let me start by saying that I love flying first class. I mean I just LOVE flying first class. It completely takes the stress out of flying for me. Even getting patted-down for the first time in ages could not discomfit me. Knowing that I will not be contorted into a torture chair, have to be on guard against an inadvertent elbow from the fat, sweaty guy in the middle seat, hover over the poor folk in the last row to wait my turn to use the lav, or deal with the interminable wait as half the plane struggles to get their oversized carry-ons down and gather up their random belongings before shuffling out ahead of me, just makes me absolutely carefree about flying.
I finally used up some of my USAirways/America West miles to upgrade to first class for my flight to Reno. Considering I had to change planes in Phoenix, making it an all day affair, first class was a life saver. The food wasn't bad either -- fairly tasty pasta and chicken dishes both ways with a glass or two of white wine. I could get used to this. I need to be rich.
The plan was for two quick nights in Reno, just to scope the place out; followed by three more leisurely nights in Lake Tahoe (about an hour and fifteen minute drive away). I arrived in Reno in the late evening, about 10:30pm so it was pushing midnight by the time I retrieved my bags, collected my Ford Taurus from Hertz and made my way to the Reno strip.
The core of Reno is an easy ten minute drive from the airport. As I arrived at my hotel, The Silver Legacy, I was directed to self-parking (free) and had to make my way up to the 10th floor of the parking garage. Apparently the place was pretty much packed to capacity, not surprising for Labor Day. Arriving so late I fretted about them not being able to honor my request for a non-smoking room -- trust me, the one place you do not want to get stuck in a smoker is in a casino -- but they came through, quick and efficient.
Reno bills itself as the Biggest Little City in the World. It's often thought of as Las Vegas North. Well, speaking as a confirmed Vegas junky, I was ready to have a good laugh at that claim. But, you know, Reno does OK. Style and attitude-wise, the Vegas Strip it ain't. It's somewhat like downtown Vegas in that it is well downscale (and even seedy in parts) when compared to the glitter at the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Blvd., but it's not without its charms.
First off, what might be termed the Reno strip is small-ish. The only really big complex is a co-joined casino threesome of Silver Legacy, the El Dorado, and Circus Circus. Stay at one and you have easy access to all three.
The Silver Legacy, where I was staying, was the central of the three properties. The first thing you notice is that just off the lobby, there is huge, multi-story Victorian era contraption serving as its centerpiece. The device had no obvious function at first glance; it was just an enormous concoction of giant gears and lever arms and pulleys. It looked like a prop from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or a time machine as imagined by a contemporary of Jules Verne or H.G. Wells.
It turns out this monstrosity is an old silver stamping machine, which cranks out some sort of coins (presumably souvenirs). This goes hand in hand with silver mining theme of the Silver Legacy. Which begs the question: Did they have the gargantuan machine and name the casino based on it, or did they want a silver mining themed casino and go out and find the gargantuan machine? Which begs a further question: What is the lamest casino theme ever? I gotta go with The Silver Legacy. At least until someone comes up with a zinc mining or gravel pit theme.
Lame theme aside, the Silver Legacy is not a bad spot. The rooms are straight out of the Howard Johnson's playbook from the 1970s, but they are clean and functional. The staff is friendly and sharp. The price is right -- the night before Labor Day, when the place was packed, the rate a bit over $100, but on subsequent nights the price plunged to $45. Toto, we're not in Vegas anymore.
The restaurant options are good and cover the full range from high-toned steakhouse to food court staples. Parking is plentiful. There is a nice workout facility. The pool, on the other hand, is sorry-looking, although it is up on the roof with a decent view. There are two -- count 'em -- two cabanas and if they charge for them, they shouldn't. Wi-fi support comes though being an AT&T hotspot and so is not free, and you all know how I feel about that.
The Silver Legacy's neighbor on one side, the El Dorado, was fairly non-descript. There is an interesting little garden courtyard area and the place is very light on pretense and affectation and appeared to be pretty much theme-free, which is a treat in the casino world, but that's about it.
The third connected property, Circus Circus, is deeply twisted and terrifying. First, there is the clown motif. CLOWNS ARE EVIL. Second, there are those obnoxious carnival games like the ring toss over the pop bottles and the squirt gun in the clowns mouth thing and so forth. All are manned by carnies -- small hands, smell like cabbage. But most disturbingly there this sign out front that features the beyond freaky picture of two obviously mutated dogs. I am sure there is a reason for this being the featured graphic for the place but I really don't want to know what it is.
You know how when you were in college and everyone would get together and drop acid, there was always the one guy who would curl up in the corner whimpering and crying "please make it stop, please make it stop". Walk into Circus Circus and you'll know what he felt like.
Silver Legacy and Circus Circus (strangely, though, not the El Dorado) are owned by the MGM/Mirage group, although I doubt Kerkorian spends a whole lot of time here.
The only other significant property in walking distance is Harrah's, which looks and feels exactly like every other Harrah's, whether on the Strip, in New Orleans, or Tahoe -- a serviceable, decent quality casino. It's kind of like the Bennigan's of casinos, nothing to get excited about, but at least you probably won't get food poisoning.
Beyond the "Strip" there are casinos spread throughout the city. The most notable of those being The Peppermill.
If I were to ever go back to Reno, The Peppermill is where I would stay. Walking into The Peppermill is a dizzying event. It is a 360 degree swirl of brightness and contrast. There can't be more than a few square feet of the place that is not covered in neon lights of some shape or form. It sounds garish and it is, but it is also strangely compelling, probably because it feels like it was done in good humor and with a certain sense of its own absurdity.
The folks at The Peppermill also realize that even party-animal gamblers need a break from the visual onslaught, so they have installed one of the strangest things I have ever seen in a casino. Just outside the main restaurant, called Oceana, there are several banks of slot machines all facing a huge video display -- must be 20 ft. diagonal. What is showing on the display, you ask? Not sports, as you might expect. Not even promos for the casino. What is showing are scenes from beaches from around the world: Hawaii, The Caribbean, Cape Cod, etc. Just scenes of water lapping on the shore, peaceful couples wandering down the shore at sunset, sailboats coasting along in the breeze.
So folks are sitting there, pumping money into slot machines, while gazing up at these serene oceanic vistas. Is this done to lull people into a hypnotic state where they just keep rhythmically hitting the "play max credits" button? Are the machines particularly tight and they are trying to chill people out once they realize how much they've lost? Is the subliminal message that if you keep playing you will eventually win enough to live on one of these perfect beaches? The psychology is inscrutable.
You know how when you were in college and everyone would get together and drop acid, there was always one guy who would just keep giggling and dancing around and proclaiming his joyousness to the world. That guy moved to Reno and designed The Peppermill.
Even though this confirmed Vegas junkie went to Reno with a cynical attitude, I couldn't help be somewhat charmed and not just by all the eccentricities. The folks in Reno were an easy-going, friendly bunch -- almost Norman Rockwell-ish in their ways; this in contrast to the intensity that permeates Vegas. Even in the casinos, the dealers were very tolerant of those who might make transgressions of etiquette. In Vegas, confusion about when you can split or double down might induce stern looks or strong words from a dealer who can barely speak English (at Mandalay Bay I believe the policy is to spit on you). In Reno the nice lady will smile and take a moment to gently educate you in her warm western drawl. She'll probably even call you "Honey".
Sadly, I just missed a couple of interesting happenings in Reno that I regretfully couldn't attend. First, there was the Rib Festival in the nearby town of Sparks. It finished up on Labor Day, but I only heard about it from a cabbie when it was too late to head out there. Not that I'm all that big on ribs, but it sounded like fun.
But the big festival that was still going on when I got there was the Burning Man. Burning Man is, well, very close to indescribable. Basically, it's a few days of safe haven in the desert for every form of freakish reveler imaginable, all of which is passed off as a form of art. I knew about Burning Man and had tentatively planned to visit, but it turns out you really cannot go for just a day. It is designed for you to attend for the full duration and essentially camp out there. I had planned to go for the final day just to gawk, but it turns out they won't even let you pay full admission that late in the session. I did notice a few, um, recently Burned Men on the Reno streets the day the festival closed, most of whom you could identify by the B.O. I never understood why some people find the search of true freedom and a higher plane of existence incompatible with personal hygiene. Lousy hippies.
The next step of my journey was the drive from Reno to Lake Tahoe, during which I made a quick side trip for lunch in Virginia City.
The road up to Virginia City roller-coasters up through the high desert; there's a great stop along the way where you can get sweeping panoramas of the entire Reno area and the surrounding desert. You keep going higher and higher beyond that and eventually you come to the Old West tourist town of Virginia City. (If you are old enough you remember Virginia City from the burning map at the beginning of the old TV series Bonanza.)
Virginia City is kind of sweet. It's like the little surf towns I have been through in Hawaii or the outdoorsy towns in northern Michigan or the tiny seaports you get all along the Atlantic coast; quiet little places that happen to have a strong pull for visitors and so Main Street becomes a litany of shops and little restaurants themed toward whatever is drawing la touristas. In the case of Virginia City it is the Old West. You can watch a gunfight, take a tour through museum of the city's history, buy all variety of souvenirs -- the usual touristy stuff. Most buildings are refurbished, with stories behind them. The saloons display the ancient gaming tables (of course, this being Nevada, they are right next to functioning banks of slot machines).
Virginia City is a worth a stop to wander up and down Main Street and maybe duck into one of the little museums. Everything is pretty inexpensive. The drive in and out provides plenty of scenery. No downsides here.
From there on to the southern shore of Lake Tahoe.
Tahoe is a strikingly beautiful place. You climb out of the hot, khaki desert (it is typically 10 degrees cooler in Tahoe than Reno, though it is only a bit over an hour south) and the haze clears into beautiful blue sky and the harsh scrub becomes thick evergreen. The personality changes from Western eccentric to well-heeled elite. And that's just South Tahoe, which the true Tahoans consider to be "too commercial."
As in Reno, my explorations in Tahoe started in a casino. I won't bore you with more casino details, but as a quick description, the casinos in Tahoe have none of the seediness that they had in Reno, but they all fall short of the best of the Vegas Strip. Lake Tahoe is 1/3 in Nevada and 2/3 in California. Not surprisingly, the casinos sit pretty much adjacent to the border on the Nevada side. I checked into the Montbleu Casino (formerly Caesar's Tahoe) and took a nice five-minute stroll over to California to get some dinner. Across the border in California is Heavenly Village, an open air shopping area with some decent restaurants. More interestingly, there is a gondola that takes you high up to the top of Heavenly Mountain. Up there is a nice restaurant and bar, some activities such as hiking trails, rock climbing, and skiing (in season). Also there are phenomenal panoramic views of Lake Tahoe -- high enough to see it from end to end.
At least that's what I was told. The gondola was shut down for repairs until my final day. But I was able to get a tasty sandwich from Wolfgang Puck and a Jamba Juice for dessert. Nice place, Heavenly Village.
There was still some time before dark so I drove a few minutes along the lake to the Tallac historic site. Tallac is where the hyper rich of Tahoe's past built their vacation homes. This is where the lords of mining and finance would chill when the world got to be too much for them, making it something like the Hamptons of the northern Nevada. Over time the homes were all sold off and fell into varying states of disrepair. In stepped the Tahoe Tallac Association and the US Forest Service and restorations are underway. It is obviously that there is a ways to go on some of this, but there are guided tours and one building has been turned into a playhouse.
I confined myself to wandering a little ways past the structures to a fine little beach adjacent to a harbor and sat on the deck of a restaurant sipping a beer and making plans for my time in Tahoe.
The next morning I was the first in line to rent a jet ski. I love jet skis. There is little I can think of that is more fun than barreling across the water searching for wakes to jump and turning crazy donuts at random moments. I know if I actually owned one and could do it every day I might get bored, but as it stands I will rent one for an hour every chance I get, even though it is ridiculously expensive.
Certain places were renting them for $100/hour. The Montbleu got me a slightly better deal than that, but damn -- I could've rented a BMW for less than $100, and that would have been for the whole day. Quite a racket. Still, this was my last chance to get on the water this year, and I have no buyers regret. It was sweet. Most fun was trailing along behind this big paddle wheel tour boat, criss-crossing its wake at top speed. Fully airborne, baby!
After a quick lunch I was back in the car for another adventure; this one to an actual ghost town. The road south from Tahoe into the wilds of western California starts with another one of those harrowing roller coaster drives over a mountain, then across a couple of hours worth of ranch country, finally culminating in about three miles of dirt road at the end of which, you come up over a rise to a sweeping view of the ghost town of Bodie.
The guidebooks say it is best to see Bodie fairly late in the day. That's undoubtedly true. The obliquely angled sunlight brings color to the place, which is primarily an array of wooden town buildings that sit at the foot of an enormous mill.
Bodie was the location of an enormous gold boom back in the 1870s. Of course almost as fast as it boomed, it busted. It hung on as best as it could until the 1930s when fire destroyed about 90% of the place. The remaining buildings were abandoned pretty much as they remain, with canned goods on the shelves and curtains on the windows, although a handful of the buildings have been converted for use by the park rangers.
OK, so it's a bunch of abandoned old buildings, right? What's the big deal? It's hard to describe, but it is simultaneously beautiful and disquieting, especially when viewed from one of the surrounding high areas where you can see the entirety of the town. It is exactly as you might picture a ghost town, in an open area of the high desert, surrounded by peaks on all sides. You come out of the desert and suddenly there is the town, in stark contrast to the scrub all around it. There are simple little cottage sized buildings all standing in the shadow of a huge mill complex -- it looks positively medieval in some ways. Like you might expect it to be pillaged by Mongol hordes at any moment.
Ghost towns are eerie things, especially this well preserved. The sense of it being a community is very strong; you can't help but see it as a piece of humanity. But everyone is just gone. It's as if you inserted a magnet into a bunch of metal filings and then, once they had fallen into place, you reversed the polarity and the filings dispersed. There must be innumerable stories of people and events in Bodie that are now lost; just vanished from existence as if they never occurred. The populace dissolved without a clue that in 150 years, packs of camera wielding hordes would return in fascination.
And judging from the visitors, Bodie is now pretty much a prime destination for photographers. Oh there were a few people wandering and sightseeing, but the majority were scurrying about, contorting themselves into all sorts of awkward positions, trying to get just the right angle for their shots. Most were very serious, judging from their camera rigs. They had tripods and light meters and lenses that were the size of my arm. I was embarrassed to be carrying my little Kodak point-and-shoot.
It's not a small task to get to Bodie. It's two and a half hours from South Lake Tahoe, and the closest town is nearly a half-hour drive away. The final miles are on a seasonally opened dirt road. There are no souvenirs and no concessions (there are bathrooms though), so once in Bodie, you have nothing to do but be in Bodie. You will drive 5 hours round trip to hang in Bodie and take pictures for an hour, so you better be keen on the visual adventure or you will be disappointed.
Me, I loved it. I found it fascinating both historically and aesthetically. And the ride there was really quite lovely over the mountains and through ranch country. If you are of an adventurous mindset, Bodie is a good target.
Just like that I was down to my last day and as usual, I had a plan. The plan was to hop in the car and do a quick day hike at Emerald Bay, which was identified in one of the tourist mags as the most beautiful spot on the lake. After that, I would return to Heavenly Village because the gondola had reopened. In the evening I would find place to watch the NFL season opener, and get to bed early since I had to get up in the middle of the night (5:30AM) the next day to drive back to Reno to catch my flight.
Of course, that didn't work. First, I got distracted in the casino on the way out in the morning. They had a craps table roped off and were filming some sort of promotional commercial. It was a curious sight so I stood and watched a while. The set up looked pretty genuine; I mean, every craps table I have been at has been loaded down with beautiful, perfectly made-up women just like the one they had staged. Or at least they would be if the unkempt middle-aged guys in baseball caps left them any room. I mentioned this to one of the film crew who looked at me like I was a germ. Strangely, they didn't ask me to be in the promo.
The road to Emerald Bay is not long, but it is under construction. It is yet another one of those roller-coaster two-lane jobs, with no shoulders in many parts, that can make you feel as though the slightest twitch of the wheel will send you tumbling to a horrible, burning, action-movie demise. It's not all that far from where I was staying, but the speed limit is on the low side and there was construction. Man was there ever construction.
In situations like this -- narrow roads with no shoulders, where they have to take it down to one lane -- they set up flag people some distance form each other and hold up traffic in one direction, then switch off after a few minutes. Standard procedure. Well, around Lake Tahoe they position the flag waivers miles and miles apart. Catch the procession at the wrong time and you will be sitting in your car for a minimum of 20 minutes.
What I'm getting at is that between making snide comments at the craps table and sitting idle watching some guy stand around with a stop/slow sign, it took me a lot longer than it should have to cover the 20 miles or so Emerald Bay.
Emerald Bay State Park is on a glacier-carved cove off the western shore of Lake Tahoe. You access it from a pull off on the high road above and hike a full mile downhill to water level. That means another mile uphill when you are done. The area is forested by enormous evergreens; like all of Tahoe, it seems much more Lush Alpine than Arid Desert. Upon passing though the woods and reaching the shore there is a beach and a small dock. Out in the cove sits the only island in Lake Tahoe, Fannette Island, looking as though it was placed by a landscape artist.
The day was perfect, the sun was high and bright, the water was the deepest of blue. There were a handful of boaters who had docked and were picnicking or getting some sun. Others who had sailed over to the Fanette Island, where you can climb the peak to a small structure called the "teahouse". From the flat blue water the mountains soar up blanketed in dark green foliage. I have seen a lot of beautiful places in the world and Emerald Bay is right up there with the best of them. I can't imagine and more perfect place to while away an afternoon with a swim and a picnic.
From the coastline there is a short steep trail up to Eagle Falls, which isn't really much more than a minor creek running over some rocks, but it's up nice and high, providing fine views, especially if you are comfortable ignoring the safety signs and scrambling out on some of the boulder formations.
There is really only one structure in Emerald Bay: a '20s era mansion called Vikingsholm. From the name you can guess that is a Nordic style lodge. It is adorned with carved wood work and has an actual sod roof -- apparently an old Norse method of insulation was to have a lawn on top of the house, which suggests a poor Scandinavian husband being nagged to mow the roof.
They give regular guided tours of Vikingsholm but I didn't take one because I needed to get back to Heavenly Village to ride the gondola. Naturally, I didn't make it in time. After the uphill trudge back to my car I got snagged in the worst possible way at the constructions site: I was the very first in line to be stopped by the flagman. I waited a solid half-hour before he flipped the sign from "stop" to "slow". Not exaggerating.
So by the time I got back, the gondola had closed for the day. Missed the last one by 10 minutes. Personally, I blame the film crew and the beautiful ladies playing fake craps. Oh well. Nothing to do but accept that I was at the end of my vacation. So I put the camera away and stopped worrying about what to do and where to go next. I stopped at a little open air restaurant in Zephyr Cove to enjoy the sunset of what was likely to be my last true summer day of the year over a bowl of what had to be the best New England clam chowder I have ever had.
The next day brought the early morning drive back to the airport where I was given the lovely send off at the airport. The Reno Air Show (another Reno festival I missed) was beginning and they kicked of with a mass ascension of hot air balloons over the city. It was awfully nice of them to do that for me, but really there was no need. I enjoyed the hell out of this vacation. And I only managed to cover about a quarter of Lake Tahoe.
I have become a big fan of Nevada and the surrounding areas. It is on par with Florida as a state I can consistently go back to and explore. [[update: I had yet to appreciate Utah back then - dam]] I'm sure I'll back sooner rather than later. Maybe next year I could come out in time to point and laugh at Burning Man. And I only covered about a quarter of Lake Tahoe.
Yes the dusty wagon trails are calling me. I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences. Like Huck Finn, I need to light out for the territories before they sivilze me. Better start hoarding those flyer miles.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
The Month That Was - May 2009: The highlight of this month is a week in Moab, UT. The write-up is below, but the pics are not close to ready. I'll update the post as soon as they are. [[Update: Photos now available at Smugmug - dam]] I also need to figure out how to get key thumbnails of the pics wedged into the posts. It's been my policy over the years to post no graphics other than the book covers to your left. Since there is no one left in the world on dial-up, I can safely change that policy, but only slightly and rarely. It is very important to me that the page load with a minimum delay. I absolutely despise it when I click on a page and there is that exasperating pause as the rendering engine searches high and low for the linked-in graphics and ads. I will not let that happen here.The other interesting thing this month is that, because of the debacle between Comcast and the NFL Network over how to charge for the NFL Network's content, Comcast decided they needed to apologize to their subscribers by giving them six free pay-per-view movies. I really doubt anyone actually felt they needed an apology, so it's likely this was just a promotion to get viewers to be on Comcast's side in the disagreement, and also to promote pay-per-view. Whatever the case, I caught three movies this month and will likely catch three more next month. I rarely watch movies and never pay-per-view them, but I can't pass up anything free, so you'll be getting some Flick Checks. Lucky you. I should warn you that, in general, I don't like movies. I find most to be contrived and vacuous. So don't look for rah-rah recommendations.
Wanting Mo Moab
Useless Airways
In Praise of the Cheap
Government Motors Round-up
Flick Check: X-files, I Want to Believe
Flick Check: The Wrestler
Flick Check: Burn After Reading
Breaking Bad, Breaking the Cycle Wanting Mo Moab: [[Update: Photos now available at Smugmug - dam]] My trip to Moab started propitiously when my upgrade to First Class, thanks to US Airways Dividend Miles, allowed me to bypass interminable lines in Detroit at both check-in and security. The flights to Salt Lake City went smoothly and were on time (sadly this luck didn't hold up on the way home, see next post) and in no time I was at the counter for Advantage Rental Car getting set for my 4+ hour drive to Moab.
(Note to self: In the absence of a direct flight to Salt Lake City, it's better to fly direct into Denver and take the six hour drive to Moab rather than waste two or three hours and risk delays on an indirect flight to Salt Lake City.)
Advantage Car Rental is a fairly inexpensive regional rental firm mostly operating in the Southwest states, but they are at least as big a mess as any of the majors -- long lines and employees trying to do simultaneously deal with complaints, answer phones, and get novice customers to understand the excruciatingly complicated details of renting a car. Experienced renters can get this done very quickly. We know to reserve online ahead of time; we know to reject to additional coverage because we use our American Express cards; we know to say, "I'll return it full" in response to questions about gas. If you haven't paid your travel dues, coming to terms with the questions and decisions involved in this process can take a half hour easy. Couple that with answering phone calls from archaic types who can't look things up on the Web and the one or two clerks trying to man the counters are completely overwhelmed by the fifteen or twenty people in line. Some companies have kiosks and "Gold" memberships and such to speed things along for those of us who know what we are doing, but in my experience such features are not available or available but not working about 50% of the time. Car Rental companies are at least as mismanaged as airlines, suffer the same cost pressures, and have the same affinity for nickels and dimes.
The travel industry is hell. The word "travel" is actually a contraction of the phrase "travails in hell". (I just made that up.)
I did not intentionally rent a Chrysler Aspen. I did intentionally rent an SUV because a) I planned on renting a bike and I needed to carry it around and b) I know from experience that travels out west sometimes offer off-road opportunities. The Aspen just happened to be what they had. It was not necessarily the best vehicle for those purposes. Oh, it had the room to easily transport a mountain bike and it had the clearance to handle a bump or two, but this class of vehicle's true purpose is as a replacement for the old land yachts of old; spiritual successor to the giant tail-finned behemoths that trolled the open byways in days of yore. Barcalounger seating, tiller-based steering, zero input required or feedback delivered. It did have one feature new to me -- a back up camera. Shift into reverse and the radio display turned into a video screen displaying what was behind you and beeped furiously if it sensed you were about to back into something. Previously I would have snorted at this as frivolous techno-bling, but it's actually pretty cool and useful, and would succeed in breaking me of the habit of looking behind me as I was backing up, thus making me a parking lot menace in a car that didn't have it.
Longtime readers are familiar with my habit of starting a travel post and getting 500 words deep before I get to writing about the actual destination. I shall get to it now.
Moab. Moab is one of the most remarkable places on Earth. It is a point at which numerous outdoor activities conflate into a complete full-service wilderness playground. Moab proper is not a big place. There is one main street, called Main Street, and most of the businesses are on or within a block of it. What might be called the downtown area runs a couple of miles along this strip. Throw in the surrounding residential areas and that's all there is. Moab exists for what surrounds it. Within easy reach are hiking, camping, rock climbing, river rafting and kayaking, 4wd off-roading (jeep, motorcycle, or ATV), the absolute ultimate in mountain biking, and even cross-country skiing in winter. I could not reliably count the National Parks, Nation Forests, National Monuments, State Parks, and other forms of protected wilderness all within a couple of hours. I knowingly visited four National Parks and certainly passed by or drove through several others. If you like the outdoors there is no place like Moab.
I sailed into Moab around dusk and pulled into the Silver Sage Motel -- basic accommodations but clean, functional and well maintained. Mini-fridge and microwave and free (and working) wi-fi, which is more than you can say for many a Ritz Carlton. At check-in the proprietor asked if I was there to play, which is the sort of thing you would ask in Moab. After getting settled in I wandered down the street to yet another Moab gem: The Moab Brewery.
I'm guessing a fair amount of beer is consumed in Moab in general. I know for most people, after a day of vibrant activity in the desert heat, there is little more satisfying than an ice cold beer. Moab Brewery fills the bill with their home grown ales. I highly recommend the Scorpion Ale. It is truly awesome, with a dry and hoppy bite. Moab Brewery also has delicious food.
Next morning, bright and early I was crawling my way up the steep, winding road through Arches National Park where, as you might guess, you can see lots of arches. A friend of mine proclaimed Arches to be the most beautiful of the parks and I wouldn't disagree. It is a red rock jamboree of enormous formations, surreal in their seeming defiance of physics. A good starter hike is through a demi-canyon called Park Avenue. An accurate description since it's the same visceral feeling you can get strolling between Manhattan skyscrapers, especially in the way you move through shadows and sunlight.
The paradigm hike in Arches in the one to Delicate Arch. It has to be one of the most photographed places in the world, although the hike there is not for the sedentary. It's only about a mile and a half, but the trip in is mostly uphill and follows some twists and turns and maneuvering along narrow cliff edges. It's not dangerous, nor does it require any special level of fitness to complete, but an aged, arthritic bus tourist is going to struggle to do the three miles round trip and will want to leave a lot of cushion for rest stops.
The best time to see Delicate Arch, I am told, is at sunset, so naturally I was there in the morning. One thing I was quite surprised about was that there was no restriction on actually walking right up to and climbing on the arch itself. Walking to it from the observation ledge requires a bit of rock hopping and walking across seriously sloped cliff which, were you to slip and fall from, would drop you many feet onto solid rock. Still, it's not a big deal to stride right up to the arch, pose for stupid pictures, try to tip it over, or do whatever.
I was fortunate to have been there in the AM. The only other folks there were a German couple (the park was crawling with Krauts for some reason) and who were just admiring the view, thus enabling me to take a bunch of decent photos. The timing was auspicious since only a few minutes later the peace was shattered by family after family; the types that could only speak to each other by screeching, everybody taking turns getting their pictures taken, then groups pictures, then every combination of each other, then pictures of the real live Germans. I would have been annoyed if I didn't already have the pictures I wanted. I can't imagine what it must be like at sunset when it's busy.
Beauty aside, Arches is about the perfect park for visitors. There are plenty of views, observation stops, and rock attractions that are pretty much a short stroll from your car, combined with several stunning but short hikes -- say 1-3 miles -- such that you can knock off 2 or 3 in the course of a day. I probably hiked a total of 10 miles combined and it was great to not have any segment turn into an endurance test.
And I can't overemphasize how beautiful the place is. It falls short of Bryce Canyon for Total Landscape Outrage. It's not as gobsmacking as Monument Valley (coming later). But it has a certain elegance that none of the others has. This is clearly not lost on the world at large because as I was passing it on my way home from Moab on a Saturday the line of cars to get in was staggering. I also feel the need to re-iterate that if you are a lifelong Easterner or City Slicker and you have never seen the vastness of the Western mountain or desert regions, you are really missing something. Words and pictures don't compare, although I believe I took in excess of 200 pictures that day -- a personal record.
Although there is much in close proximity to Moab, a day trip brings even more adventure in range. I took two, the first of which was to Mesa Verde, just over the Colorado border down near the Four Corners area. As you cross the border into Colorado the landscape turns from red rock to pine green. Mesa Verde, in fact, translates to Green Table. It is an elevated forested plateau. The park itself is famous for one thing: cliff dwellings.
The cliff dwellings are fascinating in a way. They look like something George Lucas might have invented for some scene on an alien outpost in the galactic hinterlands. The ranger tour ($3) was informative and it's a must since it's the only way to get up close and walk through the primary dwelling area, otherwise you are just viewing them from overlooks (there are some lesser dwellings that you can walk through on your own).
It turns out, the cliff dwellings were more than just homesteads. They served as administrative facilities, places to store food, and social and religious centers, and trading posts for tribes of the entire region. That's pretty impressive and, speaking as someone who has been consistently down on what is popularly referred to as Native American culture -- or more specifically, the shallow new-age image of noble savages living serenely in tune with their spirit guides -- it caused me to rethink a number of my criticisms.
It is to the credit of the rangers that they do not attempt to build an idyllic picture of happy Indians living as one with nature in the circle of life. They basically dumped all their trash just a few yards outside their front door. They seemed to simply accept that the place would burn to the ground now and then without making much effort to build any facility to protect themselves from fire. And in the end, for reasons we don't know, they seem to have just picked up and left one day. Buh-bye. Also interestingly, when these dwellings were first spotted by keemo-sabee in the 1870s they were in severe disrepair. The local Natives apparently found no interest in this part of their heritage because they were fine to just let them crumble away; it was up to the white man to restore them.
But the dwellings do indicate that there was a certain complexity to Indian culture that I had not appreciated before. It could be that there was a lot more going on than I previously thought. Perhaps there was even some sort of more advanced philosophy or art occurring. On the other hand, that can never be anying more than speculation since they never bothered to write anything down. It's hard to see much beyond primitivism in a culture without writing.
Unique among the parks discussed here, Mesa Verde has a restaurant. Well, actually it's more of a cafeteria of sorts, but the food is decent and there's outdoor seating so you can kick back and enjoy something more than half a bag of stale, gift shop trail mix and a bottle of water. There are a couple of short hikes along the canyon, but most everything else is right outside your car. Mesa Verde is certainly worth the visit, especially on a recovery day, when you need activity to be low.
Day three, park three: Canyonlands, is the other one in close proximity to Moab. Like Arches, Canyonlands is correctly named. It is simply a gigantic amalgamation of canyons and mesas and such, all carved by the Colorado River or its immediate tributaries. Canyonlands is also huge; so much so that it is divided into three segments: Islands in the Sky, Needles, and Maze. All have separate and distant entrances and each could be classified a park in itself. Although the Islands in the Sky and Needles sections have the standard paved roads through them leading to overlook and trailheads, Canyonlands is equally geared towards multi-day trekking and 4WD safari-ing. The Maze section is the most remote. I believe you need a 4WD just to get around in it and in general, you do not visit the Maze area for less than a three-day stretch and more likely a full week full of camping and hiking. It's where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid tried to escape their pursuers (in real life not in the movie).
The most user friendly section is Islands in the Sky, which, of all the National Parks I've visited, gets the title of Best Scenery Yet. Deep winding switchback canyons animated by the river running through it. Tangled messes of complex rock formations. Even beyond that, along the trails there are countless rock ledges simply screaming "I dare you to walk on me." I am amazed people don't plunge to their deaths daily. There was a pack of middle-schoolers scurrying about, many of whom looked ripe for an accidental plunge.
I was able to hit all the major overlooks and hiking trails in Islands in the Sky, and got to one of the road endings at Upheaval Dome when the rain hit. No, not rain -- hail. It had been 90 degrees the day before and now I was racing to my truck, dodging the bitter cold, freezing, stinging hail, trying to use my body as a shield for my Nikon. It didn't last too long, but it was overcast the rest of the day and on-and-off rain was the theme of the rest of the trip.
There is an off-road shortcut from Islands in the Sky back to Moab called Shafer Trail. It's a white knuckle descent out of the mesas then runs along the very rim of the deep Colorado River canyon. According to park service it is high clearance 2WD, with 4WD strongly recommended when wet. I had planned to take it back to Moab, but that was when I realized my truck was not 4WD. Great. Since when do SUVs not get 4WD? I probably would have been fine, but I was hungry and tired and I figured I'd have plenty of opportunities before I left.
Back in Moab I tried the other brewpub in town -- Eddie McStiffs. Had my first encounter with needing to sign up for a club to get a drink. In Utah, they have various forms of liquor licenses, all are available in limited numbers and some are harder to get than others. One such license is a "Private Club". Anyone can come in and sit down, but if you want a drink you have to pay the fee to join the private club. They take your name and signature, not checking if it is real of not -- you could write in anything you want, in my case Foghorn Leghorn -- and charge you $4 for membership, then they subtract $4 from your bill. It's a goofy formality required to conform to the letter of the law but still serve alcohol to the general public, all in the name of liquor control. The silliest thing ever. (I believe this silliness goes away in July of this year.) It would be tempting to snicker at Utah for this, but every State has its own bit of silliness. On the other hand, there are few places as cool and well functioning as Utah. Whatever works is fine with me.
Eddie McStiffs had decent Pizza and substandard ale. Nothing bad, just nothing special.
Day four: At this point I was burnt out of exquisite views and natural beauty. Today: no parks, no photos. Today: Rent a mountain bike and hit some of the trails around here. Moab is famous in mountain biking circles. There is no better place, and the ne plus ultra of trails is called Slickrock Trail. What El Capitan is to rock climbers and The Pipeline is to surfers, Slickrock Trail is to mountain bikers. If you have done Slickrock Trail you are a serious mountain biker.
I have not done Slickrock Trail. I was wise enough to not even attempt it, which you already know because I am here writing this and not in a coma from a head injury. But even the intermediate trails around Moab are insane. Riding along the edge of cliffs. Zig-zagging downhills over giant boulders. Lung-busting climbs through sand. (For those of you familiar with the Moab area, I spent the day on the MOAB Brand trails.) Though I would call myself an advanced-beginner/early-intermediate level biker, I was trying the "difficult" trails because, well, how often am I going to get this opportunity? I'm lucky I only fell once. The rest of the time I did a lot of flailing around and screaming (but not a girly scream).
Perhaps I am being a bit too self-effacing. I didn't do too bad. There was only one descent I didn't attempt at all -- a particularly terrifying multi-switchback single-track that ran in between boulders large enough to obscure the trail more than a few feet ahead. More importantly, there were a few times I was able to barrel over these rocky outcrops or fly through a roller coaster turn like a pro, which made the whole adventure totally worthwhile. It was a blast. Mountain biking makes me feel like I was when I was a kid on my bike, when obstacles were opportunities for fun and crashing was just another form of entertainment.
The most frightening point came towards then end when I was almost back to my truck and riding past this cheesy-looking old-time cowboy chuckwagon and these vicious dogs started chasing me. I didn't think I could pedal that fast through deep sand. Stupid Utah cur.
Day five and another need for some recovery. This time a day trip down to Monument Valley. Monument Valley is on the very southern edge of Utah just north of the Arizona border in Navajo country. If you have ever seen an old Howard Hawks film starring John Wayne, with The Duke riding off into the sunset with a panoramic view of the old west, chances are it was shot at Monument Valley.
Monument Valley is filled with enormous red rock monoliths. Yes, you've heard that before, but in Monument Valley, the stone towers are that much bigger. Not only that, they are just sparsely spread enough over the flat desert floor that the effect is jaw dropping, like a Zen rock garden for the Gods. Visions and images of Monument Valley are probably more responsible than anything else for people wanting to "see the West."
Coming from the north you enter Monument Valley proper through the Navajo town of Mexican Hat. There are a couple of little motels and a diner but that's about it. I stopped in the hopes of actually fining a hat that said 'Mexican Hat,' but no go. Between Mexican Hat and the Monument Valley Tribal Park proper is the big tourist center of Goulding. Goulding is a hotel/restaurant/museum/gift shop/tour planning complex, also referred to as a "trading post" for those looking for condescending Indian authenticity. Here you can set up bus tours of the Valley (and horse tours also I think). They are big on John Wayne memorabilia and much of the complex is themed to old Westerns. They appear to do a healthy bit of commerce, which I suppose is the benefit for being honest about what brings the tourists in, as opposed to some contrived Navajo cultural activities.
From Goulding you can head southeast into Arizona to the Tribal Park and see much more of the Valley, but I turned back north. My plan was to take a circuitous route back to Moab that would bring me past Natural Bridges National Monument. Trivia: What's the difference between a natural Bridge and a natural Arch? A bridge is made by water and an arch by wind. Now, amaze your friends with your knowledge.
It turned out I wouldn't get to Bridges, but the scenic drive off Rte 261 is a beauty -- another steep dirt road with 5-mph white knuckle hairpins climbing to give you some astounding panoramas of an area called Valley of the Gods. (There is so much I am just glossing over because there so much that I just glanced at. By this point, I had written off seeing more than the major attractions. You could easily spend months exploring around Utah and not run out of new things to see.)
Anyway, coming back off the scenic drive and on to the highway north I spotted what looked like a dust devil up ahead. As I got closer, I realized that someone had rolled his pickup truck off the road, spewing kayaks, tents, and camping gear all over the highway. The truck was sitting on the passenger side about thrity yards off the road -- it had obviously rolled several times (5 according to the sheriff that eventually showed up).
Looking over I noticed there is a guy hanging out the passenger side window. I pulled off and ran over to see if anyone was hurt. The guy hanging out of the passenger side was unconscious. His skull was completely bashed in. You could see brain. Meanwhile, the driver pulls himself out of his side window and looks down and his friend and cries, "Oh no, he's dead."
Naturally I have no cell signal -- thank you T-mobile. Then this German guy appears (what is it with all these Krauts in Utah?). I immediate ask if he has a signal -- no he doesn't. But he wants to try to tip the truck upright and pull the head injury guy out. Um, not a good idea, Fritz. If we try that the truck will just roll back and crush the guy, never mind how stupid it is to move someone in that condition.
Anyway, it's clear we need help. Fritz says he passed a ranger station on the way there, so I hop in my car and barrel north at about 95 for about five miles to the ranger station to get some help. Except it turns out the rangers at this station are this old retired couple and, while they were very kind people and certainly doing everything they could, let's just say they weren't exactly speedy. Eventually, the wife managed to call the paramedics and the husband got his first aid gear, but admitted that he didn't know to use it. They also didn't have a car available so I drove him back to the scene with me.
By the time we got back to the scene several other cars had stopped -- you pretty much had to or else drive right through the smashed kayaks and mountain bikes on the road. Luckily one of them was a nurse and they seemed to have both the guys resting a little more at ease. And the open-brain guy was talking coherently, which was a shock to me because I thought he was a goner.
It took 45 minutes for the paramedics to arrive -- I did mention it was the middle of nowhere -- the firemen were cutting the roof off the truck to free the guy up and the paramedics took one look at the guy's head and called for chopper evac. It had to be an hour and a half before the guy got flown out.
Needless to say, by the time it was all over, all that was left for me was to head straight back to Moab. As I think back on it, though, the response of everyone involved was pretty impressive. No one panicked. There were probably six or seven folks at the crash site and everyone was very calm and conscious of the need to stay out of the way of people doing work, just clearing paths for when the medics arrived and talking to accident victims. Except for Fritz wanting to tip the truck back over, nobody tried to do anything heroically stupid. Even the driver just calmly and regretfully admitted he fell asleep at the wheel. Just a lot of stoic, responsible, good-hearted folks. My experience in Utah is that it's full of solid people.
And so I was down to my last day. I had two things I wanted to do: 1) Drive Shafer Trail and 2) get back to Delicate Arch for some sunset photos. Instead, I got rain. It was on and off all day, very heavy at times, then the sun would make a brief appearance before ducking behind the clouds again. So instead of my plan I spent the morning doing some urban hiking and trolling about in Moab, getting some photos of the funky outdoor vibe shops and exploring the residential areas and dreaming about possibly buying a little vacation cottage.
After snagging lunch at the Moab Diner where they claim to have the best Green Chile sauce in the world (and they may be right), I wanted to take a shot at one final outdoorsy trek so I headed down scenic Route 128 just north of town which follows the banks of the Colorado. Very impressive. You've seen your Western movie stars navigating the perilous rapids through the rocky wilderness -- once again, that's where you are in real life. At one of the breaks in the rain, I pulled off for a quick canyon hike through -- and I am not making this up -- Negro Bill Canyon. The path runs deep through the canyon along a little stream which it crosses several times, I'd guess a mile or two one way, you have to backtrack out. If this weren't Moab, it would likely be the killer hike in the area, but here it's primarily popular because dogs are permitted, and dogs there are of all shapes and sizes.
And that was that. My hopes of getting some sunset pics of Delicate Arch were dashed by the gray and stormy skies, so I settled for a final Scorpion Ale at Moab Brewery and called it a trip. In the morning, the four-hour drive to Salt Lake City (a beautiful city with a perfect snowcapped mountain backdrop) was followed by a disastrous attempt to fly back to Michigan (see next post).
Still I have Moab on the brain now. It's not unusual for me to get fantasies of buying property at my vacation destinations, but Moab is something a bit more special. Probably because there is so much to do there that even my fantasies wouldn't run out of steam. I could go back and back and not get bored. Probably ever. That's probably the best summation for Moab: If you're bored, you must be dead. Useless Airways: At the moment I am at a Residence Inn near Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix. I am seething. I don't know where to begin. I am about to wig out on US Airways. If you have no interest in a travel rant, skip ahead to the next post.
I used up my US Airways miles on my Moab trip to upgrade to first class -- hugely important to me for long trips. The flight back consisted of an hour or so from Salt Lake City to Phoenix then a long 4-hour haul back to Detroit. Well that didn't happen. In Phoenix, one the flight attendants had a heart flutter or something and couldn't work. So our flight got cancelled.
You read that right. The flight was cancelled because a stewardess got sick. Apparently US Airways had no contingency plan for an employee getting sick. They just cancelled the flight and let the chips fall where they may. I can only assume the executives at US Airways sit around in their offices making armpit sounds and playing with plastic army men, because they sure as hell aren't doing anything remotely related to PLANNING.
So I get to the gate desk for rebooking and a cretinous dolt named Craig rebooks my first class seat to a middle seat in coach for the next morning. He will hear no argument. First Class is booked full, that's the only seat, take it or leave it. Here's a voucher for your hotel. Next! I was given no food voucher, which should be standard operating procedure. No soup for you!
Fine, I know enough not to cause a fuss with a gate agent with an ugly disposition. I figured I'd get checked into my room before the onslaught of angry travelers and get on the phone to US Airways. Once in my room I got on the line to Reservations, but they couldn't help me because they couldn't "un check-in me" from the middle seat I was given. God only knows why. They suggested I talk to the gate agents again in the morning. I asked for a Customer Service number instead. The response: "They don't have a phone number. They have a fax number or an email address." Yes, that's right. US Airways does not have a Customer Service line. And why should they? They can't be expected to take phone calls while they're in the middle of playing Chutes and Ladders, can they?
I composed a stern, yet polite email on their customer service form, checking the box that indicated my flight was leaving in less than 24 hours, hoping against hope that it might actually spur some action rather than just be a further source of sadistic entertainment for them, but no such luck, I got no reply at all. Instead, my only shot was to get to airport early and cross my fingers for something better.
****
Next morning I arrived at the airport two and a half hours ahead of time to allow for my battle with whoever I could get to talk to me at the ticket counter. After some desperate pleading (I almost resorted to claiming a medical condition) the best I could do was move from a middle seat to an aisle seat towards the back of the plane.
There was actually a time when I would go out of my way to fly US Airways, but that was years ago. There's nothing left of the decency and helpfulness of that airline. The service has been in steady decline and is about to step over the line into outright hostility. Now they nickel-and-dime like everyone else, the planes are worn to pieces, and even the wi-fi in their club comes laden with space hogging Flash ads.
Case in point: on the flight out, the guy in front of me was stopped while boarding the plane and told that his garment bag was too big and needed to be checked. The guy replied that he had just carried it on his previous three legs and this was the same model of plane. Sorry, was the reply, I guess they weren't checking before. The flight was only about half-full. There was plenty of room, but the guy got nowhere with his arguments and they checked his bag. Arbitrary and, frankly, mean-spirited enforcement of "rules" is a clear sign of a service culture with a chip on its shoulder.
If you happen to be one of the tiny minority of people who've never had a flight cancelled on them, you must understand that not only is it annoying, it can be expensive. If you are cancelled because of weather, then you are shelling out for your own hotel room. Fortunately, even US Airways has to cover your room if it's their own damn fault. They should also give out meal vouchers. But if your car is sitting in an airport parking lot, they aren't going to cover that. Missed appointment fees or work days? Sorry sucker.
I hate US Airways for this. I want to shout of their horribleness. I fully intend to keep after them about this, but it doesn't matter. They may provide some recompense, or they may figure I can go directly to hell, but it's not like I can do anything to make them care.
****
Now back home and settled in after the Memorial Day weekend. I am less flustered, but no less angry. Three days after sending an email with the indication that my flight was leaving in less than 24 hours I received a reply. Apart from the boilerplate apologies and explanations they offered to credit me 12,500 miles for my trouble. In other words, they refunded the miles for the one leg in which I lost my first class seat on. That's it. As to the other costs and inconvenience? Sorry, just suck it up.
As expected they are suggesting I can go directly to hell. I will send them a response declaring that their offer is lame and borderline insulting, but it likely won't get anywhere.
****
My response indicated that their offer was inadequate and I went further in detailing my issues, also noting that if I had to cancel a flight at the last minute, it's unlikely they would be as forgiving of me as I was expected to be of them. I suggested a domestic round trip voucher or a voucher for a future class upgrade would be more appropriate to cover the annoyance and expense I had to go to.
Their response? Point and laugh. The specific wording was: "After careful evaluation, we were unable to discover any additional concerns causing us to reconsider our original compensation." I could spend about 1000 words deconstructing that sentence (especially "unable to discover") but it all comes down to a big fat middle finger. Hell, they probably reported me to TSA for good measure.
I want to vow never to set foot on one of their lousy flights again, but that's an empty threat. They have their planes and routes and they probably figure that if they offer cheapest and most time-effective way to get to to my destination I'll still make the reservation with them, despite how much I hate them. They're right. Even if I were to fly out of my way or go to extra expense to avoid them, it's not like I would get measurably better service on another domestic airline. It's simply the way the world is and it is not going to change. Like most travelers I have been beaten into submission by this industry. Why waste the very pixels you are reading griping about it? In Praise of the Cheap: There are things that you should never spend a lot of money on. I have learned this the hard way. One of those things is sunglasses. This lesson came courtesy of a misbehaving Hobie Cat on Grace Bay in Turks and Caicos. Bye-bye pricey Ray-Bans. Since then I have never paid more than $10 for a pair of sunglasses. Of course this devil-may-care attitude also causes me to be somewhat forgetful of them, leaving me with four or five pairs sitting in my car at any given time. Still, I think I'm ahead in the long run.
Case in point: While sitting on the sharply sloping slickrock and trying to get a shot of the morning light on Delicate Arch in Arches National Park in Moab, I forgot that my glasses were on my head and they proceeded to tumble across many yards of rock towards a canyon. I just calmly sat and watched rather than risk my life by flinging myself down the slope to rescue them. I just waited to see if they would tumble over the edge. When they did not I slowly and carefully edged my way down to pick them up. One of the lenses had popped out but it snapped right back in. If they were $300 Revos I would have freaked.
Another thing to never spend money on: Earbuds. Unless you are one of those people that religiously wraps them up nicely in a little protective container, your earbuds are going to get tangled and torn. They get wedge into your filthy ears and get sweated on at the gym. And you will lose them -- at some point in the future you'll be looking for them; you'll swear you left them right there but they'll be gone.
I never spend more than $15 for earbuds. My favorites are Koss SPARKPLUGS. Perhaps I have tin ears, but they're my favorites even over more expensive models. They come with cushy cone-shaped plugs (3 sizes) that can be comfortably seated deep in your ear canal such that they isolate from outside noise better than my Sony noise cancelling headphones. You can buy them anywhere -- Target, Wal-Mart, etc. If I lose them or they break I just buy another pair wherever I am at the moment from Newfoundland to Kauai.
A third thing never to spend money on are the little USB pen drives. I use these for document portability (although I am slowing trying to get used to using Microsoft Office Live). They are inherently little pieces of crap. Three or four of them have freaked out and ceased to function on me (I am always backed up). The more clever among us can use their MP3 players or cell phones to double as one of these. $5 - $10 is right. $12 if for some reason you need more than a couple of Gb. (A cheap one at Amazon is linked on the left, or try buy.com; I'm always getting promo emails from them for these little things.)
I recently dropped a couple hundred dollars to repair my HP laptop when I could have snagged a brand new netbook for maybe $400 on sale. We're close to having disposable laptops. If I didn't do a fair amount of photo editing -- which requires some horsepower to be efficient -- I could almost take the same philosophy with computers. Maybe one day we'll reach a point where things are cheap enough that when any of these ridiculous gadgets we use decides to flake out, we'll just be able to pitch it and get a new one. That will be a good day. Government Motors Round-up: That's all she wrote for GM, eh? Is there anybody with greater than two brains cells to rub together who honestly believes the conflagration of the Treasury Department and the UAW are going to be able to run a company that makes a profit? If I ever turn to non-fiction it will be to write a book about how wishful thinking destroyed the world. Near as I can tell, the dreamers have decided that GM can only survive by the government financing UAW salaries while building electric cars that make no money. And if you can dream it you can do it, right?
Big losers:
Us. We were told letting GM be liquidated would be too costly to the economy. The tax drain over the upcoming years will dwarf any liquidation losses.
Ford. I thought they were smart to refuse Xerxes offer of kindness and to stand when others knelt, but now they look like the last business on the street that hasn't paid Tony Soprano for protection. Legislation that benefits GM and hurts Ford is inevitable. Not only that, are they going to get a labor contract comparable to the contract the UAW negotiates with itself at GM? Will the myriad regulations and arbitrations be inflicted on the two equally? There is the potential for Ford to get buggered in a million little ways.
Michigan. Note where the GM plant closings are. Note the nasty infighting going on between Detroit and Warren for the headquarters of what's left of the company. (This battle was rendered moot when the President, who was going to keep politics out of the running of GM, decreed they would stay in Detroit.) The urban, and eventually suburban, areas of this State are going to empty out. Not that this bothers me other than to the extent I will have my taxes raised to cover their loss. I would much rather see a small population Michigan that is run along the lines of Utah or Nevada or one of the other Western States than the current disaster we have. So maybe this is just a short term loss.
Big Winners:
President Xerxes. Of course. GM becomes a positioning tool for his re-election. He can strengthen his base by pointing to his green credentials or to shore up his labor support. If he needs to look tough, he can lay down the law to GM and the rest of the country (who are resolutely against the bailout) will think that he really just wanted to give them a chance before being the stern daddy and clamping down. He is kind, the God-King, but imagine what horrible fate awaits his enemies when he would gladly kill any of his own men for victory. Exceptionally well played.
The UAW. They live another day, and with perhaps even more power. If this decrepit, pointless, corrupt monopoly knows how to do anything it's survive. It is second to none for shamelessly protecting its own interests at the expense of everyone else. I would say their ownership stake is their ultimate triumph, their endgame, but whenever you think they can't get any more surreal, they do. Again, exceptionally well played.
Karl Marx. Just ask the Russians.
It amazes me to think that when I was finishing undergrad business school -- let's call it the mid-eighties -- any of us would all have killed for jobs with one of the Big Three. You couldn't buy an appointment with one of their recruiters and the only ones who scored careers there already had family or other connections on the inside. Now those people are looking for jobs. Meanwhile, I work for what at times seems to be the only company in the State of Michigan that's profitable and hiring. Life is a marathon, not a sprint, eh?
Three more articles of interest to round out the topic:
P.J. O'Rourke thinks the US car industry was killed because driving became a chore and "pointy-headed busybodies" took all the fun out of it. I love P.J., one of my favorite writers in all history, but he's wrong about this. There is still plenty of love for cars out there.
Megan McArdle can't see how the hell a government takeover is going to work, proving she has greater than two brain cells to rub together.
Paul Niedermeyer sharply observes that GM has been a zombie for 17 years, surviving on government favoritism and GMAC finance income rather than actually selling profitable cars. All true. Flick Check: X-Files: I Want to Believe: X-files, the TV show, generally succeeded when the Woo-Morgan team took control of the episodes. It achieved undying brilliance when Darin Morgan penned the script. But, it was a dreary mess anytime the series creator Chris Carter got all high-minded. X-files: I Want to Believe is a pure Chris Carter morality play, meaning it is the dreariest of messes. As a one hour TV show episode it would have been lame. As a feature film it's drudgery. It just leaves you asking innumerable questions that begin with "Whatever possessed them to..." until you just stop and write-off a couple of hours of your life rather than try to fathom the thinking behind it.
My suggestion is to turn the franchise over to Charlie Kaufman for the next film. Or just skip it altogether. Which is what you should so with this movie. Flick Check: The Wrestler: Plot-wise it's formulaic; an end-of-career athlete has one last shot at the limelight and personal redemption. Yet there are subtleties that make it slightly different. The athlete doesn't find personal redemption, or least not in the sense of correcting with long-standing emotional issues. He simply accepts that he never will and, it seems, finds a bit of peace in that. The script is sharp and polished and professional and moves well within the confines of the formula.
Much has been made of Mickey Rourke's comeback and it's well deserved. Rourke has always been a fine actor if a less than well developed individual, so it's easy to see how he identified with the character. I gather he went through some physical stresses (including bulking up on steroids) for the role. It's just the sort of thing Rourke would do and it shows.
The movie also benefits from having Marisa Tomei is running around topless in about half the scenes. Even in a bad movie that would make for don't-miss status. But it's a good movie. The Wrestler is worth a viewing, but wait until it comes out in standard release. It's not worth pay-per-view. Flick Check: Burn After Reading: A confused outing from the Coen brothers. It starts out as almost a screwball farce, and works decently as such, making you think it might be going down the path towards Raising Arizona. Then it takes a darker turn and tries to make it to Fargo. In the end it doesn't really get anywhere.
It has its share of comic moments, as you'd expect from the Coens, but there's a kitchen sink feel to the events and some scenes that don't clearly have a point and the ending is rather abrupt, as if they just kind of ran out of ideas and wrapped it up so they could move on to something else.
One thing I did take away from this is the Brad Pitt is a fine actor. At his age, he is slightly miscast as the half-wit pretty-boy, but he pulled it off very well. He's done some very good work and shown a lot of range in films that haven't pulled in big numbers (The Assassination of Jesse James..., Snatch, for example), and deserves better than his poster boy reputation.
Don't pay any money to see Burn After Reading, but if it comes on and you're looking for distraction, it's fair way to spend 90 minutes. Breaking Bad, Breaking the Cycle: Robert Fulford at the National Post has made a sharp observation about the life cycle of a TV series. To summarize, he identifies four phases: 1) Primitive, when the characters, plots and concepts are just sketches; 2) Classic, when the series hits its stride and the ideas and actors start clicking; 3) Baroque, when the scope expands and new and different elements start coming into play; 4) Decadent, which effectively means they've jumped the shark.
That's pretty accurate, and if you think back on many TV series you can easily remember the transitions points. But now at the end of the second season of Breaking Bad I tried to pigeon-hole its point on the cycle and I couldn't. The reason for that is that it was conceived from the beginning as a whole, not as an open ended enterprise that would continue as long they could find a way to keep the ratings up. This is, in fact, a common thread among the recent explosion of quality TV drama. The Sopranos, Six Feet under, The Wire, Deadwood (even though it wasn't allowed to end), and currently Mad Men and Breaking Bad on AMC. All of these show had (or have) the end in mind either right from the start or shortly after. I am currently re-watching The Sopranos and it's easy to see that by the end of season 2 and the start of season 3 they were already forming the concepts that would guide the finale.
I'm not going to recap Breaking Bad; you can get that anywhere. I'll just say you should go rent it -- both seasons if you haven't seen season 1 yet -- before you rent any movie out there. It stands out in that while the first season was excellent, the second season exceeded it. That is truly rare in television. The other important point to make is that, despite the drug/crime themes, the story never to descends to tawdry, lurid scenes of decadence. One good thing about being on AMC instead of HBO is that they can't just toss in sex and violence for the shock value. This is a case where editorial limitations work to the show's favor. They have to keep you interested with the characters and plot twists.
If you have been watching, I suggest you check out a recent interview with Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad's creator and driving force (MAJOR SPOILERS if you haven't seen the second season). In it, he hits on much of what I have just mentioned. Although I have to say his view of Walt as someone choosing to be evil doesn't jibe with my own. I see Walt as a quasi-heroic figure, and while he has done many evil things his motivation is his need to not disappear, to affirm his existence and self-worth and, for lack of a better term, his masculine identity.
Needless to say, season three can't come soon enough for me.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
The Month That Was - April 2009: Well. First the good news. Business As Usual is now available for Kindle. The price is a whopping $4.84 (currently discounted to even less). Less than what you'd pay for a Starbucks. If you have a Kindle, please get it. If you don't, please buy a Kindle and get it. The other piece of good writing news is that the first draft of my next (and probably last, although I've said that before) novel is finished. Working title: Misspent Youth. It needs a lot of work, and it will get it, but the important thing now is that everything is rewriting, which is much easier that putting stuff on a blank page. It's also an excuse for me to set it aside and let in marinate I my brain for a few weeks and that is a relief for the moment.The only travel I got in this month (also good news) was a weekend down in the Outer Banks, described below with pics at SmugMug.
On the bad news side, my all too brief return to regular running is on hiatus due to a profoundly annoying bout of tendonitis. This started at the end of last month, just before I left for NYC. I did 10K on the treadmill and came away particularly sore in my left ankle. Then I headed off to NYC, a trip that always involves a lot of walking. I came back and tried to limp through a few workouts, but it became clear that I was only making it worse. So now my running shoes are on the shelf for a few weeks in the hopes of being fully healed up for outdoor summer running. I would give anything to have the recovery ability I had when I was younger. I should find a way to start mainlining HGH.
Also bad: A was treated to a laptop break down, but more on that below also. Sigh.
Laptop Down
Breaking Great
Outer Banks Don't Fail
Travel Picks and Pans
Don't Know Where Don't Know When
Book Look: Inferno
Book Look: Heart of Darkness Laptop Down: (Warning: this is well over to the geeky side of the spectrum.) Ever since the days when DOS was king and config.sys was the Swiss army knife of computer control, I have been getting more and more separated from what is actually going on in my computer. The hard disk fires up and cranks away at random intervals with no clue as to why except the cryptic "system idle processes" in Task Manager. Hewlett-Packard pre-loads and ungodly amount of useless crap on the machine, most of which I have no use for whatsoever -- 93 different CD rippers, 420 DVD players, 847 game demos, etc.; at best it just sits there taking up space, at worst it's waiting to get hijacked to be used as a spam zombie for some greasy dirtbag in the Upper Slobovian mafia.
Most annoyingly, I'll be barreling away in Word, writing some gloriously poetic passage, when suddenly my cursor will turn into a circle and everything will grind to a halt so a little box can pop up to remind me that I can make really great home movies using HyperSuperCinemaEditor 3.0, just click here to start! Pissed off, I then go on a hunt to uninstall HyperSuperCinemaEditor 3.0 only to discover the HyperSuperCinemaEditor is listed in Control Panel under its company name of FlyByNight Software Inc., which has about six entrees in Control Panel and there is no telling which one is HyperSuperCinemaEditor 3.0 or whether I use any other products of theirs.
But it doesn't matter because my cursor is commandeered again as it seems there is a new Java Virtual Machine update that needs to be installed right away or else the internet might disintegrate before my very eyes, oh and by default it will also give you the Yahoo Toolbar because no one in their right mind would want the latest version of Java and not have the Yahoo Toolbar, silly.
But before that gets sorted out, HP wants me to know that it's time for me to check their site for any updated drivers, as it has done every couple of days for the past year, only once actually finding a driver that needs to be updated, which it seems they should know because it's their own website they are checking. Better I spend an hour or so trying to bring my laptop into conformity rather than complete my work, because of what value is art, science, commerce or any human accomplishment if your laptop isn't totally compliant?
Yes, we are so much more efficient now without that arcane config.sys file to edit.
I blame two groups of people for this: Hackers and Grandma. Hackers because they are the ones so anxious to steal your machine for fun or profit that there are constant security updates that need attention. Grandma because we all know that grandma needs to be told about everything she might want to do and hand led by little word balloons to do it. Arguably, Grandma is the bigger issue because if Grandma wouldn't do silly things like click on unverified email attachments we'd probably need less security. In all my years (at least 15) of using Windows I think I've gotten a virus exactly once and it did no damage whatsoever, and this is including Windows 98 and early XP which were known to be the playthings of every malicious, acne-scarred teenager who could write a PERL script. But in the interest of supporting the least common denominator, we all get to be treated like grandma.
Actually I also blame HP, and other PC makers for their idiotic habit of preloading all sorts of el cheapo applications and making you go hunting through the innards of the system to convince them that you really don't want them or need to be reminded that they exist.
Microsoft bears some of the blame also. I am a big fan of their applications. I couldn't live without Word. I'm getting attached to OneNote. Outlook is pretty damn useful. At my day job we use Visual Studio which is peerless. But let's face it; the operating systems have been hit or miss. I thought highly of Windows 2000. Windows XP started out awful, and ended pretty great. Vista, though not as bad as it's made out to be, can't really be called a success. For example, Vista broke my laptop.
Up until a couple of weeks ago, I may have been one of the only people who hadn't had a complaint about Vista. Actually, I have had complaints but nothing debilitating. But then things started going bad. Specifically, coming out of hibernation or after a boot up the thing would just freeze on a blank screen. I would have to hard reset to get it going. It was sporadic at first. Then it started happening regularly. Then it sometimes took two or three hard resets to get it going. I could bring it to the local coffee house and I would be through two grande chai teas before I got to my logon screen.
There was no determining the cause. I ran all the diagnostics I could find and detected no problems. Then the last straw came. My backup process started failing. It would just stop dead and report a cryptic "catastrophic error". What's worse, every time I tried to reboot, the bios would detect some issue and immediately throw me into chkdsk which would itself freeze up good and tight when verifying indexes. (Although strangely, if I terminated the chkdsk it would eventually boot up without a problem.) I immediately suspected my hard disk was failing or about to fail.
Now, back in the old days, I would have handled this in an afternoon. First, since I had my data backed up, I would have reinstalled DOS. If that didn't work, I would have re-formatted the disk and then reinstalled DOS. Follow either with xcopying back my handful of applications and then my data and I'd be golden. If that didn't work, I knew it was time to invest in a new hard disk. Annoying, but at least I was in control.
Maybe if I was still keeping up on things I would have known how to do the equivalent in today's world. I have since discovered the contemporary version is to do a clean install of Windows from the HP recovery disks (provided you can find them), restore your latest backup indicating not to overwrite any existing files (the ones you just generated from the clean install). But I didn't know that. I don't understand how my computer works anymore. I don't have the file dependencies in my head. I don't know what will work with what. And I certainly don't know where everything needs to go in the folder structure. I can't even say for sure that my backups are actually of use since the software decides how to store and format the data. Why would I know such things? Everything came preconfigured and structured precisely so that it would work and in such a way that it could not be pirated by executing a simple copy command. Computers don't exist to be controlled by their users anymore.
Besides, I thought surely it was a hardware problem. Wrong. $200 to the local PC guru got me wise -- it wasn't hardware after all. That Vista managed to break my laptop to the point where chkdsk would not run amazes me. Just one more entry in the litany of things that my leftover '90s era geekiness cannot fathom. Nearly the price of a new netbook and a weekend of downloading and reconfiguring to get it all back to where it was. Maybe it would have been smarter to pitch the laptop and buy a fresh one instead. I swear, not a day goes by when I don't get a reminder that it is simply not my world anymore.
Three things need to be done to rectify this situation.
1) Vista has to be fixed, which by all accounts Microsoft is making great strides towards doing with Windows 7
2) PC makers have to stop pre-loading applications. Just stop. Or at least give us the option of a clean Windows install. Or provide the Windows OEM disks so we can wipe the thing and do our own clean install as soon as we get home. Or something. You can't imagine how depressed I was when I got my laptop back in functioning order only to discover all the crap I had managed to clean out over the past year reappeared with the fresh install.
3) We need a unified update utility. In other words all downloadable updates are handled through a single utility. You set the utility how you want (background installations vs. notifications of availability; pop up warnings vs. passive monitoring) and every program adheres to it. MS could build something like this, but enforcement might be difficult.
I'm sure some hipster-doofus out there is laughing at yelling "get a Mac." Well, Mr. hipster-doofus, I did have a Mac, and if you had been following my posts over the years instead of twittering your facebook, or whatever the hell it is you slouchers do, you would recall that my Mac didn't just cause me temporary grief, it ceased to function completely and forever, not long after the warranty was up.
The true blue geeks out there are suggesting I try Linux, which might actually be closer to the old total control days of DOS...if I had the time to learn Linux. I don't believe I have that much time left on this planet. And if I did, would not want to spend it learning an operating system.
Besides, I really don't want control over my PC. What I want is to not NEED control over my PC. I want the thing to be an appliance, a washing machine. But a washing machine that doesn't set off an alarm and make me press a button to initiate the spin cycle. Or doesn't pause my DVD to tell me about its wonderful new setting for delicates. How bloody hard can that be? Does Kenmore make laptops? Breaking Great: Most TV shows suffer in their sophomore season. The reason is that the first season is the result of plots and dialog bubbling around on scripts and in producers heads for years before they get the green light. By the time it gets to the screen it is thoroughly marinated and aged to excellence. Then season 2 deadlines are set and you have a few months to do it all over again. I think you could probably count the number of TV shows that actually improved significantly in their second season on one hand. Seinfeld comes to mind. Maybe some of the classic sitcoms -- Cheers, Taxi. But I don't remember any show kicking it up to a new level like Breaking Bad has so far. The characters have developed better shading, the plot web has gotten more tangled, and best of all, they are really taking some chances and the risks are paying off.
A couple of weeks ago the episode intro consisted of a Mexicali band singing a song that was essentially a recap of the plot of the season and foreshadowing the danger to come. Completely off the wall, but it worked. And they've introduced this farcical sleezebag lawyer named Saul Goodman, brilliantly portrayed by Bob Odenkirk, who could be either the salvation or the death our two ham-fisted, drug-dealing heroes. He has the potential for stealing the series outright.
Ballsy moves from a dramatic standpoint. It's great to see risks like that being taken, as opposed to pouring on the sex and violence for shock value which is what most shows do. If you haven't been following along, you may want to wait for the DVDs. Or spend time catching up on season one first. Killer stuff. Outer Banks Don't Fail: From Ocean City, MD down to Florida, the Atlantic Seaboard is peppered with seaside resort towns. They range from the dingy (Ocean City), to the suburb-by-the-seas (Myrtle Beach), to the upper crust (Hilton Head). The Outer Banks is well over to the nicer side of the spectrum for the most part, but it's also unique in many ways.
OBX, which is the cool kid's shorthand for Outer Banks, consists of a thin strip of land off the mainland of North Carolina from the Virginia border south the Cape Hatteras and Okracoke Island. That is to say, it is really not one single community. There are two main bridges across the sound on to the banks and they bracket the central core of OBX. Between these bridges lie the cities of Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, and Nags Head. Awesome names. These are pretty much suburban level small cities with strip mall lined main drags and smallish two or three bedroom bungalows closer to the water. Here you get the standard coastal public beach access points and parks and recreation and goods and services. Heading south you encounter Cape Haterras National Seashore which extends all the way down to Hatteras and Ocracoke islands, both of which contains small communities, the latter being an especially picturesque village.
Every time I have been to OBX though, we have turned north. Pretty much the instant you get north of the central core, you realize you are in a controlled community. Gaudy signs and advertising disappear, and for miles and miles you encounter very little beyond enormous vacation rentals, all painted in muted hues and of similar construction and gathered into labyrinthine developed neighborhoods. As a general, but imperfect, rule, the further north you go the more new and luxurious things get. Eventually you hit the border with Virginia where the road ends and a seaside wildlife protected area begins. You can get in with a four wheel drive vehicle and some courage. There is said to be one of the last herds of wild horses roaming about in this area.
Ten or twelve bedroom homes are fairly common, most in the four to six range. Thousands upon thousands of them. The first time you see this you can't help but be stunned by the scope of the development. As I said, though, it is very controlled as to style and coloring. There are no sore thumbs. These are pricey rentals with fees designed to be shared by multiple families or large amalgamations of friends and colleagues, but off season they can be more reasonable. That explains why in all my half dozen or so visits, I've never been there in high summer.
Rental homes have the advantage over hotels in that, well, they are actual homes. Full kitchens, stocked with appliances, cookware and utensils, three or four rooms with TVs, comfortable furniture, decks, grills, hot tubs, pools, game rooms, bikes and toys, etc. Plus, you are generally within a couple of hundred yards of the Atlantic Ocean and a beautiful wide beach (although swimming can be cold and dicey). The key thing here is that you can hang out and relax and let the kids run wild, a much nicer set-up than a hotel room. And you probably will hang out more in the house, because the Outer Banks is not exactly a hot bed of wild activity. Rent bikes, walk on the beach, hit some of the little shops, miniature golf -- that's what you got. If you're feeling particularly active, you could rent a kayak or charter a fishing boat, but mostly you are just relaxing and enjoying the beach house.
And in that setting OBX is a terrific place. It is prototypical easy going beach culture. I remember the first time I ever visited being stunned by how folks could quite literally spend an entire day on the beach. I walked down to the water in the AM noticed families setting up chairs and such, then walked back down just before dark to find them still there. That would drive me crazy, but it gives you an idea of how you can take it slow. You don't have to worry about entertaining the kids, just leave them in game room or front of one of the four TVs. Get some bikes. Visit Heritage Park (see photo link below). It's kind of hard to describe other than to say it's just plain easy.
There is one major caveat, though: It's not all that easy to get to. The closest major airport is Norfolk, 2.5 hours north. In fact, considering that you'll probably end up with an indirect flight to Norfolk, you're better off with a direct flight (probably cheaper) into one of the DC airports and taking the five hour drive down. (This is especially true if you are flying on Mesa Airlines, the demon carrier of the skies. See next post.)
I would love to spend a full week down there in a big luxurious house up by the Corolla Light area, with a rented jeep to take me out into the dunes, my road bike to explore around through the toney neighborhoods, and my camera to catch the sunset. Apart from that, no agenda and nothing to prove.
I'm a big fan of the southeast seaboard -- OBX and Hilton Head in particular. It all seems very unpretentious to me, like it's not even trying to be a "destination," it just sort f happened that way. Nice.
Photos on SmugMug. Travel Picks and Pans:Arising from the dead like a great phoenix, Travelocity leaps back into good standing. Here's the deal: Last month I reposted an old New York travel write-up from 2004. In it, I pretty much got hosed by Travelocity and I said so in no uncertain terms, declaring them dead to me to that very day (5 years later). Well, what should happen but a few days after I publish that post than I get a friendly and conciliatory email from Travelocity customer service department offering me a $250 credit voucher for my trouble if I book a vacation through them.
There are two observations of special importance here. First, even though the bad experience was nearly five years ago, they still made the effort to make restitution; despite that it was a recent repost, they indicated in their email that they did know it was a very old story. Second, and more importantly, they noticed a random post on this blog. I did not log any special complaint with Travelocity or any of the other places where bad reviews can cause a company pain. I suppose it's possible that one of my dozen or so regular readers works for Travelocity and thus brought it to their attention, but it's much more likely that they have taken the step of actively monitoring the web for such posts as a matter of policy. That is smart, dedicated, proactive, ass-kickingly good customer service. In an industry where the little things can make all the difference in the world, that's huge.
Oh, and I have already used my $250 credit. Travelocity is not only resurrected but leapfrogs Expedia and Orbitz as my one-stop travel planner of choice. I guess in the travel industry, sometimes things do change for the better.
On the flip side, sometimes they don't. I have long history of total disgust with Mesa Airlines. On several occasions I have had the misfortune of flying with them -- US Airways, Untied, America West, and probably others, all contract with them to handle their "Express" regional service. For example, your boarding pass might indicate the airline as US Airways Express operated by Mesa Airlines. I have never once had an on-time flight with them, nor have I ever witnessed them managing their operation with anything other than consummate incompetence. Again, going back to old travel writings, I'd like to quote myself from back in 2004. I won't subject you to the complete 500-word rant but my summation was:
At Mesa Airlines, the only thing they care about is that you go away and not make them think. If your plane is late you don't need to know why or how or even when you can expect to leave, you don't need to be considered in any way. You just need to accept that they will eventually get you to your destination because they really just want to make you go away. That's enough for you; thank you for flying Mesa.
So imagine my revulsion when, on my way to the Outer Banks, I glanced at my boarding pass for the connecting flight from Charlotte to Norfolk read "US Airways Express operated by Mesa Airlines." Noooooo!!!
Sure enough, with no hope of making our 1:00 departure, they finally got around to updating the board at about 1:10, changing the expected departure time to 1:20. Now, even a lobotomized hamster could have told them that there was no way they were going to make a 1:20 departure time because even a lobotomized hamster could look out the window and see that there was no plane at the gate. If it's 1:10 and your plane is not at the gate, you are not going to depart by 1:20. Trust me. But why bother being accurate and informative when you can so easily confuse and frustrate your customers just for giggles?
1:20 rolls around, then 1:25, then 1:30. At this point, General Relativity dictates that we are going to have to board the plane faster than the speed of light to make our advertised 1:20 departure. I would have paid about $500 to have had Joe Pesci as one of the passengers just so he could flip out on the numb-nuts gate agent. At some point around 1:30 we got a new departure time updated to 1:50. The plane didn't arrive until 1:50 and were actually in the air by 2:15.
You can always count on Mesa Airlines to gleefully rob you at least an hour or two of your vacation, and your life, and rub it in by taking the opportunity to really angry up your blood in any way it is convenient. It doesn't matter how well you plan or what prayers you recite, it WILL happen. I so hate Mesa Airlines.
And if anyone from Mesa is reading this, I will reconsider my judgment for a credit voucher. But it's going to have to be a lot more than $250 to get me on another one of your planes. Don't Know Where, Don't Know When: Last year about this time I came up with a set of travel possibilities, ending with, "If I knock off two of these (three including NYC), I'll declare victory." Well, I guess I can declare victory, just barely. I got to Newfoundland and I got to the Spa and, of course, NYC. I also got to New Mexico, which you could consider a stand in for the California road trip I described.
It's time again to reassess possible travel plans. Things are a bit tricky this year because I sort of have tentative plans for some things already (kind of...maybe...possibly) that I won't bother discussing unless they come to fruition. But let's make a list anyway and see what gives. Start with some holdovers:
• Pacific Northwest. Or possibly Alaska proper. I have a temptation to road trip from Vancouver to Anchorage which would be awesome but very long. Not only that, I would also want to see the coast line including Juneau and Sitka. I could do a one-way rental car up and then take the ferries back down, but we are looking at two weeks easy for that, if not more, and that would put a serious crimp in any other plans I wanted to make. Let's just leave it at the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver then a train to Banff would be good enough.
• Southeast Asia. The triumvirate of Hong Kong/Singapore/Bangkok is still waiting for me, though Bangkok seems to be having a bit of strife. (I doubt it is anything for a tourist to fret over, and it makes things dirt cheap.) And there is the travel time involved still. It's sad that I can't find it in myself to take long stretches of time in one place. The sacrifice of a single 14/20-day trip being my only serious vacation of the year just seems costly to me.
• Mexico. The travel advisories suggest it's too dangerous. Probably nonsense. I'm betting in the high summer off-seaons, with drug wars and swine flu beating them down, things get really cheap -- possibly even free. This may be the year for Playa Del Carmen to be my first taste of Mexico.
• Unusual Caribbean. Last year I mentioned Saba, Montserrat, Dominica, and Grenada as possibilities. Everything I read about suggest Dominica might be the place. Lots of outdoorsy stuff.
• Hawaii is still a fallback if I get into September and need to do something serious with minimal planning. Big Island, mostly, maybe add in north shore Kauai.
New for this year:
• The Azores. Theoretically an up and coming destination. You can get direct flights from Boston. Not too distant. Thought to be exceptional in the spring. However, flights are pricey. Very pricey, since there is only really the one airline to get there. Keeping my eye out for low fares.
• London and Paris. I admit to being strange in that I feel little attraction to bopping about in Europe. But a dash to London with a cross channel expedition to Paris might actually fit the bill. I can get there reasonably easily. I can wheel and deal with travel planning to not spend an arm and a leg. I can get plenty of photos, that's for sure. Should a person not see these cities at least once in his life?
• Croatia. The Adriatic coast has been up for a bit of discussion. Supposedly this is the new Riviera. Friends speak highly of it. Looks very appealing for island hopping.
• Moab. I never get tired of going out west. Moab has Canyonlands and Arches National Parks right next door, and Mesa Verde in Colorado is within a doable drive. Could try some mountain biking in addition to hiking.
The fact is, I will probably end up defaulting to my stand-bys: Florida and Out West mostly. At some point I am going to have to break down and take an extended journey, but for this year, if I knock off one of the above or something else significant, hit my stand-bys a couple of times, and Vegas at Thanksgiving of course, I'll declare victory again. Book Look: Inferno by Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy of Dante is frequently mentioned as a poetry on the level of Shakespeare, at least when read in the original Italian. I don't speak Italian, nor am I very skilled at reading poetry even in translation so any sheer artistry is lost on me. There are about nine-million translations that have been published over the centuries; some try to hold closely to the meter of the original, others resort to straight prose; some keep to the flowery vocabulary of old, other are more colloquial. One of the first tasks for a potential reader is to pick a translation.
The translation I selected is one by Elio Zappulla. It uses colloquial language and vernacular but is structured as something called "free verse". To quote Wikipedia, "Free verse...is a term describing various styles of poetry that are written without using strict meter or rhyme, but still recognizable as poetry by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers will perceive to be part of a coherent whole." Again, I am so poor with poetry that I can discern no difference between free verse and prose that has superfluous carriage returns. Perhaps I should have gone with a straight prose translation, but this one was quite readable and, I am guessing, on the explicit side when it comes to describing Hell's horrors.
Thumbnail of Inferno: Dante, at age 35, finds himself unable to find "the right path", meaning he is losing or has lost his faith. He awakens in a dark woodland where he is trapped by three creatures -- a leopard, a lion, and a wolf. He encounters the long dead Roman poet Virgil who leads him on a journey through Hell, filled with horrific sights and a final encounter with the Devil, to find his way back. The Divine Comedy includes two further epics -- Purgatorio and Paradiso -- which follow Dante through Purgatory and Heaven to his ultimate goal of communing with God. None of this is news to you. There is little about the Divine Comedy that hasn't been said and the concept of passing through the rings of Hell is thoroughly assimilated into the stream of Western conciousness.
Still, Inferno is the sort of book that causes undergrads to groan when it appears on a syllabus. There are likely many reasons for this but I suspect the main one is that it is so far removed from contemporary experience and mores that it simply will not register in the 21st century mind.
For example, the planted philosophy is that of Catholicism -- hard, unforgiving, psycho-Mother Superior, old-school Catholicism. Confronted with the suffering of the tortured souls in Hell, Dante, at one juncture, pities them. His guide, Virgil, rebukes him and reminds him that feeling sorry for them is in itself an offending act. We just don't get that in the contemporary world where our morality is relative to a fault, and the line between religion and psychotherapy has been blurred. It's the sort of thing one would hear from some lunatic imam.
It warrants mentioning that although Catholicism is the reigning way, specific Catholics are not spared over heretics. Anyone who believes the doctrine of papal infallibility ever carried any weight should read Dante ripping Pope Boniface a new one. Which leads me to another problem. Inferno is seriously axe-grindy. Axe-grindy on the level of season five of The Wire. If you were a political enemy of Dante's you can pretty much figure you'll be burning along with common criminals and other species of dirtbags. In fact, much of the epic is given over to naming names or at least hinting at names of notorious Florentines from 'round about 1300. These names are meaningless to most everyone short of the faculties of Medieval and Renaissance Studies departments.
Perhaps the most glaring difference with contemporary times is the hierarchy of sins. In Dante's Hell, the violent are less severely punished than the fraudulent and traitorous. Here are the various levels of Dante's Inferno:
• Circle One -- Limbo for decent unbelievers
• Circle Two -- The lustful
• Circle Three -- The gluttonous
• Circle Four -- The hoarders
• Circle Five -- The wrathful
• Circle Six -- The heretics
• Circle Seven -- The Violent
Ring 1: Murderers/Robbers
Ring 2: Suicides
Ring 3: Those harmful against God/nature and usurers
• Circle Eight -- The Fraudulent
Trench 1: Panderers and Seducers
Trench 2: Flatterers
Trench 3: Those who buy religious favor
Trench 4: Sorcerers
Trench 5: Cheaters
Trench 6: Hypocrites
Trench 7: Thieves
Trench 8. Those who give evil counsel
Trench 9: Instigators (think Eddie Haskel)
Trench 10: Falsifiers
• Circle Nine -- The Traitorous
Region 1: Traitors to their kindred
Region 2: Traitors to their country
Region 3: Traitors to their guests
Region 4: Traitors to their lords
Lots of gray areas and overlaps in there. First note that by this formulation, in the hereafter, pretty much our entire political class will be worse off than your standard axe-murder. That's kinda cool.
Seriously, this does not jive at all with the modern way of thinking. To us, with a few exceptions, most of Circles Eight and Nine are torts -- stuff that gets sorted out by vampiric lawyers. Circle Seven is where the criminals lie, broadly speaking. One can't help but look at this as if it were from some alien culture dreamed up for an episode Star Trek that, however weird, needs to be respected under the Prime Directive.
Of course there are some things that transcend temporal boundaries. Horrific tortures, mutations and mutilations, and unspeakable pain and suffering for instance. Some of the scenes described here are worthy of George Romero or Wes Craven or any of the more deeply disturbed contemporary horror filmmakers. Some of the imagery in Inferno clearly demonstrates that twisted, sadistic imaginations have endured throughout the ages, although Dante does it thoughtfully; souls are tortured and degraded in ways that correspond to their earthly sins. No shock for shocks sake, there is method to this madness.
The trouble with Inferno is that, divorced of the beauty of the poetry -- which is lost on me, through my own linguistic limitations and my taste and experience as a reader -- you are left with needing to be fully immersed in the milieu of Florence in 1300 to really appreciate the content. I doubt there is enough time left before my own afterlife for me to get to that point. I'm going to have to pass on Purgatorio and Paradiso. I'm sure Dante will survive without me, as long as there are frumpy academics and people who can speak Italian. I'm better off losing myself in Rex Stout again before tackling another work of significance. Book Look: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Another try at books on tape (if you will) from the good folks at Librivox.org. The recordings at Librivox seem to be hit or miss. I tried Murders of the Rue Morgue but the cadence of the reading was very strange, loaded with mid-sentence pauses that were too distracting. I also tried Inferno but it was read in a metered poetry and read very fast, or at least too fast for me to keep track of. I say without the intent to complain. Librivox costs nothing and the readers are clearly dedicated volunteers who are to be appreciated.
Heart of Darkness is very well read, and a stunner it is. If you are like me, you're only exposure to this story had been the variation that is called Apocalypse Now. Great cinema, for sure, but having read -- or more properly, heard -- Heart of Darkness, the movie doesn't hold a candle to the book.
The schoolbook analysis of Heart of Darkness is that it is a story of a man discovering the fact that we all have a darkness within us and that give the right circumstances we all fall back to primitive cruelty. Standard study questions might be "Are we nothing more than a thin layer of civilization over a savage and empty heart?" or "Is civilization even a thin layer, or is it just a variation on savagery as basic as any other?" Through Marlow's description, we know that Kurtz found those circumstances and turned away from morality. We also know that in his journey to find Kurtz, Marlow was pushed to a similar brink but returned (maybe).
I suppose that is correct as far as it goes, but then what. If the point is really that given the right circumstances, everyone could turn savage the story would be nothing more than fodder for a freshman-level Survey of Western Literature. I suspect Conrad had something deeper on his mind.
If it is true that our hearts are dark and we are little more than savages ourselves, then what does that say about value, knowledge, and reason itself? If in the end there is nothing more than primal instincts and cruelty, then there is nothing at all. All of our beliefs are false constructs to delude ourselves that there is meaning beyond our animalistic existence. In contemporary parlance, we are nothing except a bundle of ancient developments in evolutionary psychology. The dark heart comes not from the potential for savagery, but what the savagery implies about our own existence. (It should be noted that Conrad was Russian, and all this strikes me as very Russian.)
Marlow does escape surrendering to cruelty, but he is haunted by the possibility that it is to no purpose. Early on in the story Marlow makes a stark claim that he detests a lie. Yet in the end, he lies to Kurtz's fianc‚ to ease her pain. From this act, it would seem Marlow hasn't given in to the uncaring emptiness, although he cannot explain why. He appears to have reconciled his vision of existential futility with the need to live in the world as it is; something Kurtz could never do. From the final line of the story, Conrad seems to be saying that life goes on with these answers, but the darkness is still everywhere, waiting.
Disturbing philosophical observations aside, Heart of Darkness is beautifully written. The gloomy and dire atmospherics are mesmerizing. From a historical point of view, Conrad was one of the early post-Victorians. At a time when the standard fiction involved florid, formally constructed prose filled with detailed documentation, Conrad wrote almost colloquially. He was unconcerned with details other than to the extent they moved the story along or contributed to the tone he was trying to achieve. He forewent direct description for hints and allusions. His focus was the internal journey of his character, in keeping with the rise of the concepts of conscious and unconscious psychology that were gaining prevalence at the turn of the last century.
As Francis Ford Coppolla realized, Heart of Darkness transcends time. Marlow even notes at the beginning that a similar story could have occurred at any point in history. Reading it is a both a disturbing and rewarding experience. Which begs a question: If existence is truly empty and the heart of everything is dark, how could a work like this exist?
Thursday, April 02, 2009
The Month That Was - March 2009: The highlight this month was a trip to Manhattan, but it was for work so it barely counts as travel. Still, the tale is below. No pictures this time. I really only had one full free day so I didn't even bring my camera. I did eat like a pig with a tapeworm and for weeks to come I will be doing penance for that at the gym. To go with it you get travel rewinds from two previous Manhattan trips one from '04 and '05. I am slowly clearing out the travel section to your left and incorporating anything of value, however minor, into blog posts so I can let that damstore site expire.There are two ongoing consumables art-wise that I am going to hold off letting loose on until they are complete. One is the AMC original TV series Breaking Bad. Many, if not most, TV shows fall flat in their sophomore season, but Breaking Bad has kicked up to an even higher level. I'll have a lot to say it about it when the season ends, but for now I'd say it's got a shot at sub-pantheon status. Two is that I've completed the second of what I have decided to be 10 Nero Wolfe novels, this one, The Golden Spiders, was a joy. It seems I can plow through several chapters of Rex Stout without a hint of fatigue. Nero Wolfe will be my go-to for escapist lit for the foreseeable future.
Under the heading of ongoing projects, I got the photos from last year's Death Valley excursion up on SmugMug. I was one of my favorite trips and one of my best sets of photos. By next month I should have Business As Usual available for Kindle.
What to do After High School
Manhattan Mange
Blinding Me With Science
Flick Check: Quantum of Sense
Flick Check: 1408
Book Look: Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy
Detroit in the News
Car Crazies
Travel Rewind: How We Do It in New York (2005)
Travel Rewind: A New York Minute (2004) What to Do After High School: "One word: Plastics." Of course, the contemporary version of that is probably Nanotechnology, or maybe Bankruptcy Law. But the open question that has hit everyone at age eighteen since World War 2 is, Now what? For most the answer is college but, the fact is, that is likely just accepting a default. Most 18-year olds don't have the slightest idea what they want to do and undoubtedly don't have anything resembling a plan -- this is not a criticism, I certainly didn't. For Mom and Dad, this makes for a minefield; one wrong step and you have an undergrad who's changed her plans during her sophomore summer and you're looking at paying for 6 years of college.
Unless there is some sort of extraordinary clarity of vision on the part of the child, the advice I generally offer is: Don't go off to a four-year undergrad program at the most elite college that will accept you. Just don't do it. Get a full-time (or almost full-time) job and go part-time to a small college or community college. Make sure your job is very social (restaurant work is a good example), have a million friends and stay up all night drinking and talking and whatever. Meanwhile, you knock off a few underclassman credits that, with appropriate planning, will transfer to whatever school you end up at for your degree.
The lessons learned in this period can be far more valuable than a free ride in the dorm courtesy of Mom and Dad. You will learn what it means to pay rent, and you'll learn how much cable TV costs, and you'll discover that unlimited phone plan may not really be essential after all. You'll figure out how to separate good friends (the ones who pay their share and don't use your stuff without asking) from bad ones (the ones who stiff you for the security deposit and invite their no-account friends to sleep on the couch). Then there's always the difference between gross pay and net pay to come to terms with. You'll get a lot of practice making smart decisions about the opposite sex (to put it delicately). Broadly speaking, it's really your first chance to encounter the wider world beyond school and family. It's a hugely important time, and the perspective a young person gains from this can completely change their character. For obvious reasons it's better if this happens before you're parents are out 50 large for a Bachelor's degree.
All my wisdom works very well in theory, but it's contingent on one thing: once you are done with this extended exercise in real world education, you come out of it knowing what you want to do. That is far from a foregone conclusion. You could find yourself exactly where you were when you started only with the ability to drink legally. And that's the ultimate problem with my plan. It's really just a minor deferment. If you don't know what you want, at some point, you gotta pick something and go with it for better or worse or else you'll find yourself trying to keep a straight, 35-year old face when you explain to your date you still live with your parents. If that's going to be the case, well, why not pick that something now and get your undergrad degree over with as quickly as possible?
Obviously, all this is coming up because My Darling Perfect Miss Anna Banana, the little girl who was scared to run in the ocean surf when she was three feet tall, is now facing that issue. She just wants to find a school where she can have fun, no idea what she wants to study really. Her mom is pushing for standard 4-year-degree-and-start-a-career path. Me? Well, I completely undermine her by suggesting Anna take the cruise-and-have-fun for a couple of years approach. That makes me an ass, yes, but does it make me wrong?
It's really a roll of the dice as to whether a two or three years of undirected sub-adult life will be fruitful. Of course, I should shut up either way, shouldn't I? Yeah.
Semi-related: The brain-in-a-vice website Overcoming Bias has a roundup of commentary as to whether university prestige matters. Manhattan Mange: This trip to The Apple turned out to be primarily about stuffing my face. I was officially there for a workshop arranged by my day job, so all week the evenings were filled with big family style dinners for roughly 12-15 colleagues at some of the tastier places in and around Manhattan, such as...
• Rosa Mexicanos. From the name you'd think it was a standard issue frijoles and burrito spot, but the food was a cut above, highlighted by fresh guacamole made at our table. Good Margaritas, natch.
• Becco. In restaurant row on 46th, killer pasta and lots of it. This is where you want to load carbs before your marathon. Not to mention a deadly dessert called Zabaglione con Marsala di Florio. Que Bella!
• China Grill. Not terribly original but still tasty. I managed to secure a bit of Sake, which is always a treat. Good lobster pad thai. I've eaten at the China Grill in Vegas and this was basically the same. Excellent professional service. Good quality food, but nothing all that memorable. Overpriced but fun and reliable.
• Bar Americain. I was on my own for this one, so I just did my usual travel dinner thing and snagged an appetizer at the bar. This is one of Bobby Flay's places, and while most serious foodies sneer at Flay, I find his twists on everyday dishes to be excellent. I settled on the shellfish cocktail sampler -- the traditional shrimp got a tasty tomatillo sauce, the crab cocktail came with a creamed corn (better than it sounds), and lastly a lobster, avocado and egg cocktail. Seriously good stuff.
Naturally, once the workshop was over, I stayed on and was able to get a full day of Manhattan time on my own. Now off the company expense account, that meant street food and cheap eats. I typically try to hit the Hidden Burger Joint but unlike back in '04 when I could just waltz into the place at will, it's become quite the tourist target and I haven't been able to get near the place in the last few years. That's fine; in the end, tacky-fun atmosphere aside, it's still just a burger and fries.
Better than that, the Halal cart guy on 53rd and 6th whips up an awesome gyro for $4 and you can sit on the steps of nearby building and look downtown at the Radio City Music Hall sign, or east to the Museum of Modern Art, or uptown towards Central Park and just get that rush of energy that you can only get in the center of the universe.
I finished the evening with a nightcap at the well-known Oak Room in the Plaza hotel. The Oak Room has a long and storied history and is generally thought of as an old-school throwback to the days of sophisticated New York drinking. It has plenty of wood and comfortable furniture and hand painted murals all over the walls. But it's just a veneer. As bars go it is strictly run of the mill. I got a decent sidecar, but it's not like it came from some old-time world-weary bartender. It was just a cocktail from a twenty something with other things on his mind. And the place was loaded down with loud drunks. And tourists (I was expecting silver-haired bluebloods). And it smelled (truly it did). A better choice for the long lost drinking experience is Bemelman's Bar in the Carlyle.
The main new experience this trip was the walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Wise folks claim the way to do this is to make the walk from Brooklyn into Manhattan so that the more pleasing Manhattan skyline is the in view for your walk. True enough, although the walk itself is not that long. It's hair over a mile so it's fairly trivial to walk back and forth from Manhattan. I had extended plans so I took a morning subway ride into Brooklyn to the base of the bridge. The subway let's you off a short walk from an area known as Dumbo (meaning Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) where there are some cafes, shops, bars, etc. A good plan for the future would be to walk over from Manhattan, grab something to eat in Dumbo and stroll along the East River before re-crossing back into Manhattan.
My one way trip was a stunning as expected. Views of the Statue of Liberty, the imposing buildings of the Financial District, the tall ships in the Seaport: awesome. It was the one time I regretted not bringing my camera on this trip. I did get stopped about five times to take snaps of other folks. Next time I'll bring my camera and try to get there for early morning light and maybe sunset too.
Exiting the bridge I made a bee-line to Chinatown for it is there that my ultimate NYC cheap eats exist: the Bahn Mi. Specifically, the Bahn Mi at Saigon Bakery. If I lived in Manhattan, I would eat Bahn Mi pretty much constantly, and the dude at Saigon Bakery -- which is in the back of a jewelry store on Mott St. -- prepares an awesome one. $3.75 and my favorite meal of the trip. (Serendipitously, Gridskipper recently posted on Bahn Mi in Manhattan. For Saigon Bakery click number 2.) Ann Arbor needs Bahn Mi desperately.
Tummy full, I made for the Upper West Side for a visit to the American Museum of Natural History. I gotta say this place is a huge disappointment. It is presented as a science museum, but the actual science is getting more and more out of date. The origin of the universe and the story of human evolution are right out of convention wisdom from the '70s. Much of what the place is devoted to is science mythology and dogmatic environmentalism -- they have spent plenty of time and money putting up plaques with scary missives about global warming, or maudlin quotes of third word folk wisdom, but there is very little actual science here. There were holding some kind of water conservation festival -- a children's band was going to perform songs about how it is important to preserve water in a multi-cultural manner. Or something. The AMNH is a tiresome place with messed up priorities. Give it a miss.
My last day I rose and checked out of the Hilton (this is the one on Sixth Ave.) where they have policy of charging you to store your bags for the few hours until your flight leaves: $3.50 per bag. This is the only hotel I have ever encountered that does so and it is, quite frankly, below them. Shameful. One of the few times I have been really disappointed in Hilton.
I went for a morning walk up Madison Ave and made my way to the Metropolitan Museum and caught a clever photography exhibit and a bite to eat. The Met Museum doesn't disappoint, but it had been a long week and after trolling around a bit, I was ready to go home. I had eaten everything in the universe and was tired out in that terrific way Manhattan has of tiring you out.
Of course I exited to what was probably the first real Spring day of the year, not just a less cold than usual for Winter day. The sun was out; everyone was walking their dogs; the inline skaters and Frisbee jockeys were showing off; musicians of all sorts were on every corner. I stopped for a small bag of toasted almonds and sat on a bench to watch the world pass for a few minutes. Sure enough, 10 minutes in Central Park moved me from ready-to-leave to wanna-stay.
But that was not an option. I had to get to Newark Airport. And therein lays a rant.
The cab fare from Newark Airport (EWR) into Manhattan is fixed at $55 plus tunnel/bridge toll which is another $8. So $70-$75, with tip depending on how smelly your driver is. It's a lot, but acceptable in my mind, especially since my company was paying for it. The cab fare in the other direction, to EWR from Manhattan, is metered (about $70 from Midtown), you still have to pick up the toll (another $8), and they pile on a $15 surcharge only because it is illegal to beat you with a tire iron. Bottom line, the ride back will cost you well over a c-note. Even with access to my company's deep pockets, I refused to pay that. I have no doubt a healthy percentage of that is going to Tony Soprano anyway.
There's a cheaper alternative. Take a cab to Penn Station ($10, with tip); hop the NJ Transit train to EWR ($15 -- leave every 20 minutes, no reservation needed); catch the Air Train from the train station to the terminal (free, with your NJ Transit train ticket).
It's a pretty sweet deal and it works well until you get to the Air Train portion. In all my travels I have never ever see anything as fundamentally fubar'd as the Air Train at EWR. You arrive and stand at a platform waiting for the Air Train, which is really just a monorail shuttle of the sort many airports have. And you wait. And you wait. Meanwhile more and more people are pouring on to the platform. You wait more. When the train finally arrives, you are told that you will have to exit at the first stop and then another Air Train will take you to the terminal. Meanwhile, so many people have been waiting on the platform that it's eat or be eaten to actually fit on the Air Train. A good third of everyone waiting couldn't fit and was facing another interminable wait. Finally the Air Train whizzes off toward the terminal with the blazing speed of a sloth in molasses. Halfway there it stops for no reason, or perhaps it's just to extend the sardine experience that much longer. It literally took longer to cover the mile or so to the terminal than the cab ride and train trip from Manhattan to the airport.
When you finally arrive at the stop -- the one where everyone is supposed to get off and hop another Air Train to the terminal -- it's utter bedlam. One employee is laconically giving instructions on a PA system that nobody can hear. Voices are raised as everyone starts asking everyone else if they heard what they were supposed to do. Everybody is worried that it's going to take another half-hour for a train to arrive. Finally folks move in a lemming like fashion outside the station and across some scary airport roads in a brave overland exodus to the terminal rather than go through another nightmarish ride.
Un-frickin-believable. This barely qualifies as a form of transportation. How hard can it be to move people the mile or so from the train station to the terminal? Why not just run a couple of busses back and forth? I would suggest the Air Train authorities should be ashamed of themselves but no one with any sense of shame would associate with such a disaster to begin with. The lesson I take from this: It's OK to fly into Newark if you get a really cheap flight, but never fly out of Newark. Again, I'm sure Tony Soprano had a hand in the contracting for the Air Train.
One day, I will get an NYC trip exactly perfect. Then I'll be able to die happy. Until then, I'll have to keep going back. Blinding Me With Science: The two big scientific revolutions of our lifetimes are the understanding influence of evolutionary biology on behavior (and the reverse) -- which will upend the current social landscape in one way or another -- and the general acceptance of quantum entanglement (nonlocal or spooky action at a distance) with its implied rejection of Special Relativity (i.e. nothing can travel faster than the speed of light) -- which will upend our current understanding of existence, causality and reality.
Scientific American has an article on the latter about what an exceedingly bizarre place the universe is. Beyond the imagination of just about anyone but a madman.
In the former, a hot topic is something called Signaling Theory, which is covered decently at Wikipedia. Now author William Fleisch has produced a book entitled Commupance: Costly Singalling, Altruistic Punishment and Other Biological Components of Fiction (linked over to the left), which attempts to explain how humans can become so emotionally involved in stories that are known to be fictions. The practical applications are obvious for any writer (or filmmaker). Obviously, this is coming up fast on my reading list.
I point all this out not only because it is interesting but because -- cross referencing the above NYC post -- this is the sort of thing the American Museum of Natural History should be developing exhibits on, not rehashes of maudlin, malaise era, PBS pablum. Flick Check: Quantum of Solace: How is it possible that, after kicking out a action gem like Casino Royale the subsequent rebooted Bond effort could be such a turkey. What a bizarre mess of a movie this is. It starts out with Bond after a certain evil villain, but he ends up chasing a different evil villain and the first one is just sort of dropped from the plot (did I miss something?). While I don't look for realistic plots in Bond films, I do like a minimal amount of cause and effect continuity, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out why anything was happening. Near as I can tell, Bond kept killing folks in the line of duty and M kept telling him he had to stop and threatening him with various bureaucratic sanctions but then kept backing off because "he may be on to something". Uh, what?
Mid-movie a Bond girl with the moniker Strawberry Fields appears. She and Bond show pretty much zero attraction to each other but then out of the blue we see that he's bedded her. Then the evil villain drowns her in oil for no reason. This is perhaps the most pointless and most derivative use of a Bond girl in history and that includes the worst of the Roger Moore era.
Worst of all, the action scenes are unfathomable. Rapid cuts with no context to them. Every hackneyed trick in the book from stop action to shaky cam. Just awful. It's like the whole project was run by Michael Bey's dumber brother.
Next time, how about a Quantum of Sense? Flick Check: 1408: I have no idea what possessed me to watch this. In fact, I didn't really watch it so much as have it on while I was doing laundry. It is a hackneyed bore about a haunted hotel room. It's based on a Stephen King story so that gives you an idea of the level of originality we are working with. I can't think of anything to recommend it. John Cusack stars and Samuel Jackson has a major role. It's odd to imagine either of them as hard up for work, but who knows? Maybe it's just that hard to tell how a movie will turn out from the reading the screenplay.
There are good good horror movies, good bad horror movies, and bad bad horror movies. 1408 is none of those. It's not even bad; it's drivel. Book Look: Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy: What a strange and disturbing book. Budai gets on a plane heading for a linguistics conference in Helsinki and falls asleep. When he wakes up, the plane has landed in a very strange entirely urban nation whose denizens speak an indecipherable language. Pushed along with the multitudes into a hotel, his money is exchanged for the strange local currency, his passport is taken, he is given a room, and then he is on his own. He can't get anyone to understand that he needs to get back to the airport. The telephone offers no connections outside the city-state. He can't get anyone to understand anything he is trying to get across. Frustrated and angry, he struggles with the basics of finding a food and figuring out how to find his way around and get someone to comprehend him. He grows more aggravated and annoyed as his efforts to communicate and get home continually fail.
He eventually figures out how to ride the metro and is able to explore a bit of the sprawling, chaotic city. Much of it is familiar in the way that all huge cities have similar rhythms but nothing seems to get him closer to getting home or even to the airport. He attempts more and more outrageous things to get someone to understand him, eventually spending a night in jail. He makes agonizingly slow progress in understanding the inscrutable language, but after a few weeks has only mastered a couple of words. He makes an emotional connection to woman and actually seems to be progressing a bit -- then he runs out of money, gets kicked out of the hotel, and whatever little progress he made is lost. He manages to get some itinerant work but is basically left living on the street and teetering on the verge of madness where he stumbles into what at first seems to be some kind of political revolution.
We never see Budai get home, but at the very end we are given some sort of hint that he may escape, or least that he still has hope.
In Europe, Metropole is considered something of a classic. Karinthy was a well-known and popular Hungarian writer (as was his father), and it's clear that his experiences behind the Iron Curtain (Metropole was written in 1970) strongly influenced his portrayal of Budai's nightmare. The links to Kafka are indisputable. The sense of alienation and loneliness and hopelessness in the face of unfeeling injustice run deep. But the thing that really makes Metropole hit hard is the sense that you could do no better than Budai. Accept the premise of being caught in such a place; what would you do to get out of it? This is almost certainly the question every reader will ask himself and you'll be hard pressed to find an answer. That's what makes it so disconcerting. The book is similar to a horror movie in that you feel compelled to identify with the victim and you find yourself in complete sympathy with Budai's pain and desperation. And like a good horror film, reading Metropole isn't exactly a pleasant experience, but you can't look away. Detroit in the News: I took last month off from Detroit bashing, which worked out well because others took up the mantle. An article in The Atlantic speculates on the effect the financial meltdown will have on the future landscape of America and uses Detroit as a rust belt representative:
Perhaps no major city in the U.S. today looks more beleaguered than Detroit, where in October the average home price was $18,513, and some 45,000 properties were in some form of foreclosure. A recent listing of tax foreclosures in Wayne County, which encompasses Detroit, ran to 137 pages in the Detroit Free Press. The city's public school system, facing a budget deficit of $408 million, was taken over by the state in December; dozens of schools have been closed since 2005 because of declining enrollment. Just 10 percent of Detroit's adult residents are college graduates, and in December the city's jobless rate was 21 percent.
To say the least, Detroit is not well positioned to absorb fresh blows. The city has of course been declining for a long time. But if the area's auto headquarters, parts manufacturers, and remaining auto-manufacturing jobs should vanish, it's hard to imagine anything replacing them.
When work disappears, city populations don't always decline as fast as you might expect. Detroit, astonishingly, is still the 11th-largest city in the U.S. "If you no longer can sell your property, how can you move elsewhere?" said Robin Boyle, an urban-planning professor at Wayne State University, in a December Associated Press article. But then he answered his own question: "Some people just switch out the lights and leave--property values have gone so low, walking away is no longer such a difficult option."
Perhaps Detroit has reached a tipping point, and will become a ghost town. I'd certainly expect it to shrink faster in the next few years than it has in the past few. But more than likely, many people will stay--those with no means and few obvious prospects elsewhere, those with close family ties nearby, some number of young professionals and creative types looking to take advantage of the city's low housing prices. Still, as its population density dips further, the city's struggle to provide services and prevent blight across an ever-emptier landscape will only intensify.
Eventually concluding:
Finally, we need to be clear that ultimately, we can't stop the decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try. Places like Pittsburgh have shown that a city can stay vibrant as it shrinks, by redeveloping its core to attract young professionals and creative types, and by cultivating high-growth services and industries. And in limited ways, we can help faltering cities to manage their decline better, and to sustain better lives for the people who stay in them.
But different eras favor different places, along with the industries and lifestyles those places embody. Band-Aids and bailouts cannot change that. Neither auto-company rescue packages nor policies designed to artificially prop up housing prices will position the country for renewed growth, at least not of the sustainable variety. We need to let demand for the key products and lifestyles of the old order fall, and begin building a new economy, based on a new geography.
It looks like the outrageous view (with which I concur) regarding Detroit -- that it is a Lost Cause and must be allowed to die -- is moving from the outskirts of crankdom to the mainstream. Even the blue-haired old warhorse Time magazine has a slideshow going on called, Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline. Maybe it is still possible for the world to face facts. Car Crazies: As I write this, the Gummit has pretty much taken over General Motors and Chrysler. There's not much to say about this other than it's effectively the end of these companies. The only hope we can have at this point is that they don't end up being taxpayer supported dead weights in the economy for the rest of our lives. The plan is that Chrysler either becomes Fiat's problem or it goes in the dumpster. GM is more scary. I can easily see it running on forever, pursuing whatever goals the utopian campaign contributors and self-entitled lobbyists value, instead of getting off the taxpayers back. Electric cars and free day care for all workers first, self-sufficiency and customer focus last -- all financed by you.
Aside: How smart does Ford now look for not taking bailout money? If I were younger and willing to take more risk in my investments, I might throw some money at Ford stock now. Their two domestic rivals just became eunuchs. They have to benefit from that, don't they?
For an insightful recap of how the former Big 3 got to where they are, I suggest another article from The Atlantic from back in December. It starts off explaining how the initial government loans were dependant on the companies becoming viable by March 31, 2009. To which the author says:
There is no way that the auto companies will be financially viable by March 31st. They haven't been financially viable for 25 years.
We have a winner. Although it wasn't really a long shot, was it? The entire article is good, but here are the two money paragraphs:
In the early 1950s, for various reasons Detroit developed a cozy three-way oligopoly. The UAW developed a cozy monopoly on supplying labor service to that oligopoly. In some ways, the UAW helped sustain that oligopoly. If you're a big company whose quality suffers, you have problems. But if you have a union making sure that labor quality cannot vary across the industry, you don't need to worry that your competitors will make a better car. Detroit competed on styling and power, not reliability or price.
During those years of oligopoly, the Big Three's first loyalty (after their loyalty to management) was loyalty to the union. The worst thing that could happen to a Big Three manager was a strike. Making a car that is reliable is only partly a matter of engineering; it's mostly a matter of extremely tight control over the assembly process. That tight control is necessarily less pleasing to the workers than looser rules. The unions could severely hurt a company with a strike. Whereas the customers? The customers could only go to another company where the same union was negotiating the same loose work rules.
And we have another winner. Thanks for playing, Rick Wagoner; you get a multi-million dollar payoff and copy of the Carpocalypse home game.
More recently a NY Times op-ed from David Brooks, which begins:
Some companies are in the steel business, some are in the cookie business, but General Motors is in the restructuring business. For 30 years, G.M. has been restructuring itself toward long-term viability.
For all these years, G.M.'s market share has endured a long, steady slide. But this has not stopped the waves of restructuring. The PowerPoints have flowed, and always there has been the promise that with just one more cost-cutting push, sustainability nirvana will be at hand.
There are many experts who think that the whole restructuring strategy is misbegotten. These experts think that costs are not the real problem. The real problem is the product. The cars are not good enough. The management is insular. The reputation is fatally damaged.
But if you are in the restructuring business, you can't let these stray thoughts get in the way of your restructuring. After all, restructuring is your life. Restructuring is forever. Restructuring is like what dieting is for many of us: You think about it every day. You believe it's about to work. Nothing really changes.
Here's what's interesting about that quote. Replace "G.M." with "Detroit", "restructuring" with "rebuilding", and "cars" with "quality of life" and you still have an accurate assessment. Coincidence? Travel Rewind: How We Do It in New York (2005): (In keeping with the NYC theme, here is the second of two Manhattan trip reports from a few years back.)
I stepped out of Penn Station, lugging my overstuffed bags in that sweaty, roasting city heat that radiates as much from the pavement as the sun, and lodged myself in a depressingly long line at the cab stand. The line was populated by idiots who had managed to snake themselves around in such a way that they ere strung across one of the busiest sidewalks in Manhattan. The equally idiotic cab attendant did nothing to correct this. In time, a couple of women with extraordinarily loud voices began shouting at the idiots, informing them that they were in fact idiots and instructing them in how they should line up out along the side of the street out of the way of pedestrians, noting that "this is how we do it in New York!"
The idiots just ignored the obnoxious women which, apparently, is also how we do it in New York.
Serendipitously, the New York equivalent of a rickshaw appeared -- by that I mean one of industrial strength tricycles -- with the driver soliciting passengers. He was working hard on an older couple in the cab line who were clearly afraid of a scam and were averting there eyes as if he was some sort of panhandler. I attracted his attention with a sharp "Yo!" (which is how we do it in New York), and climbed aboard with my frighteningly heavy bags.
For a ride of just a few blocks, this probably cost me double what a cabbie would charge. But having had the experience, let me just say you could ride no roller coaster more bloodcurdling than barrel-assing through midtown traffic in the back of an industrial strength tricycle. You remember that video game, Frogger -- the one that was featured in that episode of Seinfeld? Well, I was living it. Remarkably, we suffered only one minor collision with a parked delivery truck that didn't even cause my driver to slow down, although he did offer a genial wave of apology from afar. I count myself lucky that we didn't leave a path of mangled cars and bloody limbs in our wake. But it sure beat waiting twenty minutes for a cab. It is now my new favorite way to get around for short distances.
The Times Square Hilton (a good spot; actual hotel size rooms instead of the usual storage-locker-with-a-bed) did not have my room ready -- no surprise at 1:30pm, so I dropped my bags and hit the streets. Did I mention that it was hot? It would in fact get even hotter over the next couple of days, so I was actually lucky to be on my feet on the coolest day of my stay, the one day the temp didn't cross into the mid-90s.
As Captain Obvious might say, the Times Square Hilton is located in Times Square -- technically half a block East -- so I had but to click my heels three times and find myself at Broadway and 42nd street, the metaphorical center of the universe.
Here in Ann Arbor, we set aside a few days in the summer months for something called Art Fair. The streets are closed off and throngs of people come from all points to wander around in confusion, pay outrageous prices for crafty stuff that approximates art, and alternately suffer through sweltering heat and torrential thunderstorms. In return for this they get to spend a day in Ann Arbor which, quite frankly, is probably worth it. During this time, the city is packed to the gills; you cannot drive anywhere and walking times are tripled at best. When I first came out here I would attend regularly, now I avoid it like the plague. It is just too frustrating to get stuck behind these people when trying to get anywhere.
I told you all that for background. You see, the crowd on a typical day in Times Square is about the same, yet for some reason, instead of driving me up a wall, I find the Times Square crowds exhilarating. Maybe it's because as a visitor I don't have to take them too seriously. Maybe it's because, as opposed to special event crowds, these folks are purposefully dodging stragglers and teasing traffic as if it were second nature; crowds are just another aspect of existence instead of an avoidable nuisance. It's the same way with cars. These guys are constantly on their horns to absolutely no end. A cabbie pulls out slightly into traffic interrupting the flow, other drivers honk virulently at him. He pays no attention, just continues negotiating with his potential fare. Eventually the fare gets in and he pulls out into traffic unfazed while the cars previously honking just slip back into the flow without any display of anger by the discommoded drivers. Just a very strange and fascinating juxtaposition of hostility and serendipity.
Strolling down 42nd street, I made stops at a couple of tourist landmarks. Grand Central Terminal for one, with its classic architecture. It's easy to see why "under the clock" has the acceptance of locals as the location everyone knows when you need to meet up with someone. In contrast, the Chrysler Building is pure and paradigmatic art deco. Why don't they go to that kind of trouble in buildings construction anymore? Take some pride, why don't cha?
A left on Lexington to 53rd and another left down just past 5th brings you to the still relatively new Museum of Modern Art. The first thing you notice about MoMA is how expensive it is. Yeah, in the great scheme of things, $20 for an adult ticket is not a big deal, but it's a bit of sticker shock for regular museum goers. And another thing, most museums have mediocre cafeterias attached with marginally overpriced fare. While the MoMA has a couple of cafeterias (I can't speak to their quality), it also has a full-service hyper-stylish restaurant called The Modern, which is deadly expensive. The good news is that both the restaurant and museum are easily worth the cost.
As for The Modern, I'll let New York magazine describe it. As for The MoMA, it is a remarkably cool place. Spacious, multi-leveled, and structured such that there seems to be no direct plan for you to walk from points A to B to C in a certain order; the MoMA is a great museum for discoveries. The galleries run the gamut from movie posters (including much anime), to surprisingly original and unconventional sculpture. Most modern art, especially painting, leaves me cold, but MoMA has the best of it including plenty of classics: Van Gogh's Starry Night and Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, assorted Hopper's, etc. (Is it wrong to call modern art classic?) MoMA is a top notch place to spend an afternoon. I could spend a weekend just going back and forth between MoMA and The Metropolitan Museum, which would probably bore the living daylights out of most folks.
The next day was reserved for lower Manhattan. The first step in this journey was to be my first ride on the subway. A trivial exercise for the most part. The famous subway tokens are history; you now pay $2 for a little card that has a magnetic strip that you slide through a reader to enter (no more turnstile jumping). It works with less than perfect consistency. The routes are reasonably well presented, but you have to watch out for the express vs. local distinction. I got on an express by accident and ended up two stops further than I wanted to be.
Riding an urban train is pretty much the same everywhere -- whether it is the subway, or the "El" in Chicago, or the DC metro. You may get a seat, or you may have to stand next to an odd smelling person; your train will likely be on time, but there are occasional delays; you can't understand a word the conductor says over the PA system so you have to be aware of what the next stop is.
The NY subway is not as dirty or graffiti laden as I expected, but the cars are all run-down and beat to hell. It serves its purpose as a relatively inexpensive and reliable foot saver, but it is not the same quality league as the DC Metro, never mind the Toronto underground. Manhattan is a big island, though, and for the explorer it's probably the best and, depending on traffic, quickest way to cover large distances. This is how we do it in New York.
The subway dropped me off in Greenwich Village, West Village specifically, a few blocks from NYU. The Village consists of streets full of little shops, restaurants, art galleries; in many ways it reminded me of downtown Ann Arbor, although much larger of course. It was mid-morning and the various stores were just getting started, it seemed a decent place for a stroll and I'm sure there were a ton of good nice spots to eat, but I had a lot of ground to cover so I paused only for a few minutes in a shady spot in Washington Square Park with a bottle of water (did I mention how hot it was?).
Next up, a dash eastward and then south on Mott street, which took me through Little Italy and then into Chinatown. Little Italy, it turns out, doesn't much exist other than as a romantic memory. There are a handful of standard Italian restaurants, but they are surrounded by Chinatown sprawl. This is not surprising; there's very little left of the great Italian immigration of the early 20th century to assimilate. There's no mass population of Italians that have not become completely Americanized. Little Italy has outlived its purpose.
Chinatown, in contrast just explodes with color and smells. Mott Street was like a great outdoor farmers market; it was a treat for the nose that's for sure. And for the eyes; vibrant primary colors applied in the typical Asian squared-slashing all up and down the street.
Towards the south end of Mott I stopped for lunch at a restaurant called -- and I am not making this up -- Big Wong. Actually, this restaurant is a favorite of Kinky Friedman, renowned mystery writer and lead singer of that great country band, the Texas Jew Boys. I can confirm that it is good cheap eats in that way Chinese restaurants have of plying you with mounds of stuff. Interestingly, at Big Wong, if you wander in on your own and there are no empty tables, they'll just seat with some strangers. Not a typical practice at most places in the U.S. (we like to claim property rights over our tables -- don't tread on me), but nobody bats an eyelash. The folks I was plopped down with never even acknowledged me or broke their Chinese dialog, I returned the favor. Tasty stuff, good barbeque duck, fast service -- ace for a quick lunch. One shortcoming: no t-shirts. I would have paid top dollar for a "Big Wong -- Chinatown, NYC" t-shirt. I think the Big Wong himself, if he exists, is missing out here.
Back on my horse, now heading for points south, into the financial district, which is much livelier than I had expected. Lots little restaurants and bars, some blocked off streets for the sake of shopping; although I understand that after dark things get really quiet. One of the more curious sites is Trinity Church. Smack in the middle of these enormous skyscrapers stands this beautiful gothic church, you can't help being struck by the contrast.
Strangely, Trinity church, and the entire financial district for the most part, was infested with clowns. I don't mean regular people behavior stupidly; I mean people dressed like circus clowns. And, as you might expect, they were handing out pamphlets. But I confess I didn't expect them to be pamphlets for the Billy Graham Crusade. Now, as all right thinking people know, Clowns Are Evil and if I were Billy Graham, I would not want my crusade associated with them. This is not how we do it in New York.
About the only place in the area that was clown free was Ground Zero. Not only is it clown free, but it's also street vendor free, and generally garden variety New York moron free. At the moment, ground zero is a big hole in the ground surrounded by a tall hurricane fence. There is not much to see, which is as you'd expect. There are a couple of memorial plaques and indicators. It was reasonably crowded with folks taking snaps of themselves and their friends against the fence. There is much hubbub about what should eventually stand in that spot. Personally, I'd be grateful if they just put up a plaque and made it a clown/vendor/moron free zone for all time.
Back up in Midtown, I met up with Miss Kate and HRH Miss Anna who had just fought the traffic up from DC. We set to trolling midtown for an appropriate dinner place and settled on St Andrew's. Great spot -- under the radar of any guide or listing I've ever read, but quite yummy.
The following day started with a visit to the trendy world of NOHO. Technically part of the East Village area, NOHO (NOrth of HOuston street) has robbed a good deal of boutique shopping juice from the West Village. Miss Anna is currently mad for vintage clothing stores, so that's where we headed. It is a very strange sensation to see these crappy, previously-worn '70s t-shirts (that I remember from the first time around) and old canvas sneakers suddenly becoming stylish, although I have to admit there is a certain campy appeal to them. There were racks of bell-bottoms and hip-huggers. Remember the brass bendable bracelets engraved with Viet Nam era POWs? I do, from junior high. The modern version is the colored wristbands that started with Livestrong. Are these things on a timer or something? Let's see, that means the 80s are up next -- pink power ties, leg warmers, suspenders, cropped jeans...please, God, spare us the parachute pants. Miss Anna eventually bonded with Yellow Rat Bastard, sort of faux-vintage-skater-style clothing. Confirmed: I am old.
Back on the subway. Here's a perfect NYC moment. We're waiting for the train when a man and his daughter ask if they could see our subway map. Sure. Conversation ensues.
"Are you from here?"
"No," replies Kate, "We're from Washington DC. How about you?"
"No," replies the daughter.
"Oh, where are you from?" queries Kate.
"The Upper West Side."
Apparently in the Village the Upper West Side is as not "here" as Washington DC.
Next stop, a long stroll through Central Park. Despite the heat, there are people everywhere, all doing the pastoral things that you would never expect to do in the middle of the city -- playing volleyball, walking the dogs, having ice cream. We managed to end up on a path that led us to the boathouse section, a spot I had never been before. A very hangable place. A cooler day and I would have been tempted to rent a boat. Instead we continued west, stopping at all the little pond lookouts and eventually exiting the park in...The Upper West Side.
Since our dinner reservations weren't until late, we stopped for a quick bite to eat at another fine restaurant, Isabella's. It is truly amazing how many good restaurants there are in NYC. Like most visitors, I check out the guidebooks for ideas, but I've never been disappointed by just stopping when I got hungry, looking around and picking a spot that looks promising.
Another thing about dining in NYC is that, despite the reputation, it's not really any more expensive than other places. NYC is theoretically one of the most expensive places in the world, but in my experience, that is confined to two things: shelter and parking. Hotel rates and real estate are unspeakably high. Parking is almost certainly prohibitive, but you'd have to be nuts to be a regular driver in this place. Beyond that, stuff is about the same cost as anywhere else as far as I can see. In fact, restaurants may be in over supply considering there was a promotion going on throughout the city for a three course, prix fixe lunch for $20.12 (in honor of the now lost bid for the 2012 Olympics),which included some places with classy and trendy reputations. [update -- more than a few $20 cocktails later, I have revised this evaluation]
Oh, and Broadway shows are monstrously expensive. Yeah, I know there are all sorts of tricks -- waiting in line for last minute cancellations and cast tickets and so forth -- that would be fine if I lived nearby and could check every night. The TKS booth is OK provided you are not after one of the top shows in town. But if you only get a couple of chances to see a show each year and you have to do it on a limited schedule, you don't want obstructed views and you need certainty. To get that, as Doyle Brunson might say, you're going to have to pay the man off. You'll have to buy marked-up after-market tickets. If things go wrong, you can't just whine for a few minutes (and maybe publish a cathartic rant on the web) and get on with your life. You have to get it right. Paying the man off for a bad play can approximate the loss of a small non-essential extremity.
Well, for ace seats to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels we had to pay man off. And I'm glad we did. Not only are my limbs intact, but I can't think of a more entertaining way to spend an evening. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels deserves a separate review, and it will get it, but let me summarize that it is a raucous, guffaw-laden, high-energy affair that contains some truly great songs and brilliant performances. Spamalot won the Tony this year, but it's hard for me to imagine it was more fun than Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I'd verify that in person if the price for Spamalot tickets would dip below the cost of a small SUV.
One last meal, this time at Bistro Du Vent, the latest restaurant from Mario Batali, who you might recognize if you watch the Food Channel. Pretty solid French-ish fare, no complaints really, other than I expected a bit more from a renown celebrity chef. But like I said, there are great restaurants on every corner in NYC. [update - Bistro Du Vent closed after 15 months. Supposedly it had something to do with employees being very naughty after hours. - dam]
The next day brought an unexpectedly crowded drive back to the DC area (Baltimore specifically) from hence I'd fly back home. I think I'm finally getting a grip on how to stay on top of the Big Apple. Great show. Didn't wear through the soles of my shoes trying to get around. Maybe I got lucky this time. Or maybe I'm starting to figure out how we do it in New York. Travel Rewind: A New York Minute (2004): (In keeping with the NYC theme, here is the first of two Manhattan trip reports from a few years back. This was one of my very early trips to The Apple.)
A man is standing on 55th street between 7th and Broadway staring forlornly into a building that is clearly going to be a hotel someday, once they fill the place with furniture and windows and other such niceties. On the sidewalk next to him are two pieces of carry-on luggage. People are passing by without giving him a second glance in that manic way New Yorkers have. He is greatly exorcised and is talking very fervently on his cell phone, loud enough to be heard over the New York rush hour traffic. Suddenly one of the the pedestrians sneaks up behind him and yanks down the man's pants then runs off cackling with glee.
I am that man and that is actually how my NYC trip started, except for being pantsed -- that was metaphorical.
But let me start at the beginning.
We start in DC where I have a short, mid-week business conference. Rather than dash there and back, I decided to extend the trip for an extra long weekend. And rather than hang out in the DC area, where I have spent more time than gerrymandered congressman, I figured it would be a good opportunity to make a run up to The Apple. Rather than drive or fly, this time I rode the rails.
The Acela Express