Much the time I go one-on-one with Steve, my 18-year-old son, is when we’re behind the windshield on the road. At home, he’ll watch ESPN or the NFL Network or Family Guy or Entourage in a recliner, channel surfing madly. I’ll walk in, sit down, he’ll flip around channels, I’ll get irritated and get up, come back later and the TV is off, with Steve in his bedroom room clicking away at NASCAR 09, Madden NFL 10, NCAA Football 10 on the XBOX 360, or maybe watching The Lost Episodes of the Dave Chappelle Show or some cable show DVD series.
This is nothing personal. I assume.
Sometimes Steve asks, “What time do you think you’ll be going to bed tonight? I’m thinking about having some of the fellows over.” In our small rancher this mean it’s time for me to clear out. Back to the bedroom
I am the old man to be avoided. I remember well when I was about 18, going over to John Pulliam’s house on summer nights, walking quickly through the thick-carpeted living room to the stairs leading to Pulliam’s bedroom. Always, you had to pass Otto, his hulking, bald physician of a father. Otto would be off in the family den, drinking beer, watching TV, in a zone. Acknowledge us? Never. Otto was one of the old men we avoided. He avoided us. A win-win. But Otto was a unique mystery. A physician who put beers away like an Irish dockworker, judging from the pile of cans in Pulliam’s trash.
Flagler Beach
Twice this summer Steve and I have left our comfort zones to hit the road. On the first day of July we flew to Jacksonville, rented a subcompact, cheapest things on the lot, and drove 50 miles south to Flagler Beach and the Si, Como No? motel, a true relic, a family-run throwback Florida classic with only eight units. Each one with a front patio, hammock, fridge, and TV and air conditioning, thank god. Our unit had a white picket fence since our room was on the corner, maybe a hundred paces across sand-swept highway A1A to the beach.
This was base camp for NASCAR’s Daytona Coke Zero 400 Powered by Coca-Cola, plus another race the night before, plus a mind-numbing tour of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, (where veteran tour guides sounded pissed off about the shuttle program ending with no clear mission on the horizon. NASA without a mission is, well, call it Afghanistan.)
Steve and I also took a spin along the famous hard-as-bricks beaches of Daytona, where they used to race before Big Bill France, founding emperor of the NASCAR empire, built the massive 2.5-mile Daytona International Speedway in the late 1950s.
Steve did every bit of the driving down in Florida. He told me it was his father’s day present. Beautiful Steve, and pass me another Newcastle. Up and down I-95 every day, several times some days, we’d make runs through that green-sided tunnel from Flagler to Daytona. Interstate travel at its most banal — and that’s saying something since interstates are always so bland. Locals and travel authorities say the real Florida is inland. Steve and I thought about heading in, but it was so damn hot we drove all of three miles, to a marshy state park draped with Spanish Moss, crawling with armadillos, and home to the ruins of a sugar plantation.
Flagler Beach was old Florida enough. The parade passed Flagler by years, maybe decades ago. Now it’s pocked with vacant, boarded-up, rusting old homes with wild yards. An outdoor taco stand and narrow pizza joints along AIA. There are more liquor stores than churches. Pecker’s Pub and Hanky Panky’s Tavern. Drive around and you see some tidy homes in lime green, bright orange, aqua or pale red. There’s a totally old Florida garish orange and aquamarine motel. A maid or maybe it was the owner came over as I photographed this funky Florida color scheme. “What’d ya doing?” “Taking pictures. The colors are classic.” She shook her head and walked away.
Flagler looks like it’s been out in the sun too way too long. The same can be said for some of the natives. Leather-skinned wiry guys with more lines in their face than Waylon Jennings, ratty ponytails, crooked teeth, unsteady, slightly bulging eyes. Refugees from god knows where. One morning a group of them set their chairs and poles for a long day on Flagler’s fishing pier.
“I eat the right stuff, just too much,” an old hippie or alcoholic or both said to another. “Pizza has everything you need, you know. McDonald’s burgers, too.”
Flagler Beach defiantly embraces these refugees, hippies, bums, surfers, Harley riders, misfits who came up short making it to the Keys. The vibe is “whatever, who cares, take a load off.” A sign over the office of our motel reads, “Be nice 2 tourists… We’re ALL tourists!” Out by the tiki hut, where guests BYOB, light a bonfire and laugh and joke and bullshit beach nights away, there were more signs: “We’re all here ‘cause we’re not there.” “Breathe in life.”
Judging from all the “for sale” signs, though, many Flagler residents would rather be somewhere else. “Motivated seller.” “Lots for sale.” “Office space for lease.” “Sale by owner.” Marti and Karl, the middle-aged, born-again couple who own the Si, Como No? want to sell out, but Marti says the timing’s terrible, can’t get anything close to the price they want. “We may hold on.”
What happened?
Progress. High school and college kids on spring break now head to Mexico. Families flock to Disneyworld of course. Flagler got caught in what economists call “creative destruction.” The old gets chewed up and spit out by the new.
The Poconos
On the last day of July Steve and I started on another NASCAR-inspired trek, this one up to the Pennsylvania Poconos for three races: the Weis Markets 125, the Pocono Mountains 125 Camping World truck race, and the Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500, all at the vast Pocono Raceway, built 50 years ago by a dentist who is now a very wealthy man.
One of the things Steve and I converse about on the road is music. Me referencing my old school compact discs, Steve with his iTunes downloads.
We start the trip listening to Wilco, a so-called alt-country band, who quickly proves too laid back. We need driving music, groove music, on the PA turnpike, which rivals I-95 in its complete lack of scenery. We need to zone out. Kasabian, a Brit band, ups the tempo with its lively 2004 debut CD. Steve holds to the passing lane; we zip by cornfields, trailer parks, a dad lifts his squirming kid out of an SUV to take a piss, a middle-aged guy also is passed on the side of the road taking a piss. That’s as interesting as the turnpike gets.
Through a mountain tunnel Steve does some serious tailgating — again — and I put on Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, which sounds vaguely Sgt. Pepperish. On road trips past Steve and I went gone over Sgt. Pepper’s influence, which you still hear in pop music production values 45 years later. We got rock and roll 101 — Elvis, the Stones, the Beatles, Zeppelin, Dylan, Marley, the Clash — out of the way on earlier trips. Now we cruise with what’s au current. Steve gets impatient behind the wheel — again — what with all these federal shovel stimulus highway projects shutting down lanes, squeezing traffic, plus family vans and SUVs chugging up and down Pocono hills loaded up with bikes, ice chests, folding chairs and trash bags of clothes for a week’s vacation lakeside.
We bound across grassy fields to park beyond the dentist’s grand raceway and my daughter Kate texts Steve: she thinks our dog is dying. I get on the cell: “What’s up?” “He’s just standing and shaking. He won’t eat. Looks like he’s gonna throw up. What should I do?” “When’s mom coming home?” I ask. In an emergency, it’s always “where’s mom?”
Every imaginable body shape and size roams around at a NASCAR race. Obese. Anorexic. Skeletal alcoholic. Fat bums. Wide bodies. Cholesterol-clogged time bombs. Inflated breasts. Runway models. Beauty queens. Bellies the size of boulders — carried with pride. Sumo-like puffy upper arms and massive thighs. Too many fans wear too little clothing, topless men, men and women in stretch shorts or tight jeans and too-small tees that show more than we’re interested in, thank you very much. There is all sorts of hair, or lack of it. Chrome domes, Marine crew cuts, Mohawks on seven-year olds, ponytails. ZZ Top beards, Civil War sideburns and mustaches. Goatees galore. Tattoos pay homage to eagles, flags, of course mothers, snakes, barbed wire inked on necks, breasts, chests, forearms, biceps, thighs, calves, across shoulders, on hands and feet.
There’s conspicuous 24/7 consumption of alcohol, mostly all beer and Jim Beam or Crown Royal, as any NASCAR lover or hater knows, but it’s all relatively tame stuff. The most consistent consumption can be found among the RV and camper villagers parked in the track’s infield for the weekend. Confederate flags, U.S. Marine Corps, USA flags, and flags numbered and colored honoring favorite drivers, all flap or droop from rooftop poles. But they’re not burning furniture or baiting cops out there on the infield. No sir. This is for the most part a law and order crowd. NASCAR races don’t scare away families who bring five-year-olds wearing green earplugs, bored 12-year-old girls, infants asleep on mom or dad’s shoulder, and plenty of grandparents, too.
NASCAR’s 36 weekend carnivals that wheel around the country from February to November present modern Americana in all its glory, if you’re part of the party, or all its excess, if you never want an invitation. These are roaring spectacles that mix military jet fighter flyovers, religious invocations — “Thank God, Jesus, thank you” — screams the winning driver over his crew radio in one of the races, an endless sea of corporate branding. At NASCAR races sporting competition meets rabid commercialism and feeds a consumerism unseen at other sporting events. From the ear-splitting jet flyover before they drop the green flag to the checkered flag, the noise level exceeds factories and turns racers deaf by the time they’re 50. The 43 cars on the track (that is how many start the race) whoosh by like a swarm of very pissed off mechanical hornets. They hit speeds upward of 200 MPH, often on banked curves steeper than sand dunes. Speed and noise, patriotism and religion, booze and babies, country music and 100,000 to 200,000 fans. Everyman becomes a hero: tire changers, mechanics, pit broom sweepers, spotters above the press box, announcers, retired racers doing commentary, also the drivers, crew chiefs, Iraq and Afghan grunts and generals introduced proudly before the race. Hell, even the sponsors with all their flashy logos and colorful icons get some love. Fans all over wear Ford or DuPont or U.S. Army or UPS tees and ball caps.
After going to races since Steve was in middle school, we take the show, for better and worse, for granted. Like a marriage. In good times and bad…
My son corrects me. He started watching NASCAR on TV in fifth grade after playing around with a NASCAR video game. I asked him what the attraction was. “It was all just big. Big stadiums. Big tracks. Big noise. Big field of cars. And always the speed.”
You need to sit trackside in the lower rows of the aluminum, steel and concrete stadiums to appreciate how you can’t talk to the person next to you until the pack of cars is on the other side of the track. If you’re at a half-mile track, forget it, you can’t talk for three hours. And you need to get low to appreciate how fast the pack gets around, how insanely bumper-to-bumper the cars are drafting together. If you go dirt track racing, bring googles with your earplugs. At our first dirt track race Steve and I got splattered by a wave of dirt every time the “world of outlaws” circled the track. At a quarter-mile dirt track, that’s about every 20 seconds .
“You can look at racing two ways,” Steve went on. “In one way, it’s simple. Cars going round and round making left turns for three or four hours. But it can get complex. Rent of buy a radio scanner with headsets and listen to the drivers talk fuel strategy, wedge adjustments, bitch about other drivers, curse their car for being being too “tight” or too “loose” in the turns. Listen to crew chiefs calm their racers down, or try to. Spotters up in the sky lead drivers past wrecks, through smoke and flames, and around slower cars. “The pit crews jumping the wall, changing four tires, filling the gas tank, making track bar adjustments, that’s a sport in itself,” says Steve.
Millions around the country, especially in the northeast corridor where we live, ask, “Why NASCAR? And the point is?” I got the NASCAR bug about Steve’s age watching ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” every Saturday afternoon at five. They showed races on tape delay, or highlights of races. This was before all the safety measures put in place after NASCAR icon Dale Earnhardt was killed on the last lap of the Daytona 500, before car designs became standardized, and to die-hards, bastardized. On Wide World of Sports I watched cars that looked much more like what you’d see on the street cart wheel across the infield, sail over walls and fences, disappear into smoke and flaming pyres, like plane crashes. Wrecks were often spectacular, drivers and fans could and did get injured and killed. What pulled me in, though, was NASCAR’s culture, coming across my small B&W TV. It’s the culture of small, rickety tracks in towns down south I never heard of. Rough blue collar fans who don’t turn up at any other sporting event except college football maybe. Racers with titles and nicknames: King Petty, Fireball Roberts, Tiny Lund, Junior Johnson. Growing up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, with a strong streak of romanticism in me, all this was the call of the wild.
Around fifth or sixth grade I started gluing together plastic model NASCAR cars in my bedroom at night, painting the color scheme, and carefully sticking on the numbers and sponsor logos. Steve started collecting replica miniature die-cast models of cars, a lot simpler than gluing a hundred small plastic parts. We both ended up with a lot of race cars in our bedrooms. Of which we would say not a word to friends. After all, in the sophisticated suburban culture we both came out of, stock car racing was for redneck hillbillies. Dumb asses. You want be a dumb ass, too? To this day the only person I talk NASCAR to is Steve; the same goes for him with me. It’s a blessing.
“You got to get into the rhythm of the race,” says Steve. “It’s like soccer or baseball. A lot people think those sports are boring, too. Nothing happens. You can watch in that simple way and drift in and out. Or you can use that radio scanner and listen to all the crew chatter and decisions and the race goes a lot faster.”
After the race the set list for the short drive to our lodge reads like this: Jack Johnson, a laidback Hawaii surfer dude, a soothing crooner to chill us out. Something called MGMT. Eddie Vedder singing songs he wrote for the movie “Into the Wild’” Hip hop’s latest street king Drake. Arena bands Dave Matthews and the Kings of Leon. A bouncy techno group from France, Phoenix. Steve’s all-time favorite band, the Brit bad boys from dirty old Manchester, Oasis, owing a heavy debt to The Beatles, which both the band and Steve readily concede. The Philly hip hop band The Roots. The late great rapper Biggie Smalls. Gorillaz, who’ve put out the best CD of the decade called “Plastic Beach,” a fantastic, grooving, seamless mash-up of hip hop, soul, R&B, electronica, dance, drum programs, rock guitars and driving rhythm section. And bringing the set to a close, a hip hop/reggae band, the Long Beach Dub All Stars.
Saturday night we bed down in the smartly appointed and overpriced Marriott TownePlace Suites Scranton Wilkes-Barre. It still smells new, having opened May 1. It’s the next step up from a Marriott Courtyard and ten steps above the Si Como No? in Flagler Beach. We’re talking “Towne” here, not “town.” The TownePlace is sold out with race fans. And two traveling salesmen.
Two for the road
“You don’t mind if we sit here?” asks one of the reps. I’m sitting alone smoking a cigar in the hotel’s front patio. Just me, two empty lime-green patio chairs, and a round glass table. Steve is supposed to join me I don’t know where he is. Later I find out he stayed in the room watching another race, then hit the sack.
The two reps appear to be in their late ‘40s. One wears a blue stripped office shirt with no tie. The other wears a purple golf shirt. “Man, what a long, long day,” one sighs, slumping back. “Here, here’s my family,” his partner shows him, flashing open his laptop. “You’re wife, what a number,” says his partner. Soon two laptops are flipped open on the glass table and these territory nomads are in a zone of their own talking shop with surprising intensity. It is, after all, Saturday night in upstate Pennsylvania, and it makes far more sense to me that NASCAR fans are across the patio popping Budweisers, smoking stogies, joking and laughing and wondering about tomorrow’s weather.
The two reps go off on their jargon. “He’s gotta have a writing surface.” “He needs a sink.” “That’s kind of a strange arrangement.” “Does he want his laptop near him?” “This one is good, I’m telling ya, he’s got good hands. I’ve seen him work.” “What kind of margin do you want?” “I don’t know what he’s got up his sleeve.” “If he’s in the office I’ll tell you what, he’s not doing his job.” “He’s gotta think reality.” They sell office designs to dentists.
One guy gets buzzed on his cell, reads it, and yawns. “I’ve got a bride desperate to hear my voice. I’m fixing to turn in.” Unfortunately he doesn’t. These guys are ruining a contemplative smoke, and there are no other empty tables for me to move to. From what I gather, both fellows are from Tennessee, or thereabouts. What brings them bedraggled but blabbing up to Scranton-Wilkes Barre on a Saturday night in the summer is a question I don’t’ care to know the answer to.
I turn away from their machine gun rat-a-tat-tat code language shop talk and see through a large plate glass window three women, all 30ish and pudgy, all wearing bright yellow tees with “Tire Monkey” on the back, legs lazily draped over comfy chairs in the hotel lobby. They’re laughing and drinking wine (who says NASCAR has no wine sipping class?) while watching the same race on a flat screen above the lobby’s faux fireplace that Steve is watching upstairs. NASCAR has more women fans than any other sport I go to, even baseball. It’s Saturday night and they’re doing what NASCAR fans across the country are doing: drinking, smoking and watching another race. In a parallel universe, the dental office reps plan how to make more money.
Then one of the reps shifts the conversation to talk seriously about his daughter called “Buddha.” “Buddha,” it turns out, has a life-threatening auto-immune disease slowly eating away at her innards. This so depressed the rep he quit his job, went on a prescribed cocktail of meds, and was on suicide watch for eight months. His doctor called his wife every night. His wife has fallen apart several times, he says, and is angry with God. They’re both angry and incredibly frustrated because they can’t get their daughter into clinical trials because the docs say she’s not sick enough. But when she gets sicker in few years, it’ll be too late, her father says. She has stabilized for now, and is on Viagra to help her blood flow. Her father weaned off the meds, got the itch to get back to work, and so here he is, in Scranton-Wilkes Barre on a Saturday night.
I get all this just sitting at the table, smoking my cigar. After a while I broke out a reporter’s notepad and began writing down bits and pieces of what I has hearing, partly to see if the guys could or would break out of their mindmeld long enough to notice I was spying, listening in. Never happened.
We don’t talk to neighbors anymore, friendships fray over time, families move away, but we air our grievances, disappointments and banalities in front of complete strangers. So what, we’ll never see ‘em again. Bug off, as the Brits say. It’s only an embarrassment if you blab next to a journalist taking notes.
This rep raps on like I’m invisible, about vacations to Cancun and the Bahamas, buying a Lincoln Navigator for one son, a Camaro for the other, his little girl Beanie who’s more a badass than her brothers.
This “social transparency” has spread like a cultural virus thanks to wireless technology, mobile phones, transient living, increased travel, confessions on Reality TV, Court TV, Dr. Phil, Oprah, Twitter, Facebook. NASCAR fans aren’t so confessional, which is another reason I like their company..
First thing I hear Sunday morning when I go to get coffee in the lobby is a woman who proclaims: “They’re not gonna get the race in today. Look it. It’s going to rain all day.”
A different NASCAR
“Buddha” is on my mind until we take our seats at the track down low along the ¾-mile home straightaway. Directly in front of us is an aluminum walkway wide enough for disabled fans to park their wheelchairs and watch the race. Some of the young kids are severely disabled, with muscles too weak to hold up their heads or handle food; they’re seated in padded, motorized wheelchairs. Fathers, about the furthest thing from the stereotyped NASCAR “Bud head” dads, feed their boys through straws, lean over to whisper in their ears and wipe away their sweat. This is not your suburban sophisticate’s NASCAR.
One dad wears a tee shirt: “Autism affects us all.” Raceway workers with “Disabled Patrons” golf shirts hand out free box lunches. A whale of a man tending to a friend in a wheel chair chugs back can after can of National beer, tossing them into a trash barrel like he’s chain smoking. A few rows in front of him, a dude wears a cardboard Coors 24-pack carry-out case on his head like it’s Halloween. Three Coors cans are glued to the top and one on each side to make for beer can ears. A smiley face is painted on the back of the box, smoking a cigarette or a joint. In front, an oval has been cut open so Coors King can gab and drink. He reminds me of face-painted football fanatics, but with a difference. The NASCAR faithful have been drinking and smoking and barbecuing for 48 hours since they showed up Friday night, still, I don’t see the fistfights or shoving matches like in the upper deck at Eagles football games. I don’t see guys tripping and puking and falling down the stairs like at Eagles games, or splashing beer on you as they squeeze by to their seats. Even Phillies baseball games get rough. At a game last year a drunk got annoyed after being forced to vacate a seat belonging to another ticket holder; later outside the stadium after the game his gang punched around friends of the ticketholder, killing one of them. If someone is sitting in your seat at a NASCAR race, no problem, they generally smile, pack up and move on.
NASCAR Nation lets tee shirts do the talking. “You don’t know quack.” “I’m all about trucks and bucks.” “I can only please one person a day; today isn’t your day and tomorrow isn’t looking too good.” “Every day is race day.” “Old guys rule.” “Future fire fighter.” “The Power of Freedom.” Then there are the thousands of walking boards for brand America: tee shirts stamped with logos and brand colors: Loew’s, Hooters, Home Depot, M&Ms, Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Crown Royal, Red Bull, Target, Office Depot, Aflac, the Air Force, U.S. Army, National Guard, DuPont, 3M, Kleenex, Clorox, Long John Silver’s, Mountain Dew, Bud, Coors,
A NASCAR event is part German beer garden, Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville, Mardi Gras, Armed Forces Day parade (a soldier who wears one of those demolition suits from “The Hurt Locker” movie tells me inside his display booth the suits weigh 80 pounds and he can only last 45 minutes in one) Kentucky Derby, Bonnaroo rock festival, Willie Nelson concern, Harley Davidson rally, state fair, Sunday picnic, frat party, RV and Airstream camp-out. It’s orderly and controlled for the most part due to the Zen of NASCAR. It’s a philosophy that allows for the calm consumption of massive quantities of beer (not nearly as much hard liquor or pot). A practitioner assumes a yoga-like position in the bleachers, his or her radio headset is firmly in place, along with ear plugs, shades, maybe a pack of smokes and a six-pack of beer, and for three or four hours will sit almost motionless, except of course for taking a piss, following the pack around and aorund the track. The essence of NASCAR Zen was relayed to me at the Daytona race by an old boy wearing a plastic orange Home Depot hard hat. The race was in the middle of one of several rain delays that would turn it into a six-hour marathon. “It’s all good,” Home Depot boy said. “It’s all good, you know. I’m here ‘til Thursday so it can rain all it wants. Here, want a beer?”
Leaving the Pocono race Steve and I pass groups of Amish teenage boys walking and jogging on the side of Pocono country road Route 115, with their jacked-up suspenders and straw boater hats. What do they think of the miles-long crawling parade of car-crazed, gas-guzzling, alcohol-fueled race fans in monster pickup trucks, motor homes, jeeps, convertibles, minivans and SUVs? Thank God I’m a country boy.
Steve and I reverse roles on these road trips, especially with him licensed to drive. He does all the driving, never has a beer. I down shots of Maker’s Mark at dinner and don’t worry about anything. Steve’s more maturely cost-conscious than me, too. “$50 for a pit pass, no way dad. It’s not worth it.” When he was younger he’d buy the die-cast metal replica cars for $50-$60 a pop inside tents set up outside the tracks. Now if he buys any souvenir maybe it’s a refrigerator magnet. He downloads iTunes for 99 cents each. I buy CDs for $18. I buy Sports Illustrated; he downloads free podcasts. He gets all the scores on his cell phone. I still buy newspapers. I buy movie DVDs; Steve rents them from the cable company. Nothing particularly cheap about the old school
Our music set list for the two-hour drive home: The Beastie Boys, white rappers, in an all-instrumental CD, The Black Keys’ lowdown bluesy rock and roll that threatens to blow out the speakers with thumping bass lines, The Smiths, an artsy ‘80s smart-ass Brit band, REM’s early music from one of the great college towns, Athens, Georgia, circa ’82 to ’85, and finally The Strokes, a rocking New York band that was supposed to be the great group of the decade but couldn’t find inspiration or collaboration past their second album. Steve and I talk about how they are back in the studio recording after trying solo ventures.
We also talk about Steve’s transition to college living, just three weeks away, his mystery roommate, does he need a flat screen, where a degree in telecommunications might get him, his sister’s new job, friends of his buying motorcycles, one friend having it planned out to become an FBI agent after going through ROTC, Ranger School and majoring in a language, a girl on the track team who’s going in the Marines, a couple girls going to Arizona State, what it will take to make NASCAR as popular as it was before the recession, what kind of car Steve can buy for $6,000, the overnight success of the new pizza shop he delivers for, how Steve could make it as a sports TV producer. He has this way of seeing the whole field, the big picture, all the angles. He did it on the field when he was playing. He does in the stands or watching TV.
“So what kind of job do you get being able to see the big picture?” he asks.
“I don’t know, it’s like you’re a sociologist or a historian. Maybe you make documentaries. Or you’re the guy behind the camera, in the trailer, who sees all the camera shots at a game or race and makes the calls.”
“I could see doing that for awhile.”
“So, when did you get smarter than me?” I tease him.
Steve looks surprised. Reminds me of the time I walked into the office of one of the editors on my magazine staff, a woman from India, and squatted on the floor to talk about something. She looked startled and perturbed. “Dave, you can’t do that.” “Do what?” “Sit on the floor like that.” “What? Why?” “Because, you are my boss.” Cultural confusion.
“What’d you mean? You’re way smarter than me,” said Steve. “You have a huge vocabulary.”
A curious compliment from an 18-year-old. Not my wisdom or knowledge or experience. My vocab. But what compliments ever come out of 18-year-olds? They’re not built that way. So Steve listens to me after all, at least some times. But he knows I edit a magazine for a living. I better know a verb or an adjective or two.
“Well Steve, you know all the trades and drafts, the standings, who’s playing on what team, who’s coming out with new CDs, who’s touring, the good cable shows, the new racetracks. I can’t keep up.”
Steve pulls into our driveway right as dusk descends.
“Thanks for driving.”
“Glad to do it.”
Why do I feel like I’m getting off a stagecoach?
We haul our gym bags out of the backseat and head into the house. Steve goes to check his computer. I go to bed.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Close encounter of the complacent kind
I spent a lot of this summer, like many of you, reading BP stories. From all the reports, speculations, editorials, attacks and defenses, one word kept coming up — complacency. BP, its partners and contractors, possessed the knowledge, the equipment, the safety experts, the top engineers, the protocols, plans and management systems that should have prevented the catastrophe.
But as a past VP of safety for BP said in an email passed along to me, fatal decisions were made on the rig “because they had done so before” and gotten away with it. According to a federal investigation, a Transocean rig supervisor told a maintenance technician who protested that a crucial safety device had been bypassed, or disabled: “Damn thing been in bypass for five years. Matter of fact, the entire (Transocean) fleet runs them in bypass.”
Duly warned
Bad decisions. Missed warnings. Pushing the limits. I can relate. One Sunday this past July was another 90+ degree day in the Philadelphia region. We’d had at that point more than 30 days over 90 degrees in June and July. And it’s no dry heat in the Delaware Valley. There’s always a blanket of smothering humidity. “Horrid heat grips region” was a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer that particular Sunday. The National Weather Service extended its excessive heat warning. Fourteen deaths in Philadelphia had been confirmed as heat-related, according to the paper.
So there it was: knowledge. I read expert advice on how best to yield to the heat. I had the requisite experience, too: it had been a record-breaking sweltering summer. So what did I do on this Sunday in July? Decided to take a run, a jog is more like it, through Valley Forge National Park, a short drive from home.
Again, let’s compare notes. More than 50,000 wells had been drilled on federal leases beneath the Gulf before disaster struck. I’ve run through Valley Forge hundreds of times. I had my plan, my protocols, just like the drillers. Run early, before eight a.m. Bring along a water bottle. Wear a flimsy tee short, light clothing. Run on the trail that affords the most shade. On the stinking hot days, lay off the hills.
“Pushing production”
So what did I do? Circumvented my best-laid plans. The night before I’d been out late and slept in. I got a late start; I knew it. It was past eleven when I started my jog. And early on I decided to “push production,” you might say. I’ve read that enough about drillers’ mindset. I parked by the Visitor Center and jogged along the North Outer Line Drive. This trail is more open and exposed to the sun beating down than my usual route. I can’t explain why, but I pushed up the distance to swing around the National Memorial Arch, head up and past Wayne’s Woods, a picnic area, hang a U-turn where the trail meets the South Outer Line Drive, and then back-track to my car. Roughly a four-mile jaunt.
There’s a theory by James Reason that catastrophes such as the BP debacle occur when a series of breakdowns, bad decisions, etc., line up in precisely the order of a long chain of falling dominos that proceed to a catastrophic conclusion. He calls it the Swiss Cheese model of disasters. All the holes of multiple slices line up so a disaster of errors runs through the system unchecked. I worked my own Swiss Cheese model that Sunday morning. A series of lousy decisions. I ran later than was prudent. Further than was necessary. On a trail more hilly and sunny than I’d usually take. But “because I had done so before” and never paid a price, nothing seemed out of order.
Nothing was out of the ordinary until about 100, 200 yards from my car on the trail back to the Visitor’s Center. I was gulping for air. Slowed to a half-walk, half-jog, and said, “This is it. I gotta stop.” Damn, I wasn’t going to make my goal. I stopped on the asphalt trail and started to wobble. Heat exhaustion. Me?
The Good Samaritan
Valley Forge attracts more than 1.2 million visitors a year. On a day like this when the high reached 96 degrees, with the heat index above 100, the parking lots are empty. Reenactment soldiers in their blue wool uniforms go home. Very fortunately for me a fellow I’ll call John spotted me in my distress and came over. I can’t exactly remember our conversation but it went something like: “Man, you don’t look too good. You OK? You sit down here, OK?” He called to his wife, “Go call the Park Ranger Service.” John poured a bottle of water on my head. Another fellow materialized next to me. “You’ve lost a lot of liquid. Did you pass out? Are you dizzy? Don’t move.”
I don’t think I blacked out, but I had trouble putting thoughts together and answering these guys. Someone handed me a cell phone but I couldn’t remember my wife’s number. I’m lousy with names and numbers. I should have called the house line; that number is embedded in my head, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I was on the ground and could not get up. John handed me a large plastic bottle of SmartWater® A green and white park ranger patrol car pulled up, dome light flashing. Great. I’m the center of a scene created out of my own stupidity. “I’ve got an ambulance coming,” said the ranger. I started to come around after inhaling the water bottle and getting my wind back. I stood up, a little shaky at first, but I was able to talk the ranger out of the ambulance. We decided he’d drive me back to my car, then tail me on the short ride home.
“Have you had many people fainting in this heat this summer?” I asked Gordon, the ranger, on the way back to my car. “Just last Wednesday we had man, 57, die of a heart attack bicycling through Wayne’s Woods. He just went down. There was nothing we could do.”
After we pulled into my driveway, I asked Gordon for the name and address of John. I mailed him a six-pack of water bottles.
And now I read those BP stories a little differently. Hubris, recklessness, complacency, denial, tell me about it.
But as a past VP of safety for BP said in an email passed along to me, fatal decisions were made on the rig “because they had done so before” and gotten away with it. According to a federal investigation, a Transocean rig supervisor told a maintenance technician who protested that a crucial safety device had been bypassed, or disabled: “Damn thing been in bypass for five years. Matter of fact, the entire (Transocean) fleet runs them in bypass.”
Duly warned
Bad decisions. Missed warnings. Pushing the limits. I can relate. One Sunday this past July was another 90+ degree day in the Philadelphia region. We’d had at that point more than 30 days over 90 degrees in June and July. And it’s no dry heat in the Delaware Valley. There’s always a blanket of smothering humidity. “Horrid heat grips region” was a headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer that particular Sunday. The National Weather Service extended its excessive heat warning. Fourteen deaths in Philadelphia had been confirmed as heat-related, according to the paper.
So there it was: knowledge. I read expert advice on how best to yield to the heat. I had the requisite experience, too: it had been a record-breaking sweltering summer. So what did I do on this Sunday in July? Decided to take a run, a jog is more like it, through Valley Forge National Park, a short drive from home.
Again, let’s compare notes. More than 50,000 wells had been drilled on federal leases beneath the Gulf before disaster struck. I’ve run through Valley Forge hundreds of times. I had my plan, my protocols, just like the drillers. Run early, before eight a.m. Bring along a water bottle. Wear a flimsy tee short, light clothing. Run on the trail that affords the most shade. On the stinking hot days, lay off the hills.
“Pushing production”
So what did I do? Circumvented my best-laid plans. The night before I’d been out late and slept in. I got a late start; I knew it. It was past eleven when I started my jog. And early on I decided to “push production,” you might say. I’ve read that enough about drillers’ mindset. I parked by the Visitor Center and jogged along the North Outer Line Drive. This trail is more open and exposed to the sun beating down than my usual route. I can’t explain why, but I pushed up the distance to swing around the National Memorial Arch, head up and past Wayne’s Woods, a picnic area, hang a U-turn where the trail meets the South Outer Line Drive, and then back-track to my car. Roughly a four-mile jaunt.
There’s a theory by James Reason that catastrophes such as the BP debacle occur when a series of breakdowns, bad decisions, etc., line up in precisely the order of a long chain of falling dominos that proceed to a catastrophic conclusion. He calls it the Swiss Cheese model of disasters. All the holes of multiple slices line up so a disaster of errors runs through the system unchecked. I worked my own Swiss Cheese model that Sunday morning. A series of lousy decisions. I ran later than was prudent. Further than was necessary. On a trail more hilly and sunny than I’d usually take. But “because I had done so before” and never paid a price, nothing seemed out of order.
Nothing was out of the ordinary until about 100, 200 yards from my car on the trail back to the Visitor’s Center. I was gulping for air. Slowed to a half-walk, half-jog, and said, “This is it. I gotta stop.” Damn, I wasn’t going to make my goal. I stopped on the asphalt trail and started to wobble. Heat exhaustion. Me?
The Good Samaritan
Valley Forge attracts more than 1.2 million visitors a year. On a day like this when the high reached 96 degrees, with the heat index above 100, the parking lots are empty. Reenactment soldiers in their blue wool uniforms go home. Very fortunately for me a fellow I’ll call John spotted me in my distress and came over. I can’t exactly remember our conversation but it went something like: “Man, you don’t look too good. You OK? You sit down here, OK?” He called to his wife, “Go call the Park Ranger Service.” John poured a bottle of water on my head. Another fellow materialized next to me. “You’ve lost a lot of liquid. Did you pass out? Are you dizzy? Don’t move.”
I don’t think I blacked out, but I had trouble putting thoughts together and answering these guys. Someone handed me a cell phone but I couldn’t remember my wife’s number. I’m lousy with names and numbers. I should have called the house line; that number is embedded in my head, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I was on the ground and could not get up. John handed me a large plastic bottle of SmartWater® A green and white park ranger patrol car pulled up, dome light flashing. Great. I’m the center of a scene created out of my own stupidity. “I’ve got an ambulance coming,” said the ranger. I started to come around after inhaling the water bottle and getting my wind back. I stood up, a little shaky at first, but I was able to talk the ranger out of the ambulance. We decided he’d drive me back to my car, then tail me on the short ride home.
“Have you had many people fainting in this heat this summer?” I asked Gordon, the ranger, on the way back to my car. “Just last Wednesday we had man, 57, die of a heart attack bicycling through Wayne’s Woods. He just went down. There was nothing we could do.”
After we pulled into my driveway, I asked Gordon for the name and address of John. I mailed him a six-pack of water bottles.
And now I read those BP stories a little differently. Hubris, recklessness, complacency, denial, tell me about it.
Up on Angels Landing
Rock climbers are a breed apart. There he is, baggy shorts, shaggy hair, no shirt, hanging by his fingertips to thin cracks on the underside of a sandstone ledge, defying gravity. Has the body fat of a marathon runner. The taut, cut muscles of a gymnast.
Or there she is, in full climbing personal protective equipment. Helmet especially designed with an inverted ”V” in the back to accommodate her ponytail. Sleek, high-tech anti-glare eye protection. Gloves, boots, fall protection. Scaling the sheer ice face of a canyon wall, ergo-designed ice axes in both hands.
Climbing culture beckons the non-conformist. Individualists only responsible and accountable to themselves, or a small team. They are driven wanderers, seeking outrageous climbs, sometimes at the expense of local prohibitions.
“Climbing, after all, is about freedom,” writes Andrew Bisharat, in the June, 2010 issue of “Rock and Ice” magazine.
So what happens in this culture that prizes individual expression when a climber sees someone doing something dumb? Do they speak up? Intervene?
Rarely, writes Bisharat.
Laissez-faire climbing
But that doesn’t preclude climbers from thinking about saying something. Some are introspective, aware and attuned philosophers of the terra firma.
In his column, Bishart questions why he has allowed crazy fools to continue down their path of self-destruction. “Doing what’s right doesn’t come easily,” he says. The last thing the hardened climber wants to do is play safety cop, “that guy who runs around imposing his ego on everyone by telling him or how to act.”
Escape from Vegas
This past April I made my getaway from a business meeting to Las Vegas to drive three hours east to Zion National Park in southern Utah. Zion is climbing holy ground, with its 5,000 to 7,800-foot red, orange and white canyon walls, arches and hoodoos holding a “lifetime of adventure,” according to an article about the park in the June issue of “Rock and Ice.”
Believe me, I had zero intention of attempting any kind of vertical assault. I am a hiker, not a climber. My challenge would be Angels Landing. The trail to Angel’s Landing is 2.5 miles to a rocky viewpoint 1,500 feet above Zion Canyon and the Virgin River.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the journey: “After a series of steep switchbacks, the trail goes through a gradual ascent. Walter's Wiggles, a series of 21 steep switchbacks, are the last hurdle before Scout's Lookout. Scout's Lookout is generally the turnaround point for those who are unwilling to make the final summit push to the top of Angels Landing. The last half-mile of the trail is strenuous and littered with sharp drop offs and narrow paths. Chains to grip are provided for portions of the last half-mile to the top.”
Seven fatalities
Days after I made the trek a woman in her 60s, hiking alone, died after falling from Scout’s Lookout. Angels Landing is “particularly notable for fatalities,” according to an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune describing the incident. Last year, two women in their 50s died from about 1,000-foot falls on the Angels Landing trail. Since 2000, seven people have died on Angels Landing, including a 14-year-old Boy Scout, according to Tribune report.
Had I done this Internet research before my trip, would I have stuck to the canyon floor and the verdant banks of the Virgin River? Not likely. I’ve climbed Angels Landing twice before, once with my then 17-year-old daughter. I was confident and determined this time around, the only traits I might share with serious climbers.
Personal experience trumps raw statistics and incidents I did not witness.
Ascending Angels Landing, though the way is marked and chained for you at times, cranks up your adrenaline and narrows your concentration to the rocks and grips straight ahead. Depending on the time of day and year, you pass any number of people going up and down the trail. There is little conversation between strangers, none during the trickier parts of the climb. You are absorbed in your own climbing calculations — do I go this way or that way? — and most aware of your grip, footing, and stamina.
What if…
What if I saw another climber, complete stranger, straying from the chains to carve his initials on a ledge 1,000 feet up? Would I say something?
Probably not. But it depends. If the stray climber was a ten-year-old seemingly by himself, definitely I’d be compelled to do or say something. If the boy’s father was nearby, well, I might say something to the dad. Or I might figure father knows best and be on my way.
If the person initialing the ledge was a tanned and fit twentysomething wearing REI climbing gear, I’d figure he knows more than I do and leave him be. Now maybe he smoked crack before making his ascent, but I’d calculate the odds are slim and leave him alone. If he was with friends, I’d be even less likely to intervene.
If that stray climber was a soloing 60ish grandmother type timidly inching toward the edge, I’d probably shout out to her.
Mitigating factors
To speak up or ignore someone taking an obvious risk involves a startling number of potential factors. What’s your physical condition at the moment of truth: gassed, alert? What’s your perception of the risk-taker’s experience and understanding of what he’s doing? Is the risk-taker alone or with a group of peers?
Says Bisharat: “Speaking up… immediately and inescapably intertwines you with the consequences of what happens. It can feel easier to live and let die.”
If I pull back the ten-year-old or a rapdily fatiguing grandmother, do I sacrifice making the summit to escort them back down?
Sometimes getting involved is a no-brainer. If someone is about to fall, there’s no time to second-quess and as Bisharat writes, “the self is forgotten and the moral course of action just takes place…”
But seldom is the situation so black and white. “Finding that right degree, the right speech and the right listener all need to come together, and I’m still not sure I understand how to achive that balance,” writes Bisharat.
Me, too.
Or there she is, in full climbing personal protective equipment. Helmet especially designed with an inverted ”V” in the back to accommodate her ponytail. Sleek, high-tech anti-glare eye protection. Gloves, boots, fall protection. Scaling the sheer ice face of a canyon wall, ergo-designed ice axes in both hands.
Climbing culture beckons the non-conformist. Individualists only responsible and accountable to themselves, or a small team. They are driven wanderers, seeking outrageous climbs, sometimes at the expense of local prohibitions.
“Climbing, after all, is about freedom,” writes Andrew Bisharat, in the June, 2010 issue of “Rock and Ice” magazine.
So what happens in this culture that prizes individual expression when a climber sees someone doing something dumb? Do they speak up? Intervene?
Rarely, writes Bisharat.
Laissez-faire climbing
But that doesn’t preclude climbers from thinking about saying something. Some are introspective, aware and attuned philosophers of the terra firma.
In his column, Bishart questions why he has allowed crazy fools to continue down their path of self-destruction. “Doing what’s right doesn’t come easily,” he says. The last thing the hardened climber wants to do is play safety cop, “that guy who runs around imposing his ego on everyone by telling him or how to act.”
Escape from Vegas
This past April I made my getaway from a business meeting to Las Vegas to drive three hours east to Zion National Park in southern Utah. Zion is climbing holy ground, with its 5,000 to 7,800-foot red, orange and white canyon walls, arches and hoodoos holding a “lifetime of adventure,” according to an article about the park in the June issue of “Rock and Ice.”
Believe me, I had zero intention of attempting any kind of vertical assault. I am a hiker, not a climber. My challenge would be Angels Landing. The trail to Angel’s Landing is 2.5 miles to a rocky viewpoint 1,500 feet above Zion Canyon and the Virgin River.
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the journey: “After a series of steep switchbacks, the trail goes through a gradual ascent. Walter's Wiggles, a series of 21 steep switchbacks, are the last hurdle before Scout's Lookout. Scout's Lookout is generally the turnaround point for those who are unwilling to make the final summit push to the top of Angels Landing. The last half-mile of the trail is strenuous and littered with sharp drop offs and narrow paths. Chains to grip are provided for portions of the last half-mile to the top.”
Seven fatalities
Days after I made the trek a woman in her 60s, hiking alone, died after falling from Scout’s Lookout. Angels Landing is “particularly notable for fatalities,” according to an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune describing the incident. Last year, two women in their 50s died from about 1,000-foot falls on the Angels Landing trail. Since 2000, seven people have died on Angels Landing, including a 14-year-old Boy Scout, according to Tribune report.
Had I done this Internet research before my trip, would I have stuck to the canyon floor and the verdant banks of the Virgin River? Not likely. I’ve climbed Angels Landing twice before, once with my then 17-year-old daughter. I was confident and determined this time around, the only traits I might share with serious climbers.
Personal experience trumps raw statistics and incidents I did not witness.
Ascending Angels Landing, though the way is marked and chained for you at times, cranks up your adrenaline and narrows your concentration to the rocks and grips straight ahead. Depending on the time of day and year, you pass any number of people going up and down the trail. There is little conversation between strangers, none during the trickier parts of the climb. You are absorbed in your own climbing calculations — do I go this way or that way? — and most aware of your grip, footing, and stamina.
What if…
What if I saw another climber, complete stranger, straying from the chains to carve his initials on a ledge 1,000 feet up? Would I say something?
Probably not. But it depends. If the stray climber was a ten-year-old seemingly by himself, definitely I’d be compelled to do or say something. If the boy’s father was nearby, well, I might say something to the dad. Or I might figure father knows best and be on my way.
If the person initialing the ledge was a tanned and fit twentysomething wearing REI climbing gear, I’d figure he knows more than I do and leave him be. Now maybe he smoked crack before making his ascent, but I’d calculate the odds are slim and leave him alone. If he was with friends, I’d be even less likely to intervene.
If that stray climber was a soloing 60ish grandmother type timidly inching toward the edge, I’d probably shout out to her.
Mitigating factors
To speak up or ignore someone taking an obvious risk involves a startling number of potential factors. What’s your physical condition at the moment of truth: gassed, alert? What’s your perception of the risk-taker’s experience and understanding of what he’s doing? Is the risk-taker alone or with a group of peers?
Says Bisharat: “Speaking up… immediately and inescapably intertwines you with the consequences of what happens. It can feel easier to live and let die.”
If I pull back the ten-year-old or a rapdily fatiguing grandmother, do I sacrifice making the summit to escort them back down?
Sometimes getting involved is a no-brainer. If someone is about to fall, there’s no time to second-quess and as Bisharat writes, “the self is forgotten and the moral course of action just takes place…”
But seldom is the situation so black and white. “Finding that right degree, the right speech and the right listener all need to come together, and I’m still not sure I understand how to achive that balance,” writes Bisharat.
Me, too.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Summer of discontent
President Obama’s approval rating as the summer got underway: 46 percent were in favor of how he was directing affairs, 45 percent were not, according to Gallup. We are conflicted about the man. But approval of his leadership is trending definitely down. At one point in the past year, 61 percent were positive about the President.
“Conflicted” is being diplomatic to describe how many Americans feel about leadership in general these days. It’s been a sour attitude a long time festering. In the past few years we’ve endured the worst recession in 80 years. Wall Street’s embarrassment of riches. The BP debacle, the country’s worst environmental disaster and a human tragedy. Afghanistan, now the nation’s longest-ever war.
Dr. Martin Seligman, the guru of positive psychology, is perhaps the only person smiling.
Gloomy Gallup reports
Gallup reported in early summer that “slightly more” Americans believe good, quality jobs are for the taking. That’s generous. Gallup's June finding: a whopping 85 percent of Americans believe it is a "bad time" to find a "quality job." Overall, reported Gallup, “the total lack of optimism about the prospects of finding a quality job in June 2010 is consistent across ages, incomes, genders, and regions of the country.”
A “total lack of optimism.” Then there are other recent Gallup surveys: “Worry, Sadness, Stress Increase With Length of Unemployment.” “Fewer Americans Feeling Better About Their Financial Situation.” “Many Americans Say Gulf Beaches, Wildlife Will Never Recover.”
Wicked collision
Under these dark clouds Democrats on Capitol Hill have launched the most concerted effort in 40 years to reform federal occupational safety and health laws. If enacted, OSHA and MSHA fines will increase. Criminal penalties will be stiffer, enticing more attorneys to prosecute members of management, including EHS professionals for willful negligence causing serious employee injuries or deaths.. Meanwhile, over at the Department of Labor, OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels and deputy Jordan Barab are leading: 1) the biggest surge in agency enforcement since the 1970s, with record-setting fines; 2) the most ambitious standards-setting agenda since the ‘70s; and 3) development of perhaps the most sweeping single regulation in agency history, the so-called I2P2, the injury and illness prevention standard.
The irresistible political force coming out of Washington is slamming into an immovable wall of discontent. It’s a wicked collision.
“We are determined to put sharper teeth in our workplace safety laws and to step up federal enforcement,” said Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.
“Sharper teeth in our workplace safety laws and stepped up federal enforcement as Harkin states, WILL NOT improve safety and health management. People will do everything they can to avoid being penalized,” writes longtime safety and health consultant Ted Ingalls in an email.
“Bad actors have put profits before people,” blogs the AFL-CIO.
“I am not willing to trust the OSHA political appointees with the power” that would be granted the agency with the I2P2 standard, says safety consultant Tom Lawrence.
Where’s the trust?
Speaking of trust, that essential leadership element, what black hole did it get sucked into? The Tea Party grassroots insurrection, or whatever the mainstream media is calling it, has been created and is flourishing in a void of trust.
Too many businesses can’t be trusted, according to those who want a stronger OSHA and MSHA. “We have seen too many accidents over the last few months in workplaces across the country,” said Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) in a statement supporting the need for OSHA and MSHA reforms.
OSHA’s Dr. Michaels doesn’t trust the accuracy of industry’s injury and illness recordkeeping across the board. “In too many cases in this country, workplace safety incentive programs are doing more harm than good by creating incentives to conceal worker injuries,” he told the American Society of Safety Engineers’ national meeting in June.
Of course the oil industry isn’t deemed trustworthy after the BP catastrophe and a series of plant explosions. Here is OSHA’s Barab addressing the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association’s National Safety Conference in May: “Bluntly speaking: Your workers are dying on the job and it has to stop.”
Anything but empathy
In the absence of trust, you get bluntness, blame, anger, anything but empathy. You get current national dialog. Glen Beck. Hilda Solis’s “new sheriff in town.” The “small people” along the Gulf. Broken Promises. A general and his aides blabbing to Rolling Stone.
You get deep division over OSHA actions: I2P2 as the best move OSHA ever made or a Trojan Horse for an ergo rule. OSHA is fighting for the working man and woman or it is a police state.
It was 15 years ago, in 1995, that Daniel Goleman’s book, “Emotional Intelligence,” was wildly popular. “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen R. Covey’s book that has sold 15 million copies in 38 languages, dates back to 1989. Remember interdependence? Wrote Covey: “People who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players.”
What planet did those books come from? That idealism seems of a different century, which of course it was. Pre-9/11. Before the housing, auto industry, 401K meltdowns.
Pre-occupied with self-esteem
“Empathetic Communication in High-Stress Situations” is the title of Dr. Peter Sandman’s timely web post from earlier this summer (www.psandman.com/col/empathy2.htm). “I think it’s unusually hard for my clients to sit still for empathy training,” wrote Sandman, the internationally-known risk communications expert.
And the problem is? Leadership’s pre-occupation with self-esteem, writes Sandman. Think General McChrystal. Tony Hayward. LeBron James. Our cultural obsession with being liked, more than respected.
In an interview this summer with the London newspaper, The Guardian, Judith Hackitt, chair of the United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive (think of a publicly-funded, apolitical OSHA) comes across as the definition of an occupational safety and health professional. Self-esteem takes a backseat to personal convictions. “Certainly, the belief and strength of purpose that Hackitt brings to the job is evident,” writes The Guardian. “She also admits to having ‘difficulty’ with negativity. ‘I’m not terribly sympathetic to the all-too-difficult brigade,’ she says firmly.”
“There are no flies on Judith,” says one colleague in the article. That’s a British compliment. A sign of leadership.
The flies are out in force this summer. All over the likes of McChrystal, Hayward, “King” James. How many are on you?
“Conflicted” is being diplomatic to describe how many Americans feel about leadership in general these days. It’s been a sour attitude a long time festering. In the past few years we’ve endured the worst recession in 80 years. Wall Street’s embarrassment of riches. The BP debacle, the country’s worst environmental disaster and a human tragedy. Afghanistan, now the nation’s longest-ever war.
Dr. Martin Seligman, the guru of positive psychology, is perhaps the only person smiling.
Gloomy Gallup reports
Gallup reported in early summer that “slightly more” Americans believe good, quality jobs are for the taking. That’s generous. Gallup's June finding: a whopping 85 percent of Americans believe it is a "bad time" to find a "quality job." Overall, reported Gallup, “the total lack of optimism about the prospects of finding a quality job in June 2010 is consistent across ages, incomes, genders, and regions of the country.”
A “total lack of optimism.” Then there are other recent Gallup surveys: “Worry, Sadness, Stress Increase With Length of Unemployment.” “Fewer Americans Feeling Better About Their Financial Situation.” “Many Americans Say Gulf Beaches, Wildlife Will Never Recover.”
Wicked collision
Under these dark clouds Democrats on Capitol Hill have launched the most concerted effort in 40 years to reform federal occupational safety and health laws. If enacted, OSHA and MSHA fines will increase. Criminal penalties will be stiffer, enticing more attorneys to prosecute members of management, including EHS professionals for willful negligence causing serious employee injuries or deaths.. Meanwhile, over at the Department of Labor, OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels and deputy Jordan Barab are leading: 1) the biggest surge in agency enforcement since the 1970s, with record-setting fines; 2) the most ambitious standards-setting agenda since the ‘70s; and 3) development of perhaps the most sweeping single regulation in agency history, the so-called I2P2, the injury and illness prevention standard.
The irresistible political force coming out of Washington is slamming into an immovable wall of discontent. It’s a wicked collision.
“We are determined to put sharper teeth in our workplace safety laws and to step up federal enforcement,” said Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.
“Sharper teeth in our workplace safety laws and stepped up federal enforcement as Harkin states, WILL NOT improve safety and health management. People will do everything they can to avoid being penalized,” writes longtime safety and health consultant Ted Ingalls in an email.
“Bad actors have put profits before people,” blogs the AFL-CIO.
“I am not willing to trust the OSHA political appointees with the power” that would be granted the agency with the I2P2 standard, says safety consultant Tom Lawrence.
Where’s the trust?
Speaking of trust, that essential leadership element, what black hole did it get sucked into? The Tea Party grassroots insurrection, or whatever the mainstream media is calling it, has been created and is flourishing in a void of trust.
Too many businesses can’t be trusted, according to those who want a stronger OSHA and MSHA. “We have seen too many accidents over the last few months in workplaces across the country,” said Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) in a statement supporting the need for OSHA and MSHA reforms.
OSHA’s Dr. Michaels doesn’t trust the accuracy of industry’s injury and illness recordkeeping across the board. “In too many cases in this country, workplace safety incentive programs are doing more harm than good by creating incentives to conceal worker injuries,” he told the American Society of Safety Engineers’ national meeting in June.
Of course the oil industry isn’t deemed trustworthy after the BP catastrophe and a series of plant explosions. Here is OSHA’s Barab addressing the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association’s National Safety Conference in May: “Bluntly speaking: Your workers are dying on the job and it has to stop.”
Anything but empathy
In the absence of trust, you get bluntness, blame, anger, anything but empathy. You get current national dialog. Glen Beck. Hilda Solis’s “new sheriff in town.” The “small people” along the Gulf. Broken Promises. A general and his aides blabbing to Rolling Stone.
You get deep division over OSHA actions: I2P2 as the best move OSHA ever made or a Trojan Horse for an ergo rule. OSHA is fighting for the working man and woman or it is a police state.
It was 15 years ago, in 1995, that Daniel Goleman’s book, “Emotional Intelligence,” was wildly popular. “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” Stephen R. Covey’s book that has sold 15 million copies in 38 languages, dates back to 1989. Remember interdependence? Wrote Covey: “People who do not have the maturity to think and act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players.”
What planet did those books come from? That idealism seems of a different century, which of course it was. Pre-9/11. Before the housing, auto industry, 401K meltdowns.
Pre-occupied with self-esteem
“Empathetic Communication in High-Stress Situations” is the title of Dr. Peter Sandman’s timely web post from earlier this summer (www.psandman.com/col/empathy2.htm). “I think it’s unusually hard for my clients to sit still for empathy training,” wrote Sandman, the internationally-known risk communications expert.
And the problem is? Leadership’s pre-occupation with self-esteem, writes Sandman. Think General McChrystal. Tony Hayward. LeBron James. Our cultural obsession with being liked, more than respected.
In an interview this summer with the London newspaper, The Guardian, Judith Hackitt, chair of the United Kingdom’s Health and Safety Executive (think of a publicly-funded, apolitical OSHA) comes across as the definition of an occupational safety and health professional. Self-esteem takes a backseat to personal convictions. “Certainly, the belief and strength of purpose that Hackitt brings to the job is evident,” writes The Guardian. “She also admits to having ‘difficulty’ with negativity. ‘I’m not terribly sympathetic to the all-too-difficult brigade,’ she says firmly.”
“There are no flies on Judith,” says one colleague in the article. That’s a British compliment. A sign of leadership.
The flies are out in force this summer. All over the likes of McChrystal, Hayward, “King” James. How many are on you?
The revolution will be digitized
Rather it is being digitized here and now.
I have been slow to catch on. Six months ago I didn’t know a tweet from a twit. Then I learned a bit about Twitter and thought tweeters are twits. Now I tweet every day. To go from writing 1200-word editorials to 140-character tweets has been a paradigm change. That’s OK, we’re all in for a paradigm change.
For a long time I thought Facebook was a teenage wasteland. Now I send Facebook news updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I believed LinkedIn was for self-promoters. Of course it is. So what? Now I’m caught up in the numbers game — how many contacts can I add to my network?
It’s a brave new world, these social “nets.” Especially if you’re over 45 years old. According to “Twitter Usage in America: 2010,” the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Study, 35 percent of 45-54-year-olds currently have a personal profile page on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any other social networking web site. That compares to 77 percent of 18-24-year-olds, 65 percent of those between 25-34 years old, and 51 percent of the 35-44 crowd.
For safety and health professionals, so many of them baby boomers in the 45+ demographic, to use social nets is to venture where few of their peers have gone before. Most safety and health pros, cautious and conservative by nature (hallmarks of being safety conscious, after all), have not exactly jumped at the chance to “join the conversation,” as social nets love to advertise.
Free to choose
On our website is an open invitation to “join the conversation” and provide feedback, comments, opinions to my blogging and the news of the day. Consider this response:
“Oh gawd Dave... you've imbibed the millennial Kool-Aid. I have been fighting the rope pulling me into Facebook and so far have maintained my freedom. Social networking can be a ‘cancer’ in that it spreads rapidly and there is no real cure other than amputating the PC/laptop from the clutches of the fingertips.
“Don't let the new age rule your life. As Chloe said in the final seconds of "24," ‘SHUT IT DOWN.’
“Smell the coffee, hug the kids and wife and go walk the dog and breathe the polluted Philly air. THAT is what really matters.”
Now that is excellent blog material. Too bad he’s “fighting the rope.”
I also received this response:
“I keep getting requests to join associates’ groups etc., have done that, but have found few who actually utilize the network to any extent. Most say something like, ‘everyone else is in so I got in!’ I too must get better acquainted with the tools available. Thanks for giving us all (or at least those who are uninitiated to date) a little push.”
Consider this column a nudge.
“Inherit the future”
At least keep an open mind. Philosopher and one-time longshoreman Eric Hoffer: "In times of great change, it is the learners who inherit the future."
And to quote another philosopher, Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a-changin’.” Newspapers across the nation are folding faster than beach umbrellas before a storm. Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Rolling Stone are pathetically thin. Evening newscasts are hanging on to the AARP crowd. Every other commercial is for a prescription med.
Dylan again: “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
Mr. Jones, with “his pencil in his hand” is a reporter. How prophetic. Many so-called “Mainstream Media” journalists stubbornly scorn social nets. The Babel of bloggers and blowhards.
Yet… in 2009, social net usage spiked to 57.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet population to 127 million users, according to projections from eMarketer. By 2014, social nets will reel in 65.6 percent of all Internet users, 164 million people.
Something is happening when Deepwater Horizon Response has 28,323 fans on Facebook. The official site of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command has embraced social nets like a teenager, not a bunch of bureaucrats: Breaking news is sent via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, StumbleUpon, email and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.
“There’s something happening here…”
Something is happening when, just on LinkedIn alone:
● The American Industrial Hygiene Association networking group has 1,491 members;
● EHSQ Elite has 12,108 members;
● The American Society of Safety Engineers has 3,787 members;
● The Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics has 2,640 members;
● The Environment Health & Safety Professionals group has 9,127 members;
● The Safety Training group has 1,016 members;
● The Green group has 84,090 members.
Something is happening when the Green group discussion on “Is global warming finally being exposed for what it is?” elicits 3,949 comments.
To be sure, the overwhelming majority of discussion group members consist of a vast tribe called the “lurkers.” Lurkers passively follow and read the updates of others without contributing updates or comments of their own. This is no different than the audience at any professional conference. In a room of say, 500 people, how many walk to a mic stand to ask a question or offer a comment during the Q&A? We are a silent majority of lurkers. The social nets merely reflect human nature.
Come out of your silo
Maybe you have nothing to contribute to the conversation. But don’t miss out on the conversations occuring on the social nets. It is here that you learn what’s on the minds of your peers. What the issues of the day are. You’ll relate to some of the gripes and complaints. You’ll find some comments self-aborbed, specious, ridiculous.
That’s no excuse for dismissing the revolution in communication. This isn’t a fad. There’s no turning back. According to the Arbitron study: Eighty-four percent of the U.S. population has Internet access. Six in seven homes with Internet access have broadband connections. Dial-up is so 20th century. More than six in ten homes with Internet access have a wireless (Wi-Fi) network set up. In 2008, 24 percent of the populations had a personal profile page on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, et al. In 2010, 48 percent have some type of profile page.
There’s a novelty effect here, no doubt. But folks by the millions are not going to wake up one morning bored with social nets, re-up their newspaper and magazine subscriptions and throw a life preserver to Katie Couric. It’s about the day-to-day pace. The times they are a-movin’ fast. We want to know what’s going on, right now, on demand, not tomorrow morning or next week.
So as you check in with ISHN’s daily Twitter updates, Facebook and LinkedIn updates, and daily e-news posts and blog accounts on our website, look at it this way: We’re not trying to ‘rope you in;’ we’re reflecting the revolution. And overturning paradigms is not for lurkers. Engage. Write a comment. Far too many blog posts show goose eggs in the comment column. The story is not just the facts of who, what, where, when and why. It includes how people react to the news. How they form communities. Hello Tea Party. Combustible Dust Policy Institute Group. Travel Media Pros. Writing Mafia. Find your niche. Be part of the story.
Who wants to be Mr. Jones?
I have been slow to catch on. Six months ago I didn’t know a tweet from a twit. Then I learned a bit about Twitter and thought tweeters are twits. Now I tweet every day. To go from writing 1200-word editorials to 140-character tweets has been a paradigm change. That’s OK, we’re all in for a paradigm change.
For a long time I thought Facebook was a teenage wasteland. Now I send Facebook news updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I believed LinkedIn was for self-promoters. Of course it is. So what? Now I’m caught up in the numbers game — how many contacts can I add to my network?
It’s a brave new world, these social “nets.” Especially if you’re over 45 years old. According to “Twitter Usage in America: 2010,” the Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Study, 35 percent of 45-54-year-olds currently have a personal profile page on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any other social networking web site. That compares to 77 percent of 18-24-year-olds, 65 percent of those between 25-34 years old, and 51 percent of the 35-44 crowd.
For safety and health professionals, so many of them baby boomers in the 45+ demographic, to use social nets is to venture where few of their peers have gone before. Most safety and health pros, cautious and conservative by nature (hallmarks of being safety conscious, after all), have not exactly jumped at the chance to “join the conversation,” as social nets love to advertise.
Free to choose
On our website is an open invitation to “join the conversation” and provide feedback, comments, opinions to my blogging and the news of the day. Consider this response:
“Oh gawd Dave... you've imbibed the millennial Kool-Aid. I have been fighting the rope pulling me into Facebook and so far have maintained my freedom. Social networking can be a ‘cancer’ in that it spreads rapidly and there is no real cure other than amputating the PC/laptop from the clutches of the fingertips.
“Don't let the new age rule your life. As Chloe said in the final seconds of "24," ‘SHUT IT DOWN.’
“Smell the coffee, hug the kids and wife and go walk the dog and breathe the polluted Philly air. THAT is what really matters.”
Now that is excellent blog material. Too bad he’s “fighting the rope.”
I also received this response:
“I keep getting requests to join associates’ groups etc., have done that, but have found few who actually utilize the network to any extent. Most say something like, ‘everyone else is in so I got in!’ I too must get better acquainted with the tools available. Thanks for giving us all (or at least those who are uninitiated to date) a little push.”
Consider this column a nudge.
“Inherit the future”
At least keep an open mind. Philosopher and one-time longshoreman Eric Hoffer: "In times of great change, it is the learners who inherit the future."
And to quote another philosopher, Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a-changin’.” Newspapers across the nation are folding faster than beach umbrellas before a storm. Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Rolling Stone are pathetically thin. Evening newscasts are hanging on to the AARP crowd. Every other commercial is for a prescription med.
Dylan again: “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
Mr. Jones, with “his pencil in his hand” is a reporter. How prophetic. Many so-called “Mainstream Media” journalists stubbornly scorn social nets. The Babel of bloggers and blowhards.
Yet… in 2009, social net usage spiked to 57.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet population to 127 million users, according to projections from eMarketer. By 2014, social nets will reel in 65.6 percent of all Internet users, 164 million people.
Something is happening when Deepwater Horizon Response has 28,323 fans on Facebook. The official site of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command has embraced social nets like a teenager, not a bunch of bureaucrats: Breaking news is sent via Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Technorati, StumbleUpon, email and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.
“There’s something happening here…”
Something is happening when, just on LinkedIn alone:
● The American Industrial Hygiene Association networking group has 1,491 members;
● EHSQ Elite has 12,108 members;
● The American Society of Safety Engineers has 3,787 members;
● The Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics has 2,640 members;
● The Environment Health & Safety Professionals group has 9,127 members;
● The Safety Training group has 1,016 members;
● The Green group has 84,090 members.
Something is happening when the Green group discussion on “Is global warming finally being exposed for what it is?” elicits 3,949 comments.
To be sure, the overwhelming majority of discussion group members consist of a vast tribe called the “lurkers.” Lurkers passively follow and read the updates of others without contributing updates or comments of their own. This is no different than the audience at any professional conference. In a room of say, 500 people, how many walk to a mic stand to ask a question or offer a comment during the Q&A? We are a silent majority of lurkers. The social nets merely reflect human nature.
Come out of your silo
Maybe you have nothing to contribute to the conversation. But don’t miss out on the conversations occuring on the social nets. It is here that you learn what’s on the minds of your peers. What the issues of the day are. You’ll relate to some of the gripes and complaints. You’ll find some comments self-aborbed, specious, ridiculous.
That’s no excuse for dismissing the revolution in communication. This isn’t a fad. There’s no turning back. According to the Arbitron study: Eighty-four percent of the U.S. population has Internet access. Six in seven homes with Internet access have broadband connections. Dial-up is so 20th century. More than six in ten homes with Internet access have a wireless (Wi-Fi) network set up. In 2008, 24 percent of the populations had a personal profile page on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, et al. In 2010, 48 percent have some type of profile page.
There’s a novelty effect here, no doubt. But folks by the millions are not going to wake up one morning bored with social nets, re-up their newspaper and magazine subscriptions and throw a life preserver to Katie Couric. It’s about the day-to-day pace. The times they are a-movin’ fast. We want to know what’s going on, right now, on demand, not tomorrow morning or next week.
So as you check in with ISHN’s daily Twitter updates, Facebook and LinkedIn updates, and daily e-news posts and blog accounts on our website, look at it this way: We’re not trying to ‘rope you in;’ we’re reflecting the revolution. And overturning paradigms is not for lurkers. Engage. Write a comment. Far too many blog posts show goose eggs in the comment column. The story is not just the facts of who, what, where, when and why. It includes how people react to the news. How they form communities. Hello Tea Party. Combustible Dust Policy Institute Group. Travel Media Pros. Writing Mafia. Find your niche. Be part of the story.
Who wants to be Mr. Jones?
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Rock of Ages
The best way to make your getaway from the assorted vulgarities of Vegas is to head east on Interstate 15. The posted speed limit is 75 MPH, which means you draft behind SUVs barreling along at 90+ MPH. And you do it for about a hundred miles. The first stoplight is 133 miles away in Hurricane, Utah, if you’re heading to true escape in the glories of Zion Canyon. God has a vacation home in Zion, the saying goes. Who’s to question His infinite wisdom?
Following a few days of work meetings in Vegas, my family graciously extended to me a five-day yard pass, allowing me dangerous free rein to roam southern Utah. My base would be the Zion Mountain Ranch, a collection of log cabins on 3,000 acres three miles east of Zion. The ranch doubles as a buffalo reserve, home to a herd of about 40 free-grazing buffalo. There’s no cell phone reception on the ranch, no phones in the cabins, no wake up calls, no clocks in the cabins. My family was comfortable with me going off the grid. In 2004 we spent Christmas at the ranch with a scrawny runt of a Christmas tree, no ornaments. Back then my kids tired easily of my all too frequent stops to snap photographs of canyon walls and hoodoos. Today they have absolutely no interest in returning to the rocks. So go ahead dad, disappear for a couple of days.
This is my fourth trip to Zion. Every time its massive red, white and charcoal cliffs have put me in my place. First time was 20 years ago, with two friends from work. Second time was in ‘93 with the family. We stayed at the old Parry Lodge in Kanab, where movie stars drank the idle nights away during the heyday of westerns in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Third time was Christmas, 1994. The kids agreed with reluctance to return with the promise of a few nights in Vegas.
It was April when I rolled into the ranch this time. I came in with an ugly low-pressure front from California, bringing freezing temperatures and a mix of snow and rain showers. “My girlfriend in Bakersfield says it’s raining cats and dogs there, so we’re in for a couple of nasty days,” said the owner of a unique bookstore/outfitter gear /CD/souvenir shop in Kanab. Kanab calls itself “Little Hollywood” and “The Greatest Earth on Show.” It is the county seat of Kane County, with a population of 3,564. Motels outnumber attorneys 20 to 3. The owner of one of Kanab’s two supermarkets, Glazier’s Foodtown, is a well-known local photographer. The eatery Houston’s Trail End has been family-run for 35 years.
Kanab lives off nostalgia for a west that no longer exists. What happens when the baby boomers raised on Gunsmoke, Rawhide and F Troop can no longer make the trek out here? Above the front doors of the small rooms at the Parry Lodge are the names of the stars who once stayed there: Frank Sinatra, Telly Savalas, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Arlene Dahl, Joel McCrea, Fred McMuarry, Maureen O’Hara, Ty Power, and on and on. When we stayed here over the Fourth of July in 2003 these names meant nothing to my kids. My wife was spooked by the prospects of ghosts.
So there’s something to be said for soloing to savor the rock of ages. A dusting of snow covered my rental Mitsubishi Galant the morning I grabbed two large Styrofoam cups of java from the ranch’s grill and headed east to Monument Valley. Another pleasure going it alone: you play whatever damn music you want.
The Impalas are a now-defunct surf-rock band out of Memphis, recommended to me by a know-it-all clerk at Shangri-La Records, not far from Sun Studios in mid-town Memphis. Healthy morning guitar twang and reverb to get you going.
Between Kanab and Page, Arizona, 70 miles southeast on 89 South, lies nothing save for an abandoned movie set used for “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” starring and directed by Clint Eastwood in 1976. The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, 1.7 million acres of vermilion cliffs, sandstone sculptures, canyons, mesas and plateaus, runs along to your left. On your right, a vast expanse of flat tumbleweed desert. Utah Off Road Tours asserts it is here you can stop and “feel your place in the universe.” Also “meditate with lizards” — I thought they dart around too much to stop and chill — and “come to know yourself through knowing a landscape.”
Mystical PR. It will take longer than my five-day yard permits to gain fresh insights into the nature of the universe. I’m on a whirlwind tour, listening to loud music, blowing down empty 89 South at speeds my wife would waffle me for. I control the volume, the speedometer, and the choice of liquor. It’s a few shots of Old Grand Dad and some Zion Canyon Virgin Stout beer (“brewed with love and kindness between the walls of the great Zion Canyon”) in the evenings back at the cabin. No TV, newspapers, voice mails or emails. That Virgin Stout refers to the Virgin River that runs through the canyon, by the way. The buxom lass on the label is too politically incorrect for my wife and daughter. Another benefit of leaving the family at home.
89 East runs from Page to Kayenta, Arizona, another empty stretch of sandy, rocky nothing. You have a long and unpredictable wait if you run out of gas out here.
The Impalas’ CD runs through an impressive 30 songs. I continue the surf theme with a new CD by Surf Blood, less classic surf and more a melodic attack of pop guitars. Well-known lone travelers run through my mind as I think of nothing in particular: William Least Hurt Moon, Thoreau, Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and Edward Abbey, the bearded bard of the West, described on his web site as a desert anarchist “mocking the mindless bureaucrats hell-bent on destroying it.
The wide-open, wild west (despite Abbey’s old school protests, desolation is a few miles down an “unimproved” gravel road) has the effect on stress the same as an Ansel Adams photograph. One night at the Zion Ranch grill I hear the chef tell a dining couple about all the touristos who drive out from Vegas for a “cleansing.”
The road and remoteness is also tonic for your inner outlaw. “Resist much, obey little” advised Walt Whitman. It’s a tradition in the U.S. created by revolutionaries, mythologized by Zane Gray and Hollywood. But as the west was been tamed — Eisenhower’s national interstate infrastructure, Indians shunted off to the rez in America’s version of apartheid, cars now banned from Zion National Park April through October— who really resists anymore? Especially in 2010 after being beaten down by the recession for a couple of years.
What fight is left is channeled through Willie Nelson. Or Ronny Elliott. He’s next up on my CD player. A hillbilly rock and roll guitar twanger-banger out of a Tampa garage originally. In fact played with bands called the “Outsiders” and the “Outlaws.” Now plays with a bunch of self-described misfits called “The Nationals.”
I enter the Navajo nation near Kayenta in northwest Arizona. How “mindless bureaucrats” corralled and forced the Navajo into an estranged nation of misfits (from mainstream America and with numerous exceptions to be sure) is simply a bullshit embarrassment.
Consider these facts: 165,673 Navajo live on the rez in northern Arizona and southern Utah; median age is 24. Sixty percent live without telephones. Median family income is $22,392. Forty percent of families live below the poverty level. About one-third of the housing is without complete plumbing.
Ronny Elliott’s reedy bluesy vocals, long gone and aching, with harp, mandolin and a stinging steel guitar, are appropriate for the rez.
About 30 miles from Kayenta on 163 North is Monument Valley. I arrive on a postcard-perfect afternoon to bounce along the 17-miles gravel loop through what the Navajo call the “Valley of the Rocks.” About 570 million years ago the valley formed the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The waters subsided as the Pacific and North American plates shifted, and about 65 million years back the mud from the ocean floor became sandstone, giving rise to Monument Valley’s Elephant Butte, Three Sisters, The Hub, The Thumb, Mitchell Mesa, Thunderbird Mesa, Spearhead Mesa, Sentinel Mesa, Gray Whiskers and Camel Butte.
The valley is bathed in red from iron oxide; some canyons and buttes are a darker blue-gray from manganese oxide. The towering rock monuments are icons of American rugged individualism. Maybe that’s what attracts curious tourists from around the globe — the chance to get a sense of America’s still adolescent spirit. I hear as many foreign accents and languages at the Monument Valley visitor center as I do English speakers. Sure, it’s April and American family vacations are months away. But I get the weird sense Europeans and Asians are more interested in our history than we are. Same feeling came to me a few summers back walking the rolling hills of Custer’s Last Stand in eastern Montana, where foreign tourists seemed predominant.
During the evening drive back to the ranch from Monument Valley, damn if I don’t nearly run out of gas. Out of nowhere I see the needle resting on E. A road sign indicates 30 miles to Kanab. This will be close.
The CD plays some more outlaws: Simon Stokes, a biker Willie Nelson with a long white beard, ponytail, tattoos up and down both arms. On the CD cover he’s sitting at a bar with another biker, both dressed in black. What else?
Miles Davis, up next, was an outlaw to his soul. Didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thought. Played what he wanted, fans, critics be damned. Growled at the audience in something of an old man’s raspy hiss on the concert CD I’m playing. Proved Duke Ellington right — made music beyond category. Miles’ late period space jazz is well-suited for empty desert travel. Music to contemplate your place in the universe? Don’t get that heavy on Miles.
Too bad towns like Tesgi and Kaibeto on the road to Kanab don’t have gas stations. I don’t even see the towns, just the signs.
Outside of Kanab I put $53 dollars of gas in the Galant at a Phillips 66 station. The red canyon cliffs surrounding Kanab are radiant red in the setting sun, and I follow one brilliant sliver of glowing red rock to a place called Tom’s Canyon. From 1880 to 2000 this was Tom Robinson and sons’ ranch, where they raised crops and graze cattle. The Hollywood people loved to film here because it’s so close to town and the Parry Lodge. But now the canyon is paved with curvy boulevards named Donner Circle, Rainmaker Road, Cutter Trail. Empty lots are tagged with markers: Lot # 115 and so on. You can purchase a Tuscan style abode with 2,135 square feet of living space, or The Knolls, done in the southwestern style with 2,563 square feet. “Live everyday where you love to vacation!” says the billboard on Mohawk Drive.
So we’re not at the ends of the earth. Heroic rock outcroppings become development backdrops.
I decide to traverse up to Capitol Reef National Park the next day to say I was there. This evolves into a nine-hour jaunt through bizarre weather (hail, snow, snow showers, windswept rain, sometimes drenching) and fantastic scenery (crystallized white woods of the Dixie Forest, low-lying snow clouds, expansive white and yellow canyons, tight S curves through Rocky Mountain-like high forests, and the white domes of the park that do indeed resemble capitol architecture). Capitol Reef is in what’s called south-central Utah. Coming from Kanab there is but one road in and out, via 89 North to 12 East to 24 East, past Boulder, Escalante, Torrey, Tropic, and appropriately, Box Death Hollow Wilderness.
Damn if a tricked-up black Jeep suddenly flashes dashboard lights in my rear view mirror. I’m ticketed $165 by Officer Dunton for speeding 52 MPH in a 30 MPH zone through the tiny burg of Escalante.
The road to Capitol Reef is not for the vertigo-challenged. S curves time and again scale up and down canyon walls. Past Boulder a summit marker reads 9,600 feet. Outside it feels like February. What travelers, hikers I see wear parkas and gloves. It’s about 40 degrees. Snow clouds render the land white or gray. There is no other color. A sign points to Hell’s Backbone. Indeed.
On my way back I calculate I’ve got to make it to Angels Landing in Zion today. Tomorrow I have a few hours in the morning, then the drive back to Vegas and a 2:40 pm flight home to Philadelphia.
Watermelon Slim is on the CD player. Name about says all you need to know. Then a dude dubbed “The Hillbilly Cat” from 1955. The clouds have cleared, the sun is out bright over Moss Cave, about three to five miles from Bryce Canyon, elevation 7,777 feet (positive encouragement to press on). I get out of the car (you cannot see the west from a damn automobile, said Edward Abbey) to hike across the Tang orange soft gravel hills and a nest of red rock hoodoos. No self-absorbed reflection. Better to follow Thoreau’s dictate: Why am I in the woods if my head is some where else?
By the time I reach Angels Landing it’s what filmmakers call “the magic hour.” That short window of time, less than 60 minutes in the evening, when the low sun produces a fantastic shadow and light show off the rock of ages. I’m running late so I say screw the car ban, ignore the flashing road sign “Red Permits Only Beyond This Point” and park in an empty lot near the Old Grotto. Will the eco-police tow my rental away? Give me a ticket? A warning? What will be my defense: The shuttle goes too slow?
For whatever benevolent reasons, the Galant sits where I left it when I return from Angels Landing, still the only car in the lot. Back home in Philadelphia, no doubt, that car would’ve been long gone and I’d have a long walk to the park police.
There is no obesity epidemic on Angels Landing. What hikers I see are wiry and fit. The trail is what the park service defines as a “strenuous.” A five-mile, supposedly five-hour hike. An incline gain of 1,488 feet to reach the flat, white rocky summit at 5,785 feet. Two middle-aged women in shorts share the summit with me; one breaks out a kite to fly. “Isn’t she crazy?” says her friend. “No. You sure have enough wind up here,” I say. “Well, that makes you both crazy.”
I don’t’ know about crazy. An aging adolescent, as Abbey called himself, yes, that I’ll concede. Call me a guerilla resistor. For three full days, not counting the transit days from Vegas and back, I don’t think about much and it feels good. Appropriately, 1970s British pub rockers Dr. Feelgood are the last band on the CD player, after Jack-O and the Tennessee Tearjerkers. Again, their name says enough
The canyon floor of Zion on the Saturday morning I leave for Vegas is a riot of vibrant green coming alive on aspens, cottonwoods, Ponderosa Pines, and oak trees along the Virgin River. The azure sky is cloudless. The sun is brilliant. My yard pass is set to expire. I exit, turning in whatever road warrior credentials I have, to blend back into the suburbs.
Following a few days of work meetings in Vegas, my family graciously extended to me a five-day yard pass, allowing me dangerous free rein to roam southern Utah. My base would be the Zion Mountain Ranch, a collection of log cabins on 3,000 acres three miles east of Zion. The ranch doubles as a buffalo reserve, home to a herd of about 40 free-grazing buffalo. There’s no cell phone reception on the ranch, no phones in the cabins, no wake up calls, no clocks in the cabins. My family was comfortable with me going off the grid. In 2004 we spent Christmas at the ranch with a scrawny runt of a Christmas tree, no ornaments. Back then my kids tired easily of my all too frequent stops to snap photographs of canyon walls and hoodoos. Today they have absolutely no interest in returning to the rocks. So go ahead dad, disappear for a couple of days.
This is my fourth trip to Zion. Every time its massive red, white and charcoal cliffs have put me in my place. First time was 20 years ago, with two friends from work. Second time was in ‘93 with the family. We stayed at the old Parry Lodge in Kanab, where movie stars drank the idle nights away during the heyday of westerns in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Third time was Christmas, 1994. The kids agreed with reluctance to return with the promise of a few nights in Vegas.
It was April when I rolled into the ranch this time. I came in with an ugly low-pressure front from California, bringing freezing temperatures and a mix of snow and rain showers. “My girlfriend in Bakersfield says it’s raining cats and dogs there, so we’re in for a couple of nasty days,” said the owner of a unique bookstore/outfitter gear /CD/souvenir shop in Kanab. Kanab calls itself “Little Hollywood” and “The Greatest Earth on Show.” It is the county seat of Kane County, with a population of 3,564. Motels outnumber attorneys 20 to 3. The owner of one of Kanab’s two supermarkets, Glazier’s Foodtown, is a well-known local photographer. The eatery Houston’s Trail End has been family-run for 35 years.
Kanab lives off nostalgia for a west that no longer exists. What happens when the baby boomers raised on Gunsmoke, Rawhide and F Troop can no longer make the trek out here? Above the front doors of the small rooms at the Parry Lodge are the names of the stars who once stayed there: Frank Sinatra, Telly Savalas, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Arlene Dahl, Joel McCrea, Fred McMuarry, Maureen O’Hara, Ty Power, and on and on. When we stayed here over the Fourth of July in 2003 these names meant nothing to my kids. My wife was spooked by the prospects of ghosts.
So there’s something to be said for soloing to savor the rock of ages. A dusting of snow covered my rental Mitsubishi Galant the morning I grabbed two large Styrofoam cups of java from the ranch’s grill and headed east to Monument Valley. Another pleasure going it alone: you play whatever damn music you want.
The Impalas are a now-defunct surf-rock band out of Memphis, recommended to me by a know-it-all clerk at Shangri-La Records, not far from Sun Studios in mid-town Memphis. Healthy morning guitar twang and reverb to get you going.
Between Kanab and Page, Arizona, 70 miles southeast on 89 South, lies nothing save for an abandoned movie set used for “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” starring and directed by Clint Eastwood in 1976. The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, 1.7 million acres of vermilion cliffs, sandstone sculptures, canyons, mesas and plateaus, runs along to your left. On your right, a vast expanse of flat tumbleweed desert. Utah Off Road Tours asserts it is here you can stop and “feel your place in the universe.” Also “meditate with lizards” — I thought they dart around too much to stop and chill — and “come to know yourself through knowing a landscape.”
Mystical PR. It will take longer than my five-day yard permits to gain fresh insights into the nature of the universe. I’m on a whirlwind tour, listening to loud music, blowing down empty 89 South at speeds my wife would waffle me for. I control the volume, the speedometer, and the choice of liquor. It’s a few shots of Old Grand Dad and some Zion Canyon Virgin Stout beer (“brewed with love and kindness between the walls of the great Zion Canyon”) in the evenings back at the cabin. No TV, newspapers, voice mails or emails. That Virgin Stout refers to the Virgin River that runs through the canyon, by the way. The buxom lass on the label is too politically incorrect for my wife and daughter. Another benefit of leaving the family at home.
89 East runs from Page to Kayenta, Arizona, another empty stretch of sandy, rocky nothing. You have a long and unpredictable wait if you run out of gas out here.
The Impalas’ CD runs through an impressive 30 songs. I continue the surf theme with a new CD by Surf Blood, less classic surf and more a melodic attack of pop guitars. Well-known lone travelers run through my mind as I think of nothing in particular: William Least Hurt Moon, Thoreau, Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and Edward Abbey, the bearded bard of the West, described on his web site as a desert anarchist “mocking the mindless bureaucrats hell-bent on destroying it.
The wide-open, wild west (despite Abbey’s old school protests, desolation is a few miles down an “unimproved” gravel road) has the effect on stress the same as an Ansel Adams photograph. One night at the Zion Ranch grill I hear the chef tell a dining couple about all the touristos who drive out from Vegas for a “cleansing.”
The road and remoteness is also tonic for your inner outlaw. “Resist much, obey little” advised Walt Whitman. It’s a tradition in the U.S. created by revolutionaries, mythologized by Zane Gray and Hollywood. But as the west was been tamed — Eisenhower’s national interstate infrastructure, Indians shunted off to the rez in America’s version of apartheid, cars now banned from Zion National Park April through October— who really resists anymore? Especially in 2010 after being beaten down by the recession for a couple of years.
What fight is left is channeled through Willie Nelson. Or Ronny Elliott. He’s next up on my CD player. A hillbilly rock and roll guitar twanger-banger out of a Tampa garage originally. In fact played with bands called the “Outsiders” and the “Outlaws.” Now plays with a bunch of self-described misfits called “The Nationals.”
I enter the Navajo nation near Kayenta in northwest Arizona. How “mindless bureaucrats” corralled and forced the Navajo into an estranged nation of misfits (from mainstream America and with numerous exceptions to be sure) is simply a bullshit embarrassment.
Consider these facts: 165,673 Navajo live on the rez in northern Arizona and southern Utah; median age is 24. Sixty percent live without telephones. Median family income is $22,392. Forty percent of families live below the poverty level. About one-third of the housing is without complete plumbing.
Ronny Elliott’s reedy bluesy vocals, long gone and aching, with harp, mandolin and a stinging steel guitar, are appropriate for the rez.
About 30 miles from Kayenta on 163 North is Monument Valley. I arrive on a postcard-perfect afternoon to bounce along the 17-miles gravel loop through what the Navajo call the “Valley of the Rocks.” About 570 million years ago the valley formed the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The waters subsided as the Pacific and North American plates shifted, and about 65 million years back the mud from the ocean floor became sandstone, giving rise to Monument Valley’s Elephant Butte, Three Sisters, The Hub, The Thumb, Mitchell Mesa, Thunderbird Mesa, Spearhead Mesa, Sentinel Mesa, Gray Whiskers and Camel Butte.
The valley is bathed in red from iron oxide; some canyons and buttes are a darker blue-gray from manganese oxide. The towering rock monuments are icons of American rugged individualism. Maybe that’s what attracts curious tourists from around the globe — the chance to get a sense of America’s still adolescent spirit. I hear as many foreign accents and languages at the Monument Valley visitor center as I do English speakers. Sure, it’s April and American family vacations are months away. But I get the weird sense Europeans and Asians are more interested in our history than we are. Same feeling came to me a few summers back walking the rolling hills of Custer’s Last Stand in eastern Montana, where foreign tourists seemed predominant.
During the evening drive back to the ranch from Monument Valley, damn if I don’t nearly run out of gas. Out of nowhere I see the needle resting on E. A road sign indicates 30 miles to Kanab. This will be close.
The CD plays some more outlaws: Simon Stokes, a biker Willie Nelson with a long white beard, ponytail, tattoos up and down both arms. On the CD cover he’s sitting at a bar with another biker, both dressed in black. What else?
Miles Davis, up next, was an outlaw to his soul. Didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thought. Played what he wanted, fans, critics be damned. Growled at the audience in something of an old man’s raspy hiss on the concert CD I’m playing. Proved Duke Ellington right — made music beyond category. Miles’ late period space jazz is well-suited for empty desert travel. Music to contemplate your place in the universe? Don’t get that heavy on Miles.
Too bad towns like Tesgi and Kaibeto on the road to Kanab don’t have gas stations. I don’t even see the towns, just the signs.
Outside of Kanab I put $53 dollars of gas in the Galant at a Phillips 66 station. The red canyon cliffs surrounding Kanab are radiant red in the setting sun, and I follow one brilliant sliver of glowing red rock to a place called Tom’s Canyon. From 1880 to 2000 this was Tom Robinson and sons’ ranch, where they raised crops and graze cattle. The Hollywood people loved to film here because it’s so close to town and the Parry Lodge. But now the canyon is paved with curvy boulevards named Donner Circle, Rainmaker Road, Cutter Trail. Empty lots are tagged with markers: Lot # 115 and so on. You can purchase a Tuscan style abode with 2,135 square feet of living space, or The Knolls, done in the southwestern style with 2,563 square feet. “Live everyday where you love to vacation!” says the billboard on Mohawk Drive.
So we’re not at the ends of the earth. Heroic rock outcroppings become development backdrops.
I decide to traverse up to Capitol Reef National Park the next day to say I was there. This evolves into a nine-hour jaunt through bizarre weather (hail, snow, snow showers, windswept rain, sometimes drenching) and fantastic scenery (crystallized white woods of the Dixie Forest, low-lying snow clouds, expansive white and yellow canyons, tight S curves through Rocky Mountain-like high forests, and the white domes of the park that do indeed resemble capitol architecture). Capitol Reef is in what’s called south-central Utah. Coming from Kanab there is but one road in and out, via 89 North to 12 East to 24 East, past Boulder, Escalante, Torrey, Tropic, and appropriately, Box Death Hollow Wilderness.
Damn if a tricked-up black Jeep suddenly flashes dashboard lights in my rear view mirror. I’m ticketed $165 by Officer Dunton for speeding 52 MPH in a 30 MPH zone through the tiny burg of Escalante.
The road to Capitol Reef is not for the vertigo-challenged. S curves time and again scale up and down canyon walls. Past Boulder a summit marker reads 9,600 feet. Outside it feels like February. What travelers, hikers I see wear parkas and gloves. It’s about 40 degrees. Snow clouds render the land white or gray. There is no other color. A sign points to Hell’s Backbone. Indeed.
On my way back I calculate I’ve got to make it to Angels Landing in Zion today. Tomorrow I have a few hours in the morning, then the drive back to Vegas and a 2:40 pm flight home to Philadelphia.
Watermelon Slim is on the CD player. Name about says all you need to know. Then a dude dubbed “The Hillbilly Cat” from 1955. The clouds have cleared, the sun is out bright over Moss Cave, about three to five miles from Bryce Canyon, elevation 7,777 feet (positive encouragement to press on). I get out of the car (you cannot see the west from a damn automobile, said Edward Abbey) to hike across the Tang orange soft gravel hills and a nest of red rock hoodoos. No self-absorbed reflection. Better to follow Thoreau’s dictate: Why am I in the woods if my head is some where else?
By the time I reach Angels Landing it’s what filmmakers call “the magic hour.” That short window of time, less than 60 minutes in the evening, when the low sun produces a fantastic shadow and light show off the rock of ages. I’m running late so I say screw the car ban, ignore the flashing road sign “Red Permits Only Beyond This Point” and park in an empty lot near the Old Grotto. Will the eco-police tow my rental away? Give me a ticket? A warning? What will be my defense: The shuttle goes too slow?
For whatever benevolent reasons, the Galant sits where I left it when I return from Angels Landing, still the only car in the lot. Back home in Philadelphia, no doubt, that car would’ve been long gone and I’d have a long walk to the park police.
There is no obesity epidemic on Angels Landing. What hikers I see are wiry and fit. The trail is what the park service defines as a “strenuous.” A five-mile, supposedly five-hour hike. An incline gain of 1,488 feet to reach the flat, white rocky summit at 5,785 feet. Two middle-aged women in shorts share the summit with me; one breaks out a kite to fly. “Isn’t she crazy?” says her friend. “No. You sure have enough wind up here,” I say. “Well, that makes you both crazy.”
I don’t’ know about crazy. An aging adolescent, as Abbey called himself, yes, that I’ll concede. Call me a guerilla resistor. For three full days, not counting the transit days from Vegas and back, I don’t think about much and it feels good. Appropriately, 1970s British pub rockers Dr. Feelgood are the last band on the CD player, after Jack-O and the Tennessee Tearjerkers. Again, their name says enough
The canyon floor of Zion on the Saturday morning I leave for Vegas is a riot of vibrant green coming alive on aspens, cottonwoods, Ponderosa Pines, and oak trees along the Virgin River. The azure sky is cloudless. The sun is brilliant. My yard pass is set to expire. I exit, turning in whatever road warrior credentials I have, to blend back into the suburbs.
Friday, February 19, 2010
A record snowfall puts us in our place
The all-time Philly snowfall record was busted Wednesday, February 10. We’re now just shy of six feet of snow for the winter — 70.5 inches and counting.
I spent the day writing blogs for my magazine with the blinds on all four of my home office windows raised so I could watch storm rage on…
My neighbor is shoveling his drive. He’s a somewhat vague, bundled and determined figure with the snow coming down thick and wind-whipped. Often when we get snow around here big flakes float lazily to the ground, like one of those small shake ‘em up snow globes. The air is usually wet and the accumulation civilized.
This is not one of those storms. The snowfall is dense and unrelenting. It began last night and will eventually end a little more than 24 hours later. There’s already about two feet of snow on the ground from a storm last weekend. I see that my neighbor is up on his roof, shoveling off snow. Back on the ground, he then shovels away what he dumped on his front stoop and sidewalk.
Early in the afternoon my kids and I venture out to see what, if anything, is moving — people, snowmobiles, snowplows. We hear strange, muffled explosions. It’s thunder and lightning above the dense cloud cover. Visibility is 100-200 yards. We walk into a driving wind with heads down, trudging as though defying gravity. “Now I know what it’s like to be a Muslim woman,” says my daughter. She’s covered with layers of sweatshirts and scarves, boots, gloves, a wrap-around hood and wool cap. Only her eyes are uncovered. She wishes she had ski goggles, preferably yellow-tinted. With the exception of the howling wind, which reaches 30 to 40 MPH, and the intermittent thunder, it’s quiet. And smells very fresh, clean. A supermarket is open, and a convenience store. The linoleum tiles in both are slick with melted snow and slush. Everybody in line at the convenience store seems to be a snowplow operator holding a large coffee.
As always in these emergency-like circumstances — sirens periodically go off in the distance — some unprepared fools in compact cars too small and light blunder off the road or billow exhaust spinning their wheels on a hill. “What the hell is anybody doing out in this?” demands my daughter. “Where do they think they’re going?”
It’s scary amazing. Here in the mid-Atlantic states, crowded with office towers and strip malls, concrete and asphalt, we rarely see Mother Nature when she really gets it going. Volcanic eruptions, tornados, avalanches, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, monsoons, earthquakes — the power when she unloads is random, merciless and miraculous.
Back in my office I see my neighbor is shoveling his drive again. Taking a broom to his cars again. I watch him as through veils of white gauze. The snow falls almost horizontally. “Falling” is too benign a description. The snow is being driven into the ground. There’s nothing gentle about it. Thin, small trees crack apart under the snow’s weight. Large evergreens sag like the weight of the world is on their branches. I see my neighbor dusting off the bushes he trims so fastidiously every summer.
Around 4:30 in the afternoon the electricity quits on us. I’m thinking it could be out for days. We just don’t have storms like this; Philadelphia Electric Company, PECO, must be overwhelmed. The township snowplows can’t keep up as darkness sets in. My son and I walk our dog, a Husky who frolics in this stuff. Our neighborhood streets haven’t seen a plow in hours. Some of the drifts are shoulder high. Power lines sag so low you can touch them. Don’t do that, I warn my son. A few men are out manning snow blowers. When nature turns nasty like this, it makes us humans nicer. Strangers mumble “hello” to each other. Hold on, this guy fishtailing up the hill needs a push. A neighbor with a wood burning stove calls and invites us over if it gets too cold in our house. My neighbor across the street is digging out a space by the street for the recyclable bin that his wife is holding.
By eight or nine at night, in the blackness, my kids are bored out of their minds. I see my neighbor out shoveling his drive one last time. Even the laptop with wireless Internet connectivity has lost its Facebook allure after three or four hours. The kids blankly text friends on their cells. My daughter reads by flashlight. My son drags our two dogs in bed with him and calls it a day. My wife bunks down in my office, warmer than our freezer-like bedroom. I’m lying on the living room sofa, in a hoodie and long johns and thick thermal socks, a mummy with a large vanilla candle balanced on my stomach. I’m trying to read The New York Times. It’s hell turning the pages without the candle sliding off and starting a house fire. I look out our bay window and see daggers of icicles, up to two feet, hang from the gutter. I think I hear my neighbor across the street scraping ice from his sidewalk.
Around midnight I wake up to the lights and widescreen TV on, the stove clock beeping and the furnace whirring and chugging to life. Homes across the street show signs of life. It has stopped snowing. That shadowy figure is my neighbor salting his drive; he’s the first one out of the neighborhood every morning. The wind rattles branches high in the trees and roars around the corners of our house. Otherwise, the storm has exhausted itself. But is has definitely served notice, putting us in our place.
I spent the day writing blogs for my magazine with the blinds on all four of my home office windows raised so I could watch storm rage on…
My neighbor is shoveling his drive. He’s a somewhat vague, bundled and determined figure with the snow coming down thick and wind-whipped. Often when we get snow around here big flakes float lazily to the ground, like one of those small shake ‘em up snow globes. The air is usually wet and the accumulation civilized.
This is not one of those storms. The snowfall is dense and unrelenting. It began last night and will eventually end a little more than 24 hours later. There’s already about two feet of snow on the ground from a storm last weekend. I see that my neighbor is up on his roof, shoveling off snow. Back on the ground, he then shovels away what he dumped on his front stoop and sidewalk.
Early in the afternoon my kids and I venture out to see what, if anything, is moving — people, snowmobiles, snowplows. We hear strange, muffled explosions. It’s thunder and lightning above the dense cloud cover. Visibility is 100-200 yards. We walk into a driving wind with heads down, trudging as though defying gravity. “Now I know what it’s like to be a Muslim woman,” says my daughter. She’s covered with layers of sweatshirts and scarves, boots, gloves, a wrap-around hood and wool cap. Only her eyes are uncovered. She wishes she had ski goggles, preferably yellow-tinted. With the exception of the howling wind, which reaches 30 to 40 MPH, and the intermittent thunder, it’s quiet. And smells very fresh, clean. A supermarket is open, and a convenience store. The linoleum tiles in both are slick with melted snow and slush. Everybody in line at the convenience store seems to be a snowplow operator holding a large coffee.
As always in these emergency-like circumstances — sirens periodically go off in the distance — some unprepared fools in compact cars too small and light blunder off the road or billow exhaust spinning their wheels on a hill. “What the hell is anybody doing out in this?” demands my daughter. “Where do they think they’re going?”
It’s scary amazing. Here in the mid-Atlantic states, crowded with office towers and strip malls, concrete and asphalt, we rarely see Mother Nature when she really gets it going. Volcanic eruptions, tornados, avalanches, hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, monsoons, earthquakes — the power when she unloads is random, merciless and miraculous.
Back in my office I see my neighbor is shoveling his drive again. Taking a broom to his cars again. I watch him as through veils of white gauze. The snow falls almost horizontally. “Falling” is too benign a description. The snow is being driven into the ground. There’s nothing gentle about it. Thin, small trees crack apart under the snow’s weight. Large evergreens sag like the weight of the world is on their branches. I see my neighbor dusting off the bushes he trims so fastidiously every summer.
Around 4:30 in the afternoon the electricity quits on us. I’m thinking it could be out for days. We just don’t have storms like this; Philadelphia Electric Company, PECO, must be overwhelmed. The township snowplows can’t keep up as darkness sets in. My son and I walk our dog, a Husky who frolics in this stuff. Our neighborhood streets haven’t seen a plow in hours. Some of the drifts are shoulder high. Power lines sag so low you can touch them. Don’t do that, I warn my son. A few men are out manning snow blowers. When nature turns nasty like this, it makes us humans nicer. Strangers mumble “hello” to each other. Hold on, this guy fishtailing up the hill needs a push. A neighbor with a wood burning stove calls and invites us over if it gets too cold in our house. My neighbor across the street is digging out a space by the street for the recyclable bin that his wife is holding.
By eight or nine at night, in the blackness, my kids are bored out of their minds. I see my neighbor out shoveling his drive one last time. Even the laptop with wireless Internet connectivity has lost its Facebook allure after three or four hours. The kids blankly text friends on their cells. My daughter reads by flashlight. My son drags our two dogs in bed with him and calls it a day. My wife bunks down in my office, warmer than our freezer-like bedroom. I’m lying on the living room sofa, in a hoodie and long johns and thick thermal socks, a mummy with a large vanilla candle balanced on my stomach. I’m trying to read The New York Times. It’s hell turning the pages without the candle sliding off and starting a house fire. I look out our bay window and see daggers of icicles, up to two feet, hang from the gutter. I think I hear my neighbor across the street scraping ice from his sidewalk.
Around midnight I wake up to the lights and widescreen TV on, the stove clock beeping and the furnace whirring and chugging to life. Homes across the street show signs of life. It has stopped snowing. That shadowy figure is my neighbor salting his drive; he’s the first one out of the neighborhood every morning. The wind rattles branches high in the trees and roars around the corners of our house. Otherwise, the storm has exhausted itself. But is has definitely served notice, putting us in our place.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Dissing the gods
We’re actually all in the house at the same time. Kate, back in the nest after graduating from Delaware, works ‘til seven every night at a KinderCare. Steve, restless high school senior, frequently slips out to the Y, Barnes & Noble, over to a friend’s.
This night, for a few minutes anyway, not only are we all home, but in the same general vicinity. Kate’s watching “E! News,” kicked back in the recliner, doing her nails, the two dogs curled on the couch.
“So,” I ask, “what’s your recommendation for Steve? What college do you think he should go to?”
“Well, I just learned Drexel is $51,000 a year.”
“Next.”
The conversation draws Steve into the living room.
“Wait!” yells Suze. “What time is it? Turn on channel 12.”
“What?”
“Just turn on channel 12. It’s eight o’clock.”
Steve, after years of diligent practice handling the remote like an extension of his arm, flicks to channel 12.
There on the flat screen are John, Paul, George and Ringo, in soft-focus black and white, flickering as though transmitted from a distant planet. They’ve got their matching mop-tops, dark suits with white shirts and thin dark ties. “She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah,” they sing, with a smiling earnestness seeming to be aimed at earning Establishment Ed’s approval.
“It’s the Ed Sullivan show,” says Suze. “It’s the first time the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Who’s Ed?” asks Steve.
Steve and Kate start giggling, then laughing. Their parents are taken aback, especially Suze, who one time actually saw the Beatles live in concert. “What’s so funny?”
“They look so corny,” says Kate. “Yeah,” seconds Steve. “Did they really wear their hair like that?” asks Kate.
The kids are disrespecting the gods. Funny thing is, both of them like Beatles’ music off of CDs. But visually you better be styling nowadays: Calvin Klein, Urban Outfitters, The Gap, Banana Republic, New York Connection, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, American Apparel, American Eagle, the brands that Kate (“I am, therefore I shop”) can recite in her sleep. Steve was a late bloomer but is coming on strong — J. Crew, Ralph Lauren, Polo, Nike. Awkward Ed’s show of course never scored any style points. Steve and Kate might as well be watching the Marx Brothers as the Beatles. But the Marx Brothers would be equally baffling and prehistoric. “Who are the Marx Brothers? You mean Karl Marx? Were they a band?”
Anyway, Ed comes out, shakes hands with the Beatles, and the documentary moves to a clip of the Beatles’ archrivals, the Beach Boys, also singing on the Sullivan show. The five boys in the band, barely out of their teens, are scrubbed fresh and wear matching striped shirts and white pants. A couple of hot rods have been rolled on stage for props. They’re sing “I Get Around” by Ed’s rules, like the Beatles, standing in place, smiling and clean. Nothing to unnerve the adults.
“Oh… my… god!” sputters Kate. “They’re even cornier. They’re nerds.”
“What do you think, Steve? Steve?”
Black and white TV was never his world. He’s retreated to his bedroom and his X Box 360 and NCAA Football 2010, with animated players more realistic than 45-year-old clips of the Beatles.
Next up, from 1969, Tommy James and the Shondells singing “Crimson and Clover,” with the Sullivan show now in color, and the camera going psychedelic with tripped out mirror images and dizzying, flashing shots zooming in and out. Scenes from Woodstock follow and Kate groans.
“You gotta be on drugs, then this music would sound OK,” says Kate, staring in befuddlement. “You guys did a lot of drugs back then, right? I mean the hippies. If that’s what drugs make things looks like, I’d completely freak out.”
“Times change,” says Suze.
“I should say,” says Kate, inferring a total understatement. “Can I change the channel?”
This night, for a few minutes anyway, not only are we all home, but in the same general vicinity. Kate’s watching “E! News,” kicked back in the recliner, doing her nails, the two dogs curled on the couch.
“So,” I ask, “what’s your recommendation for Steve? What college do you think he should go to?”
“Well, I just learned Drexel is $51,000 a year.”
“Next.”
The conversation draws Steve into the living room.
“Wait!” yells Suze. “What time is it? Turn on channel 12.”
“What?”
“Just turn on channel 12. It’s eight o’clock.”
Steve, after years of diligent practice handling the remote like an extension of his arm, flicks to channel 12.
There on the flat screen are John, Paul, George and Ringo, in soft-focus black and white, flickering as though transmitted from a distant planet. They’ve got their matching mop-tops, dark suits with white shirts and thin dark ties. “She loves me, yeah, yeah, yeah,” they sing, with a smiling earnestness seeming to be aimed at earning Establishment Ed’s approval.
“It’s the Ed Sullivan show,” says Suze. “It’s the first time the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show. I remember it like it was yesterday.”
“Who’s Ed?” asks Steve.
Steve and Kate start giggling, then laughing. Their parents are taken aback, especially Suze, who one time actually saw the Beatles live in concert. “What’s so funny?”
“They look so corny,” says Kate. “Yeah,” seconds Steve. “Did they really wear their hair like that?” asks Kate.
The kids are disrespecting the gods. Funny thing is, both of them like Beatles’ music off of CDs. But visually you better be styling nowadays: Calvin Klein, Urban Outfitters, The Gap, Banana Republic, New York Connection, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, American Apparel, American Eagle, the brands that Kate (“I am, therefore I shop”) can recite in her sleep. Steve was a late bloomer but is coming on strong — J. Crew, Ralph Lauren, Polo, Nike. Awkward Ed’s show of course never scored any style points. Steve and Kate might as well be watching the Marx Brothers as the Beatles. But the Marx Brothers would be equally baffling and prehistoric. “Who are the Marx Brothers? You mean Karl Marx? Were they a band?”
Anyway, Ed comes out, shakes hands with the Beatles, and the documentary moves to a clip of the Beatles’ archrivals, the Beach Boys, also singing on the Sullivan show. The five boys in the band, barely out of their teens, are scrubbed fresh and wear matching striped shirts and white pants. A couple of hot rods have been rolled on stage for props. They’re sing “I Get Around” by Ed’s rules, like the Beatles, standing in place, smiling and clean. Nothing to unnerve the adults.
“Oh… my… god!” sputters Kate. “They’re even cornier. They’re nerds.”
“What do you think, Steve? Steve?”
Black and white TV was never his world. He’s retreated to his bedroom and his X Box 360 and NCAA Football 2010, with animated players more realistic than 45-year-old clips of the Beatles.
Next up, from 1969, Tommy James and the Shondells singing “Crimson and Clover,” with the Sullivan show now in color, and the camera going psychedelic with tripped out mirror images and dizzying, flashing shots zooming in and out. Scenes from Woodstock follow and Kate groans.
“You gotta be on drugs, then this music would sound OK,” says Kate, staring in befuddlement. “You guys did a lot of drugs back then, right? I mean the hippies. If that’s what drugs make things looks like, I’d completely freak out.”
“Times change,” says Suze.
“I should say,” says Kate, inferring a total understatement. “Can I change the channel?”
Monday, January 11, 2010
Only in Ojai
Very freakish, Philadelphia getting bombed with almost two feet of snow less than a week before Christmas. So the first order of business Sunday morning, before I could go anywhere, was grabbing a broom and sweeping snow off our three cars, defrosting the cars, and then shoveling out. Figuring to find mayhem at the airport, I left about four hours before my flight to LA.
Sure enough, flights were canceled all over the departures board. Stranded holiday travelers were sprawled out or slumped over, bleary-eyed zombies at most every gate. My flight got pushed back from 2 to 5 p.m. in a case of a missing pilot. Then his plane landed but could not reach a gate for all the snow plowed into small mountains. Next came the dreaded tarmac delay. We were on board, buckled in and going nowhere. The pilot, with a soothing British accent, explained only one runway was operating, alternating take-offs with landings. Finally we were airborne about 6 p.m. for the 6-hour flight cross country. The plane’s cabin of course was crammed to the max, not an empty seat. Across the entire nation a little dog yapped, yapped and yelped, trapped in a cage stowed in the overhead luggage rack.
The most disorienting and dangerous part of a trip I find is getting a start in an unfamiliar city after the dark, when you’re in a rental car you’ve never driven before, making seat adjustments, mirror adjustments, deciphering the dashboard, trying to follow typed directions handed over by an automaton behind the counter at Avis Rental. I’m leaving LAX, scanning for street and interstate signs, discovering the directions are flat-out ass backwards wrong, and dealing with a zooming flow of traffic to the right and left. I do believe the highest risk for some kind of rental car road collision is always within the first 10-15 minutes when you’re trying to figure out both the car and where the hell you’re heading.
That critical juncture for me came at Sunday night about 9:30 in LA. Of course the freeways are flooded with streams of red and white lights across 12 lanes like rush hour in most towns. I take I-405 to North 101 and try to center myself if you will listening to a CD of raw gut-bucket Clarksdale, Mississippi bottomland blues by Terry “Big T” Williams and Wesley “Junebug” Jefferson. This deep-down thumping blues, totally at odds with the fast LA tempo, is what I need.
An hour and half later around Ventura traffic has thinned way out and I make a right to head up Route 33, which narrows to a twisting two-lane mountain road. It’s nearing 2 a.m. east coast time and a world away from shoveling snow in the driveway this morning. The key to my hotel room is in an envelope taped to the office door at the Blue Iguana Inn. Described by a tourist magazine as “hip and stylish,” the inn is designed in a Mexican motif by a local architect and decorated by his wife, who owns the place. All that matters to me after a day shoveling snow, waiting out a 4-hour delay, then the 6-hour flight and that damn barking mutt, and the 2-hour drive up to Ojai is that a beautiful bed takes up almost my entire room, with giant fluffy pillows and a cushy, soft mattress to die for.
Come 7 in the morning the alarm is beep, beep, beeping away. I set it early to leave sufficient time to chug vast quantities of java, clear my head, and think about what it is that I want to see happen at my 9 a.m. meeting. Also need some extra time to find the meeting place.
It’s an overcast Monday morning driving along Ojai Avenue past a running/bike trail, the town’s Spanish-style arcade, a bell tower supposedly reminiscent of one in Havana, the pergola, which is a walkway beneath a series of connecting arches, a skateboard park, small parks and plazas, small art shops, craft stores, restaurants and bars. Everything in Ojai is on a small scale. The town, two hours north of LA, has only 8,000 residents, most living in tidy cottages and ranchers in leafy blocks off the main drag. There is a lengthy list of Hollywood celebs who’ve retreated here to slum in disguise and hide out — Tim Burton, Julie Christie, Johnny Depp, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anthony Hopkins, Diane Ladd, Malcolm McDowell, Bill Paxton, Ted Danson. Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter had a place up in the hills in nearby Casitas Springs, where every Christmas John would put speakers on his deck and blast the valley with Christmas tunes, until a neighbor finally got him to shut it down. That’s John, sentimental, romantic and a pain in the ass at the same time.
The CEO and the Board Chairman were chatting, waiting for me when I arrived pretty much on the button at 9. The ice was broken by my being completely over-dressed for the occasion; wearing jacket, tie and pullover sweater. The chairman was in sneaks, jeans and a corduroy shirt. The CEO, a Brit, wore business casual shirt and slacks. He had been in Oslo, Norway last Thursday, stopped over in London on Saturday, and was here in the plush and comfy chairman’s office Monday morning. The chairman, an older man, was yawning, complaining he still couldn’t shake off the jet lag after a three-week trip to Taiwan, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Management consultants like these two make their living on the road, flying off to clients, conferences, training seminars and speaking gigs around the globe.
Our meeting was scheduled for Christmas week for the simple fact it’s one of the few times during the year both of these globe-trotters can be found in the same room at the same time. They’ve scheduled me for two hours and we take it down to the last minute. The casual conversation and open-ended brain-storming is laid back. The one exception to this relaxed atmosphere is the statute of a large, threatening gargoyle that dominates the chairman’s broad, clean desk. “Where’d you get that?” “My wife gave it to me to ward off evil people.” “Does it work?” “Why yes, I believe it does.” Not interested in learning the details, I bring our talk back on track.
We decide on two projects I’ll go forward on, shake hands, and part ways with smiles all around and Merry Christmas send-offs. I lunch for two hours with the communications manager, who fills me in some more about the projects I’ll be working on and the culture of the organization.
By 2 pm I’m a free man, feeling good about making a decent impression after Sunday’s long day and night. I head to Ojai’s public library to use one of its free Internet-connected computers to check emails. My magazine, the editing of which is my occupation aside from independent contracting, is winding down production on the January 2010 issue and there are usually last minute glitches and changes and questions.
The temperature is in the high 50s, the sun finally breaks through, and I get an idea of how the valley, running east-west about ten miles long and three miles wide, traps light all day long, inspiring Ojai’s colony of artists. Nordhoff Ridge, towering over the north side of town at more than 5,000 feet, is now clearly visible and stunning.
Stuart Rupp runs a shop where he makes prints of his wife’s delicate Oriental brush art — depending on the strength and balance of line — coupled with calligraphy and Zen seals ‘Laugher,” “Unique,” “Cherish the Moment” and “No method.” He explains to me how Ojai’s mountains and looming trees humble locals, an odd diversity of Hollywood intelligentsia, redneck farm laborers, retired millionaire industrialists, and new-age spiritualists. The sun’s day-long radiance, the famous pink glowing sunset, the absence of shadows, the mountainous confines and stands of forests put residents in what Stuart describes as a state of “Quiet Excellence.”
My conversation with Stuart, a short, gregarious man with shaggy gray hair who’s got a rep in town as something of a maverick, runs past an hour. He recounts how his wife Nancy’s life was cut all too short at age 57 in 2001 when she was struck in the leg by a car on Ojai’s Main Street, not 50 yards away from the shop. She died when a blood clot broke free in her leg 11 days later. Stuart keeps her spirit alive in the small shop, crammed with prints of Nancy’s art: the Buddha’s 12 barnyard animals printed on cardboard packaging boxes, tee-shirts, sweat shirts, night shirts and “Sanity Bites” framed reprints of mixed Chinese calligraphy and brushpainting. Stuart, who retired as a physicist and oceanographer at 45 to let Nancy do her thing, and I carry on about transcendent physicist Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Obama, the New England Patriots, “global weirding,” health care reform, the computer software and hardware industries, junior chamber of commerce carpetbaggers, the country’s energy oligarchy, the demise of conversation, Johns Hopkins lacrosse, the 57 churches Stuart counted on his paper route as a boy growing up in Ojai, his father the doc who made house calls until he was 80, the orange groves to the north that benefit from the full day of sunlight to deliver product a month after the rest of the state’s groves are harvested. “Embrace life,” Stuart smiles at one point. “It’s all we have. We’re all in this together, after all.” I forget what we were talking about.
I run into a peppy young blonde woman with rosy cheeks sitting behind the counter at the Trowbridge Gallery who says people call her Sunshine because she’s always had a bubbling, giggling energy. She’s from the far northeast of Philadelphia and we talk about places in South Jersey. She looks like a native but has been out here just less than a year. It was time to “gain her footing,” she explains, vague about where her traction will lead. “You’ve got to learn California,” Sunshine says. “It takes a while. You know, it’s the west out here. People think different. More open. In the east people think more in boxes.” As I walk out the door she greets two friends and I hear her talk about “the good energy” to be found in something or somewhere. She’s right: back east you hear little about embracing the good energy.
Another dose of positive energy came my way at dinner Monday night at Azu Mediterranean Restaurant and Bar on East Ojai Avenue. Eric the bartender had set me up with a couple of generous shots of Woodford Reserve bourbon and a draught of something called Wildfire beer. I had retreated from the bar to a couch to talk on the cell to Kate, my daughter who was spending the night at her boyfriend’s in Delaware. No one had picked up when I called home, and son Steve and Kate hadn’t picked up cell calls to them. After 30 years of travel I still get nervous when no one answers the call at home.
“Everything OK?” a fellow asks me when I sign off with Kate. “Sorry, I talked too loud.” “No, not a problem, glad to share a couch with you,” he smiles. Ron is his name. He introduces a cute young blonde woman, Desiree, his best friend, he says. Desiree reminds me of other SoCal girls or women, attractive, fit, and seemingly somewhat bored and weary of it all. Turns out Desiree is 32, doesn’t look it, was born in Ojai, hates LA, there’s no culture there, loves New York but couldn’t live there, might end up in South Carolina, likes the pace, like country music.
Ron says all the money in the world couldn’t buy a friend like Desiree. Ron’s blind in his right eye, going blind in the other one. He’s 62, doesn’t look it, is tanned with his hair parted down the middle and a diamond in his left ear. Ron smiles constantly. He asks Desiree are they OK with time, can he have another 5 minutes? He was born in Manhattan and runs 4 massages parlors in Ventura he bought after getting sick off looking in his mirror each morning hating his work as an account manager for high-end men’s fashion accessories, belt buckles he mentions in particular. It was his father’s business he got into after 7 years working for CBS behind the camera in production, where he tired of kissing ass to get anywhere. “I was making $300,000 a year, now I’m making $35,000. I had a lot of money, I spent a lot of money. My life’s complicated like you wouldn’t want to know. But I can get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror.” As he leaves he shouts across to Eric the bartender, “We’ll be back. This is Desiree. We love this place.”
I’m back at the Blue Iguana by around 10. Read newspapers in bed to decompress and then wake up around 4 a.m., earlier than I wanted and before the alarm goes off. Grab some heavy duty Costa Rican java at a shop, Full of Beans and Fuel, and it’s off to LAX at 6 in the morning darkness to beat the dreaded LA rush hour. To bypass some of it, I take the Pacific Coast Highway outside of Oxnard and watch the sun rise over the Santa Monica Mountains at about 7:15. Make a point to drive to Zuma Beach and wade into the Pacific. A couple of men in sweatshirts walk large dogs. It’s cold and wind, and the sea is churning and roiling.
The security line at LAX three days before Christmas is out the door at 8 a.m. But it moves along. My flight gets delayed an hour — a case of a missing aircraft. Then we’re stuck on the tarmac again when the pilot announces we’ve either got a fuel leak in one of the wings or it’s goo leftover from a de-icing. “Keep your fingers crossed,” he says. He advises passengers who will miss connections to stay on board and hope for the best because there’s not an empty seat on any flight out of LA until Friday.
Holiday time is amateur hour for infrequent flyers. They bombard gate agents with anxious, edgy questions: Is the plane here? The pilot here? I’m going to miss my connection. When will we board? How long is this flight? A cell phone chorus makes the rounds: “We’re delayed, delayed, delayed.” Finally, when we get into Philadelphia at about 8:40 p.m., two hours late, one of the attendants grabs the PA: “Any passengers to Tel Aviv or Madrid, you’ve got to run to your gate. Please make way. The rest of you poor bastards who missed your connections, see the agent at the podium.”
I’m not moving, stuck in the last row by the window, seat 33A. The woman next to me sounds exasperated: “Dad, dad, I just landed. Dad, didn’t you check online to find my terminal. C’mon dad, you can do it.” From another row: “Brendan, did you find what you needed? Is that our bag? Where’s our other bag?” From behind me: “Hi, mom, we’re on the ground. Just getting off the plane. Huh? Huh? Can’t hear you. See you soon.” A small girl wanders off dragging a pink blanket, holding a purple stuffed dragon.
Walking through Terminal B, I see small tight clusters of lost travelers surround besieged gate agents, hands out waiting for hotel vouchers for an unwanted stay-over at the Marriott. Flights to Boston, Tampa, Charlotte, State College, are taking off at 10 and 11 tonight, unusually late for Philadelphia. Passengers, tired and blue, will roll into beds not as comfy as the Blue Iguana’s at 2 or 3 a.m. Adding to the irritation, the muzak in Terminal B’s is playing possibly the most ridiculous holiday songs, “ding-dong, ding-dong, Christmas bells are ringing.” Stressed-out travelers have already been dinged and donged. How about, “God rest ye merry flyers, let no delay dismay, air traffic is our saviour, our only ticket home, just save us all from winter’s power, when plans have gone astray, O tidings of comfort and joy, that’s what we seek, may departure boards bring comfort and joy, on-time flights, may departure boards bring comfort and joy.”
Sure enough, flights were canceled all over the departures board. Stranded holiday travelers were sprawled out or slumped over, bleary-eyed zombies at most every gate. My flight got pushed back from 2 to 5 p.m. in a case of a missing pilot. Then his plane landed but could not reach a gate for all the snow plowed into small mountains. Next came the dreaded tarmac delay. We were on board, buckled in and going nowhere. The pilot, with a soothing British accent, explained only one runway was operating, alternating take-offs with landings. Finally we were airborne about 6 p.m. for the 6-hour flight cross country. The plane’s cabin of course was crammed to the max, not an empty seat. Across the entire nation a little dog yapped, yapped and yelped, trapped in a cage stowed in the overhead luggage rack.
The most disorienting and dangerous part of a trip I find is getting a start in an unfamiliar city after the dark, when you’re in a rental car you’ve never driven before, making seat adjustments, mirror adjustments, deciphering the dashboard, trying to follow typed directions handed over by an automaton behind the counter at Avis Rental. I’m leaving LAX, scanning for street and interstate signs, discovering the directions are flat-out ass backwards wrong, and dealing with a zooming flow of traffic to the right and left. I do believe the highest risk for some kind of rental car road collision is always within the first 10-15 minutes when you’re trying to figure out both the car and where the hell you’re heading.
That critical juncture for me came at Sunday night about 9:30 in LA. Of course the freeways are flooded with streams of red and white lights across 12 lanes like rush hour in most towns. I take I-405 to North 101 and try to center myself if you will listening to a CD of raw gut-bucket Clarksdale, Mississippi bottomland blues by Terry “Big T” Williams and Wesley “Junebug” Jefferson. This deep-down thumping blues, totally at odds with the fast LA tempo, is what I need.
An hour and half later around Ventura traffic has thinned way out and I make a right to head up Route 33, which narrows to a twisting two-lane mountain road. It’s nearing 2 a.m. east coast time and a world away from shoveling snow in the driveway this morning. The key to my hotel room is in an envelope taped to the office door at the Blue Iguana Inn. Described by a tourist magazine as “hip and stylish,” the inn is designed in a Mexican motif by a local architect and decorated by his wife, who owns the place. All that matters to me after a day shoveling snow, waiting out a 4-hour delay, then the 6-hour flight and that damn barking mutt, and the 2-hour drive up to Ojai is that a beautiful bed takes up almost my entire room, with giant fluffy pillows and a cushy, soft mattress to die for.
Come 7 in the morning the alarm is beep, beep, beeping away. I set it early to leave sufficient time to chug vast quantities of java, clear my head, and think about what it is that I want to see happen at my 9 a.m. meeting. Also need some extra time to find the meeting place.
It’s an overcast Monday morning driving along Ojai Avenue past a running/bike trail, the town’s Spanish-style arcade, a bell tower supposedly reminiscent of one in Havana, the pergola, which is a walkway beneath a series of connecting arches, a skateboard park, small parks and plazas, small art shops, craft stores, restaurants and bars. Everything in Ojai is on a small scale. The town, two hours north of LA, has only 8,000 residents, most living in tidy cottages and ranchers in leafy blocks off the main drag. There is a lengthy list of Hollywood celebs who’ve retreated here to slum in disguise and hide out — Tim Burton, Julie Christie, Johnny Depp, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anthony Hopkins, Diane Ladd, Malcolm McDowell, Bill Paxton, Ted Danson. Johnny Cash and his wife June Carter had a place up in the hills in nearby Casitas Springs, where every Christmas John would put speakers on his deck and blast the valley with Christmas tunes, until a neighbor finally got him to shut it down. That’s John, sentimental, romantic and a pain in the ass at the same time.
The CEO and the Board Chairman were chatting, waiting for me when I arrived pretty much on the button at 9. The ice was broken by my being completely over-dressed for the occasion; wearing jacket, tie and pullover sweater. The chairman was in sneaks, jeans and a corduroy shirt. The CEO, a Brit, wore business casual shirt and slacks. He had been in Oslo, Norway last Thursday, stopped over in London on Saturday, and was here in the plush and comfy chairman’s office Monday morning. The chairman, an older man, was yawning, complaining he still couldn’t shake off the jet lag after a three-week trip to Taiwan, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Management consultants like these two make their living on the road, flying off to clients, conferences, training seminars and speaking gigs around the globe.
Our meeting was scheduled for Christmas week for the simple fact it’s one of the few times during the year both of these globe-trotters can be found in the same room at the same time. They’ve scheduled me for two hours and we take it down to the last minute. The casual conversation and open-ended brain-storming is laid back. The one exception to this relaxed atmosphere is the statute of a large, threatening gargoyle that dominates the chairman’s broad, clean desk. “Where’d you get that?” “My wife gave it to me to ward off evil people.” “Does it work?” “Why yes, I believe it does.” Not interested in learning the details, I bring our talk back on track.
We decide on two projects I’ll go forward on, shake hands, and part ways with smiles all around and Merry Christmas send-offs. I lunch for two hours with the communications manager, who fills me in some more about the projects I’ll be working on and the culture of the organization.
By 2 pm I’m a free man, feeling good about making a decent impression after Sunday’s long day and night. I head to Ojai’s public library to use one of its free Internet-connected computers to check emails. My magazine, the editing of which is my occupation aside from independent contracting, is winding down production on the January 2010 issue and there are usually last minute glitches and changes and questions.
The temperature is in the high 50s, the sun finally breaks through, and I get an idea of how the valley, running east-west about ten miles long and three miles wide, traps light all day long, inspiring Ojai’s colony of artists. Nordhoff Ridge, towering over the north side of town at more than 5,000 feet, is now clearly visible and stunning.
Stuart Rupp runs a shop where he makes prints of his wife’s delicate Oriental brush art — depending on the strength and balance of line — coupled with calligraphy and Zen seals ‘Laugher,” “Unique,” “Cherish the Moment” and “No method.” He explains to me how Ojai’s mountains and looming trees humble locals, an odd diversity of Hollywood intelligentsia, redneck farm laborers, retired millionaire industrialists, and new-age spiritualists. The sun’s day-long radiance, the famous pink glowing sunset, the absence of shadows, the mountainous confines and stands of forests put residents in what Stuart describes as a state of “Quiet Excellence.”
My conversation with Stuart, a short, gregarious man with shaggy gray hair who’s got a rep in town as something of a maverick, runs past an hour. He recounts how his wife Nancy’s life was cut all too short at age 57 in 2001 when she was struck in the leg by a car on Ojai’s Main Street, not 50 yards away from the shop. She died when a blood clot broke free in her leg 11 days later. Stuart keeps her spirit alive in the small shop, crammed with prints of Nancy’s art: the Buddha’s 12 barnyard animals printed on cardboard packaging boxes, tee-shirts, sweat shirts, night shirts and “Sanity Bites” framed reprints of mixed Chinese calligraphy and brushpainting. Stuart, who retired as a physicist and oceanographer at 45 to let Nancy do her thing, and I carry on about transcendent physicist Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Obama, the New England Patriots, “global weirding,” health care reform, the computer software and hardware industries, junior chamber of commerce carpetbaggers, the country’s energy oligarchy, the demise of conversation, Johns Hopkins lacrosse, the 57 churches Stuart counted on his paper route as a boy growing up in Ojai, his father the doc who made house calls until he was 80, the orange groves to the north that benefit from the full day of sunlight to deliver product a month after the rest of the state’s groves are harvested. “Embrace life,” Stuart smiles at one point. “It’s all we have. We’re all in this together, after all.” I forget what we were talking about.
I run into a peppy young blonde woman with rosy cheeks sitting behind the counter at the Trowbridge Gallery who says people call her Sunshine because she’s always had a bubbling, giggling energy. She’s from the far northeast of Philadelphia and we talk about places in South Jersey. She looks like a native but has been out here just less than a year. It was time to “gain her footing,” she explains, vague about where her traction will lead. “You’ve got to learn California,” Sunshine says. “It takes a while. You know, it’s the west out here. People think different. More open. In the east people think more in boxes.” As I walk out the door she greets two friends and I hear her talk about “the good energy” to be found in something or somewhere. She’s right: back east you hear little about embracing the good energy.
Another dose of positive energy came my way at dinner Monday night at Azu Mediterranean Restaurant and Bar on East Ojai Avenue. Eric the bartender had set me up with a couple of generous shots of Woodford Reserve bourbon and a draught of something called Wildfire beer. I had retreated from the bar to a couch to talk on the cell to Kate, my daughter who was spending the night at her boyfriend’s in Delaware. No one had picked up when I called home, and son Steve and Kate hadn’t picked up cell calls to them. After 30 years of travel I still get nervous when no one answers the call at home.
“Everything OK?” a fellow asks me when I sign off with Kate. “Sorry, I talked too loud.” “No, not a problem, glad to share a couch with you,” he smiles. Ron is his name. He introduces a cute young blonde woman, Desiree, his best friend, he says. Desiree reminds me of other SoCal girls or women, attractive, fit, and seemingly somewhat bored and weary of it all. Turns out Desiree is 32, doesn’t look it, was born in Ojai, hates LA, there’s no culture there, loves New York but couldn’t live there, might end up in South Carolina, likes the pace, like country music.
Ron says all the money in the world couldn’t buy a friend like Desiree. Ron’s blind in his right eye, going blind in the other one. He’s 62, doesn’t look it, is tanned with his hair parted down the middle and a diamond in his left ear. Ron smiles constantly. He asks Desiree are they OK with time, can he have another 5 minutes? He was born in Manhattan and runs 4 massages parlors in Ventura he bought after getting sick off looking in his mirror each morning hating his work as an account manager for high-end men’s fashion accessories, belt buckles he mentions in particular. It was his father’s business he got into after 7 years working for CBS behind the camera in production, where he tired of kissing ass to get anywhere. “I was making $300,000 a year, now I’m making $35,000. I had a lot of money, I spent a lot of money. My life’s complicated like you wouldn’t want to know. But I can get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror.” As he leaves he shouts across to Eric the bartender, “We’ll be back. This is Desiree. We love this place.”
I’m back at the Blue Iguana by around 10. Read newspapers in bed to decompress and then wake up around 4 a.m., earlier than I wanted and before the alarm goes off. Grab some heavy duty Costa Rican java at a shop, Full of Beans and Fuel, and it’s off to LAX at 6 in the morning darkness to beat the dreaded LA rush hour. To bypass some of it, I take the Pacific Coast Highway outside of Oxnard and watch the sun rise over the Santa Monica Mountains at about 7:15. Make a point to drive to Zuma Beach and wade into the Pacific. A couple of men in sweatshirts walk large dogs. It’s cold and wind, and the sea is churning and roiling.
The security line at LAX three days before Christmas is out the door at 8 a.m. But it moves along. My flight gets delayed an hour — a case of a missing aircraft. Then we’re stuck on the tarmac again when the pilot announces we’ve either got a fuel leak in one of the wings or it’s goo leftover from a de-icing. “Keep your fingers crossed,” he says. He advises passengers who will miss connections to stay on board and hope for the best because there’s not an empty seat on any flight out of LA until Friday.
Holiday time is amateur hour for infrequent flyers. They bombard gate agents with anxious, edgy questions: Is the plane here? The pilot here? I’m going to miss my connection. When will we board? How long is this flight? A cell phone chorus makes the rounds: “We’re delayed, delayed, delayed.” Finally, when we get into Philadelphia at about 8:40 p.m., two hours late, one of the attendants grabs the PA: “Any passengers to Tel Aviv or Madrid, you’ve got to run to your gate. Please make way. The rest of you poor bastards who missed your connections, see the agent at the podium.”
I’m not moving, stuck in the last row by the window, seat 33A. The woman next to me sounds exasperated: “Dad, dad, I just landed. Dad, didn’t you check online to find my terminal. C’mon dad, you can do it.” From another row: “Brendan, did you find what you needed? Is that our bag? Where’s our other bag?” From behind me: “Hi, mom, we’re on the ground. Just getting off the plane. Huh? Huh? Can’t hear you. See you soon.” A small girl wanders off dragging a pink blanket, holding a purple stuffed dragon.
Walking through Terminal B, I see small tight clusters of lost travelers surround besieged gate agents, hands out waiting for hotel vouchers for an unwanted stay-over at the Marriott. Flights to Boston, Tampa, Charlotte, State College, are taking off at 10 and 11 tonight, unusually late for Philadelphia. Passengers, tired and blue, will roll into beds not as comfy as the Blue Iguana’s at 2 or 3 a.m. Adding to the irritation, the muzak in Terminal B’s is playing possibly the most ridiculous holiday songs, “ding-dong, ding-dong, Christmas bells are ringing.” Stressed-out travelers have already been dinged and donged. How about, “God rest ye merry flyers, let no delay dismay, air traffic is our saviour, our only ticket home, just save us all from winter’s power, when plans have gone astray, O tidings of comfort and joy, that’s what we seek, may departure boards bring comfort and joy, on-time flights, may departure boards bring comfort and joy.”
Dusseldorf divas and Bonnie’s delta dudes
I imagine rounding up the noontime patrons at Bonnie’s Café for a group photo on the front porch. It’d be a challenge to break up the half-dozen or so conversations buzzing inside Bonnie’s. To pull these boys, 12 to 15 I reckon, away from their heaping hot supper plates of chicken and gravy and dumplings. Fact is, I seriously doubt some of these boys are ready to take directions from a Yankee photographer. “Squeeze in on the left over there, just a little bit more, little more. Now everybody say, ‘gravy’.”
It’d be hard to fit all the fellows in one frame. Bonnie’s regulars are big boys. Broad shoulders. Large hands. Mostly heavyset dudes. They clomp into Bonnie’s looking like they’ve wrestled in mud trenches all morning. Before they grab a seat they head straight back to the kitchen to wash up over the sinks. It’s a gray raw November day out and the boys wear layers of clothing, plaid shirts, overalls, Carhartt outer jackets, work boots or knee high rubber boots. Every one of them wears some kind of ball cap, skull cap or wool knit cap. They pull up chairs that scrape across Bonnie’s plain wooden floor and huddle around square pedestal tables by two’s and four’s; a long table by the front window seats a half dozen. They’re all chowing down.
There is nothing fancy in the least about Bonnie’s Café. Function trumps form. Work crews don’t lounge about, they’re fed and out in 25 minutes. The cafe butts up against an abandoned general store with a sagging red rusted roof and has two plump and torn old sofas on its porch. Train tracks run in front of Bonnie’s, on the other side of a gravel-strewn street where the boys park hulking, mud-splattered Ford and Chevy, red and black, pickups. You won’t find a minivan, an SUV, or any foreign made car parked anywhere near Bonnie’s. Not down in these parts. A white water tower standing on three steel legs and rising above bare trees has “Watson” spelled out in black letters. Watson sits on Arkansas Route 1 about 8 miles west of the Mississippi River, a little more than 100 miles southwest of Memphis.
The town is but a speck on the map, taking up 0.2 square miles and home to 288 residents, according to the 2000 census. Bonnie’s is where the action is at lunch hour during the week. The waitresses work fast and talk like they know every customer, which they do. Everyone gets a large round jar, no handles, of iced tea. Some of the boys bullshit, joke and laugh, talk about the weather or the morning’s work, or equipment problems or what they’ll be doing this afternoon. Others sit and shovel down the chicken and dumplings. Three teenage Mexicans sit by themselves wearing hoodies. One fellow sits down, he’s lost every one of his fingers and his two thumbs jut out from club-like hands. A young boy hardly out of his teens if he is at all drags his limp right leg from table to table, shooting barbs, and taking some himself. A couple of large men wear big bushy beards, other have sideburns from another century. All have weathered, creased and lined dirty faces. Definitely lived in. “Those fried taters are good with catsup, let me tell you.” “What d’ya have coveralls on for, it ain’t winter yet?”
A couple of Bonnie’s boys yell goodbye to the women working the grills and the other fellows, and shove open the creaking screen door. A few minutes later they’re sitting in the cabs of huge green and yellow combines, metallic monsters as wide as the street that roar past Bonnie’s and slowly lumber up and over the train tracks.
Watson, Arkansas is 4,644 miles from Dusseldorf, Germany. After a day making sales calls in Memphis, I passed through Watson on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, spiritual home of American blues music, by way of Marvell, Arkansas (population 1,395 and birthplace of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer), heading down to Vicksburg, Mississippi across miles and miles of bottom land cotton fields. Exactly two weeks earlier, Wednesday, November 4, I was sitting in Frank Gehry’s restaurant and bar downing a couple of shots of Noah’s Mill bourbon in what’s called Dusseldorf’s Media Harbour, by the Rhine River.
Absolutely the one and only common thread connecting Dusseldorf with Watson, Arkansas half a world away is beer. In Dusseldorf it is Altbier, an “old beer” amber lager poured into tall thin glasses with three-inch foam heads. And the waiters keep pouring, refilling, until you say, “no mas.” Down in the delta the beer flows easy, too. Liquor stores, shacks or huts still stand in the smallest, poorest of towns. A Miller Lite “Welcome Hunters” orange banner hangs on fence next to the F&L Liquor Store outside Watson. At Monsour’s at the Biscuit Company in Vicksburg I downed dark bottles of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan and Lazy Magnolia Indian Summer Spiced Ale, brewed in Kiln, Mississippi. That happens to be where future NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre played quarterback for his dad, Irvin, who coached Kiln’s Hancock High.
In all other ways of life, culture and values, Watson and Dusseldorf trace extremely different orbits. Watson is rusted-out, dirt farmer poor. Dusseldorf, as Ibrahim, my Senegalese cabbie pointed out driving me in from the airport, is the most expensive city in Germany, the country’s center for advertising and fashion. Ibrahim confided in me his vision. After somehow enduring 28 years in Dusseldorf, where people of color are invisible, Ibrahim was finally plotting his return to Senegal, to build a home from scratch and bake all day. “If you are black, you get nowhere in Dusseldorf. No jobs, no opportunities, nothing,” he said.
In the delta you get stories, lots of stories. Just ask a question or two. I spent two hours jawing with a businessman named John at the bar in Vicksburg after the sun went down. According to John, who’s the only man in the bar wearing a jacket and tie — “It’s been a long day; I’m kinda tired — three times he sat down with old Irvin Favre for beers. “He was tough on the outside but a softie, really.”
Neil the bartender served up shots of Old Charter and kept the chatter going about Southeast Conference football, predictions, opinions and his supposedly inside information. Mark in a tie-dyed tee shirt and flowing locks walked past offering chocolate pecans. “Pass ‘em around. They don’t get getter than this. You OK, bud? Keepin’ the chill out?”
These conversations with John, Neil and Mark ran longer and deeper, far longer and deeper, than any conversation I had in Dusseldorf in the four days I was there, save for a dinner with the trade fair sponsor who paid my way over to write up the show. And that was the kind of shallow business lite talk you could have in your sleep. Dusseldorf is all business, no small talk. Germans I’m convinced don’t do small talk. Especially with foreigners. Especially in Dusseldorf, ranked by the Mercer 2009 Quality of Living survey of cities as possessing the sixth highest quality of living in the world and first in Germany. In Dusseldorf it’s about making money and spending money. Office lights are on until 7 or 8 at night at banking institutions, publishing houses, telecommunications giants, insurers, ad agencies and internet companies.
As I sat at world renown architect Frank Gehry’s stylishly hip, amber-lit woodsy bar rest assured no one came up and asked if I was OK or passed around chocolate pecans. The after-work crowd started filtering in around 8 and all went straight to dinner tables. No raucous laughs and ribbing like you got with Bonnie’s boys; no barstool philosophizing like at the biscuit company in Vicksburg — “It’s laid back here. It’s beautiful on these bluffs overlooking the river. People here, like the owner over there, they put up with me; they’ve shoveled me out of here more than once, I can tell you,” said John.
Image is paramount, image is everywhere in an ad agency and media capital like Dusseldorf. Nature is buried beneath late 20th century architecture, save for several parks. History is difficult to find, too. The RAF firebombed the city repeatedly in 1942, destroying 80 percent of it. More than 700 British bombers would crowd the night skies over Dusseldorf, igniting hundreds of fires, killing thousands, and making 140,000 homeless. “A pity,” said a middle-aged well-to-do investor, shaking his head, as I walked through the faux old town cobblestone streets taking photos. One was of a bright, shining red metallic front door of an office the man had rehabbed and was now looking to lease. He had rushed out to greet me like I was a potential leaser, scouting locations with my camera. It’s all about business in Dusseldorf.
And it’s about the fruits of a workaholic life. Black and silver BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, and Opels are tightly parked on “Queen Street,” the KÖ shopping district. Not a single minivan, SUV or pickup will you find. No U.S. or Japanese cars. And strangely, there is little sign of family life. No college stickers on rear windows. No “Proud parent of an all-star honor student” bumper stickers. “All this, too expensive, very expensive, for you and me,” smiled Ibrahim on the way to my hotel in the cab. Women in tight black skirts, with black stockings or black stretch leggings, maneuver atop black leather boots with spiked heels, balancing shopping bags from Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Boss, Sacha, Espirit, Tiffany and Company, Goex, Feel Good, Elena, Franzen, Kult, Villa Happ, Bvlgari, Louis Vitton. Men wear black, black ties, black scarves, black overcoats, and particularly hip black-framed thick, rectangular glasses that make them look like professors or scientists.
“Dusseldorf denizens thumb their noses at the rest of Germany,” I recall Ibrahim warning me. “But the German character is strong. No dancing about. You get straight talk. Yes is yes and no is no. That’s OK. But Germans, they are not warm and open like the Dutch. The time is come. I must live my vision. Make my home in Senegal.”
Down in the delta, folks of course are too damn poor to thumb their noses at anyone. Red Roof Inns don’t have portraits of Audrey Hepburn and Jackie O, like were hanging in the lobby at my Dusseldorf Hotel Carat. Red Roof rooms are twice the size of my spartan Carat closet, too. It is the world of dirt farmers, combine drivers, ditch diggers, machinists, blue collars versus Dusseldorf’s world architects, psychiatrists, fashion designers, lawyers, accountants, consultants and gallery owners.
At Gehry’s on the Rhine no one asked if I was OK to get home. John at the bar in Vicksburg leaned over at one point and strongly suggested in friendly manner, “You don’t wanna drive back up to Clarksdale tonight. That’s three hours. You don’t wanna do that. Tell you what, you go down the street to Harrah’s and get yourself a room for $31. Then come back and stay with us for a few more pops. Then you can just walk back to your room.”
I walked along the Rhine back to my hotel from Gehry’s. It was chilly and spitting rain. Couples walked arm in arm in wool caps, scarves, driver’s gloves, berets, those studious rectangular glasses, carrying umbrellas. Some jogged in running suits. Cars suddenly pulled out of side alleys, crossed walkways, wheeled and circled like in a Bourne movie. Silent cyclists occasionally zoomed up on you out of the dark, without warning, no bells or horns or “hallo,” seemingly intent on seeing how close they could come to clipping you.
A few times in Dusseldorf I chanced upon old white-haired Germans, stout, stone-faced husbands and wives, standing shoulder to shoulder, bundled up, like squat statutes waiting for a bus or the tram. I wonder if a wailing Little Walter harmonica solo would make them flinch, or wince.
It’d be hard to fit all the fellows in one frame. Bonnie’s regulars are big boys. Broad shoulders. Large hands. Mostly heavyset dudes. They clomp into Bonnie’s looking like they’ve wrestled in mud trenches all morning. Before they grab a seat they head straight back to the kitchen to wash up over the sinks. It’s a gray raw November day out and the boys wear layers of clothing, plaid shirts, overalls, Carhartt outer jackets, work boots or knee high rubber boots. Every one of them wears some kind of ball cap, skull cap or wool knit cap. They pull up chairs that scrape across Bonnie’s plain wooden floor and huddle around square pedestal tables by two’s and four’s; a long table by the front window seats a half dozen. They’re all chowing down.
There is nothing fancy in the least about Bonnie’s Café. Function trumps form. Work crews don’t lounge about, they’re fed and out in 25 minutes. The cafe butts up against an abandoned general store with a sagging red rusted roof and has two plump and torn old sofas on its porch. Train tracks run in front of Bonnie’s, on the other side of a gravel-strewn street where the boys park hulking, mud-splattered Ford and Chevy, red and black, pickups. You won’t find a minivan, an SUV, or any foreign made car parked anywhere near Bonnie’s. Not down in these parts. A white water tower standing on three steel legs and rising above bare trees has “Watson” spelled out in black letters. Watson sits on Arkansas Route 1 about 8 miles west of the Mississippi River, a little more than 100 miles southwest of Memphis.
The town is but a speck on the map, taking up 0.2 square miles and home to 288 residents, according to the 2000 census. Bonnie’s is where the action is at lunch hour during the week. The waitresses work fast and talk like they know every customer, which they do. Everyone gets a large round jar, no handles, of iced tea. Some of the boys bullshit, joke and laugh, talk about the weather or the morning’s work, or equipment problems or what they’ll be doing this afternoon. Others sit and shovel down the chicken and dumplings. Three teenage Mexicans sit by themselves wearing hoodies. One fellow sits down, he’s lost every one of his fingers and his two thumbs jut out from club-like hands. A young boy hardly out of his teens if he is at all drags his limp right leg from table to table, shooting barbs, and taking some himself. A couple of large men wear big bushy beards, other have sideburns from another century. All have weathered, creased and lined dirty faces. Definitely lived in. “Those fried taters are good with catsup, let me tell you.” “What d’ya have coveralls on for, it ain’t winter yet?”
A couple of Bonnie’s boys yell goodbye to the women working the grills and the other fellows, and shove open the creaking screen door. A few minutes later they’re sitting in the cabs of huge green and yellow combines, metallic monsters as wide as the street that roar past Bonnie’s and slowly lumber up and over the train tracks.
Watson, Arkansas is 4,644 miles from Dusseldorf, Germany. After a day making sales calls in Memphis, I passed through Watson on Wednesday, November 18, 2009 out of Clarksdale, Mississippi, spiritual home of American blues music, by way of Marvell, Arkansas (population 1,395 and birthplace of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer), heading down to Vicksburg, Mississippi across miles and miles of bottom land cotton fields. Exactly two weeks earlier, Wednesday, November 4, I was sitting in Frank Gehry’s restaurant and bar downing a couple of shots of Noah’s Mill bourbon in what’s called Dusseldorf’s Media Harbour, by the Rhine River.
Absolutely the one and only common thread connecting Dusseldorf with Watson, Arkansas half a world away is beer. In Dusseldorf it is Altbier, an “old beer” amber lager poured into tall thin glasses with three-inch foam heads. And the waiters keep pouring, refilling, until you say, “no mas.” Down in the delta the beer flows easy, too. Liquor stores, shacks or huts still stand in the smallest, poorest of towns. A Miller Lite “Welcome Hunters” orange banner hangs on fence next to the F&L Liquor Store outside Watson. At Monsour’s at the Biscuit Company in Vicksburg I downed dark bottles of Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan and Lazy Magnolia Indian Summer Spiced Ale, brewed in Kiln, Mississippi. That happens to be where future NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre played quarterback for his dad, Irvin, who coached Kiln’s Hancock High.
In all other ways of life, culture and values, Watson and Dusseldorf trace extremely different orbits. Watson is rusted-out, dirt farmer poor. Dusseldorf, as Ibrahim, my Senegalese cabbie pointed out driving me in from the airport, is the most expensive city in Germany, the country’s center for advertising and fashion. Ibrahim confided in me his vision. After somehow enduring 28 years in Dusseldorf, where people of color are invisible, Ibrahim was finally plotting his return to Senegal, to build a home from scratch and bake all day. “If you are black, you get nowhere in Dusseldorf. No jobs, no opportunities, nothing,” he said.
In the delta you get stories, lots of stories. Just ask a question or two. I spent two hours jawing with a businessman named John at the bar in Vicksburg after the sun went down. According to John, who’s the only man in the bar wearing a jacket and tie — “It’s been a long day; I’m kinda tired — three times he sat down with old Irvin Favre for beers. “He was tough on the outside but a softie, really.”
Neil the bartender served up shots of Old Charter and kept the chatter going about Southeast Conference football, predictions, opinions and his supposedly inside information. Mark in a tie-dyed tee shirt and flowing locks walked past offering chocolate pecans. “Pass ‘em around. They don’t get getter than this. You OK, bud? Keepin’ the chill out?”
These conversations with John, Neil and Mark ran longer and deeper, far longer and deeper, than any conversation I had in Dusseldorf in the four days I was there, save for a dinner with the trade fair sponsor who paid my way over to write up the show. And that was the kind of shallow business lite talk you could have in your sleep. Dusseldorf is all business, no small talk. Germans I’m convinced don’t do small talk. Especially with foreigners. Especially in Dusseldorf, ranked by the Mercer 2009 Quality of Living survey of cities as possessing the sixth highest quality of living in the world and first in Germany. In Dusseldorf it’s about making money and spending money. Office lights are on until 7 or 8 at night at banking institutions, publishing houses, telecommunications giants, insurers, ad agencies and internet companies.
As I sat at world renown architect Frank Gehry’s stylishly hip, amber-lit woodsy bar rest assured no one came up and asked if I was OK or passed around chocolate pecans. The after-work crowd started filtering in around 8 and all went straight to dinner tables. No raucous laughs and ribbing like you got with Bonnie’s boys; no barstool philosophizing like at the biscuit company in Vicksburg — “It’s laid back here. It’s beautiful on these bluffs overlooking the river. People here, like the owner over there, they put up with me; they’ve shoveled me out of here more than once, I can tell you,” said John.
Image is paramount, image is everywhere in an ad agency and media capital like Dusseldorf. Nature is buried beneath late 20th century architecture, save for several parks. History is difficult to find, too. The RAF firebombed the city repeatedly in 1942, destroying 80 percent of it. More than 700 British bombers would crowd the night skies over Dusseldorf, igniting hundreds of fires, killing thousands, and making 140,000 homeless. “A pity,” said a middle-aged well-to-do investor, shaking his head, as I walked through the faux old town cobblestone streets taking photos. One was of a bright, shining red metallic front door of an office the man had rehabbed and was now looking to lease. He had rushed out to greet me like I was a potential leaser, scouting locations with my camera. It’s all about business in Dusseldorf.
And it’s about the fruits of a workaholic life. Black and silver BMWs, Mercedes, Audis, and Opels are tightly parked on “Queen Street,” the KÖ shopping district. Not a single minivan, SUV or pickup will you find. No U.S. or Japanese cars. And strangely, there is little sign of family life. No college stickers on rear windows. No “Proud parent of an all-star honor student” bumper stickers. “All this, too expensive, very expensive, for you and me,” smiled Ibrahim on the way to my hotel in the cab. Women in tight black skirts, with black stockings or black stretch leggings, maneuver atop black leather boots with spiked heels, balancing shopping bags from Gucci, Chanel, Prada, Boss, Sacha, Espirit, Tiffany and Company, Goex, Feel Good, Elena, Franzen, Kult, Villa Happ, Bvlgari, Louis Vitton. Men wear black, black ties, black scarves, black overcoats, and particularly hip black-framed thick, rectangular glasses that make them look like professors or scientists.
“Dusseldorf denizens thumb their noses at the rest of Germany,” I recall Ibrahim warning me. “But the German character is strong. No dancing about. You get straight talk. Yes is yes and no is no. That’s OK. But Germans, they are not warm and open like the Dutch. The time is come. I must live my vision. Make my home in Senegal.”
Down in the delta, folks of course are too damn poor to thumb their noses at anyone. Red Roof Inns don’t have portraits of Audrey Hepburn and Jackie O, like were hanging in the lobby at my Dusseldorf Hotel Carat. Red Roof rooms are twice the size of my spartan Carat closet, too. It is the world of dirt farmers, combine drivers, ditch diggers, machinists, blue collars versus Dusseldorf’s world architects, psychiatrists, fashion designers, lawyers, accountants, consultants and gallery owners.
At Gehry’s on the Rhine no one asked if I was OK to get home. John at the bar in Vicksburg leaned over at one point and strongly suggested in friendly manner, “You don’t wanna drive back up to Clarksdale tonight. That’s three hours. You don’t wanna do that. Tell you what, you go down the street to Harrah’s and get yourself a room for $31. Then come back and stay with us for a few more pops. Then you can just walk back to your room.”
I walked along the Rhine back to my hotel from Gehry’s. It was chilly and spitting rain. Couples walked arm in arm in wool caps, scarves, driver’s gloves, berets, those studious rectangular glasses, carrying umbrellas. Some jogged in running suits. Cars suddenly pulled out of side alleys, crossed walkways, wheeled and circled like in a Bourne movie. Silent cyclists occasionally zoomed up on you out of the dark, without warning, no bells or horns or “hallo,” seemingly intent on seeing how close they could come to clipping you.
A few times in Dusseldorf I chanced upon old white-haired Germans, stout, stone-faced husbands and wives, standing shoulder to shoulder, bundled up, like squat statutes waiting for a bus or the tram. I wonder if a wailing Little Walter harmonica solo would make them flinch, or wince.
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