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 runs numerous times daily from DC to Boston and back, with a few stops along the way including Penn Station in NYC. Having taken this train I can think of no way in which this is not superior to flying for a short trip. Not even time-wise. Flying from DC to NYC you'll want to be at least an hour ahead of time to the airport. Then probably an hour and 15 minutes on the plane once you figure in loading and unloading and sitting on the tarmac. Then another 45 minute cab ride from JFK or LaGuardia to your hotel in New York. Figure three hours if nothing goes wrong.
The Acela Express takes about three hours of travel time. You get to the departure station maybe 10 minutes ahead of time and you have a ten minute cab from Penn Station to your hotel. Do the math.
Then consider the following:
• No security line or baggage check
• Plenty of arm and leg room
• Plenty of carry-on space
• AC outlets for your phone or laptop
• About 90 decibels less noise (you can carry on a normal conversation)
• A cafe car where you can get food and drink at will
• More comfortable seats, bigger tray tables, and foot rests
• No seat belts and no restrictions on leaving your seat
• No restrictions on or the use of portable electronic devices
• Plenty of bathrooms, with enough space to actually turn around
• Big windows with actual landscapes (although some you wouldn't want to look at)
You would have to have some sort of cerebral dysfunction to prefer flying in those circumstances. I don't know how other rail lines would compare, but when it comes to the Acela Express, Amtrak done good.
Above mentioned cab ride from Penn Station gets me back to where I started, on the street.
I made the reservation with Dream hotel, a new designer/boutique hotel, with the full knowledge that they would have just opened for business when I arrived. As a designer/boutique hotel I knew to expect an entertaining combination of quirks and luxury. As a brand new hotel, I expected there to be service breakdowns. I did not, however, expect to find myself on the street.
To their credit the folks at the Dream hotel were effusively apologetic and unerringly helpful to the point where, despite the snafu, I wouldn't hesitate to give them another try once they are actually open. I had booked the reservation through Travelocity and the general manager of Dream took the time to meet me out on the street and assist me in calling Travelocity and trying to get things cleared up, then hail me a cab to get me to where I had been rebooked.
But here's the issue. Travelocity rebooked me into a Howard Johnson's.
Now, here is the description of Dream from Hotels.com:
Float away on a cloud at Dream - and wake up to an entirely new hotel experience...a mind-enhancing lobby and three separate bars inspired by fashion surrealist David LaChapelle...sleek, modern black floors and gaze up into the vaulted, mirrored ceiling reflecting blown glass flames sitting atop decorative columns...an antique bar serve as a welcoming concierge desk and cappuccino bar...1940's style seating and hand-carved lion heads greet guests upon check-in...the tone throughout the public spaces is at once luscious and austere - intertwining fantasy and luxury. Guests are privy to numerous amenities including, for the first time in any hotel, digital cable provided by Time-Warner (2005)...hundreds of channels and On-demand movies are at your fingertips...aglow in an otherworldly blue light and filled with the most modern gadgets available including such exclusive perks as a wall mounted 37-inch Panasonic Plasma TV and an Apple iPod preloaded with ambient sound and connected to BOSE stereo speakers.
Allow that to sink in. I am in NYC and I have been relocated from a place with the above description to friggin' HoJo's. I will now set myself on fire.
OK. I check into HoJo's because I have an open mind and sometimes budget hotels can have really nice properties in certain cities. Also, because I have seen The Out-of-Towners and I don't want to spend the night sleeping under a rock in Central Park. HoJo's on 51st is not an exception. It is essentially a roadside motel that happens to be in mid-town Manhattan; peeling wallpaper, screaming redneck families in the next room, an unidentifiable liquid covering the elevator floor -- you get the picture. It's the same sort of place I would stay at when I used to drive the length of I-75 to Florida in my youth with little more than $20 in my pocket and I had to stop somewhere in the deep south, usually a place where the over/under on a number of teeth in the proprietor was three. This is what I have in exchange for Dream, with no decrease in price because it is Manhattan and, frankly, if you don't like it there's rock in Central Park with your name on it.
Great Bloody Hell. Back on the phone to Travelocity. After a 30 minute wait on hold, in the lobby because I could not get a signal in my room, I get a response. According to Travelocity, they show I approved of the rebooking. I count to ten, ask the woman if she may have recently arrived from a different dimension because there is simply NO WAY IN THIS UNIVERSE THAT I WOULD APPROVE OF BEING RELOCATED TO HOJO'S IN NYC. You may as well claim that I had a reservation at the Super 8 Motel in Las Vegas. NOT GONNA HAPPEN. This is a world gone mad.
I tell them they need to book me somewhere better. After getting passed around to a couple other Travelocity reps with different titles, but no greater ability to solve the problem, they tell me to book myself somewhere better and check out of HoJo's, but make sure they don't charge Travelocity any kind of minimum fee because Travelocity will charge me, in turn. BASTARDS. They mangle everything up and turn around and tell me to make sure to sort it out without it costing them anything. I repeat: BASTARDS. [[update: to this day I have never again used Travelocity. They remain dead to me over this. - dam]] [[update to the update: Wow. Shortly after posting this I got an email from Travelocity customer service apologizing for this bad experience from way back when and offering me a pretty generous coupon for my trouble. More on this next month, but needless to say, Travelocity is back from the dead and gets my next booking. Just wow.]]
I quickly make for an Internet kiosk and book MYSELF in a room at the nearby Hilton. Why Travelocity couldn't do this for me I don't understand. I'm told they have on occassion made some travel arrangements for people in the past. Meanwhile, I have to behave like I'm about to kill and eat the better portion of the housekeeping staff to get the manager of HoJo's not to charge a one night cancellation fee. What an ass. I worked in the hotel business long enough to know what a load of crap that cancellation fee is. Luckily I also know that in a public place that depends on service, threatening to make a scene is often the only way to get justice.
Finally, I check into the Hilton and can start my weekend in New York. I quickly ditch my bags and hit the street to re-orient myself and grab some dinner. Up 6th to 54th where I dash into Le Parker Meridien, a fine hotel that happens to contain the mysterious Hidden Burger Joint. Completely out of character for the hotel d‚cor and hidden behind a curtain with no indication that it exists is a genuine burger joint. It's the kind of place where the menu consists of Cheeseburger, Hamburger, Fries, Soda, and Beer, scrawled on a little board in front of the cash register. Sadly, I did not see Bill Murray sweating over the grill, but I did have an awfully good cheeseburger and fries.
Back out on the street; it's getting dark. I walk over to Broadway and up to Columbus Circle at the edge of Central Park, then back down to Times Square. And now I am OK. Now I am in New York City.
There are people who are awed by the Grand Canyon; people who are mesmerized by the lush greenery of the tropical rainforest; people who thrill to the sight of the snow-capped Himalayas; people who are enthralled by the barren Mojave. To me, Times Square at night along with the Vegas Strip are the most beautiful sights I've seen. This, no doubt, stems from my deep appreciation of civilization and all its Byzantine complexities and motivations. The lights of Las Vegas are similar, but whereas Vegas is certainly civilization's greatest monument, New York City is its home base.
Now fully acclimated, and with the harrowing events of the late afternoon in their proper place, I ambled back to the Hilton, sat in the wonderfully comfortable Bridges Bar with a Marker's Mark and watched the baseball playoff while writing up the events of the day, which became more comic when described in the past tense.
In some ways I don't consider these articles about my travels as traditional travel writing. Pick up any of the leading travel magazines and you will not read anything about the actual travel, you'll read about the destination. You will get desrcriptive discussions of the "feel" of a place and of the sights and sounds; most travel writing is very impressionistic. Rarely will you get in-depth personalized scoop on hotels and restaurants and museums and shops and attractions. You will almost never get stories about the hassles of getting there or back home.
There are two reasons for this. The big one is space limitations. A magazine writer will have a word count limit and often the best you can do in the allotted space is present an accurate overall impression. The other reason is that travel writing, in many ways, is about fantasy. People who read a piece about the Maldives or Tierra Del Fuego are unlikely to actually go there, but they enjoy the thought of being able to go and what a great adventure it would be. Commentary about annoying layovers, surly hotel employees, unexpectedly closed attractions, or lousy meals do not enhance the sense wonder and fascination in the reader that a good fantasy needs to provide.
Obviously my travel scribblings are not for the fantasy seeker. I do have a penchant for paying outrageous prices for pointlessly luxurious hotels, but apart from that I'm not a big spender. I don't generally go to very exotic or distant places; often, my travels are just extensions of business trips. So what does someone get from my travel writing? My "impression" of a place certainly, but also a sense for what it is like to travel there instead of just be there.
Most people don't travel all that much; once or twice a year and often repeat visits to a familiar destination or for a stay with remote family or friends. Much of the activity of travel is a black box to them. So when a decision is made to go somewhere new and unfamiliar, there is a certain amount of anxiety. What happens if my flight gets cancelled due to bad weather? What do I say to the rental car agent when they try to make me pay for gas up front? How much of a certain attraction can I expect to cover in one day? What do I do if I am standing in the middle of midtown Manhattan and I find out the hotel I booked is not open for business?
Some of this is simple consumer advice and recommended practice: "This Mazzotta character seemed to enjoy [insert experience here], so let's give it a try." Some of it is entertainment: "Can you believe this clown got pantsed by Travelocity?" But for the most part I hope it provides a certain amount of comfort that, when your trip requires more effort and fortitude than your standard stroll-around-and-drink-in-the-beauty travel piece would suggest, you'll realize it's just par for the course and you won't be dismayed or take it in poor humor. It's the yin that goes with the yang of seeing and doing new and interesting things and it is probably the most fundamental aspect of travel. Once you take it to heart only a real disaster can make for a bad trip.
Now after saying all that I have to confess that most of what I have to write about New York City is impressionistic. Somehow, coming away from NYC I can't think of the trip as the sort of chronological series of judgable events that I usually provide.
I continue to be overwhelmed by NYC and that is not something I say lightly. I don't mean that the city intimidates me (I actually find it very inviting); I mean it is just so impressive to be there. You can see NYC a million times on TV (and most people probably have) but being in the midst of it is very different. The sense of activity at any time of the day is amazing. I've been in plenty of busy places in my life but there is something very different about the teeming throngs in NYC--they are incessant. In most other settings such crowds can be maddening, but in NYC their inevitability forces you to just accept. Behavior from other drivers that would warrant a savage middle finger in the Midwest simply don't seem to matter so much because it's just the way it is. Life's tough, get a helmet. I have found that New Yorkers are not especially rude despite their rep. Perhaps this is why.
To recap a few events that stand out for me, let's start with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Excellent: especially notable in the architecture of the place and its focus on clever themes for displaying ancient art. From there a walk through the Upper East Side with stops to appreciate the attempts to bring nature to skyscrapers and to check out the genuine magnificent swank of the Carlyle and vow to see Bobby Short next time.
My friends Kate and Anna were able to drive up from DC and we managed to get over to Rockefeller Center and then out for dinner and a show. Despite a valiant struggle, we could not manage to score tickets to Wicked, which happened to be the hottest show at the moment, so we ended up at Dracula, the Musical. The play itself held no attraction for me, but HRH Miss Anna (age 12) is mad for vampires, and there is very little in this world more fun than going to a musical with Miss Anna. She completely loses herself in the story; jumps at the shocking moments, predicts what's going to happen next -- I love that.
My final moments in NY were filled with a stroll through Central Park and through the Upper West Side past stylish restaurants and little outdoor artists booths and back to Lincoln Center and on home.
All that's left for me of New York City is the blur -- the tumbling through the 24/7 light and sound show, the center of mankind flashing by in a New York minute. There is nothing in NYC you haven't seen or read about but being there makes all the difference.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
The Month That Was - February 2009: Heavy on Florida this month. I went down to the keys for few leisurely days because this winter has been atrocious (pics on SmugMug). A full recounting is below, along with two Florida travel rewinds from years back. I have been light on travel of late and that will probably continue for the first half of the year. I hope to make up for it after half-time.Apart from that, the big accomplishment of the month is getting Apple Pie available for Kindle. It's not a difficult task if you have passable technical skills, it is tedious however. But Business As Usual is coming along more quickly -- if I could get a break from weekend work spill over and doing my father's taxes and other writing I don't want to lose momentum on, I could knock it off fairly quickly.
Both will be priced at $4.84 which Amazon will subsequently discount a few pennies. You pay more than that for a Starbucks. Really, if you have a Kindle, there's no reason not to download. (If you don't have a Kindle, well, the price of the books will be trivial compared to the $359 purchase price so again, no excuse not to purchase.) And, just as I was posting this, I see there is now a free Kindle app for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. So you pod people have no excuse either.
As promised, I'm giving you a break from Detroit bashing this month. But oh how I want to let loose. We'll see how long I can hold my horses.
Up the Amazon
Sour on Apple
Book Look: The Man Who Was Thursday
Book Look: Honest Signals
Book Look: Some Buried Caesar
Flick Check: Bringing Out the Dead
Flick Check: Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
Keys to My Heart
Travel Rewind: Babylon on the Make
Travel Rewind: The Gold-Plated Swamp Up the Amazon: Speaking of Amazon, I am very close to buy some stock in it. I buy virtually everything from them, and not just books. It's my go to service for music downloads. I picked up a new el cheapo Timex Ironman watch because I wanted something with a lap timer and while there were a lot of places I could have bought from, of the cheapest prices Amazon was the only one that didn't strike me as potentially fly-by-night -- that's typical. I have in the past purchased everything from wi-fi routers to fruit baskets to bathing suits to USB hubs to a road bike. My standard purchasing habits now consist of finding something I want in a brick and motor store to make sure it has tactile validity, then ordering it on Amazon. I even track things I'm interested in by keeping a wish list going and watching for price drops. They have done an amazing job of consolidating retailers on their web site -- going forward in the world on online retail, there will be Amazon, and a few niche retailers (Zappos, NewEgg), and that's all. When retail push comes to shove, Amazon will likely be the last one standing.
(Begging: if you read about something here that you would like to buy, please click through the link on the left panel. I get a tiny, tiny little commission if you do.) Sour on Apple: In contrast, I'm really down on Apple. iTunes has driven me crazy more often than I can count. It constantly shows songs from the same album as being in separate albums of the same name. The interface is atrocious. Last time I tried to buy something from the iTunes music store I couldn't figure out whether it was DRM'd or not so I just bought from Amazon where nothing is DRM'd. My experience with my iBook was less that positive. My little 2 gig iPod has been fine, and in fact, has taken a fair amount of abuse, but it was hell trying to find an armband for it since it's a long lost model, I see no particular advantage to the wheel interface, and there's no FM so I can't listen to the football games at the gym during workouts -- nothing terrible, nothing special either. I have Safari on the PC and use it occasionally to test page rendering, but I can't have it auto-update without being constantly asked whether I want other Apple software which I don't care about. Plus, all that pretty gear they market is ludicrously expensive. I think the second age of Apple -- which was built on the newness of the iPod (under constant pressure now -- I like Zunes, but the new Sony Walkmans are slick as hell) and iTunes (bettered by Amazon) and the luxo-geek appeal of their gear (one word: recession) -- is over. Book Look: The Man Who Was Thursday: Let me start by recommending Librivox.org, where you can download public domain audiobooks. Yes, that's right -- free audiobooks. Virtually all the works available are old, because they need to be out of copyright -- 1930-ish is about as contemporary as they get. But that's OK, it's good for you to realize that the world you live in is nothing all that new. The readings are all done by kindhearted volunteers, but the ones I've heard are all very polished. They are in .mp3 format so you can listen on you
From Librivox I downloaded The Man Who Was Thursday an oddly spiritual classic from 1908 by G.K. Chesterson. It starts out as if it were going to be a standard mystery -- a Scotland Yard operative makes contact with an anarchist (the terrorist sect of the day) and insinuates himself in what appears to be some sort of high level Anarchist organization.
Things then start to get peculiar. A long, and at times quite comic, pursuit of the leader of the anarchists reveals enemies to actually be friends. The final chase of the anarchist leader takes the story into the realm of the surreal, eventually revealing the anarchist leader to also be the leader of his pursuers, with the apparent intent to have him symbolize God. Allegory upon allegory.
Written in vivid Edwardian prose, with a heavy dose of alliteration, The Man Who Was Thursday ends up resembling something like an Arthurian adventure, wherein a group of stalwarts pursue what seems to be a concrete result and end up with a spiritual elevation. A strange, thoughtful, imaginative story and a rewarding read.
Or a rewarding listen in my case. Book Look: Honest Signals: I don't read much non-fiction, but this one was fascinating, if a little dry.
This is a scholarly, yet accessible, book about the genesis and continuance of social signaling -- speech inflections, eye contact, body language in general -- and how it can be used to predict all sorts of things from bluffing at the poker table to anticipating success and failure in a business setting. These signals are unconscious, and as such they are referred to as "honest" in that you can't even fool yourself into not betraying the truth. (At least, it is extremely difficult to do so.) Honest Signals is concerned primarily with how much this unconscious behavior affects our social interactions and how much can be predicted from it.
The folks behind Honest Signals developed a device called a sociometer that is worn like a badge and provides telemetric information about signaling behavior. Using this they were able to find strong and predictable correlations between the signals and human behavior in many sorts of social situations. In fact, they track this signaling back through primates and other species of animals to reveal how it can inform some very complex behaviors. If there is a shortcoming to the book, it's that they don't go into detail about what the signals actually are and how to spot them. I'm glad to know there is a way to spot bluffers at the poker table or determine the roles being played in a group setting, but tell me what it is!!
This topic is part of what is turning out to be the game changing scientific story of our lifetime: discovering how much of what we do and think and feel is biologically based, and thus, the result of evolutionary pressures. This is a huge change from when I was younger and we took as gospel the notion that a human being pretty much started as a blank slate and developed traits as a result of cultural influence and Freudian psychology and heroic free will. Just the other day I was having a conversation with some friends who mentioned that their experience raising children had caused them to see behavioral development as vastly more nature than nurture. The times they are a changin'.
If you have an abiding interest in this subject, Honest Signals is a probably worth the read. But don't expect to come out of it with much practical knowledge. If your interest is more casual, you can get what you need from a google search on the topic for an overview Book Look: Some Buried Caesar: First, a word about mystery series. I have read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon. I believe I have read all of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels. I was working my way through John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, but at some point it got too violent. Same for McDonald's and McGee's spiritual successors, Randy Wayne White and Doc Ford. Likewise, I have covered most of the Fleming James Bond books. So I am no stranger to getting attached to well written thriller series (because man does not live by Nabokov alone). Now, perhaps inevitably, the new obsession shall be Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. I feel a mutli-year project coming on.
Some Buried Caesar is the story of a set of generally feckless and wealthy upstate New Yorkers getting themselves all worked up over cattle to the point of murder. Of course, that is less important than the portrayal of Nero Wolfe and, even moreso, his personal assistant, strong right arm, and wise-cracking narrator, Archie Goodwin.
Nero Wolfe made his first appearance in 1934 and soldiered on through 30-plus novels and nearly 40 shorter works until author Rex Stout's death 1975 (with a couple of posthumous releases a decade later). Wolfe is old school: genius-but-eccentric detective, practical and admiring assistant, and a big dramatic summation in the end. Holmes/Watson, Poirot/Hastings, and Wolfe/Goodwin use the same framework. But Wolfe is not a pie-in-the-sky do-gooder. His work is definitely not its own reward. He will keep his nose out of anything including murder, unless he has a paying client -- and he can be quite clever and manipulative in acquiring one. And Archie Goodwin has more personality than any other detective-foil, often being the true face of the manuscript. This pair is a delight.
I have no intention of reading all the novels. I picked Some Buried Caesar from a website recommendation, and next up will be The Golden Spiders, but I will NOT allow myself to read more than 10 of these. I just don't have enough time left on earth to get obsessed. I don't believe it is necessary to read them in order. I asked Metafilter for which ones to read (results) and I'll likely follow their advice in some form. I'm sure I'll be commenting more on Wolfe, Goodwin, and Stout as time goes on. Flick Check: Bringing Out the Dead: A disappointment. Scorcese directed from a Paul Schrader script so we shoulda had a contender, but it falls flat. This is the story of an EMT in Manhattan who is slowly going crazy from all the chaos and death that surrounds him. It fails on numerous levels and in fact might be the worst movie Scorcese has made. Among the problems are:
• Manhattan is portrayed as if it were still the unmitigated disaster that it was back in the Taxi Driver days. Rings untrue.
• The characters are simply not realistic, they may have been intended to be surreal but that doesn't jibe with the gritty, realistic tone.
• The lead character is haunted by the memory of a homeless girl he could not save and he feels responsible for her death. Lamest clich‚ ever.
• The biggest problem is the lack of dramatization. In Taxi Driver we knew DeNiro was sliding into madness because we saw it. In Bringing Out the Dead we know Nic Cage is going crazy because he tells us.
I first heard of Bringing Out the Dead a year or so ago, even though it came out in 1999. I wondered how a Scorcese film could have gotten out without my notice. It turns out it was no harm done. Marty brought out a dead one this time. Flick Check: Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay: Why is it there are some puerile, raunchy gagfests that I can't stand (Something About Mary) and some I think are tremendous (Superbad)? Whatever it is Harold and Kumar Escape... is one of the good ones. It's truly silly to try to do a review of such a film; anybody can guess what it's about. It picks up where the first one left off with H & K on their way to Amsterdam where they intend to smoke more weed than anyone in the history of the known universe. Thanks to Kumar's uncompromising irresponsibility they end up arrested and tossed in Guantanamo, from which they escape and journey through the Deep South to get to Texas where they believe they will find help. Along the way they have various asinine encounters with assorted cliched rubes and authority figures, including George W. Bush.
Aside: I had reached the point where GWB parodies really got under my skin. It was like being forced to watch an endless litany of Michael Bay movies: the same thing over and over, as if it were some sort of obligation. Otherwise respectable artistic works all seemed to have a perfunctory snark angle about GWB. They ceased to be funny or witty or sharp, but people kept doing it because they felt they were doing the world a social service. Well, to paraphrase Woody Allen, if you want to do the world a service, write funnier jokes. Anyway, the one in this movie was kinda cute and fun.
None of that explains why I liked it, though, so let's see: John Cho and Kal Penn (H & K) are fine comic actors; the pacing was just shy of frenetic; H & K were never made to be stupid losers, just swamped by events; parodies and cartoonish villains were not drawn in anger or hostility, just for comic purpose; there was actually a nice human subplot with Kumar reconnecting with a lost love (excellent work by Kal Penn) -- that's about it, nothing extraordinary. Nothing to explain why I would like this and not other raunchfests. Maybe the writing by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg (same team as H & K Go to White Castle) is just exceptionally skilled. Who knows? But I was glad to hear they are churning out a third screenplay. Cool. Keys to My Heart: (As usual, pics are up on SmugMug. Lots of alligators and birds in this set.)
One of the single most troublesome qualities I have is the inability to fall asleep when I need to. Before any important event and nearly all unfamiliar situations, I find that I tend to lie awake until about an hour before the alarm goes off. In some instances where the lack of sleep itself is the issue, I can lie awake at night wondering why it is I lie awake at night.
I'm choosing my words carefully because I don't think is it apprehension that causes it. If I am apprehensive, I certainly will lie awake, but it doesn't have to be anything I'm apprehensive about. To wit, I had a 6:30 AM flight down to Ft. Lauderdale. If there is anything I would not be apprehensive about it would be flying. It's not a new experience. I know the drill. I was all packed and ready. I needed only to rise at 4, get dressed, grab my bags, and leave.
Yet here I was looking at the clock at 3AM, knowing that I have essentially pulled an unwanted all-nighter.
So the day's travel -- park and fly at DTW (with an early morning slice of quiche), plane change in Charlotte (with a Jamba Juice), renting the car and driving from Ft. Lauderdale to Key Largo (way to many toll booths), a bite of road food (somewhere), get checked in to the Ramada -- was all done with swollen eyes and blurry vision. The best effort I could muster was to get down to the pool and sit out for a while in the late afternoon then scarf down some conch cerviche and a beer and go to sleep. So much for day 1.
I slept wonderfully that first night, got up late, hopped in the white Dodge Avenger rental and made for the river of grass, where I stopped at the Shark Valley station of Everglades National Park. I almost turned back; there was an enormous wait to get in the park due to their parking lot being full. A strange experience -- I have never encountered a wait like that at a National Park before, and I've been to a few. Scuttlebutt is that with everyone scrimping and saving, the parks are looked at as a good budget destination. They are. Fortunately I was able to park along the highway just outside the park and walk in.
To the casual tourist, the point of the Everglades is alligators, and that's what you get at Shark Valley. Hundreds of them. Roaming free. Lying about without a hint of fear or notice that homo sapiens is walking among them. You get so acclimated to them that you don't think twice about walking within a few feet a 13-footer laying on the paved roadway. The only reaction you will get is a stare from a dead-eye for a few seconds, then you are ignored once again.
The main loop though Shark Valley is a fifteen mile paved road. It is a popular biking route, and you can rent bikes right there (although I didn't notice this until I was leaving). You could walk it too I suppose, but there is a fine tram service the runs the loop and is narrated by some excellent guides. At one point the tram stops and the guide walks out into the swamp, inviting others to come. Of the maybe forty people on the tram, three actually followed. I was one. Thank God for gore-tex day hikers. I would have expected to sink knee deep in muck, but he water itself is crystal clear only about ankle deep. Beneath that is a very thin layer of settled muck. And beneath that is some very precarious limestone -- uneven and slightly slippery, it's all about balance if you want to avoid a youtube moment, but it is very solid footing.
The 'glades are not exceptionally picturesque. There are no gnarled, moss-covered trees casting eerie shadows, like you get in the Georgia and Carolina swamps. In fact, I wouldn't suggest this place for a Hollywood swamp. It is, as the phrase goes, a river of grass with pockets of sediments formed into little islands, just barely high enough to support impenetrably dense shrubbery and bits of fauna. Apart from that it's pretty much all sawgrass and shallow open sections punctuated with gator holes.
And fish -- tons of fish. And big birds and turtles to feed on them. The place is just teeming with life -- so many alligators I have to wonder if they aren't feeding on each other. It's also a birders paradise; half the folks on my tram were binocular-wielding bird spotters. There are enormous cranes of all shapes and sizes and colors. You see the mother gator protecting her little babies, and the birds feeding their young. It the kind of stuff you figure they must spend days to get on film for the wildlife shows. And none of this is Disney. The gators don't show any interest in the people but when you walk within a few feet of a 12-foot gator you should be very aware of what end of the food chain you occupy. I'm pleasantly surprised that such an activity is allowed in our world of airbags and bicycle helmets.
At the midway point on the trail is an observation tower from which you get a 360 degree view for miles around. Shark Valley is a great all-round experience. Here's how I would do it in the future. Rent a bike and ride behind the tram, since it stops wherever they spot something interesting. Bring a picnic lunch and hang out by the observation tower at lunch time. That'd be about perfect. I continue to be amazed at the National Park System and all the opportunities it provides.
Day 3 began with a trip about 2/3rds down the Keys for Bahia Honda State Park. Rumored to have one of the few nice beaches in the Keys (the Keys are very short on good beaches). It actually has a fairly narrow beach that is currently covered with some sort of ugly brown nettles a foot-and-a-half thick washed up on the shore. It's not dangerous or icky, just ugly. The water is clear but the undergrowth comes in about 25 feet off shore. It's fair for splashing around and maybe a bit snorkeling, but that's it.
Which is not to say the park isn't worth a visit. For all its beachy shortcomings it's a very pleasant place. You can rent a kayak and paddle the entire circumference of the key (although high winds prevented that the day of my visit). There are birds wandering the grounds and a tangled brushy area that contains about a half dozen big-ass iguanas trolling around, climbing the trees and such. The whole park is framed by the old Bahia Honda Bridge, which is now a walkway to a scenic outlook from which, if the water is clear, you can supposedly see sharks (I didn't).
But I did lie in the sun and read and swim and be all summery with myself for a couple of hours. Very much needed after weeks in the evil northern winter. Then, since I was 2/3rds of the way there, I decided to make the short drive all the way to Key West.
The thing is, there is no short drive to Key West. No matter how close you think you are, you are at least an hour away. Although it is quite lovely in many places, crawling along Route 1 into Key West is one of most frustrating drives you can take. The speed limit drops to 35 and even if it didn't, it's one lane -- no passing; you will always get stuck behind the slowest common denominator. You read the mile markers as they fall at a snail's pace, and your goal always seems just out of reach.
I finally made it into Key West with enough spare time to snag a burger and a beer on Duval St. before a walk down to Mallory Square for the sunset. Key West remains Key West, good natured revelers left and right, street performers hamming it up for the touristas, all the gaff-rigged schooners loaded down passengers for sunset, their square rigs silhouetted against the blinding sun. About perfect: a just reward for making the deadly tedious drive across the Keys.
On my last day I was once again going to try for a kayak tour but, once again, the wind wound up too high and no one would rent to me. Florida let me walk among gargantuan primordial predators but would let me take a kayak out in the wind. Go figure. So I did something I almost never do on my trips: nothing. I spent the better part of the morning and afternoon in the sun just reading. I didn't give in to the temptations to do a snorkel trip or drive up to Biscayne Bay. I even took a brief nap. I got slightly sunburnt and I certainly made up for any lost sleep. I also healed up a bit -- it's amazing how many minor aches and pains ease up after three days of pretty much complete inactivity.
The only effort I made was to drive off to the legendary Alabama Jack's for a seafood platter. Alabama Jack's is situated just beyond a tool booth on the Card Sound Rd. so in essence you pay a buck to get through the toll booth, stop almost immediately for dinner, then pay another buck to get back. Hmmm. Not only that Alabama Jack's seafood, like just about all the seafood outside the hoity-toity restaurants, is battered or breaded and fried. I'm not a big fan of that, but 'Bama Jack did it about as good as can be expected. The conch fritters were top notch and tasty. 'Bama Jacks is situated right on the water; open air (they close shortly after dark when the 'skeeters get active); filled with fishing ephemera; you sit on plastic white chairs that they probably got for 1.99 each at the local swap meet -- that kind of place, yet the crowd was not rednecky at all; lots of oldsters and locals. Recommended.
And that was that. Back in my hotel room the TV showed record cold and snow waiting for me up north. Can I have one more day? Just one more day please... Travel Rewind: Babylon on the Make (2003): (The first of two trip reposts from long ago, in honor of my most recent trip to the Sunshine State.)
Sometimes it can seem like everybody in the State of Florida is on the make. Two of the three hotels I stayed at had valet as their only parking option. All of them added a "resort fee" or something similar, on the order of $10-$15 dollars a day, which is supposed to cover all sorts of miscellaneous expenses. But then you find out that there are various little things it doesn't cover -- health club access here, a lounge chair on the beach there, the very generous gratuity added to your bill -- and you begin to wonder if you're being scammed.
You're not, really. Nobody's trying to hide anything from you for the most part. They're all pretty straightforward about what charges cover what services. But the whole business of nickel-and-diming you endlessly just naturally raises your scam shield.
The incessant hand in your pocket at the hotels I can accept. Like I said, they are honest about it and you have a sense of what you are paying for. Since they all do it, it's really no different financially from raising the room rates and including everything. Hotel management probably feels it gives them some flexibility when it comes to dealing with complaints and serves as a way to make people acknowledge all the services that are available to them. My counter argument is that it can give you feeling that you have been bled. But psychology aside -- it's six of one, half-dozen of the other.
Where I can't accept this is from auto rental companies. Auto rental companies nickel-and-dime you just like anyone else in the travel industry, but they push and spin all their add-ons like a telemarketer on a deadline. A typical exchange when picking up your car:
Rental Guy: For only $10/day I can get you an upgrade to a nicer vehicle -- with four doors.
Me: Doesn't the one I reserved have four doors?
RG: Let's see. Oh, yes it does. But they're smaller.
Me: Do you think I look fat?
RG (confused): Um, no.
Me: Nevermind. No thank you.
RG: OK, here we go. I've got you down for added insurance to cover you in case of mishap.
Me: I don't need it. I have that through my Amex card.
RG: Well, it's only $8 and with this we won't even call your company. If there's any damage you can just walk away.
Me: $8 total or $8 per day?
RG: That would be per day.
Me: No, thank you.
RG (shaking his head like I should know better): Then I'll need you to initial that you've refused it. Would you like to pay for your gas now?"
Me: No, thank you.
RG: If you pay for a tank now, the price is only $1.75 per gallon. If we have to fill it when you return the car it's a lot more expensive -- three dollars per gallon more.
Me: Or, I can just fill the tank at the Citgo station across the street before I return it. That's probably the cheapest of all, don't you think?
RG (shaking his head again): Then I'll need you to initial here also.
I really have serious issues with industries that thrive on squeezing people who don't know any better or are caught off-guard when confronted with mealy-mouthed half-truths. This includes the idiots who leave me voice mails about how they happened to be in the neighborhood installing satellite dishes and they are sure sorry that I missed the opportunity to get in on their deal. This claim would hold more water if I didn't get that same voice mail every other day. It also includes timeshare hucksters who provide those scratch-and-win tickets for a special value on some property. Of course, your chance of winning is approximately 100%.
I know of what I speak. Many years ago I worked briefly -- very briefly -- as a car salesman (the champions of mealy-mouthed half-truths). If you find yourself in an industry like this, I strongly advise you to get out of it. It will scar your soul.
But anyway, I was in Florida for a while. Let me tell you about it.
The plan was three nights at the famous South Beach, followed by a drive down the Keys for two nights in Key West, followed by a drive in the reverse direction back up to Palm Beach for two nights before heading home.
Miami Beach is rightly famous for its Art Deco style architecture, and some of it is striking. It's a real blast from the swanky past and very much responsible for the unique South Beach-pastel couture vibe.
Although I didn't stay there, when I am one of the rich and famous, my first hotel choice would be The Delano. I'm not much for favoring a hotel because of its decor or style. The now famous boutique hotels really don't do anything for me. I want service. I want convenience. I want amenities. I want easy access. I have no desire to stand in the lobby and admire the fashionable furniture. And yet I was amazed by The Delano. Huge white flowing curtains and tapestries are everywhere in the lobby -- and when I say huge I'm mean something on the order of three stories high. They are used both as d‚cor and as separators. The use of clean white sheeting is a brilliant touch for a hotel (where clean white sheeting is symbolic of all sorts of positive sensations). The furniture is all cushy, living-room style furniture, again mostly white and very inviting. As you walk through you notice the front desk -- a very simple little table. Move further on and you see a sushi bar tucked away in one corner. Yet further, an off in an alcove is a fine looking bar. Further still begins the restaurant; it is located half indoors and half outdoors. The soft separation between the areas gives you the sense that it's all one big space yet you always know where.
Outside, after you pass through the outdoor tables of the restaurant, there is a garden with the usual trappings and a fairly comfy hammock. Then comes the pool -- they're big on infinity pools down there. Beyond that is the poolside bar surrounded by comfortable lounge chairs and a bunch of what might be called daybeds, but are really oversized ottomans. Between the pool bar area and the beach is a tall wooden fence with a gate that is closed after sunset.
It's beautiful enough to make me just want to be there. And that from Mr. I-only-want-practical-and-functional. It's definitely where I would stay, if I could afford it, but even off-season discounts are out of my reach.
There are three major points of interest for the tourist in South Beach (apart from Art Deco watching). The primary destination is the beach, which is very nice, if well-trodden; the water warm, clear and shallow. It is the Atlantic Ocean as I remember it from age 11.
Next, there is what is known as the Lincoln Road shopping mall, which is really a street that has been closed over for several blocks and is lined with a mishmash of crappy souvenir stores, high-toned boutiques, and restaurants with outdoor seating. About half way through there was a big screen that was running fashion shows -- models cat-walking up and down the runway for your entertainment while you have alfresco dinner. South Beach is about two things and high fashion is one of them (although everybody still dresses in shorts and t-shirts).
The third point of interest is Ocean Drive a few blocks of roadway famed for its restaurants and clubs, most of the open air variety. There is an extended area just across the street, where nets are set up for impromptu beach volleyball. There is what must be the world's largest and most complex sandcastle. Just beyond that is the beach. I'm told that during high season the place is loaded with colorful people -- a guide I read said it was the place to people-watch and it's where E! Wild on South Beach would set up their cameras. But obviously not in September; it was pretty dead. A walk down the street mid-afternoon elicited offers of a drink on the house from the proprietors, just in the hopes I'd stay for more. But I can see where the Ocean Drive might get a little crazy on busy nights. There is an energetic vibe about the place. Surprisingly, I spotted only one bar that was obviously trashy. It was called Mangos, and out front they had a huckster with a couple of friendly parrots on his shoulder, working the passers-by. And some girls in bikinis doing nothing but standing there. Naturally, I went in for a drink, just to cool off a bit.
The next three paragraphs include a critical discussion of women's breasts. If that bothers you, please skip ahead.
The other thing that South Beach is about, besides fashion, is women's breasts (the two are symbiotic in many ways). Sunbathing topless is de rigueur -- which makes the place feel rather Caribbean or French or something. Beyond that, and not to put too fine a point on it, I have never seen so many fake boobs in my life. And it's not subtle work; it's cartoonish, like the fevered dreams of adolescent boys. Tiny, wispy little girls that look like they just inflated their personal floatation devices. Fifty year old women who, considering the sagging and drooping elsewhere, appear to be mechanically suspended by their gravity defying breasts. Even the mannequins in the shop windows are top heavy.
In the aforementioned Mangos, all the waitresses are pretty and wear bikini tops -- the overwhelming majority has had "work done." Mangos is an equal opportunity employer; the waiters are also clearly hired based on how much they look like male models, but thankfully, they are fully clothed. Periodically, they play a bit of salsa and one waiter and one waitress would hop up and the bar and dance to it. (This only served to put me in mind of the old Lone Star Steakhouses back when the wait staff would periodically start line-dancing amongst the tables. Annoying, really, when they should have been bringing your food.) Then, of course, the parrot guy is wandering around, trying, and failing, to be glib and clever while having his parrots climb on to your shoulder for a snapshot that he will happily sell you (another Floridian on the make). In that kind of scene I would have expected the audience to be wild revelers and drunken schoolboys. Nope, the crowd was indistinguishable from your average Bennigan's or Max 'n' Erma's patrons. Imagine, all that money to have "work done" and you still end up surviving on 11% tips from the common, suburban rubes and tourists.
Now let me say quite unselfconsciously that I have no problem with cosmetic surgery. If I could go under the knife and come out looking like Sean Connery circa 1963 I would not hesitate. I'm also fine with breast enhancement, as long as it comes out looking good. Women who have a more, let's say, voluptuous body type can carry it off. Women who have small and subtle touch-ups can come out looking pretty good. But the South Beachers take it too far. They are no longer doing it just to look and feel good about themselves. They are doing it to draw attention to themselves from the world at large. They buy themselves hugely exaggerated breasts for the purpose of being able to say "Made ya look!" But since they all seem to go to the same extreme, it ceases to be attention-worthy. It's a viscous cycle that only ends up benefiting MTV and their newly pubescent audience.
And that all I have to say about women's breasts.
In the end, I have mixed feelings about South Beach. People were friendly everywhere I went. Despite my little breast tirade and the selective camera work on E!, the majority of people are dead normal looking. The beach is sweet. There are good restaurants and bars. And yet, I never actually settled in anywhere -- never got comfortable. It seemed like it could have a real Caribbean coolness to it, but there's really too much of a sense of effort, and perhaps pretentiousness, to make it a laid-back tropical locale. Maybe it would have been more fun in-season. It's a good spot for a couple of days of sun and fun, definitely worth the visit. But after three nights I was ready to leave and did so, not feeling like I missed out on anything.
One thing about driving around in Florida: you will get caught behind someone going a good 20 mph below the speed limit. This may seem like reasonable caution on the part of a senior citizen who understands the need for extra reaction time, but it has nothing to do with that. They are not intentionally driving 20 mph below the speed limit. They are intentionally driving 30 mph, regardless of the speed limit. This only becomes worthy of an aneurism when the speed limit is 50 and your mind tries vainly to fathom the reasoning behind this behavior and draws the erroneous conclusion that they are just being cautious. The fact is they just drive 30 because they don't care about the rest of the world. They pull out into traffic without looking. They cruise through stop signs with nary a glance. They stop dead in the middle of the road when they get confused. Their right to do these things has been vigorously defended in court by the AARP. So they get in the car and depress the accelerator to a point where the engine noise doesn't intrude upon that Perry Como CD they bought for $2.99 at Target; it just happens to be about 30 mph.
When you are driving US 1 to Key West, you will get caught behind one of these people. It doesn't matter how clever you are or how well you plan things out. You can't pass them or dodge them and flipping them off is completely futile. No matter what you do, it will happen. This is, so far, the only practical application I have found for yoga breathing.
US 1 to Key West is generally thought to be one of the most beautiful drives you can take. And it is, for a portion of it. As you cross Seven Mile Bridge, the view is as impressive as it is in all the post cards and magazines. But it's really only in the western part of the keys where you can see the ocean and/or gulf from the road. For the first half of the journey you are ambling down a road that looks no different than any other road in touristland -- lined with various crap shops hawking three t-shirts for $15.95 and greasy looking restaurants that will sell you the "captain's platter" for $6.95 before 4 pm. Not that I'm against crap shops and greasy restaurants, but it's not what you are expecting from a visual of the Keys. This is where you really don't want to get caught behind the guy with his pants hiked up around his armpits and the full-coverage, cataract sunglasses. (Do note that once you are off U.S. 1 things get a bit better.)
I checked into the Wyndham Casa Marina which is a longish, but quite pleasant walk to the far end of Duval Street, the point of action on Key West.
Duval Street starts roughly at the Southernmost Point in the Continental U.S. It's not really the southernmost point in the continental U.S., since there is quite obviously land going a bit further south. Furthermore, it's not even on the continental U.S., it's on an island just off the continental U.S. -- specifically Key West. (You need not fear for the future of pedantry as long as I'm around.) From there, it's a straight shot for what must be nearly a mile of nothing but open air bars, boutiques, crap shops, along with a girlie bar and a "bathhouse" just for good measure. Let's just say Duval Street is not the place to bring impressionable youngsters. Even if you could steer them clear of the dens of ill-repute, so to speak, the crap shops keep inanely obscene t-shirts in the windows, and the bars feature live entertainment of the foul-mouthed variety.
Still, Key West is not without its charm. Away from Duval Street there are some lovely shoreline areas. The residential streets seem fairly quiet and quaint. Even Duval Street ends in a spot called Mallory Square where crowds gather to watch the sunset and be entertained by street performers and local artisans.
I arrived in Key West in the late afternoon and had the entire day following to check things out. I had high hopes, I spent the late afternoon hanging out in the resort by the pool and wandered out for a quick bite of dinner at none other than the genuine Key West version of Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville (not particularly impressive, even the margarita). The next day I had planned to do the full tour of Duval Street, hit the crap shops to buy some crap for the folks back in Michigan, and see if I could get out on the water somehow. Ominously, I noticed a preponderance of Harley-Davidsons but I just figured it was typical of the keys.
The next day, Bike Week was upon me in full force. Bike Week is when bikers, I would guess 99.99% Harley riders, gather to ride up and down the street, show off their bikes, and hang out in the bars. It sounds like a recipe for violence and terror from a '50s exploitation flick, but it's not. The bikers actually seem to be more mild than wild. The majority appear to be solidly into middle age -- presumably because you have to be at least upper middle-class to afford a Harley, never mind have one modified into a wicked looking chopper. Although many are big on leather and scruffy facial hair, a good third of them looked like they had just spent the morning mowing the lawn in their Bermuda shorts. All in all, a pretty decent crowd, with a couple of unfortunate traits.
One thing they all have in common, besides motorcycles, is that they are uniformly fat. I mean f-a-t. I worried that Key West would crumble and sink under their collective bulk. Seriously guys, eat a salad now and then, the shocks on your bike will last longer.
Another thing they all have in common is the odd fetish for making as much noise as possible. I think I can understand the attraction of motorcycling -- flying down road, the open air, the hint of danger and rebellion. But where does the noise come into it? Many of these folks just seem to revel in sitting curbside, revving their engines -- engines that have actually been modified to be noisier than a standard Harley which is ear-splitting enough. Good grief. Guys, get it through your heads, you're not the Hell's Angels. You're middle-class, middle-aged, middle-heavy posers. You look as silly pulling that bad-boy act as I would trying to pick up college girls on spring break in Ft. Lauderdale. Almost, anyway.
Despite the biker intrusion I did finish my circle tour of Duval Street, including crap shop purchases. The most notable stop was Sloppy Joe's, famous for being a Hemingway hangout half a century ago. Actually, it's moved to a new location since then. And the old location is now a new bar, Captain Tony's, whose claim to fame is that it is in the location of Sloppy Joe's back when it was a Hemingway hang out. Such is the vague nature of commercial myth-making. In any event, I can confirm that the sloppy joes at Sloppy Joe's (the original name at the new location, not the new name at the original location) are most excellent -- very effective use of dill.
My excursion out on the water was fine. I had hoped to get on a boat to the Dry Tortugas and get some snorkeling in, but it was too long a trip and too expensive, so I settled for a glass bottom boat tour of the reef. It was a fine way to kill a couple of hours. Nothing too amazing about the reef -- it would have been better through a snorkel mask -- but it was a pleasant trip and a good overview of some of the interesting history of the island while I worked on my tan.
After the boat trip I decided to make my way back to the Wyndham where I could relax by the pool away from Harley-Davidson's high decibel flatulence. While I was gone the Wyndham had been invaded by some convention of personnel recruiters and there was nary a chair to sit in by the pool. I went in for a dip, but it became clear after a while that poolside was a barren land wherein my butt could find no purchase. So I headed back down Duval Street to Mallory Square (I should have rented a scooter as soon as I arrived) to enjoy the sunset, snag a bite to eat from one of the local vendors, check out the locals, chill while looking out over the water, and grab a piece of genuine key lime pie. Nice. I get the sense that this must have been what Key West was like "before it was spoiled by evil commercialism," or at least without the bikers and conventioneers.
I have mixed feelings about Key West. Despite the annoyances, Key West still has a certain charm to it. It still has the feel of a special place in spite of the cheap fa‡ade. No doubt there are nooks and crannies of real interest if you had the time to find them, but as the saying goes, timing is everything. After a day and a half, I left Key West for the mainland, passing even more bikers arriving from the opposite direction. Again, I didn't feel like I was missing anything.
The next, and last, stop was Palm Beach. In stark contrast to the high fashion Babylon of South Beach and the squalorous tourist Babylon of Key West, Palm Beach is old school, old money Florida. If you're of a certain age, you've seen all the old pictures of Florida with the shiny shops along a street lined with evenly spaced palm trees and genteel folks walking around is stylish casualwear. That's Palm Beach. At least the "beach" part is, go a couple of streets inland and it's indistinguishable from any suburb in the country.
I intentionally scheduled Palm Beach for last because I figured after the chaos of the week I would want some peace and quiet. And that's what you get in Palm Beach. To a fault. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, going on. One of the central attractions of Palm Beach is Worth Street, claimed to be the country's original upscale shopping attraction. I really had no interest in shopping at Gucci or Tiffanys, but I thought I'd see what was going on and maybe grab a drink and some dinner only to find the place was empty. On a Saturday night, no less. There were probably a total of three humans in sight and no pub or casual spot to quench my thirst. So I drove around along A1A in the waning light of the evening, admiring the mansions and the views of the sea until the weather turned dicey and I headed back to the hotel.
At this point you are probably expecting to read that I had mixed feelings about Palm Beach. As I look back over this essay in its entirety, it reads a bit too much like a bad trip. It wasn't at all; it was a good trip. I saw and did things that I don't do at home. I broke whatever routines I was stuck in. I got a really wicked tan. But it is true that I hadn't experienced that vacation moment. There should be a point in every vacation of significance that makes you feel as though you are doing or experiencing something special. It can be a new activity or a moment of relaxation or a revelation of some sort, but there should always be something that is meaningful.
Back at the Hilton, with one day left before flying back and I still hadn't had that vacation moment. It had started to rain in earnest and I had overheard the expectation of more rain for the following day, which was to be my last full day in Florida. I resigned myself to spending the next day in search of a place to settle in and watch the football games, maybe get some writing done, and call it a trip.
Sure enough, in that way Florida has of jading you into submission then dazzling you into delight, I dragged myself down for breakfast the next morning to a perfectly sunny day and 5 foot waves curling just off shore -- boogie boarding nirvana. I must have spent three hours riding the waves to shore until I didn't have the strength to pull myself up on the board, only pausing to walk the ten yards to the bar for a quick drink. At one point, the water around me got all dark. Thinking it was a shadow, I looked up expecting to see the sun hidden behind a cloud, but the sky was clear and the sun was high. As I scanned the water I realized I was in the midst of an enormous school of fish (I'm guessing herring, but I wouldn't know). It was as if I could have just reached into the water and grabbed and armful of them. Remarkable.
And that was it. I was on vacation. Of course, I had to leave the next day, but you just need the one moment to make it work.
Back in Michigan it was time to crank up the thermostat and break out the fall jackets. But it's good to know that if you can blaze a trail through everyone on the make, there are still vacations to be had in Florida. Travel Rewind: The Gold-Plated Swamp (2002): (The second of two trip reposts from long ago, in honor of my most recent trip to the Sunshine State.)
What kind of idiot goes to Florida in the middle of August?
Look, the day I left Michigan it had been in the 90s for most of the past three weeks, so exactly what sort of heat was I avoiding by staying up north? Besides, I had some long neglected family down there, I was about to collide with my company's use-it-or-lose-it vacation policy, and I really needed some distance from my life to get myself back into the groove of fiction writing. Combine this with off-season rates and it all made sense. I wanted to see Sanibel Island and points south, so I arranged to fly into Ft. Myers, drive north to Sarasota for a couple of days for the family visit, then back down to Ft. Myers for a week of gulf-coastal exploration.
After a blessedly uneventful flight on Delta, I picked up my rental car from Alamo with an equally blessed eventlessness. For the heck of it, I rented a Jeep Wrangler.
A Jeep Wrangler is an intentionally crude vehicle. Road and wind noise are deafening. The engine howls in pain at the mere thought of acceleration. The ride will induce you to pass blood in your urine. Parts just fall off -- quality control is vintage 1970s American Motors. The tires whine at the slightest turn of the wheel. And it sucks gas faster than Michael Moore sucks chocolate shakes, primarily because it is somewhat less aerodynamic than a block of cement. All this is part of the genuine military, off-road, old-fashioned, no sissified luxuries, Jeep mystique (except for the CD player, A/C, automatic transmission, cruise control, and so forth).
But: the top peels off, the doors pop off, the windows zip off -- and in that condition there is no better way to tool around southwest Florida.
The first stop was Sarasota, a city I've visited many times over the years and it's become a pleasant surprise. It used to be a bunch of strip malls and fairly nasty restaurants and a lot of old folks driving around at 30 miles an hour no matter the speed limit. Now it's gone fully upscale. There are any number of fine restaurants, high-tone shopping malls that pride themselves serving the nouveau riche, and the place is crawling with latest model German sedans, and I don't mean Volkswagens (all going 30 miles an hour).
I stayed at the Holiday Inn on Lido beach, a lovely stretch of sand on one of the keys just off the mainland. I was only staying for a day or two, so I didn't much care about where I stayed and the description sounded decent, plus I got a good rate. Remembering the Holiday Inns along the highways from family road trips when I was a mere lad, I honestly didn't expect much. I was pleasantly surprised. The Lido Beach Holiday Inn sits directly across a lightly traveled shoreline road from the Gulf of Mexico. About a ten minute walk will get you to St. Armand's Circle, a terrific little shopping/dining location situated around a large circular turnaround in the road. No Holiday Inn is a Hyatt or a Ritz, but this one had a lot going for it -- a lounge in the lobby, a nice restaurant on the top floor where you could sit and watch the sunset, a decent pool, and, like I said, a prime location. Given the great off-season rates I can see it being a great place for a family on a budget to spend a week. I wouldn't hesitate to stay there again.
One of my all time favorite Sarasota activities is the Ringling Museum of Art, founded by John Ringling of Ringling Bros. Circus fame. Lest you think that's the equivalent of the Krusty the Clown Opera House, understand that John Ringling was a great patron of the arts and the Ringling Museum is probably the premier fine arts institution of the South. Yes, there is a Circus museum on the grounds, but it's much deemphasized. The art museum is loaded down with great works. You are hit with a series of towering Rubens upon entrance -- the collection is heavy on Old Masters. In the center is a beautiful courtyard filled with classical statues. It's really quite picturesque.
Another gem is Ca d'Zan, the Ringling family mansion. Probably the best way to describe it is that you could just picture Jay Gatsby wandering around on the terrace amidst scores of revelers. Everything about the house is ornate in the extreme. The guided tour gives you the impression that that partying never stopped and no expense was spared. I had been through the house years before when it was in an advanced state of disrepair, but after a long and expensive restoration, it's a site to behold.
All this is situated among verdant pathways with enormous banyan trees at every turn. It's a wonderful spot for a museum junkie like me to spend a day.
Following a 2-hour freeway ride in the Jeep (not a pleasant experience), I was back in Ft. Myers and checking in to the Sanibel Harbor Resort, which would be my base of operations for explorations south.
I cannot recommend Sanibel Harbor Resort. Have you ever seen Singing in the Rain? The premise is that there is this famously beautiful actress who made her fame in silent pics, but along come the talkies and everyone discovers her voice is cringe-inducing. That's what Sanibel Harbor Resort is like. It is unbelievably beautiful -- the grounds, the views -- and filled with friendly employees, but scratching that pristine surface is like nails on a chalkboard.
Among other things, they provided a wired in-room internet connection but the only Ethernet cord they provided was about two feet long and the jack was beneath around the back of a night stand so effectively I had to sit on the floor and use the bed as my desk. They left the sliding door to the balcony open one day and I came back to a room full of mosquitoes. They left the door to my room wedged open for several hours such that anybody could have walked in and stolen my $3000 laptop. And to finish up, they completely ignored my pleas for redress to management. NEVER STAY AT SANIBEL HARBOUR RESORT. [update: I am bitter about it to this day - dam]
Just across a short toll bridge sits Sanibel Island. About half of Sanibel Island -- the side of the island facing the mainland -- is protected wildlife habitat. On the rest of the island development is strictly controlled and there are obviously extensive regulations controlling commercial ventures. There is effectively one long two lane road that runs the length of the island. It is along here that most for the commercial activity goes on. Shops boutiques, restaurants abound, but are for the most part set back from road, with small, tastefully done signs and cute names like The Hungry Heron and the Lazy Flamingo. My personal favorite was the sushi at the open air Key Lime Caf‚.
The beaches are the same broad, white sand, clear green water beaches you get throughout the southwest gulf coast. They are especially prized for shell collecting (not a big hobby of mine), and one of the largest shell stores in the world, Sanibel Seashell Industries is located on the island. Beach parking can be expensive by the hour, or you can go the route of buying a permit. Either way there is no guarantee of space availability.
One thing about Sanibel: they do not make it all that easy just to drop in for a visit. Traffic is horrendous in-season (they say), and parking is tough and expensive. And it's three bucks and a bit of a wait in line just to get on to the island from the mainland. This is undoubtedly done intentionally to make sure anyone visiting does so out of desire and not whim, making a visit to Sanibel a planned event and something to be done with a certain sincerity. Probably this helps them maintain the island and keep the riff raff away. It works. Despite the development and numerous resorts, some of significant size, it retains a little, hidden away, tropical island feel that accounts for its charm and popularity.
Telling facts about Sanibel Island: 1) There is a $500 fine for littering. 2) There is a $500 fine for feeding an alligator (it's a bit worrisome that such an activity needs to be actively discouraged). 3) There is only an $80 fine for not yielding to a pedestrian at a crosswalk. It's all about priorities.
I can't think of a better place to spend a day bopping from beach to bar to beach in a Jeep Wrangler with the top dropped than Sanibel Island.
Ft. Myers Beach, immediately south of Ft. Myers proper, would have to be considered the area's party focus. A resident described it to me as a "former Spring Break destination" and I could see that. (Like everything else, spring break has gone upscale from gulf beaches to exotic Caribbean and Mexican destinations.) Whereas the rest of southwest gulf coast pushes hard to focus on the upscale Ft. Myers Beach is all about fun. It's definitely a younger crowd. The beaches, though still broad and white sand, are swarming with active folks; Frisbees, beach balls, and various objects are being tossed about; Boston Whaler-esque boats are flitting back and forth; and there appears to be an unbroken line of beach bars about half a mile long -- something I saw nowhere else along the coast. There's even a beachside Hooter's. You won't see that on Sanibel. Ever.
Accommodations at Ft. Meyers Beach are of the mostly of the motel variety -- right on, or across the street, from the beach. There don't appear to be any big resorts (but the motels probably treat you better than Sanibel Harbor Resort anyway -- sorry, bitter moment). As you move further south, there are a number of larger buildings labeled as "beach clubs," with severe-looking parking attendants to prevent beach crashers. "Beach club," as it turns out, is a euphemism for time-share condos. Cute.
I can see where Ft. Myers Beach would be an ideal destination for a family road trip. Check-in to an inexpensive motel. The kids play in the water while Mom gets all nice and tan while reading the latest Grisham, and Dad sneaks away for an afternoon Bud Light or two at the Hooter's beach bar. Work in a day trip to a shell store, a couple rounds of miniature golf, a parasail ride, a fishing expedition, and lots of snapshots with a disposable camera and you got yourself a family vacation to make Chevy Chase green with envy.
The furthest point south I reached was Marco Island. It barely rates a mention. In marked contrast to Sanibel, Marco Island appears to have been leveled of anything resembling nature then re-populated with megalithic condominium high rises. It has one publicly accessible beach, Tigertail Beach, that was mis-located on my map and if it wasn't for my laser surgery flawless vision I never would have seen the microscopic roadside sign to point me in the right direction. The rest of the beaches -- none of which you can see from the road since they are blocked out by the high rises, are for residents only. By the time I got to Tigertail Beach it was late afternoon so I passed on the three dollar entrance fee and decided to drive around the island to see the sights. There are none. Just huge buildings and a bunch of strip malls. Basically, Marco Island is your standard land-locked suburb dropped on to an island off the gulf coast.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Head back north again from Marco Island and your next stop is the heavenly city of Naples. Where to begin? I liked Naples so much I went twice.
Central to Naples are the 3rd Street South shopping district and the 5th Avenue South shopping district, both filled with boutiques on a par with Rodeo Drive, and many, many fine restaurants with sidewalk cafes or open air bars. Naples is one of the wealthiest cities extant. I grabbed a sidewalk lunch and wandered about a bit to get my bearings, then walked down to the beach.
I know it seems like beach after beach has the same monotonously perfect description: broad white sand, and clear green water. The beach at Naples was like that, only more so. I still can't describe why it was the best one of the trip. I don't know what it was. Maybe the water was just that much clearer. Maybe the sand was just that much whiter. Maybe it was the sight of folks strolling along the long pier, as opposed to the unbroken shoreline everywhere else. I just don't know how I knew, but I knew this was a special spot. I didn't have my bathing suit so I had to be content with a barefoot walk along the edge of the waves and promise to myself to return.
Back in town, I stopped for a quick drink at the excellent Yabba Island Grill. A friendly, open-all-the-French-doors restaurant designed to exude a strong Caribbean vibe, and accordingly, they specialize in rum. Now, lots of places have great wine lists. Lots of places have great beer lists. Lots of places have great lists of Single Malts. There are even plenty of places with excellent lists of Bourbons. But this is the first place I've come across that has a huge Rum list. This is not mix-with-Coke or blend-in-your-daiquiri rum. This is sipping rum -- meant to drink straight. So that's what I did, I tried one called Anniversaro from Venezuela; it has a delicious, complex flavor that made me vow to spend more time with quality rum in the future. Yo-ho-ho.
On my second visit I took a short time-out to visit the Naples Zoo. It's not a big zoo, really, but it was a nice diversion. There is a large central pond filled with alligators and turtles where they hold feedings every few hours. This amounts to someone dangling whole fryers from a rope, demonstrating how high the gators can leap out of the water to get it. It worked a couple of times, but the gators are so fat and happy they get bored. So to fill out the show, questions along the lines of "Does anybody know how long alligators live?" are shouted out to the crowd. Without exception, the children in the audience knew the answers to every question. They may not know who won the war of 1812, but they've got the world according to Animal Planet down pat.
Funny thing about southwest Florida: for all the development and commerciality along the coast, there are reminders everywhere that it is just a civilized face covering a palm and cypress swamp. You are, after all, on the edge of the Everglades. Anyone who has visited Florida can attest to the ubiquitous presence of those ever-so-cute little lizards. I was lazing by the pool one day when I noticed an injured fly on the ground struggling to escape the ants chaotically swarming about, looking to make a meal of it. Suddenly, one of those lizards darts out from under a bush and snags the fly with one bite, leaving the ants looking like they had been mugged. It was sort of like a scene from a National Geographic nature special in miniature.
Alligators loom large everywhere you go, from the signs prohibiting feeding on Sanibel, to the staged gator feeding at the zoo, where you are informed that the gators don't hesitate to take birds
and any other fauna that happens near their pond, to the fact that the highway that cuts across the Everglades to Miami is called Alligator Alley. South of Naples there are long stretches of road, what we would call 'country road' in the Midwest, with the cypressy, swampy, grass crawling almost up to the edge. A broken down Jeep, a man on foot, a snap of a tail, a lot of sharp teeth, and yours truly would have become just another tourist causality statistic. That is, if the gator left enough uneaten to be identified.
Back to Naples beach, this time with the appropriate gear. In the residential area just outside the Naples shopping districts there are a string of east-west streets which dead-end on small parking areas adjacent to the beach. I pulled the jeep into one spaces only to find myself without any change for the meter. No way was I going to waste precious beach time trying to find change for a buck so I just double parked.
I spread my towel, slathered on SPF 30 and lay in the sun. I realized I had been rushing around trying to be a thorough traveler ever since I arrived in Florida. I became aware of a tightness in my jaw and a worried furrow in my brow. I tried to read, but I couldn't keep my concentration. I tried to sleep but only drifted fitfully. I rose and went for a brief walk up the beach.
A largish family were chattering in some vaguely Eastern European dialect while their kids darted in an out of the water (imagine the Florida gulf coast versus, say, Belarus). A woman had her lounge chair placed at the very edge of the surf so she could tan while dipping her toes in the water. Two teenage girls walked by, complaining about boys. An infant boy cried out in terror when the surf got hold of his sand pail, until his father retrieved it. Some people sat serenely under umbrellas. Others, already too tan, lay drenched in oil, angled to maximize exposure. Out in the water, gulls dive bombed for unsuspecting fish -- completely submerging before arising with their prey not ten yards from swimming humans; more Darwinian nature amidst civilized luxury.
I waded out until the dead-calm water was up to my chin. Schools of minnow-like fish stayed in close proximity, hoping my presence would deter the gulls. I floated on my back allowing the buoyant salt-water to support me. The sky was bare and blue. And I found something I had been looking for. For a little while, I stopped.
Stopped wondering if the double-parked Jeep would get a ticket.
Stopped fretting over lousy hotels.
Stopped wringing my hands about what awaited me when I returned to work.
Stopped agonizing over my stalled writing career.
Stopped mentally preparing for the trip home.
Stopped plotting how I would do things differently if I could.
When I finally did pull myself off the beach and drag myself back home, I was able to see all the small events of the previous two weeks as part of the whole of a fine coastal tour, laced with all the enjoyment and frustration that are why we travel.
Even to Florida in the middle of August.
Monday, February 02, 2009
The Month That Was - January 2009: We had a string of days in the middle of the month where I glanced at the thermometer in my car and consistently saw a minus sign for the outside temp. Ugh. Actually, the whole month has been a bloody aggravation. I had tech issues (see below). I took my car into the Toyota dealer for a half-hour oil change and left 4 hours later down $800. I tried to figure out a way to get down to Florida for a break from the cold, but failed miserably. Combined with a couple of other major foul-ups I think I am out around $1200 in unexpected repairs and idiotic purchases. Let's just say this year's tax refund can't come soon enough. And worst of all, after I wrote last month about Chad Pennington being the sort of rock solid QB a team needs to win in the NFL, he proceeds to meltdown in the biggest game of his life. Thanks for getting my back, Chad.Check out my photos of the local winter over at SmugMug. T.S. Eliot was wrong. January is the cruelest month.
Tech Annoyances
Book Look: Resume with Monsters
Flick Check: I'm Not There
Book Look: Ficciones
Know Your (Planck) Limitations
Broken Record on Detroit
Travel Rewind: Detroit Auto Show '03 Tech Annoyances: The new year started out with the Zune bug. I guess it was actually New Year's Eve, but every Zune of a certain model -- a first-generation 30 gig model -- suddenly stopped working at midnight Greenwich Mean Time on 12/31/08. This is, of course, the model I have. What happened was, in the middle of the night when I was fast asleep, the Zune kicked on, got locked on the splash screen with the hard disk whirring along at top speed, and no combination resets or USB connections or four letter words would have any effect. Trolling the web soon revealed this to be a global epidemic triggered when SkyNet became self-aware...no wait, I mean triggered by a chip from a third party vendor that gacked when confronted with the 366th day in the year. Yes, three years ago, some idiot software developer hard-coded a 365-day year into the device.
It took about 5 minutes for the internet to light up with reports of this. Before the guys at Microsoft even got out of bed, somebody had pointed out that since it happened to everybody and it happened shortly after the internal clocks of the devices crossed over into leap day, the likely culprit was some idiot programmer hard-coding 365. By about 6 pm Microsoft finally confirmed what we already knew -- that some idiot programmer had hard-coded 365 -- and said to just let the player run down until the battery drains, then recharge it and let it restart after the New Year and you would be good to go.
In treading the Zune.net boards looking for info I was amazed by how many people still owned and used this player but I shouldn't have been. Despite being a generation or two old, there is no reason not to. Unlike Apple, MS has been good about keeping their legacy players up to date with new software and functionality. And you would be surprised how much music you can store on 30 gig. My entire music collection only takes up about 20.
The other thing I was surprised about was how the user comments on the Zune.net bulletin boards ranged from utterly useless to completely insane. Even after the official response from MS was posted, people by the hundreds felt the need to post saying their Zune wasn't working (we knew this, it was the reason the thread existed). Others felt the need to demand an immediate fix from MS (um, even if MS could get a fix written and tested in less than 24 hours, your Zune was locked up, how are they supposed to get the fix on your player when you player doesn't work - some kind of Jedi mind trick maybe?). Some howled about whether there would be the same problem four years from now. (Well, they have four years to post a fix. If they fail, you will be without your then 8-year-old Zune for twenty-four hours at the end of the year 2012 -- it'll be hell, but I suspect you'll survive.) Unreal.
Despite the short outage, I still love my Zune. I would take it over even the flashiest iPod any day (except leap day).
I had a more serious problem with Sirius (heh heh). Simply put, my original old school Sirius Sportster, that lives in an aftermarket cradle in my car, stopped working. The audio was intermittently failing more and more often until finally, it ceased altogether. This was a bigger problem than it seemed because they no longer make the original Sportster model, which is the only one that will fit in my cradle. A call to Sirius support confirmed that It's Dead Jim.
So now I had a decision. A) I could hunt around for a used one. Relatively inexpensive, but risky. B) I could buy a newer version of the Sportster, but that would require a new cradle purchase and a new installation. And another problem is that the Sportster transmits it's audio to the car radio via FM. Because of an FCC ruling, the newer Sportsters transmit a much weaker signal than the older ones. Would the weaker signal still work? Expensive and somewhat risky. C) In addition to a new Sportster and cradle I could also get a new el cheapo car stereo that has an aux input jack in the front so I no longer have to use the FM transmission. Very expensive. 4) I could get a new car stereo that has built Sirius built in so I don't need an external unit at all. Also very expensive.
I went the cheap route. Won an auction on eBay for a used original Sportster via some egregiously cutthroat last minute bidding -- $47, and it came with a boombox. A quick call to Sirius to transfer my account almost became more expensive that the unit itself. Apparently there is a $75 fee to transfer a lifetime account to a new unit. I pled my case that I was not upgrading by choice, my previous unit died. Fee waived. I must say that Sirius tech support was exemplary in my calls to them. Zero wait; intelligent and knowledgeable reps; seemed anxious to help rather than just get you off the phone.
I do recommend Sirius (although I don't think you can get a lifetime sub anymore). It is about a million times better than terrestrial radio. Often people ask, "Who needs radio? Why not just listen to your iPod in the car?" The answer is that radio can be fresh. If you are only used to terrestrial radio with its typical playlists of about thirteen songs in rotation, you may not realize that with the enormous number of formats Sirius offers, you would have to have a pretty big MP3 collect to match it. You can think of Sirius stations as a set of giant, constantly updated playlists for various music formats, all set on shuffle. As much as I listen to my Zune collection, sometimes it's just better when you don't know what is coming next. Personally, my unit has been set to the Little Steven's Underground Garage for many months straight.
So my two tech annoyances this month had happy endings. Speaking of good experiences, if were to give away annual tech awards, my award for most reliable gadget would go to my SMC wireless router. I went through a NetGear and a Linksys unit, both of which failed immediately after their warranty was up. The SMC has been barreling on through power outages and equipment updates without a hitch. Never. Not one. Since I got my SMC I have never lost my wireless connection. That's saying something given my router history. No doubt I've jinxed myself. Book Look: Resume with Monsters by William Browning Spencer: If the name Cthulhu and the mythology behind it are unknown to you, much of this book will be lost on you. However, if you even have a passing familiarity with H.P. Lovecraft's horror classics you'll get a kick out of the exceedingly clever premise behind Resume with Monsters.
Philip Kennan is a loser who has been bounding from one dead end office job to another for decades and is now on the cusp of middle age. He's divorced. His girlfriend has dumped him. Horrible childhood memories of his father's descent into paranoid madness haunt him very deeply. All of this angst, along with whatever energy he can summon, gets hopelessly poured into a rambling, gargantuan novel based on Lovecraft's creations. Philip's problem is that he really believes in Cthulhu and the other unspeakable ancient monsters. They are the things responsible for all the horrors in his life from his Father's insanity to his wayward career. Our problem is that, as he describes the day to day happenings at his office jobs in Lovecraftian terms, we're not sure he's wrong.
The plot is b-movie stuff, and the ending is worse, but the premise and the view of contemporary activities as subtle forms of a prevailing demonic influence in the world keeps things interesting until the plot needs to be resolved. The prose is straightforward with occasional plunges into horror stylings. Nicely done. A good escapist read for the most part. Think of it as Office Space meets Stephen King. Flick Check: I'm Not There: A Bob Dylan bio-pic worthy of Dylan. That is to say rambling, enigmatic, vague, and pretentious, yet oddly compelling with flashes of brilliance. The movie leaps around interpreting Dylan's career, music, and personal life through a series of different actors/characters. Rightfully, the most renown was Cate Blanchett playing the rebellious folkie going electric and the experiencing the excesses of fame. She did quite a good job with the role, especially considering that the slightest misstep would have turned it into parody or novelty. The other threads coincide with flex points in Dylan's career and life (and, presumably, his precedent in the form of Woody Guthrie) but have less impact and reveal nothing that anyone familiar with Dylan doesn't already know. The fact is there are no clear themes to Dylan's life or work. He's really just being a singer and songwriter and going through the changes that life brings. Everybody thinks they see some profound storyline but there isn't one. He's not there. If that's what director Todd Haynes was going for, he succeeded.
If you never liked Dylan or saw the attraction, this movie will not awaken your interest. If you have a passing interest in Dylan or greater, it's an interesting document. I give it major points for getting through almost the entire film without playing "Like a Rolling Stone," which turns any such project into cliche. There is a brief excerpt over the final credits, but it seems tacked on and I'm betting the network suits forced that on Haynes. Book Look: Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges: The seminal collection of short stories from one of the founding fathers of modern Latin American literature. I have previous discussed the opening story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (second entry), which is the best of this collection and one of the finest short stories ever written. The remainder of the stories vary in quality from stunning to passable.
Borges stands out for his unmatched imagination. A list of the topics covered by some of the stories here (besides Tlon, above) will give you a good idea:
"The Babylon Lottery" -- imagines a civilization where all facets of life are left to the chance of lottery drawings. The history of the lottery is described wherein it becomes more and more prevalent and more and more secretive until it takes on the aspect of God.
"The Library of Babel" -- an unimaginably large library of hexagonal rooms filled with books of an identical length. The books contain every possible combination of 25 characters (22 letters, space, period, comma). As such, although the vast majority of them are total gibberish, they also they must contain every concept that it is possible to express and every bit of knowledge that can be known.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" -- A Chinese spy in England in the employ of the Kaiser in WWI is the descendant of a man who wrote strange book with no apparent logical structure -- characters die only to reappear later, events show little causal continuance. The spy happens to cross paths with a man who has determined that his ancestor was writing a single story but following the different ways it could have played out. Each decision made by a character opened a new thread of reality. Interestingly, this corresponds to, but predates and presages, the many-worlds theories of quantum mechanics by a decade. (Don't dig into it without clearing your schedule.)
"Funes the Memorious" -- the story of a young man who remembers everything in exact detail. He passes the time by reconstructing a full day's memory, an act which takes him a full day.
You get the picture. Borges existed at the intersection of speculative fiction, metaphysical epistemology, and literature. He was well ahead of his time in that respect, but to the modern reader some of this can seem unimpressive simply because imitators have done it to death over the ensuing years. Borges prose can be very dense and, to my eye, it is oddly parsed but that may be the result of translation more than anything else. If your taste is of an imaginative turn, Ficciones is a good book to keep handy. The stories are short and it's good to dive in at any point as a kick-starter for your neurons. Know Your (Planck) Limitations: Many, many years ago, when I was a college freshman, I got into a moronic metaphysical conversation with a few other people in my dorm hall. The topic was not moronic, the people discussing it were (which is redundant to point out since I already said we were college freshman). Naturally the topic of discussion was nothing less than the nature of the universe, which we were going to determine, and being a lifelong, knee-jerk contrarian I argued that the universe was discrete, that space-time was not infinitely divisible. This was met with sarcastic missives about all of us walking around like images on film, moving in chunks at a time, or living as drawings on a deck of cards being flipped through. Patently absurd, right? (Actually I think this conversation started as a discussion about Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise.)
In all honesty I had no actual reason for making the argument other than it was not disprovable, and because then as now, I love to be the outlier, and because then and hopefully not as now, I was something an ass. (Did I mention I was college freshman?) But current research indicates I may have been right.
We all know about the universal speed limit, right? Nothing can go faster than the speed of light (~186,000 miles per second). Not even relatively. If you were in a car going 50 MPH and another car was going the opposite direction at 50 MPH and you hit it with a radar gun, the gun would tell you the other car's speed in 100 MPH. Makes sense. If both cars were going 186,000 miles per second, the radar gun would not measure the other car at 372,000 miles per second, but 186,000 miles per second. Makes no sense whatsoever.
The reason it doesn't make sense to us is because of evolution. The human animal has never seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched a world with conceptual limitations. However fast anything was, there was always something that could go faster. However far away something was, there was always something a bit farther. You can divide things into smaller and smaller pieces, but you can always divide it again. Our minds accommodate infinity. That our brains evolved with the understanding of a limitless existence was probably a tremendous gift. It is almost certainly the basis of the species continued struggle to see beyond current boundaries and thus make constant improvements throughout the millennia.
It took a particularly highly evolved brain (Einstein) to discover that we were wrong; that when you reach magnitudes well beyond our current purview, there is a limit. No matter what you do, or how hard you strive, you will never exceed the speed of light. Perhaps one day, our brains will evolve such that that is as intuitive as limitlessness is now.
But how weird is that? Here we have this time-space continuum that is essentially limitless except for velocity. Other than velocity, there are no limits that we know of, right? Why just the one? Well, there is not just the one after all; the speed of light is just the most famous one. The other limits grow out the work of another highly evolved brain named Max Planck, who was one of the founders of quantum theory. Quantum theory states that energy is not infinitely divisible. In other words, a particle might have energy equivalent to 1 unit, and it might have energy equivalent to 2 units, but it cannot have energy equivalent to 1.5 units. Again, this is entirely illogical to our evolutionary ingrained sense of limitlessness.
From this understanding of energy only taking discrete values (quanta) Planck came up with something called Planck Length -- the shortest possible distance there can be; Planck Time -- the shortest possible time interval (which intuitively corresponds to how long it would take something at the speed of light to cover Planck Length); and a slew of others. I'll be damned if the universe is not discrete after all. The structure of the universe, to the best of our knowledge, is a thing we can calculate and imagine but not naturally comprehend.
Actually, that only goes as far as our current knowledge level. There is a phenomenon called Quantum Entanglement that makes even less sense that a limited universe. Two particles can be linked in such a way that no matter the distance between them, one reacts simultaneously to a change in the other. Think of it this way: two spinning tops both rotating clockwise are sent off in opposite directions. Eventually one suddenly begins spinning counterclockwise. The other does also, at the exact same instant. How does the other one know the first one changed? It couldn't be from having seen it or received any signal from it because we know the speed of light is finite, there would have to be a time lag before the second one changed, however small. But there isn't. No matter how far separate the two tops, they are perfectly in sync at all times. This is so bizarre that physicists have referred to it as "spooky action". It may indeed open the door to limitlessness again at some point in the future once we better understand it. Or it may be something even weirder.
I have no reason to delve into all this other than stumbling across an article in New Scientist about the world being a giant hologram that took me back to that conversation from freshman year. I guess the lesson is that no matter how obnoxious some little twerp can be he still might have a good idea. Doesn't mean he shouldn't be smacked-down on principle, though, just for being an ass. Broken Record on Detroit: The powers du jure of the City of Detroit have been repeating endless mantras about rebirth for the last 50 years. The Lions have been talking about "restoring the roar" for the last 50 years. And I have been hammering Detroit mercilessly on this site for the last 3 or 4 years. It's all a broken record and you are probably getting sick of it. There's nothing I can do about the Lions or the City, but I should probably lay off for a couple of months in the interest of not boring you to death. But permit me one more rant...
My problem is that I want to scream when I read some of the profoundly delusional opinions on Detroit -- the same things that have been said in various ways for the last half-century to no effect whatsoever, yet people keep repeating them. The latest overarching case-in-point comes from Detroit's favorite celebrity writer and hometown hero Mitch Albom via Sports Illustrated. I'm afraid I'm going to have to rip into it:
"There's a little too much glee in the Detroit jokes these days. A little too much flip in the wrist that tosses dirt on our coffins. We hear a Tennessee player tell the media that the Thanksgiving win didn't mean much because "it was just Detroit." We hear Jay Leno rip our scandalous former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, by saying, "The bad news is, he could be forced out of office. The good news is, any time you get a chance to get out of Detroit, take it."
We hear Congress tongue-lash our auto executives for not matching the cheaper wages of foreign car companies. We hear South Carolina senator Jim DeMint tell NPR that "the barnacles of unionism" must be destroyed at GM, Ford and Chrysler. Barnacles? Barnacles are parasites without a conscience. Sounds more like politicians to us.
Enough, we want to say. The Lions stink. We know they stink. You don't have to tell us. Enough. The car business is in trouble. We know it's in trouble. We drive past the deserted parking lots of empty auto plants every day.
Enough. We don't need more lofty national newspaper laments on the decay of a Rust Belt city. Or the obligatory network news piece, "Can Detroit Be Saved?" For too long we have been the Place to Go to Chronicle the Ugly. Example: For years, we had a rash of fires the night before Halloween -- Devil's Night. And like clockwork, you could count on TV crews to fly in from out of town in hopes of catching Detroit burning. Whoomf. There we were in flames, on network TV. But when we got the problem under control, when city-sponsored neighborhood programs helped douse it, you never heard about that. The TV crews just shrugged and left."
Unbelievable. What an enormous load of tripe. And the fact is, sentiment like that has been a rallying point for Detroiters for decades. Read through the entire article. It all comes down to "It's not fair" and "People are picking on us" and "Nobody talks about the good stuff". Then we get to the punch line:
"Do you think if your main industry sails away to foreign countries, if the tax base of your city dries up, you won't have crumbling houses and men sleeping on church floors too? Do you think if we become a country that makes nothing, that builds nothing, that only services and outsources, that we will hold our place on the economic totem pole?"
So let me see if I have this straight: Everyone is mistaken, Detroit is really a fine place with lots of good stuff; and even if it's not you shouldn't talk about it; and even if you do talk about it you should realize that Detroit is just a victim of circumstance, and you could be too one day if your city is ineptly governed as Detroit has been for decades on end. Unbelievable.
Mitch Albom is a paradigmatic sentimentalist. He sells billions of books with maudlin storylines that really tug at the heartstrings. I say that in admiration, by the way: all successful writing in any venue or genre takes talent, and Mitch's talent for goosing your emotions is second to none. But -- and this is the key thing I am trying to get across -- sentiment don't feed the bulldog. Detroit has fought the world using sentiment as its primary weapon for fifty years and look at the results. People who live in Detroit, who experience the reality of it -- not just the view from afar or the words in the press -- have been fleeing like Cubans in a boat lift.
Mitch thinks he is doing good by bucking up the fine folks of Detroit but we have long passed the point where bucking up is damaging. I do not know how to fix Detroit. In fact, I suspect it cannot be fixed, that it must simply die. That is mere supposition, of course. There may be people out there with the ideas and energy to save the City. I will guarantee you that if there are, the decisions and the actions they will have to take are draconian, cold-hearted, and hard-headed. How can anyone pedaling such a painful strategy compete with the uplifting prose of hope from Mitch Albom.
For a clearer, more honest picture read Matt Labash's stunning elegy from the Weekly Standard:
"Its recently resigned mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, he of the Kangol hats and five-button suits, now wears jailhouse orange as he's currently serving a four-month sentence as part of a plea agreement for perjuring himself regarding an extramarital affair with his chief of staff, which yielded soupy love-daddy text messages that would make Barry White yak in his grave. Those in Detroit who are neither recipients of sweetheart contracts nor Kilpatrick family members on the city payroll at inflated salaries think he got off easy. Because what led to the perjury was concealing an $8.4 million payout from city coffers to settle a whistleblower suit brought by cops who'd been fired for investigating, among other things, the murder of a stripper named Strawberry who, prior to her death, was allegedly beat up by Kilpatrick's wife when she caught her entertaining her husband.
In a city often known as the nation's murder capital, with over 10,000 unsolved murders dating back to 1960, the police are in shambles through cutbacks and corruption trials. (They have a profitable sideline, though, as one of the nation's largest gun dealers, having sold 14 tons of used weapons out-of-state.) Their response times are legendarily slow. Their crime lab is so inept that it has been closed. One Detroit man found police so unresponsive when trying to turn himself in for murder that he hopped a bus to Toledo and confessed there instead.
Detroit schools haven't ordered new textbooks in 19 years. Students have reported having to bring their own toilet paper. Teachers have reported bringing hammers to class for protection. Declining enrollment has forced 67 school closures since 2005 (more than a quarter of the city's schools). The graduation rate is 24.9 percent, the lowest of any large school district in the country. Not for nothing did one frustrated activist start pelting school board members with grapes during a meeting. She probably should've reached for something heavier.
An internal audit, which was 14 months late, estimates next year's city deficit to be as high as $200 million (helped along by $335,000 embezzled from the Department of Health and Wellness Promotion). With a dwindling tax base--even the city's three once-profitable casinos are seeing a downturn in revenues (the Greektown Casino is in bankruptcy)--the city has kicked around every money-making scheme from selling off ownership rights to the tunnel it shares with neighboring Windsor, Canada, to a fast food tax. It's perhaps unsurprising that Detroit now has the most speed traps in the nation.
It also has one of the highest property tax rates in Michigan, yet has over 60,000 vacant dwellings (a guesstimate--nobody keeps official count), meaning real estate values are in the toilet. Over the summer, the Detroit News sent a headline around the world, about a Detroit house that was for sale for $1. But it's not even that uncommon. As of this writing, there are at least five $1 homes for sale in Detroit."
And that is quite literally the least of it. Read the whole thing. It's mind-blowing. And if you can stomach anymore, the very best ongoing documentation of the death of Detroit is done over at detroitblog.org. Try this entry for example, which starts off: "Throughout Detroit there are still little libraries full of books that half the residents can't even read", and goes downhill from there.
Thanks for pat on the back, Mitch, but the bulldog is still starving. Travel Rewind: Detroit and the North American Auto Show (1/25/03): (In honor of the North American Auto Show's dutiful continuance in the face of the Carpocalypse, here is a re-run of my attendance from back in '03. The only thing I can say about this is that the comments about Detroit are as accurate today as they were then. Although I should have been less snarky, I claim validation.)
In the days before I attended the North American Auto Show, there was a minor dust-up going on about this article wherein some English journalist trashes Detroit.
"This is the biggest annual motoring festival in the United States but is held in the bleak and frozen inner-city wasteland that is Detroit. They advise you not to go out alone after dark in the centre, not that you can walk far in Motor City, where the pavement is a mere add-on to the wide roads and the cold freezes your breath on your lips."
The good people of Detroit loosened the thick woolen scarves from around their faces to shout in outrage. They fumed behind their triple locked doors. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (who gives new meaning to the term Black Irish) dashed off an angry letter to the London Times in protest. Detroit may be a fiscal mess, but he has his priorities. How dare they?
Now, I'm generally delighted to lambaste some euro-weenie who takes the opportunity to dis' things over here. After all, what business does this clown have denigrating the weather? Does he miss the year-round sunshine and balmy North Sea breezes of England?
But sadly, I'm on his side with regards to Detroit. Many, many people, including some of my friends, bristle when someone complains about Detroit. It just the reputation, they say, in reality it's not that bad.
Well, I'm sorry, but it is that bad. Oh I know, you can have some fun -- Greektown is fine and there are casinos and new stadiums and so forth. But that all misses the point.
While much of the country has experienced significant drops in violent crime, Detroit has always been one of the most dangerous cities. It may not be the murder capital of the nation anymore, but I bet it has never slipped out of the top five.
It is dirty and run down everywhere you look. They may have built a glistening new stadium, Comerica Park, yet directly across the street is a building that has been abandoned for ten years, covered with boarded-up windows and graffiti.
The infrastructure is atrocious. The People Mover? Don't make me laugh. As transportation it is only slightly more effective than the horsey ride outside of Wal-Mart. Streets lead off in seemingly random directions and it's not like you have any signs you can follow. Basically, you should not drive in Detroit unless you already know how to drive in Detroit.
The civil servants rival those of Washington D.C. for discourteous deportment.
Example 1: Naturally, due to the Auto Show, traffic was a mess down there -- bumper to bumper. At one point someone to the left of me needed to cut across in front of me to the right lane so that he could make a right turn. I let him through, but before he could make the turn he found himself being berated by some traffic cop for cutting across lanes. Now, there was no danger here, no one was going more than half a mile-per-hour. The guy was probably from out of town, just struggling to find his way around. But if you are a Detroit traffic cop, why pass up the opportunity to get in someone's face?
Example 2: I'm in a throng of people, now about 27 minutes into a wait on the People Mover platform. We have all been shepherded back a safe distance from the tracks by a transit worker. One couple is trying to keep their little kids under control but, bored from standing around for almost a half-hour, one of them breaks free and crosses a couple of feet out beyond the safe distance. The transit worker shouts, "Now I'm not a babysitter! You are going to have to keep those kids under control!" Even as a veteran of many trips to Washington D.C., the capitol of dismissive rudeness, I was amazed at the manner of these people at a time when the city should have been on its best behavior.
When you point things like this out to Detroit defenders, they say "that's just one bad experience" or "all cities are like that" or the classic, "it's not that bad." The underlying assumption is that everyone is just reacting to an unfair reputation. Despite all the statistics and all the experiences that make people flee Detroit, the powers behind the city proclaim it's really just an erroneous perception. So the response is to use public money for enormous rebuilding projects and to run PR campaigns claiming that Detroit is on the road to Renaissance and everyone should lend a hand.
Detroit has been rebuilding for the entirety of my adult life. Businesses are regularly duped or guilted or bribed into locating downtown, only to find that no one wants to work down there. Yet you can always find someone to appear on the local news express indignation at any belittling of the city, invariably invoking the phrase, "it's not that bad."
Yes, it is that bad. You can build all the bright shiny monoliths tax money can buy and they will still be outnumbered by the boarded up edifices between them. You can put on sporting events and festivals and auto shows, but people are still treated rudely, and every visitor to Detroit has the crime rate in the back of his mind.
Pretty buildings and public relations do not make it better. Convincing a lot of people to say "it's not that bad" doesn't make it better. The only thing that will make it better is to actually make it better in reality, not just words and facades.
But I was going to talk about the Auto Show.
One thing I noticed was, in contrast to the outside world, the Auto Show was not dominated by enormous SUVs.
I dislike SUVs. They are gaudy and crass. They block your view at almost every turn. They cause you to have to back out of your parking space blind. What's worse, the only way to see beyond them is to buy an SUV yourself. They are like an automotive virus.
And yet, if I was still in the market for a new car I would consider buying one just to irritate people who feel that SUVs help terrorists. That has to be one of the silliest, most poorly reasoned opinions I have ever heard. The supposition that oil consumption "helps terrorists" is ludicrous. By that way of thinking, if we did away with all petroleum based products and lived in caves, we might impoverish the terrorists to the point where they had to live in caves. That's terribly inefficient. It is more efficient, and less troublesome, to pay for the A-10s and Special Forces to make the terrorists live in caves. And to do that we need to buy the A-10s and pay the Special Forces. And to do that we need to have a strong economy that generates enough tax money. And to have that we need to a lot of commerce, which requires the use of petroleum. I'd be willing to bet there's a strong correlation between oil-consumption and tax revenue.
So why pick on SUVs as if oil consumption for SUVs is evil, as opposed to other oil consumption? Simply, because they block your view and disrupt your parking and generally annoy you in many ways. But you can't really get on your soap box and build yourself a noble cause out of fighting something that is just annoying -- you have to fight something that is immoral. Thus, the effort to ally SUV drivers with terrorists.
That's why I would consider actually buying one; just out of righteous indignation towards the righteously indignant.
But I was going to talk about the Auto Show.
I attended the Auto Show as part of a marketing project put on by a company called Gongos Associates, who were quite obviously employed by GM. My mission was to spend time evaluating three exhibits and responding to survey questions about them. In return I would get free admission, $8 for parking, and $75 for my trouble. The Saturn, Pontiac and GM Advance Tech exhibit were assigned to me. I suppose there is relationship between me getting those exhibits and the fact that I recently bought a Toyota Camry, but I cannot fathom what it is.
The results of my evaluation: Saturn had a very cool setup. Terminals where you could build your own car (virtually, of course) and they had a rotating platform with seating -- about the only place in the entire show that had seats. But the cars remain some of the most plain vanilla vehicles ever produced. [Update: still true. - dam]
Judging from the Pontiac display, they are about to go the way of Oldsmobile. Nothing much to show, no razzle dazzle, and pretty dour looking employees. They had a couple of things that looked like video games, but I don't think they actually did anything except play a video when you sat in them. Weird. [update: Despite the short-lived G8, I still maintain there is no reason for Pontiac to exist. - dam]
The GM Advanced Tech exhibit had one interesting tech demonstration -- a Drive by Wire car. Drive by Wire basically means all inputs are computer controlled. For example, when you hit the gas, instead of a mechanical link to the carburetor or fuel injection system, a sensor measures the pressure you exert and transmits an electronic signal to tell the fuel system how hard to kick it up. Similarly, instead of a mechanical link between the front wheels and the steering wheel, desired changes in direction are transmitted electronically. The effect is that control is much more consistent and precise, and there are safeguards built in to stop you from doing something stupid, like causing a spin out. Think of it as anti-lock brakes in the extreme. Advanced military aircraft have had this for years. It's a much better use of modern technology than, say, voice recognition. Have you ever spoken to a machine? I don't know about you, but I'd feel like a complete tool sitting in traffic and talking to my car.
Other than that there was nothing special at the tech exhibit. There was a truck standing up on four hydraulic lifts being jostled around, and an engine being run under various stressful conditions. These were designed to demonstrate how committed GM is to testing and quality -- despite their reputation -- thanks mostly to Cadillac, which is always bringing up the rear in any quality surveys. [Caddy's doing better these days. -dam] Speaking of Cadillac, they had a sofa sized, 16 cylinder, 1000-HP engine on display. Terrorists praised Allah.
With my assigned duties completed I was able to spend time wandering the rest of the show. As I said, SUVs are on the way out. The new big things are station wagons, which were last seen as new big things in the '60s. These new-breed station wagons have a little SUV influence. They are a little taller and sit a little higher of the ground than normal cars, but they don't go anywhere near the extreme of SUVs with their truck pretensions.
I like these nouveau wagons. They are technically referred to as Crossovers, as in they cross-over the line between cars and SUVs. They come in all shapes and sizes, and offer a good deal of character. Despite the commonality of the station wagon, the designs vary considerably.
Getting a lot of attention was the BMW xActive, which had a number of interesting features, not including the cutesy high-tech name. Along the same lines is the Infiniti FX45. There's even the Maserati Kubang. These are meant to meld the look and vibe of quality sports cars with the practicality of the station wagons. They are quite fetching, and I would consider getting one, but I'm afraid I would have to become a player first -- you know, read GQ, buy art deco kitchen appliances, hit on women at Starbucks, and so forth.
Some crossovers are just funky cool -- the Dodge Kahuna for example, although I would never buy a Chrysler product for quality reasons (I know three people who have had Chrysler products spontaneously combust). Equally funky and fun is the Honda Element. Yeah it looks goofy, but it's my kind of goofy. Of all the cars I saw, this was the one I would have possibly purchased over my Camry, had it been available at the time. [Not a bad call - dam]
Of course there was plenty of extravagance out on display also. Daimler introduced the Maybach. At 330,000 simoleans, the target audience is those who find the top of the line Mercedes too downscale. The Maybach was placed in the middle of a large platform behind velvet ropes and under high security -- the peasants were allowed to view from afar, not touch. Problem: even from afar you could tell that the Maybach is just plain ugly.
Less expensive but equally ugly is the entire line of Cadillacs. Sorry, but that toothy grill and those chrome encircled headlights make me think of a dorky looking guy with thick glasses and braces. In their commercials, they always show these freaky things in contrast to beautiful tail-finned classic Caddies from the '50s. Talk about advertising your faults. [Not a good call - dam]
These cars are for people who are long on money and short on taste. They are the automotive equivalent of Anna Nicole.
Is the Auto Show a good time? Yeah, sort of. It could be. There are lots of shiny cars to see and sit in. There are big flashy displays. There are smiling spokesmodels. On the other hand, it's crowded all the time. You might think mid-afternoon on a weekday would be less popular, but no -- it is always filled with people.
It would be fun to casually walk through for about an hour or so, but that's it -- unless you had another purpose: you were actually in the market for a car or you were with some friends and planning on dinner and gambling afterwards at Greektown. Absent something like that, it really becomes just a big auto showroom that you must survive the squalorous insanity of Detroit to reach.
How to make it better? Have it in the summer -- outside (or at least open air), give it twice as much space and locate it somewhere you can actually get to without having to adopt an eat-or-be-eaten mindset to survive.
Until then, I'll pass on future Auto Shows, unless I get offered a lot more than $75.
Originally posted 1/25/2003
Thursday, January 01, 2009
The Month That Was - December 2008: Kiss another year goodbye, so I'm starting to think about projects for next year. I need to start getting this place (this site) organized and sorted out. First, all the media I review are now going to get their own posts rather than doing "flick notes" and "reading roundups". This will make it easier for folks to zero in on things when they do web searches. Second, I want to get all the travel reports that are linked to the left worked into the actual blog, so I will likely be editing and reposting them as "travel rewinds" or something like that, and getting all the pictures up on SmugMug; the goal is to get all the content in the blog or on SmugMug, again for the sake of searching and linking.My writing projects are to either finish Misspent Youth and/or my top secret other project, and to get Apple Pie and Business as Usual formatted for the Kindle. Figure I'll finish about half of everyting I want done.
Right now Michigan is swirl of dead tree brown and salt road grey. The only remedy, of course, is travel planning. But that'll wait until the new year.
The End of Vegas?
Book Look: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Book Look: Europe's Last Summer
Book Look: Last Night at the Lobster
The Decline and Fall of HBO
Christmas in New York
Football (With Regrets) The End of Vegas?: For I don't know how many years now I have spent my Thanksgiving in Las Vegas. (Photos on SmugMug.)I don't know whether it's me or the city, but I simply don't feel the excitement I used to feel going there. Bill Simmons once wrote that there are three places in the U.S. where just being there makes you feel like you're in a movie: Manhattan, Bourbon Street, and the Vegas Strip. But familiarity takes all that away. I don't get those feelings anymore after multiple visits, especially in Vegas.
I used to get geeked up for blackjack sessions, but once I mastered basic strategy it became rote (plus they started getting all namby-pamby on the rules like shortening the payouts for a blackjack). I tried the other table games, mostly just to have had the experience, but again, once I had done it I didn't feel compelled to continue. Poker was good for a while, and it can be a stimulating challenge; on the other hand, I don't ever recall being at a poker table that was fun (like a good blackjack table). The only gambling left for me is NFL betting.
Likewise, I've experienced the other aspects of Vegas life now. I was never truly interested in clubbing, other than as an observer of humanity. They are generally horrible places where if you want to sit you have to buy $400 table service otherwise you get to stand and order $15 drinks provided you can elbow your way to the bar. No conversation can be had over the music. The shows can be fun, but how many Cirque du Soliels can you see before they start to run together in a colorful blur? Gentlemen's clubs? Even the best come off as seamy.
So now I tend to haunt the sports books and visit my favorite restaurants -- Vegas has not let me down food-wise. It's hard to imagine more great food concentrated in walking distance than you get on the Strip. The big new development since I was last on the Strip is the Palazzo, which is an addition to the Venetian. It has its own upscale shopping mall and its own canals and some truly top notch restaurants, the best of which was Carnevino, Mario Batali's Italian Steakhouse. I forwent steak and had the Ravioli Di Stracotto, a duck liver ravioli in a balsamic sauce. It may have been the single most tasty thing I have ever eaten in my life. Also at Palazzo is Cut, Wolfgang Puck's steakhouse where I snacked on some tasty steak tartare, and Woo, a nouveau Asian spot with an awesome ginger chicken dumpling appetizer (I did a lot of snacking around, rather than big meals). I indulged in sushi and sake for the first time in ages; it was a non-traditional Thanksgiving dinner.
Generally with respect to the Strip I know where I want to go and what I want to eat and who I want to bet on. As a result, two nights on the strip was just about right. Friday morning, when the masses were flowing into the city for the long weekend I was on my way out, headed toward San Diego.
There are two paths to San Diego from Las Vegas. One is to head westward towards L.A. and then swing south just before you get into the meat of Los Angeles. That's the fast way -- maybe 5 hours. The other option is to head south out of Vegas, through the desert. Once outside the city, the landscape goes barren fast. In Michigan we often find ourselves dodging squirrels and chipmunks as they dart through traffic in pursuit of God knows what. South of Vegas, you see a little critter making its way across the road and by the time you get up to it, you realize it's a tarantula. Three times I sped past these hairy beasts, all eight legs working to get them across the tarmac. Ick.
These long straight roads take you through the Mojave Desert and skirt Joshua Tree National Park. Apart from the tarantulas, all that exists are a few dusty little towns and a few outdoorsy resorts geared toward four-wheeling (which looks like an awful lot of fun). Then, after a few hours, civilization suddenly reappears in all its glory. Resort communities spring up fully-formed and golf course-green: Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage, Desert Hot Springs, etc. The whole area exists as a way for west coasters to get away from urban life and escape to "The Desert". (We have a similar habit here in Michigan we call "Going Up North".) The streets are all lined with symmetric rows of palm trees while BMWs and Lexuses weave in and out of the gated communities and country clubs. These folks have more money than God, and play more golf than Him, too.
I only had time to stop for a late lunch in Palm Desert, but I was thinking it would surely be nice to hang there. I took a brief walk up El Paseo, which looks to be the Main Street of Palm Desert -- shops, restaurants, etc. -- and had a nice al fresco lunch at City Grill, then it was off to meet Chevy Chase and Ted Knight on the first tee at Bushwood. Actually, it was back on the road to San Diego.
And this is where taking the road less travelled paid off. Exiting Palm Desert you find yourself on the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail for a brief period, which entails snaking through hairpin turns up through astounding photo-worthy mountain passes. It turns out that locked between the shiny worlds of Las Vegas and L.A. are some strikingly scenic high desert vistas. From there on it's a dash down from the peaks to the coast and into San Diego, or more specifically, Del Mar.
I have never "gotten" Los Angeles. I know it is supposed to be paradigmatic of Southern California and its praises are raised in story and song, but I don't see the attraction, relatively speaking. If you are not in the film industry, or angling to get in, I see absolutely no reason anyone would prefer L.A. to San Diego. I find San Diego to be about the most beautiful large city I have ever seen. It is a city of easy charm versus the teeth gritted smile of Los Angeles.
North of San Diego sits the famed suburb of La Jolla, and just beyond that sits Del Mar -- possibly a bit downscale from La Jolla, but equally beautiful if not more so. The first time I was in San Diego, several years ago on business, on my one free day I rented a car and asked the desk jockey where he would go if he had one day at the beach. He said would go to Del Mar which, in his opinion, had the most beautiful beach in Southern California. I took his advice back then, and this time I went back. I have to admit that I have kind of fallen in love with Del Mar.
Del Mar seems nothing more than a little surfside town with a main shopping and dining area and a couple of state parks along the shoreline. There is a famous racetrack there, and Torrey Pines Park, which constitute its main public attractions, but my impression is the vibe is still that of a small, beach community. I snagged a decent room at the Best Western Stratford Inn, which is a five minute walk to the bluff overlooking the beach. You walk down a very pretty little side street and come to a set of railroad tracks over the shore along which runs Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner service, from San Diego all the way up past L.A. to San Luis Obispo (gotta try that sometime). You can walk north along the bluff looking down on the beach (or climbing down to hit the surf), eventually the bluff slopes down and merges with the beach proper at Powerhouse Park, where everyone gathers for the sunset. Me, I could have hung out shooting pictures all day and fantasizing about learning to surf.
San Diego proper is only a few minutes away and my only full day free was dominated by a visit to Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo. I had picked the perfect day, it was sunny and not too hot. I managed to be one of the first into the zoo and got to enjoy it before it got too crowded. The SD Zoo is an exceptionally well-designed place. Most all the critters are easily viewable, the exception being the pandas, for which the viewing line was ludicrously long from the opening of the gates. They have foot-saving busses that run throughout the park and an aerial tram that takes you from the far end back to the entrance.
Outside the Zoo are the other attractions of Balboa Park which is, effectively, a museum campus -- Art, Photography, Air & Space, History (both natural and manmade), Cultural this and that -- all with a certain local angle to them. The grounds are nicely landscaped. It is a place where San Diegans go to promenade on a sunny afternoon. I snagged a bite to eat from one of the cart vendors and found a comfy spot on the lawn to watch the world go by for an hour or so in the late afternoon. I do awfully like San Diego. And in my visits (maybe 4 of them over the years) I have just scratched the surface.
After a sunset photo shoot and a quick dinner back in Del Mar, I was up the next morning and headed back towards Vegas. In an effort to save time I took the road more traveled back. Ugly gray freeway all the way; hideous truck stop towns outside L.A.; a bizarre place called Primm just inside the Nevada border that looked like a parody of commercialism: a huge flashy casino and outlet mall in the middle of a barren desert. And for the hundreds of miles from L.A. to just outside Vegas the traffic was stop and go in the other direction as the folks I passed on the way out Friday were returning to the West Coast from their long holiday weekends. What a living hell for them: After a grueling Thanksgiving with the annoying relatives, you crawl through traffic, turkey-nauseated, to the Vegas strip, spend the weekend overpaying for your room, overeating in buffets, and losing your shirt in blackjack or on the slots, then you claw your way back to L.A. at a snail's pace. Thank you, God, for making me a contrarian.
I closed out my trip on the outskirts of Vegas at the Red Rock Resort. I chose Red Rock for three reasons: 1) I could easily make the run into the strip to collect on my NFL bets (I broke roughly even), 2) it is about the nearest place to Red Rock Canyon State Park, and 3) it was supposed to be beautiful. All three were true. Red Rock Resort has a sweet pool area and would probably be a killer spot to hang in the summer when pool time is an option. The rooms are big and awesome with high-def flat screens and gigantic marble bathrooms. There are a ton of restaurants on the property; you could have a decent trip if you never left the resort. But that would be silly because Red Rock Canyon is only 7 miles away.
Red Rock Canyon is called that because it is dominated by a canyon of reddish rock, go figure. But there really is a good deal of geological diversity in relatively small area (it's barely a blip on the map relative to major national parks). Technically it is not a National Park, but a National Conservation Area, which I believe differs from a park in that there are minimal facilities and maintenance. Basically it's just a chunk of land that no one is allowed to develop. There is a 13-mile one way road through the place with a visitor's center at the start. There are a handful of parking areas and overlooks, each with a primitive restroom and a trash can. From many of the stops there are hiking trails through various regions, generally starting from the road and heading into the canyonland.
I took off for a quick hike through an area called the Calico Tanks, and promptly found myself off the trail, with no idea where I had lost it. This is par for the course considering my hiking habits and usually I pass it off to my congenital trailblindness, but this time I cut myself some slack in that these are some very poorly marked trails over and around boulders; I think it would be tough for even experienced hikers to keep on these trails.
The good news is that I was able to make my way fairly deep into the crevices and recesses of the canyon. Surrounded by towering walls of red boulders, it was eerily dark and astoundingly quiet. The only sounds came from within the strewn-about thickets where birds engaged in periodic screeching matches. I am not particularly aware of what might be termed the "spiritual essence" of a place, but some combination of isolation, security, silence, and the cool desert air inside that canyon made me feel as though I was in some sort of secret hiding place.
Apparently a fit chap with some time on his hands could make his way all the way to the top of the ridge, scrambling up large boulders the whole way, no special rock climbing skills needed. I debated finding my way back to the car to drop off my Nikon then doing just that, but decided against it. I wanted to see the rest of the park. As it was, I still got to do a good deal of rock-hopping, followed by crab-walking down the steeper parts just finding my way back to the trail. Good fun; definitely lined up for a return visit. The remainder of the road loop is lovely and offers some decent desert hiking, just not the drama of the red rocks proper.
So that's how I spent my Thanksgiving. Despite my misgivings above, I'll likely go back next year. Even if the Strip is fading in esteem, Vegas offers all the opportunity I need to Southwest exploration. I still have never been to the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam (damn contrarian). Besides, by next year Wynn's Encore and MGM's City Center will be open, and I have to see those. There's plenty of opportunity left for giving thanks in Sin City.
Photos on SmugMug. Book Look: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami: I've written about Murakami's fiction before. I'm a big fan. I confess I didn't know he was such a dedicated runner. And this book is a short, quick reading, deceptively simple memoir about his avocation. He talks about how he runs, where he runs, when he runs, and most interestingly, what he thinks about why he runs. There is nothing special about this book beyond the fact that it is exceptionally personal -- a rare thing for the somewhat withdrawn Murakami. Over the years, he had just recorded his thoughts about running and has followed them to a deeper understanding of himself and the world, and organized them into this book. It is not profound in any way, but there is a sort of elegiac quality to the resigned acceptance of things. If you run, you will almost certainly identify with some of the sentiments. If you don't, you probably will too. Book Look: Europe's Last Summer by David Fromkin: I have always had an odd fascination for WW1, specifically the events surrounding its outset. The romantic view of WW1 is that, apart from being a horrific from a military standpoint, it was a clean demarcation of modernity. Although the old order had been crumbling from within for decades, the Great War was the nail in the coffin. It ushered in the world we know and love by kicking off the bloodiest century in human history.
That's cynical comment, but not inaccurate. Modernity has brought us in the West very good lives for the most part, but there is also much we have lost, as Fromkin reminds us early on when he notes that in the summer before the war it was possible to travel anywhere without a passport, take up residence anywhere with no documentation, and generally live wherever and however you wanted with little or no interaction with any governmental authority whatsoever. Although there has been undeniable scientific and industrial progress, and there has arguably been a good deal of social progress in some quarters, those simple freedoms are gone from us now and likely never to return. How did this happen? Or put another way, who or what really started WW1?
Fromkin does a bang up job of incorporating relatively recent scholarship into his analysis. This is the sort of stuff that wasn't really known when I was memorizing WW1 facts in junior high school. (And now that it is known, the topic is likely no longer in public school curricula.) As revisionism goes, this is very mild. It's more of a clarification -- a well-reasoned expansion of context. In the end Fromkin concludes that the culpability rests primarily with the German General Staff. However, he also notes a striking bit of irony. As events tumbled toward finality, the only ones who could have and would have likely stopped them were two paragons of the old order, living parodies of obnoxious monarchs, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (by then assassinated) and Kaiser Wilhelm II (effectively neutered by the German political establishment). Modernity was born of blood not from the death throes of the old order, but from self-inflicted wounds. Book Look: Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan: What a perfect slice of life. Manny is the manager of a Red Lobster on its last day of business. The outlet is closing and Manny is being transferred to a nearby Olive Garden (and taking a corresponding demotion to Assistant Manager). Things are complicated by the fact that a massive snowstorm is upon them so the place is empty, and that he can select five employees to bring with him to Olive Garden, then rest get to pound the pavement for a new job. Things are further complicated because Manny is still hopelessly infatuated with one of the waitresses to the point of having elevated their erstwhile affair into heavenly bliss.
Among its many virtues, Lobster gets the whole day in the life of a franchise restaurant dead on perfect. An old chain restaurant employee (such as myself) cannot stop nodding in recognition at virtually every setting and all the little actions and attitudes that fill the day. Although I worry those details may make things seem a bit slow going for folks not familiar with that life.
The bigger achievement is the portrayal of Manny. An underachieving, aging, everyman with an excess of belly that disturbs him and a longing to recapture the one passionate time in his life. Manny is a true believer. It's the last day the restaurant will be open, but he is going through the processes and following the guidelines as best he can, all the while understanding and honoring of the disinterest of other employees. He soldiers on trying to do the right and responsible thing when it doesn't count a whit if the place is open or closed or clean or filthy. He hopes by hanging on to paychecks he can keep enough staff from deserting so he can stay open, but whatever chance there was for a solid final performance is lost in the debilitating snowstorm. He's down to a skeleton crew of folks who are really just hanging out to help him through the end.
The final insult comes when a bus load of seniors show up and he's convinced they can do one last heroic act to get them served and satisfied, except all they want is to make use of the bathroom and get back on the road. Manny laments his lost chance to do something special, mirroring his lament for his lost lover. Only for the briefest moment does he sense that the fact that some staff actually stuck it out to closing, despite already having their checks, despite being terminated the next day, despite simply not caring about their jobs, for no reason other than to support him, counts as a special achievement. It's an act of gratitude that he has earned over the years for his basic honorability despite the negativity and disappointment of his staff.
There are millions of people like Manny out there. They have lost any pretense of their own special value, without anything hope for passion or greatness, yet they press on, working hard and being responsible because it is the right thing to do and because they know no other way. They are the finest of the faithful. All they can hope for is some marginal form of justice in the end; meanwhile dirtbags, deviants, and sore thumbs get their stories told and wallow in their own infamy.
Well done Stewart O'Nan! More people should write books like this. The Decline and Fall of HBO: I suppose True Blood was OK. That is to say, it's not worth watching other than as a mild distraction. The concept of vampires as an oppressed minority with religious and quasi-right wing human supremacist forces out to get them is about as heavy-handed and conceptually confused as anything I have seen. It also appears to have no actual point. Beyond that, True Blood is a generic combo of soap opera and murder mystery, just add vampires. Attempts at humor are not particularly funny. Attempts at suspense are not particularly arresting. Attempts at romance descend into dull pseudo-porn. Producer Alan Ball's reputation now rests on American Beauty, an overwrought movie which gets exponentially worse with age; Six Feet Under, which had one great season, and one good one, and also has no staying power; and the shrug-inducing True Blood.
(By the way: I am already sick to death of frickin' vampires. Let's declare a moratorium on any more vampire crap. Let the undead rest in peace for a while, wouldja?)
A better pointless time waster is Entourage because it doesn't profess to be anything more than tissue-thin and therefore doesn't require the effort to be disappointed, and you only end up wasting 30 minutes instead of an hour. Plus, there is always The Piven to liven things up.
Upcoming for HBO is a sitcom called Hung and I refuse to describe the premise, but you can probably guess. I'll just say that if you are one of those people who believes TV is a lurid cesspool, you're about to get a reload of ammo, as if you needed it. All this is made more poignant because they have just re-run the final season of the finest TV show ever made, Deadwood.
I know some people claim The Wire to be best, but they are wrong. That show's source of brilliance was the treatment of the series as a contemporary Greek Tragedy, but it was marred by the very contemporary setting it so valued. In the end outside forces like David Simon's axe grinding weighed heavily on it, and I grew to sense an uncomfortable voyeurism, as if it a certain class of elitist progressives were gawking at the portrayal of some horrible primitives, while congratulating themselves on their broad-minded evaluations. The ambition for social relevance inevitably makes the living reaction to the show part of the experience; "contemporary" is a double-edged sword. I rank The Wire at #3.
The Sopranos also bears mentioning, but to be honest, it was 6+ seasons when it should have been about 4. There were stretches that were carried almost entirely by James Gandolfini. However, it benefitted supremely from Matt Weiner's subtle and honest insights into humanity (now obvious thanks to Mad Men). The characters were as deep and the relationships as complex as any ever created. The Sopranos comes in at #2.
Deadwood rises above the others simply by the scope of its ambition. The Wire was about impotence in the face of a cold-hearted, dehumanizing system. The Sopranos was about the lies we tell ourselves and how we work to preserve them. Excellent and timeless themes, no doubt; well-plumbed throughout the history of the arts. But Deadwood was about how civilization emerges from barbarism. Go find examples of that anywhere else in the arts or humanities. Forgive me if I don't wait. If it wasn't totally original, it was pretty rare. And I'll wager anything you do find in a similar vein is mawkishly simple in comparison. More likely you'll find high-minded expositions about how we are no different from savages.
But more than that is the language. As far as I know Deadwood is the only TV show, and one of the few recent works of drama in any form, to use the English language in something other than a utilitarian, realistic way. The dialogue had a rhythm and tone all its own -- it approached having a meter. People spoke in complete sentences and paragraphs. There were regularly soliloquies. All of this was intermixed with some of the most poetic profanity imaginable. I know the gangsters and gangstas in the other two shows had the lingo right for their idioms, but that was for the sake of genuineness. The dialogue in Deadwood wasn't aiming to be genuine; it was aiming to be beautiful. And it was. Just an amazing work of art.
Deadwood never got a chance to end, because it was more important to have time slots for something like Hung. Where once HBO had the balls to greenlight epic drama, they now only have the balls to greenlight epic genitals. Christmas in New York: I flew into DC to meet Miss Kate and we took the Amtrak up to NYC for Christmas Day. We quickly came to the realization that the traditional Christmas, where a family stays in huddled around the tree, is long gone. The streets were packed. Rockefeller Center was packed stem to stern with cops directing the foot traffic. It was simply astounding how many people were scurrying about. We walked up toward Central Park and tried to get into the Oak Room in the Plaza for a drink -- no go. We finally found some respite from the crowds in Central Park itself which was quite lovely even in bare-treed winter, although that too took a little bit of seeking out the path less travelled. There was even a line for the horse and carriage rides.
With sundown approaching we made our way to the Lobby Bar in the Mandarin Oriental on Columbus Circle for a pre-dinner drink. Stylish and expensive, don't bother unless you have some green. Drinks are twenty bucks each. Next we made it to BLT Market in the Ritz-Carlton for a very tasty, if somewhat overpriced dinner; eight dollars for a cup of tea and they add in a 20% gratuity on a table of 2 -- shameful, but that's the Big Apple. Then it was time for the train ride back to DC. A short but enjoyable adventure that was appropriately festive and certainly beat the hell out of sitting home watching old movies.
The next day we hit the newly renovated Smithsonian Museum of American History and it was filled to the brim; folks lined up outside just about every exhibit. Sheesh. So we made our way over to the Freer/Sackler museum of Asian Art, a real hidden gem and deceptively large. I like Asian art and one nice thing about the Freer/Sackler Museum is that it is never crowded. Currently there is a big exhibit on Indian art that was fascinating in many ways, but with all the wandering of the previous day, my feet were throbbing. After a last beer in Crystal City, Kate dropped me at Reagan National and I was winging my way home.
Travelling on holidays can be good, but it works best if you are heading away from standard tourist destinations. My ultimate lesson for the holiday season: It pays to be a contrarian.
Photos on SmugMug. Football (With Regrets): I can't do it. I can't make it through the whole year without writing about football. Sorry, but the Dolphins won their division (by a tie-breaker, but still) and in the process slammed the door on that insufferable diva, Brett Favre. That cannot go unnoted.
I knew I was going to have withdrawal over giving up my NFL column, but you can't imagine the self-control it took not to go off on novel-length savaging of Lord Favre when he was doing his little golly-I-changed-my-mind-about-retiring-why-are-you-being-so-mean-to-me episode at the outset of the season. Favre has always been overrated and manipulative, but he finally reached Terrell Owens level selfishness.
In case you don't remember, the Packers, having already named Aaron Rodgers as the starting QB before the King decided to Return, did the honorable thing and kept their promise to a guy who patiently waited in the wings all those years while The Diva was padding his consecutive start streak. They offered Brett the back-up job, even though he would be a locker room cancer at that point. Playing second fiddle was, as you can guess, intolerable to Ms. Hilton...er, I mean Brett Favre.
So after all the wheedling and whinnying, His Lordship ended up on traded to the Jets. Having landed His Royal Brettness, the Jets summarily shipped their previous starting QB, Chad Pennington, to lowly 1-15 Miami, where this supposed mediocrity would mingle with existing mediocrities and offer no sort of threat to the Jets, even though they are in the same division. Favre must have been in hog heaven at that point. Not only did he have all the attention he could ever want, but he had the reputations of two other QBs (Rodgers and Pennington) hinging on his performance. Imagine the boundless self-validation of wielding such influence.
In the beginning of the season, things were going exactly as planned. The Jets were winning and sports journalists were trumpeting the glory of Lord Favre across the land. The Jets were brilliant and Favre was a true-life superhero. Still, even with Brett at his high point, there were flaws that were apparent to anyone who follows closely. You have no idea how many times I came close to punching out a column at that point, but I would have needed to new keyboard for every paragraph from hitting the keys so hard.
Readers who kept up with my erstwhile football column will remember that there are rules for having a winning football team. The first rule is: The Offensive Line is the Most Important Part of Your Team. That rule doesn't really have much bearing since the Jets O-line was marginally better than average. The second rule is: A Reliable, Consistent and Accurate Quarterback is better that a Star that Makes Big Plays. That does apply.
Another thing readers of my football column will recall is that I that place a lot of faith the cold, heartless statistical analysis that comes from Football Outsiders. That analysis indicated for most of the year, that Favre was putting up a less than middle-of the-road year at best. He was benefitting from a ridiculously easy schedule more than anything (as was all the AFC East). Meanwhile, down in Miami, where mediocrity was supposed to rule the day, the Fins were hanging in there with Jets and the Pats for the division lead, and Chad Pennington was putting together an outstanding season, albeit with roughly the same easy schedule benefit.
But it was still all about Favre -- he may throw an interception for every touchdown, but he's a game changer. You're never out of the game if Brett is your QB. Just knowing he's behind center raises the play of the entire team. God how I hate that nonsense. You can imagine how frustrating it was for me to watch that crap. And for a while it looked like injustice would be served as the Jets had the postseason in sight.
Sometimes, however, even in this chaotic world of chance and happenstance, things work out the way they are should. It seems that all the praise and puffery couldn't mask the truth forever. The Jets began to crumble. True to his history, the King of Intangibles started winging the ball to the guys in the wrong jerseys. In week 13 Favre could only manage 17 points against the Broncos, who were sporting the second worst defense in the NFL since 1995 (again, per Football Outsiders -- the 2008 Broncos are second only to the 2008 Lions). In week 16, against the craptastic Seattle Seahawks who had nothing to play for, he couldn't even manage a touchdown.
Down south, the Dolphins were still plugging away with Pennington doing what he always does (when he's not injured) -- being accurate, sticking to the plan, following his progressions, not wasting passes, and never drawing attention to himself. The Fins won four straight going into week 17, including 3 on the road. AS a result, they were in the driver's seat for the final week showdown with the Jets, a match heightened by Pennington's returning to the place he was cast out of for "someone better".
When truth, justice and beauty all coincide, it's a rare and wonderful thing to behold. The Fins played smart and steady. Chad completed 73% of his passes with 2 TDs and no interceptions. Brett completed only 50% with a single TD and 3 big ol' gunslinger interceptions. His final desperate pass of the game, and possibly his career, was an illegal forward lateral. In the immortal words of Nelson: Ha Ha.
So the Fins deservedly get the playoff berth and The Diva gets to go home and contemplate his next dramatic episode. Back in Green Bay Aaron Rodgers had a fine year, finishing as a top ten QB (per Football Outsiders), but the Pack simply didn't have anything go their way. Their play-by-play performance suggested they should have ended up with nine-ish wins -- instead they got six. Look for a big rebound next year as the statistical flukery reverts to the mean. That'll cook the Legend of Gunslinger for good.
In the fallout, the Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum, having discarded a better QB for a worse one and costing themselves a postseason berth, needed a fall guy. One of the only-hinted-at issues of the Jets season was a simmering conflict between the coach, Eric Mangini, who is a system guy, and The Diva, who didn't like to be told what to do or how to play. Mangini would sometimes question The Diva on his improvised decision-making. This is Something You Do Not Do To His Brettness and Tannenbaum had to side with Brett or admit he messed up by making the trade in the first place. Mangini was fired after the game. You live by The Brett, you die by The Brett.
The whole story is just 900 kinds of awesome. I wish I had written about it now, so I could look back at all the doubters and say "Neener, neener, neener"!
Sunday, December 07, 2008
The Month That Was - November 2008: Little to say except that I continue to cross days off the calendar with no obvious end in sight. This droning on gets worse when the weather gets cold, and frankly, I think we are in for a blistering cold winter this year. I've seriously considered taking up cross-country skiing this year, if we get enough snow -- just to get out and stay fit.All this is compounded by the fact that each year for the past three my company has reduced the amount of vacation time you can carry over from year to year. This year we are down to carrying a single week -- 40 hours -- which means that if I decide to make a January or February run for the sun I will have to be extra judicious in my plans for the remainder of the year. Long gone are the days when I would have five or six weeks banked and be able to head off into the wild as the feeling moved me.
Not that it will stop me. I will weasel whatever I need to get out of town -- leverage floating holidays, get "sick" at the right time, and so forth. But the travel time security blanket is gone.
I should mention that as I write this I am winging my way towards Vegas and points west for my traditional Thanksgiving trip. That write up will have to wait until next month. This month you get my Florida trip report, including pictures posted on my new Smugmug account (hooray!), which is like Flickr only classier. I'll work on getting some of my old stuff up there too. It's much easier to look at the galleries than clicking links through individually. Plus it gives me chance to tag them and for complete strangers to find them and point and laugh.
Remembering the Forgotten Coast
Inside the Glove
Pale Fire
Flick Notes
All Things Must Pass Remembering the Forgotten Coast: An extra, extra long weekend gave me the opportunity to head down to Sarasota again, for a quick visit with family, then off to explore more of Florida. I should have the State just about covered by the time I die. This trip I was to head up into the Panhandle -- commonly known as the Redneck Riviera. Photos are on Smugmug.
An el cheapo flight from AirTran got me into Tampa (apropos of nothing, it was one of the final domestic flights that did not charge for checked baggage, which is a rant I have already howled), and to the Hertz check in desk where they didn't have the car I requested. I wanted a mid-sized car with Sirius since I was going to be on the road for a good bit of time. As expected they offered me an upgrade, but not to a full sized car. They offered me a Mustang GT, which counts as an upgrade even though it is stiflingly cramped because, presumably, it is really fast and tasteless bimbos will think you are a player. I really had no interest but the next grade up was a Ford Edge, which would have been fine, but they wouldn't give me that upgrade for free. So if I wanted Sirius, I had to take the cherry red Ford Mustang GT or pay more than I had intended. I took the Mustang and put Hertz on my ever growing list of bastards.
I will say this for the Mustang, it steers very precisely and it is exceedingly quick. The power would have been lost on me but the first time I pulled out on a two lane road to pass a semi and hit the accelerator -- whoa Nellie! You could get whiplash on that downshift.
Anyway, Sarasota remains Sarasota. It is a strikingly beautiful city. And the sun is always shining. And the trip across the bridge to the Longboat Key is worth the price of the trip. The other thing about Sarasota is that there is a ton of stuff to do there. I've spent a huge amount of time there over the years and I still find new experiences. This time it was Mote Aquarium. A great place to spend a couple of hours with the embalmed giant squid, the shark tank, the pool where you can pet the rays, the hands-on crustacean exhibit, educational movies, boat tours into the bay, even the old-time ice cream parlor on the premises. Manned by a volunteer staff (mostly retirees), it's the sort of place Sarasota specializes in: low-key but top quality attractions that don't claim to be anything more than they are.
Family visit over, I aimed the Mustang toward the Forgotten Coast. Generally when one thinks of the Florida Panhandle, one thinks of the spring break madness at Panama City and the massive condo and resort development over into Destin and Pensacola. But the coast between Tampa and Panama City, which is essentially the hard left turn where you shift from peninsular Florida in to the Panhandle proper, remains largely underdeveloped. Traffic arteries move north from Tampa inland to Tallahassee and west towards Gainesville then down into Panama City, bypassing the easternmost panhandle for the most part. As a result the coastal towns in that area have taken to referring to themselves as the Forgotten Coast, which from east to west, includes the towns of Eastpoint, Apalachicola, Port St. Joe, and Mexico City Beach.
Two quick observations about this being the Redneck Riviera: A) It is. B) But it's not what you think.
There are a decreasing number of uniform places in this country. Despite a political class that likes to paint counties and even entire states in red or blue, I doubt you find a state that is more the 55% or so one way or the other. That means if you took a random sample of ten people from the most partisan state you could find you would still only likely get six people who conformed. At the county level maybe you'd get seven once in while. Which is to say you rarely go anywhere in the country and get overwhelmed with the prevailing socio-political sentiment. This being a couple of days before elections, it was pretty clear that the place was majorly McCainiacs, but there were still a healthy number of O-bots to balance them.
The other thing is that these places, like everywhere else you go, are gentrifying. Apalachicola was my first stop, and the social changes of the last decade or so are written all over it. From time immemorial, it had been a fishing village populated with back-slapping bubbas, now suddenly there is a stylish Cuban restaurant on main street and a Starbucks knock off -- which by the way happened to have the very best breakfast sandwich ever; unbelievably fresh and flaky croissants -- where the bubbas now backslap over $4 lattes. Those picture perfect old houses in the historic district are now trophy homes for wealthy northerners with fishing boats. But they all seem to be doing OK with it, from what I could tell. Everyone I happened to make eye contact with was delighted to start up a conversation about anything and everything, usually ending up with a suggestion about what a good place it was to live. Smarmy, small-minded northerners would probably freak-out at the good ol' boy drawl and neighborly familiarity and sneer at the simple rubes, but I sure saw nothing but a lot of decent, freindly folks living lives that urban elites fanaticize about -- which is why they are down here overpaying for all those historic fixer-uppers and opening upscale coffee bars and boutiques.
The big to-do in Apalachicola was the Florida Seafood Festival, a celebration of, well, seafood. Thousands come in to the little town from far and wide. A carnival is set up. Oysters are shucked and beers are poured on every corner. The day starts off at sunrise with the Red Fish Run, a friendly foot race of 5k through the historic district with a whopping 60 or 70 participants, including Yours Truly. What comes next is a lengthy, joyous parade featuring all the usual suspects -- community groups, high school bands and beauty queens, car dealers and politicians, Shriners in their little cars and pirates on their boat floats, all flinging candy to children along the way. When the sun warms up, the gates are open on the festival proper where any local restaurant worth its salt has a food booth set up; there are carnival rides, crab races, oyster eating contests, and live entertainment featuring both Country and Western music. It's generally well done, and everybody seems to have a good time. But I must say this: The folks in the panhandle no doubt are expert fishermen, but they have no clue how to cook what they catch. It is all battered and sauced and spiced beyond recognition. It's as if they took some beautiful fresh catch and made very attempt to make it taste like chicken fried steak.
My big discovery of the Seafood Festival was the music of Jim Morris -- basically a Jimmy Buffett disciple who plays around Florida. He wasn't actually there, there were just playing a collection of his called, appropriately, Seafood Platter over the loudspeakers. It's now on my Amazon wish list.
I wasn't actually staying in Apalachicola, though. The hotels were all booked up for the festival. I was staying further west in Port St. Joe, home of the renown St. Joseph State Park, which the renown Dr. Beach named best beach in the U.S., back in 2002. If you peruse that site a bit, you'll note that the good Dr. has a predilection for Gulf beaches -- not that I disagree, the beach further south in Naples is my benchmark, but I can attest to the total serene beauty of the beach at St. Joseph State Park. Although you would be unlikely to find it as deserted as I did, the fact that it is in a State park, that facilities are sparse and basic, that there is nothing commercial (especially beach bars or t-shirt huts) for miles, and that lodging is limited to campgrounds and rustic cabins, generally means you won't find you big beach partiers here. I think crossed paths with exactly one couple, and everyone else I saw was pretty much a speck in the distance. Nor will you find any discarded cans or bottles or Big Mac wrappers and such. Which is good because anything that would mar the quality of this beach, with its talcum power sand and wholly organic feel, would be criminal.
My final evening I made the hour drive to Panama City Beach just to see what all the fuss was. Panama City is where all the Deep South types go on spring break, so naturally the beach road was lined with bars and crap shops and liquor stores and tacky motels. I pulled into a monster sports bar to catch some of the Sunday games, and actually got a decent muffaletta, but at half-time I decided to duck out and head back to a dockside restaurant at the Port St. Joe Marina because I really wanted to spend my last evening in the open air rather than inhaling the moldy beer smell endemic to virtually every sports bar in existence.
I should have stayed. I snagged a seat at the bar at the marina only to find that they had such a completely basic cable TV package that they didn't even get the broadcast channels, so I couldn't see the Fins game. Then I ordered a beer and it turns out that the city of Port St. Joe is dry on Sunday. Great. So I got a game I didn't want to see and a Diet Coke. Whatever the case, I still got the sunset as the pictures attest.
Drive back was ugly -- I held to the secondary coast roads instead of the freeway. After the turn south into the pneninnsula things go full-on suburban fast and don't stop; an endless row of Home Depots, WalMarts, Targets, Best Buys, Publix, Applebees, Chilis -- for over a hundred miles (literally) (no literally literally). At Clearwater you can turn off down the bay road, but even there the shore is hidden by huge resorts. St. Pete/Clearwater has some very nice aspects and the beaches are stellar, but the bits and pieces of beauty seem rather swamped by concrete. It seems a million miles from sweet Apalachicola.
Here's hoping the Forgotten Coast stays that way. Inside the Glove: Things are getting dicey here in The Mitten. Actually, things have been dicey for quite a while. Now they are looking apocalyptic. Michigan, wracked with a contracting economy for years, now gets to feel the full force of the national recession as transmitted through the auto industry. An enormous number of jobs in Michigan are linked to cars and the ramifications of GM/Chrysler/Ford going belly up are huge. For the City of Detroit proper, it might be the end of the world.
That's not necessarily an argument for a bailout, though. If I were a narrow-minded political animal I would argue there is no option whatsoever and the loss of the U.S. auto industry would be dire for the nation. The fact that I have many, many friends facing real income consequences from this, and the ancillary affect it will have on everyone in these parts, means that I should feel that way. And I do, superficially. But, sadly, I have inflicted upon myself the habit of trying to see the big picture.
The number being tossed around is $34,000,000,000.00. Lots of zeros, there. Now let's say you're sitting in Ft. Lauderdale or Tucson or Eugene or Burlington. If the car oligopoly destructs, you're not going to see your friends trickle away in search of employment or see local strip malls abandoned. You probably drive a Toyota anyway. Why should you give those clowns shivering away in the Michigan winter any of your money, even if they call it a "loan" or a "bailout"? Didn't they get themselves in this predicament to begin with? Well, if that's how you feel, then were screwed (perhaps justly).
But suppose you do want to help out, the question then becomes what is the smartest way to spend your 34 billion. The auto industry wants you to give it to them, but what are you actually trying to achieve? Is the goal to keep the auto industry alive, or is it to assist the desperate people associated with it. Those are two very different things. What is magical about the auto industry that having it around means more than having that much more of some other industry? In other words, why is it better to prop up the auto industry rather than use the money to expand a different sector (or sectors) of the economy as a way to employ the ex-auto people?
This is why there is all the hemming and hawing about the future plans of the big-but-diminishing three. There is no point in providing 34 billion to the auto companies if it is going to go down the toilet for the UAW monopoly and the incompetent corporate bureaucracy, just so we can keep uncompetitive businesses going so folks don't have to adapt. That's not a loan or a bailout. That's welfare. If you give us the 34 big ones and we squander it trying to avoid adaptation, then the joke's on you.
On the other hand, if you give out the 34 billion to get us resituated in industries that are healthy and growing, thereby providing us security an avoiding us coming to you with our hands out again, you can declare victory. Yes, that massive proportion of the labor force all looking for employment would be traumatic, but 34 billion could sure help that along, couldn't it? Nobody wants their life turned upside down in relocation and have to assimilate in a new working environment, but I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden.
The point is, it's not a simple binary choice: give the Big Three the money or the let everyone fend for themselves. There are options. There are outside the box strategies that may be better and may or may not include letting GM/Chrysler/Ford live on as they were.
Then there's the question of whether it is really good for Michigan to get the bailout at all. If the auto meltdown brings the reality of Detroit to the broader state, are we really better off getting 34 billion? What are the chances that we would be asking for another few billion in debt forgiveness every few years -- not competing in the market anymore but at the public trough, just so we can hang on a little while longer? Meanwhile, our taxes would shoot through the roof because fixing the roads and paying for the lousy school system would fall on a smaller and smaller number of people. The raise-taxes/lose-population death spiral would speed up (this death spiral has been present in Detroit for years). What, exactly, is the endgame and how do we get there so we can start over? I don't know. Perhaps it would never happen. Perhaps we would become wards of the federal government, like the District of Columbia. Perhaps we would end up burning the abandoned homes for heat and eating roadkill venison all winter. It's nice to think we are going to find a way to turn things around, but as much as I love Michigan, I see no evidence that there is that kind of foresight and ambition among the political leaders or the electorate. Whatever the endgame is, we will have to reach it before anything really changes.
Why am I so negative? Because I know what a lost cause looks like. I have seen Detroit "rebuilding" for the last half-century with less than nothing to show for it. Imagine the millions or billions of dollars that have been poured into that city over the past fifty years, all wasted in the name of trying to save the unsavable. Are the folks who appear in the pages of Detroit Blog really better off for having been caught the endlessly-fraying safety net for decades, rather than having bitten the bullet and started a new life in, say, Raleigh NC, 20 years ago?
Of course, I live in a sort of bubble. Ann Arbor has the insulation of University as its tax base, and I work as a software development manager for a company that serves the private financial and regulatory sector, so I have a very safe job. The only debt I have is on my condo and considering I would probably pay more in rent than I do in monthly mortgage and property taxes, I am in no trouble. Even the latest investment meltdown didn't alter my lifestyle. Now, I have had hard financial times in my past and I know very well what it's like to be out of work, but maybe I am far enough removed from such pain that I don't have sympathy anymore.
Yet, I do hope the money comes here. For me, personally, yes, I want the 34 billion. I don't want my friends to feel pain or move away. I'd rather have the option of shopping at Whole Foods and Macy's instead of Kroger's and Wal*Mart. I don't want my property takes to double because sales tax revenue has disappeared. Give me the money, keep stringing me along. In twenty years or so, I'll just slide off to Sarasota, hike my polyester pants up under my armpits, and spend my time bitching about everything over my senior coffee at McDonald's.
But looking at the big picture, 34 billion might be less of a loan or even a gift, and more of a curse.
Postscript: The death spiral begins with things like instructing traffic cops to write more tickets as a source of revenue and leads to cops writing thousands of tickets for personal gain. This is the on-ramp for the road to ruin, and there are no exits in sight. Pale Fire: Wow. What kind of mind does it take to conceptualize such a work as Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov? And can I replace my current, run of the mill version with such a mind?
It goes something like this. In the introduction we meet the narrator, Charles Kinbote, a pompous, arrogant, academic ass who is in possession of the final work of a famous poet, John Shade, with whom the narrator maintained a friendship. This final poem was unfinished at the time of Shade's death, with 999 of 1000 lines being completed. Shade it seems was murdered in some manner that involves Kinbote.
The second section of the book consists of the poem itself; all 999 lines. It's a fine poem, autobiographical, that shows Shade to be an aged, introspective, soulful fellow. There are sections on mortality and loss, delivered through the heart-rending story of his daughter who was apparently born with some disfigurement and became a suicide, his love for his wife, and his struggles with the creative process. It is a quite a work in and of itself, outside the context of the novel, and I say this as someone who is not warm to poetry in general.
The third part of the book is where all the action occurs. We're back to Kinbote's voice in what is supposed to be a detailed analysis of the poem. Kinbote, who's friendship with Shade was strongest during the time Shade was writing the poem, was under the impression that Shade was writing about the storyline that he (Kinbote) was feeding him (Shade) -- specifically, the story of Kinbote's homeland of Zembla, a monarchy that had its royalty deposed by communists in a revolution. It was a story that was close to Kinbote's heart and his ego seems to have deluded him into thinking that the poet had an equal interest. The poet did not. So in his "analysis", Kinbote rarely actually discusses the poem and simply uses the verse as a platform from which to launch his own narrative describing the life of the King of Zembla, the crisis of the communist revolution the King's flight to safety, and the timeline of an assassin sent to find and kill the King.
Kinbote can be infuriating, as when he takes a heartfelt passage about the tragedy of Shade's daughter's suicide and simply goes off on his Zemblan story with casual cold-heartedness. On the other hand, the Zemblan story is itself fascinating and Kinbote, despite his unmitigated self-regard, is not entirely unsympathetic. In time one is left with the stories of two seemingly disparate characters who's desires for understanding life, loss, and longing are intertwined with their ultimate fates.
It's Nabokov, so you can expect florid, exquisitely constructed sentences. The structure of the book into the intro, poem and "analysis" is utterly flawless. A slow and thoughtful reading of is required. Although I am sure people who are steeped in the history of literature will find precedents, it strikes me a something totally original. So much so that my ultimate reaction is not so much to the book extant but what sort of brilliant imagination could bring it into being.
(By the way, if you are an X-files aficionado, knowing the genesis of the name Kinbote should bring a smile to your face.) Flick Notes: As usual, I see movies once they are well past their box office peak; often not until they hit cable. Here are some quickie reviews of what I've seen of recently.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - the story of the end of the James Gang and the murder of Jesse James, along with the story of what followed on for his killer Robert Ford. Kind of slow moving, it is standard, gritty western stuff but the sharp angle on Ford, and how he is compelled to kill James is interesting. More interesting still is what happens after. He starts out heralded as a heroic figure, and makes a decent income re-enacting the assassination on stage, but in time, popular opinion turns and he is labeled a coward and James is elevated as the hero. It gets so bad that he finds himself consistently shamed in public and is eventually gunned down himself, by a Jack Ruby-esque character. A good lesson for anyone who believes fickle public opinion and mawkish celebrity are contemporary developments. There is little new under the sun. Excellent acting all around, including Brad Pitt as James who is showing himself to be more and more of an exceptional actor. It's making me look forward to Benjamin Button.
I Am Legend - Will Smith is also a excellent actor with a terrific presence and the first half of the movie is fascinating as he makes his way through empty streets of Manhattan with only his dog for a companion, hunting deer and dodging zombies. When the plot moves from his survival to his rescue it descends into the sci-fi grist mill. Clever in parts, but ultimately forgettable.
Darjeeling Limited - Arch-typical Wes Anderson outing: three brothers, sullen, depressed, and eccentric, set out on a journey to sort out family issues. I admit to having a soft spot for his previous stuff - The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, The Life Aquatic. They are quirky and indirect. They are loaded down with people staring into space or blankly gazing at the camera -- intended to be especially poignant. Characters intone so as to express meaning through often very bland dialogue. Maybe it's just the presence of Bill Murray in some of them, but I find it endearing in a soft-serve sort of way. But Darjeeling just didn't do it for me. I never really cared what these people were struggling with. In fact I was never entirely clear on it. Maybe it was the noticeable lack of Bill Murray.
No Country For Old Men - I get the feeling I should have liked this. The whole idea of the existential force of brutal chance cutting through a world of people trying to make decisions as if they were really in control of their lives, seems like something that would appeal to me. But it just struck me as inhuman and, frankly, a little academic. Yes, perhaps we just have the illusion of control while merciless random forces effect all our lives, often thwarting us or killing us. No Country tells us that by clubbing us over the head with it, but we already knew it. Art is telling me something new about it, not just yelling it louder.
Ironman - This was fun. Well crafted superhero fare, moved along especially well by Robert Downey Jr.'s ironic mastery. Some of his exchanges with Jeff Daniels had to be heavily improvised because they were clearly having a good time with them. As good as you will while watching it.
The Dark Knight - You have to at least give this movie splitsies with the first Spiderman on the best superhero movie ever. To me this one gets the nod for having the more operatic ending, where only a few understand how much the hero has sacrificed or that he is a hero at all, for that matter. He doesn't get cheers. He doesn't get the girl. He gets the short end of the stick and has to be content with having done the right thing. Another example of the malleability, power, and necessity of myth, kind of like The Assassination of Jesse James above. The praise for Heath Ledger was well earned, not just sympathetic. I am semi-hoping they make no sequel and just leave it sit where it is. Not bloody likely. All Things Must Pass: This list of "timeline twins" from kottke.org identifies edgy cultural artifacts that you may have experience to when they first came out and finds comparable oldies to the current day. The one that got me: listening to Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols (1977) today would be the equivalent of having listened to some old Doris Day or Perry Como in back 1977. Whoa.
It is yet further evidence the time from, say, 1955 to 1980 was a time of accelerated change. The difference between Johnny Rotten and Doris Day is vastly greater than the difference between, say, Jack White and Johnny Rotten. (Although when it comes right down to it, the difference between Johnny Rotten and Doris Day is greater than the difference between Jack White and Doris Day.)
Meanwhile, a friend of mine made the observation that her three year old daughter will never know a world where you cannot stop TV whenever you want. We are raising a generation of children with no bladder control.
But if you really want an artifact from the past, remember Battle of the Network Stars? Arguably it was the predecessor to shows like Surreal Life and Biggest Celebrity Loser. Check out the video of Gabe Kaplan smoking Robert Conrad in a 100-yard race. I remember seeing this first run and being blown away that Mr. Kotter was actually faster the James West. How could that be? I don't know if this is proof that the world is getting better or worse. It is proof that I'm getting old. As if I needed it.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
The Month That Was - October 2008: As I write this I am in the brand new “North Terminal” at Detroit Metro Airport, on the way to a family visit in Florida, with a hopefully interesting side trip that I will hopefully write about next month. The other eventful occurrence this month was the death of my friend Kate’s mom (and Miss Anna’s grandmother). I was lucky enough to be able to help out in a small way and the family handled the whole situation with grace and good humor, which was exactly what anyone who knows them would expect. It did leave me with some interesting feelings about the assorted rituals we perform to honor our dead, but it’s too soon for that.Michigan is turning that brownish gray color that will be with us all through the winter. There is a malevolent sickness going around that apparently starts with a hellacious sore throat, followed by nausea and lassitude. So the Primordial Evil that is wintertime begins. I have found that assiduously washing my hands and frequent gargling are the best way to stay healthy -- gosh, just like Mom would tell you when you were a kid. I went all last season without being sick and I hope to do it again -- pretty big accomplishment for me, who spends regular time in writ large petri dishes such as airplanes and gyms. Healthy or no, the only cure for that brownish gray color is travel.
Lastly, some site notes. First, I signed up as an Amazon affiliate, so I will begin adding direct Amazon links to the various stuff I talk about -- look to your immediate left. Click through and buy from those links and I get a tiny fraction the sale. (You’ll notice also that links my novels are now directed at Amazon, instead of those preview pages I used to have.) I also removed all the old criticism I still had over to the left. I haven’t written much purposeful criticism in a while as I've been thinking I should spend more time on creation, and what was there was getting old anyway.
Emotional About Baggage
Southwest Passage
Swinging Empress
Men Going Mad
Mapping Reality
Reduction in Ugly
Next month, in addition to my Florida trip I expect to have a big ol’ movie round up. Emotional About Baggage: The North Terminal at DTW is sparking clean, spacious, well designed, relatively quiet, and generally pleasant -- as you would expect of a state of the art airport terminal that just opened a month ago. Coupled with the enormous and quite lovely McNamara Terminal (the Northwest/Delta hub terminal) which is, I think, about five years old, Detroit Metro has become one of the nicest airports in the world.
But no matter how fine the airport, it can’t make the planes arrive on time. Right now my flight is delayed about 20 minutes, which cuts my transfer time in Atlanta down to about 20 minutes. Cutting it close -- but if I was checking bags they would certainly be lost.
I am not checking bags; I managed to wedge five days worth of clothes and all my gadgets into a couple of carry-ons. I anticipated this situation. I am not a frequent flyer for nothing. With sub-45 minute layovers, carry-on only