Sorry, Mitt, corporations are not people

Last August while trolling for votes at the Iowa State Farm, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney created a media stir when, egged on by an irate protestor, said, “Corporations are people, my friend.” After someone yelled, “No they’re not,” Romney went on: “Of course they are. Everything corporations ultimately earn goes to people. Where do you think it goes?”

Let’s put aside the issue of which “people” benefit most from corporate earnings, and the Grand Canyon-size gap between what executives are paid versus the average worker.

It’s been said forever that safety is all about people. Many if not most safety and health pros are drawn to their positions because of their feelings for people; their innate desire not see people hurt or killed on the job.

This often makes the safety and health pro something of a misfit in corporations. Because most employees in the corporation, most senior leaders, don’t share this level of caring and concern. Especially when it involves sizeable investments. So often the safety and health person becomes “the conscience of the corporation.”

If a corporation was a person, it would have its own conscience. It would have, either in its DNA or through parenting and schooling, some sense of right and wrong. But corporations are not biological, obviously. Some CEOs do have a conscience for safety, for sustainability, for a sense of corporate responsibility. But CEOs are agents for the corporation. Agents with agendas, emotions, perspectives, values, ambitions. These very human characteristics steer the corporation.

As such, sustainability and social responsibility often become “directional” tactics, not values. Marketing and communications departments get involved to make the corporation more appealing, more reputable and responsible to customers, stock analysts, investors, regulators, their own employees.

There is nothing wrong with tactics of self-interest if they benefit the safety and health of the employees, the environment, and the communities in which corporations operate. Let’s have more of it.

But don’t mistake that self-interest as coming from a living, breathing corporation. As the late economist Milton Friedman said, “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. In a 1970 article in “The New York Times Magazine,” Friedman said, “Only people can have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but ‘business’ as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities…”

No calls, no texting behind the wheel? I’ll go out of business!

Wait a minute.

You’re telling me, no calls, no texting, no email behind the wheel! No hands-free headset even? Then what was the point of those things?

I’m going to go out of business. Who is dictating my demise?

The National Transportation Safety Board? On December 13?

There goes Washington. Again. Issuing regs that shut down businesses. Damn.

What that’s? This is only a recommendation? The NTSB wants all 50 states to ban the use of any type of personal electronic device while driving, a nationwide ban, is that right?

Those DC bureaucrats are chained to their cubicles, you know, so they can’t wander around in the real world. I swear. They are so cut off from reality. They don’t get it. In the 21st century your car is your office, or one of your offices.

Listen, I’m on the road selling every week. I’m in the car every day, for hours and hours. Now if NTSB gets its way I won’t be able to call or text or email my office, my customers, my boss all those hours I’m in a car. Talk about lost productivity, there goes my productivity, out the damn car window.

Hell, no call, no text, no email… I will not know what’s going on in the world, or at least in my business world. No emails? I’m lost. Doomed. You cannot live without email.

What’s that? More than 3,000 people lost their lives in distraction-related accidents last year, eh? In one case a pickup driver who caused two school buses to crash had sent and received 11 text messages in the 11 minutes before the crash, is that so?

Well, still, this is classic, world-class regulatory overkill. Those bureaucrats in DC, what do they know? They all commute to work on the Metro. Let’s see them hump the interstates like I do all week selling for a living and do without any calling or texting or emailing. How do I confirm appointments? Schedule calls? Check my messages? Change flights? Talk to my team? Say goodnight to my kids? I am supposed to drive 4-5-6 hours a day and just stare out the window, talking to myself. I’ll go nuts. Driving for hours thinking about the business I’m losing. Dammit, this is even interfering with my parenting. I always call my kids before they go to bed.

There goes Washington, sticking its nose in places it shouldn’t be sniffing.

What’s that you say? Research shows about half of American drivers between 21 and 24 say they have thumbed messages or emailed from the driver's seat. Yeah, that’s easy to believe. Texting is mostly a kid thing, teenagers. Mostly a social thing. Washington doesn’t get it.

What’s that? At any given moment last year nearly one in every 100 drivers was texting, emailing, surfing the Web or otherwise using a hand-held electronic device, and that number is up by 50 percent from the year before? Listen, I’ll be honest with you, I squirm a little when I’m a passenger in a car and the driver is texting or on the phone. I do feel unsafe.

In fact, I can’t stand being in the car with one of my kids driving and texting, so I won’t allow it. Yeah, I ban it. But that’s family. I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do to make a living. Which means call, text and email from the road.

See, I trust my own driving abilities. I’m not worried at all about myself behind the wheel. Hell, I just about live behind the wheel.

This calls for drastic resistance. I’m going to organize a protest. What the hell, everyone is protesting about something these days. A bunch of my sales buddies will drive to Washington. Remember when truckers did this years ago to make their point? We’ll have hundreds, maybe thousands of sales reps in car rentals, all silver, cruising up and down and around the Mall. Can you picture it?

Then, this is the kicker. We’ll show the regulators distracted driving. Guys will be driving and eating Subway subs, with lettuce and mayo falling all over ‘em. Guys will be driving and reading maps. “Damn those tiny highway numbers, says the Baby Boomer with bad eyes. Guys will be leaning in, squinting at a GPS, reading the sports page, turned around to the back seat trying to find a CD. They be driving and blasting CDs, Ozzy Osbourne, yeah, Metallica, heavy metal, distracting as hell. We’ll put two reps in the same car and have them shout and scream at each other in a fight. Reps have been arguing in cars for 100 years.

One time I was making calls with another rep on election day. We got into a huge fight about who should be president. The rep driving got so caught up, so upset in not being able to “sell me” his candidate, at one piont he stopped the car with a jerk and said, “You’ve got me so steamed I’m completely lost. Do you know where we are?”

Nothing electronic about that at all.

So what are the feds going to do? Ban eating in cars? Ban CD playing? Limit the number of passengers? No infants, they’re damn distracting, that wouldn’t be a bad rule. No political or religious debates. I can live with that. No fiddling with the radio? Ban back-seat driving? That’s one good thing that could come out of this travesty.

Look, I understand the danger of distracted driving to kids. And this kind of electronic ban should apply to anyone under 21. Like drinking.

But working adults. You can’t throw us back to the 1950s. Just wait til you see thousands of silver rentals clogging up the Mall and scaring everyone with perfectly legal distracted driving. Then what will the feds say?

The persistent mental health stigma

One by one they disappeared into the dark house. All curtains and blinds were drawn. The house looked like a bulky shadow in the night. They were careful to time their arrivals. No clustering or crowds that would attract attention. Every few minutes another figure would knock and enter silently. Many wore hoodies, scarves and hats so their faces were concealed. They seemed nervous, edgy, walking to the house, looking around as though someone might be following them.

Inside, down in the basement, a circle of folding chairs was set up around a small table with white candles lit on it. Kind of like a church meeting.

The candlelight revealed the visitors to be adults of all ages. All appeared to be on their way home from work. There were a few secretaries. A car mechanic. Couple of warehouse guys. Then there were men in suits, executive looking. And women in smart pants suits. There was even a cop and a fireman. A teacher. Maybe two. And a nurse and a physician.

“OK,” said the hostess, a pleasant looking woman in her 50s. She looked like she had just come from work. “Everyone feel safe? No one followed you, right? That’s why we change the meeting address every week. Hard to find a moving target, you know.”

Everyone took their seats, settling into their chairs. Some had water bottles. Others brought coffee.

“Did everyone have a chance this week to read the material?” asked the hostess. Turns out hosts and hostesses rotate with every new meeting place.

Heads nodded.

“So… let’s hear it. What do you think of this report, ‘Sick on the job? Myths and Realities about Mental Health at Work’?”

There is uncomfortable silence. No one seems to want to break the ice. Numerous faces stare at the tile floor.

“Well,” one man finally spoke up. “This Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, that wrote the report, is based in Paris. I don’t take comfort in that. The Europeans have always been far ahead of the U.S. when it comes to facing up to mental health issues. I don’t think this report, important as it is, will have any impact whatsoever on U.S. businesses.”

“There is a lot of truth in the report,” said a woman. “One in five workers suffer from a mental illness, such as depression or anxiety, and many are struggling to cope. We can all relate. It is a struggle.”

“And it’s definitely true,” said a young man, “most people with mental health disorders do work. It’s not like we’re trying to be lazy.”

“When I’m anxious or depressed, sure, my productivity goes down,” said the mechanic. “I try to hide it best I can.”

“Sometimes I can’t get out of bed in the morning,” said one of the men in suits and ties. “I hate it, but I call in sick. That report is right, workers with mental health disorders are of course more likely to have more absences.”

“It just so tough to file a disability claim for anxiety or depression or burn out,” said one of the secretaries. “I tried it once years ago and got rejected. Even with my physician’s notes on my medical history. Insurance claimed that since I was not 100% incapacitated by my illness, that I could get up and get around and still do my job, I was not truly disabled.”

“The best I could do was get a month’s unpaid leave from my boss,” said a woman. “When I came back, he said, ‘Now I just want you to promise me this will never happen again.’ What could I say? He had me. As you all know, one of the real frustrations with depression and anxiety is it is unpredictable. You don’t know how you’re going to feel next week, or tomorrow. Some days I have energy, some days I’m really struggling. But I told my boss, “Yeah, this won’t happen again.” And I’m thinking to myself: It won’t happen on this job again because if it does, I’m out of here. They won’t put up with me.”

“That’s why I do everything I can to cover up my depression,” said one of the warehouse guys. “Once they find you out, they never look at you the same way. You are on permanent probation. They don’t trust you, no matter how many excellent performance reviews you’ve had. The stigma, I think it’s worse than being an alcoholic, a gambler, an adulterer. Those things are more out in the open. Hell, look at ‘Mad Men.’ All of that was OK in the office. Boys will be boys.

“But have a panic attack and have to hide in a bathroom stall, well, big boys don’t cry, you know,” said another man. When that has happened to me I wish I was a woman with a make-up kit.”

The tight circle of work-weary men and women laughed or smiled.

“I’ve used my company’s EAP,” said a woman. “They put me in touch with some good people. It helped. But you know, I do wonder about privacy. There just doesn’t seem to be privacy anywhere anymore. IT from HQ 600 miles away can get crawl all around my computer and emails. So I wonder. If I do use the EAP 800 number, you mean no one but no one in my company knows anything about it? I’m not sure about that firewall.”

“Well, it’s good to talk like this,” said the host. “At least here we can be ourselves, be out in the open. See and hear how others deal with working with mental health issues.

“You mean our stealth tactics,” said a young man.

“Our evasion tactics,” said another.

“You got to protect your livelihood,” said the cop. That report from France says people with a mental disorder are two to three times as likely to be unemployed as people with no disorders. I believe it, and I can’t afford to lose my job, not in this economy. So I go underground.”

“Or stay in the closet,” grinned another man.

“That’s why the report says almost 50% of those with a severe mental disorder and over 70% of those with a moderate mental disorder do not receive any treatment for their illness. It’s too much of a risk. You never know how people will react. Badly, mostly.”

“Well, our situation will never get better unless it’s discussed out in the open much, much more than it is today,” said a woman. “Most common mental disorders can get better, we all know that, and employment chances can be improved with the right treatment. But health systems just focus on treating people with severe disorders, like schizophrenia, who make up only one-fourth of sufferers. Employers need to know there are all different levels and degrees of mental health disorders. We’re not all bound for the asylum.”

The group got a chuckle out of that.

Borderline madness or myth?

An Arizona Trilogy

Foreword

Bill Moyers: Can you say, for example, that John Wayne has become a myth?
William Campbell: When a person becomes a model for other people’s lives, he has moved into the sphere of being mythologized.

The west, Arizona for certain, is one of the states richest in romantic mythology. There is the land: Arizona sunsets. Arizona highways. The iconic Grand Canyon and Monument Valley, which straddles Utah. High desert country. Sedona’s red rocks.

There are heroes and villains. Wyatt Earp. Doc Holiday, Kit Carson. Cochise, Geronimo, Pancho Villa. And the actors of Arizona westerns (we’ll put aside the palefaces who played Indians): The Duke, Burt Lancaster, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine. The Old Tucson movie lot provided the films, the context for myth-making, from about 1939 with the film “Arizona” (appropriately enough) until about 1997. By then filmmakers had fanned out across western states in search of better tax breaks.

I came to Arizona in late February for a way-too-short guerilla road trip tacked on to a business meeting. I came with a baby boomer’s memories of TV series like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Big Valley, The High Chaparral. And films: Gunfight at the OK Corral, 3:10 to Yuma, Last Train from Gun Hill. Part of the attraction for me was, and still is, the John Wayne/Shane character model: havingr room to roam, freedom, independence, a natural savvy, no need to explain yourself. I also find a clarity out west, like seeing things in high contrast, that is lost in the polluted east. Perceptions improve. And there is an energy in the West, maybe it comes from having that room to roam free, or the fierce sun, that seems to be manufactured by ambition, the rat race, in say, Manhattan or DC.

I came to Arizona for a quick look-see at what has happened out here since the TV westerns died out after the 1950s and 60s, after Wayne and larger than life western actors died off. After the vast open pit mines closed. And since the invasion of illegal “wets” (a myth itself since the desert is dry ten months out of the year) and the empires of Mexican mafia clans began making billions of dollars. I would put about 750 miles on the odometer to see where and how the Old West meets the New West. How the legends hold up, and if they still have meaning.

Borderline madness or myth?

Why walk or drive across the Mexican border these days? My 88-year-old mother warned me, “God, I’ll be glad when you get back.” My wife warned me, my daughter warned me, friends and coworkers. Jeez, be careful down there. I was curious to see — as much as is possible in a three-day blitzkrieg tour tacked on to a business trip — whether the reality is borderline madness or modern media myth-making.

In Arizona the talk is about rugged individualism. Saddle up. Wagons ho! The Old West. The Far West. The Wild West. Stage coaches and bat-wing saloon doors. Tumble weeds and Deadwood Dick. Wyatt Earp and Pancho Villa. Cochise and Geronimo. Tombstone and Boot Hill. Mining empires and ranching empires.

Old romance versus current reality: More than 35,000 people have been killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched his crackdown against drug syndicates — the Gulf Cartel, Los Zetas, La Familia, et al — in December, 2006. About 17,500 Border Patrol agents scour the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. In the few days I was on the border local newspapers carried stories about a seizure of 8,700 rounds of ammunition; Arizona investigators seized $420,000 and confiscated about 100 pounds of marijuana and six pounds of methamphetamine. Minor losses for the bosses that make everyday news.

Border Patrol white and green SUVs and pickups are everywhere, like taxis in Manhattan. They’re kept busy. One afternoon the BP was called to a ranch after skeletal remains were found. A few miles east of Tombstone a body clothed in a hoodie and jeans was found off Middlemarch Road. Up in Tucson a Mexican drug trafficker was found beheaded in an apartment building. West of Douglas, Arizona a border helicopter’s searchlights spot 128 illegals lost in the desert one night. A Cochise County rancher was found last year murdered by a suspected illegal immigrant.

Is the border a no-man’s land, or a no-go-for-tourists’ land of kidnappings, beheadings and public shootouts? I did my Google research before flying west. Yes, it is easy to find various State Department warnings. The central thesis from all I could gather is to blend in as much as possible. So I went out and bought an “original Senor Lopez” black and green-striped hoodie. (“We call those ‘drug rugs,’ dad,” said my son. Perfect.)

Internet instructions included: “Avoid overt displays of wealth.” Don’t flash jewelry. Carry only the cash you need. Watch yourself at ATMs. Stay with the crowds on streets. Watch your back everywhere, day or night. “Visitors should be aware of their surroundings at all times.” “Always keep car doors locked and windows up while driving.” Avoid driving or walking alone at night.

“After reading all of this you may not want to go across the border,” states one blog post. Well, hello.

But I had a plan. From my base in the border town of Douglas, I’ll cross over into Mexico early, very early on a Sunday morning. Hopefully the drug lords and their minions will be sleeping off Saturday night. From Agua Prieta on the Mexican side I will hop on Sonora State Highway 2, which looks like a well-traveled route on the map and is hopefully empty on a Sunday morning. I’ll take it slow. Many highways in Mexico have steep shoulders to avoid flash floods and many more Americans die in highway rollovers than are caught by stray bullets. I’ll follow the advice from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene where Chef and Captain Willard are jumped in the jungle by a tiger. Chef comes screaming back, “I’m never getting off the fucking boat. Never get off the fucking boat.” Rolling down Highway 2 for Cananea — “horse meat” in Apache — about 80 miles south and home to the largest open pit mine in Mexico, I’ll never get out of the car.

The car proves to be a problem, a mistake. My plan was to “blend in” by renting a humdrum compact and dusting it up a bit going off road before crossing the border. But Cliff, my friendly Budget Rent A Car clerk at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, announced I was his last customer of the day and gave me a free upgrade — a silver convertible Ford Mustang. I was too zoned out from the five-hour flight from Philadelphia to think straight. A convertible Mustang is not what you want to cruise Mexico in. I’d either be mistaken for a gangster or be car-jacked by a gang.

I cross the border around 7 a.m., past parallel 12-foot-high steel fences that run the length of Douglas and Aqua Prieta. Aqua Prieta is a “popular shopping area for southern Arizona residents,” according to one web site. “Where South of the Border Intrigue abounds,” states a brochure. The “intrigue” I get, the popular shopping is difficult to swallow. It’s hard to believe this is a city of 68,000. I see only wild dogs roam dirt streets. What I see of the city is dead, and looks reservation poor. Easier to believe is the Spanish name for Aqua Prieta: “Dark Water.”

Border Patrol agents look me over: “Where are you going? What will you do there? How long are you staying? What’s your occupation, sir? Will you be bringing anything back? Where are you staying? Is this your car?” I blame all the questions on the silver convertible. On the Mexican side I’m directed into a parking slot and asked a few questions in Spanish, which I do not speak. I nod “yes” and they wave me along.

The Sunday morning drive is in fog-shrouded, 30-degree weather called “equipatas,” a mix of hail, rain and snow. The road is cracked, worn, and as barren as the surrounding Sonora desert. All brown and gray. The vibe does not feel dangerous. At Cananea I’m abruptly stuck behind 20 or 30 semi tractor trailers, all stopped. I snake out of the line only to be quickly stopped by a Mexican police officer. I want to get to Imuris, I tell him, another 40 miles south. He grins. “No speak English.” The next half hour I spend driving up and down Cananea streets, looking for an alternate route. But I can’t get around a vast open pit copper mine, the largest in the country. I break my rule and get out of the car at a local supermarket. Another rule of the road for me is this: there are two ways to really check out any local populace — walk the aisles of a supermarket and take public transportation somewhere. Actually, in Cananea I’m hunting for Cuban cigars and the only store open is the supermarket. A long shot for cigars, and I find none.

Why drive further south to Imuris? A bit further on is Magdalena de Kino, where I want to photograph the Temple of Santa Maria Magdelena. It’s also where I plan to turn around and drive north on State Highway 15 for 50 miles to the border city of Nogales. I circle around Cananea to make a last attempt to pass the line of trucks and slip through a loose barricade of barrels and cones. I still don’t understand the delay. It is an embarrassing disadvantage to travel a country and have no idea of the native tongue. I’m shouted down by several officers as I try to squeeze through the barriers. Fuck it. Nothing is worse on the road than retreating back the way you came.

So I head back on Highway 2, now with the sun breaking through solid low cloud cover. I find a turn off, hang a left, and head to cross back into the states at the small, very small village of Naco. At Naco two Border Patrol officers direct me to park the car for what they call a “routine inspection.” A line of vehicles backs up behind me because I can’t figure out how to flip open the damn trunk. I fumble around like a clueless touristo. This is not blending in. Finally one of the officers figures it out. They open the trunk. Open the hood. Open the doors. “Sit over there, sir, this won’t take long.” They bang the tires. Roll adjustable mirrors on extension rods under the front and rear. Pound door panels. Meanwhile I watch a steady flow of cars with Arizona plates cruise through. I blame the “routine inspection” on the silver Mustang convertible. And possibly my Senor Lopez “drug rug.”

From Naco I have a choice: backtrack to Douglas, where there is nothing worth doing, or take a looping, long route to Nogales from the Arizona side. In Douglas, a town of about 15,000, I’m staying at the historic Gadsden Hotel, the largest building in the city. Built in 1907, it has five floors, one of the few remaining manually operated elevators in the country, a 1929 manual telephone switchboard behind the front desk, a lobby with a sweeping Italian marble staircase, a tiffany-stained glass mural, and four soaring Italian marble columns. Shadowy, headless ghosts supposedly wander in the basement, in hotel corridors, playing tricks with lights and furniture. The hotel burned down in 1929, with no loss of life, and was rebuilt. One night I was reading in bed when the bed lamp went out. I figured the ghosts were telling me it was time to turn in.

The rooms are Spartan, the radiator I couldn’t figure out how to crank up, and the room carpet is laid like loose sod. Did you ever see the Coen Brothers’ film Barton Fink? The Gadsden reminds me of the rundown Hollywood hotel Barton stays in, trying in vain to write a movie script. Steve Buscemi, bulging eyes and nervous ticks, plays the creepy desk clerk. Wallpaper keeps peeling off in Barton’s room. In the finale, narrow hotel corridors like the Gadsden’s become tunnels of flames in Barton’s hellish nightmare exit from Hollywood.

I don’t want to go back to Douglas. Saturday night in the Gadsden’s Saddle Spur Saloon was enough. Another legend has it Lee Marvin, in town to film a western and likely bored to death, almost got into a brawl in the tavern. I was compelled to leave — not by the three old timers talking real estate, or the young barkeep who told me Chivas Regal was one of the bourbons he had, or the old guy and his young thing getting lovey-dovey in a circular booth — no, it was the music. A lanky middle-aged rancher-dude with white cowboy hat and a beer swilling older babe kept returning to the jukebox to play dismal Top 40 hits from the 1980s, the worst decade for music in my life. Journey. Heart. Foreigner. Michael Bolton and Christopher Cross. My god what a dark, depressing scene. Also, I wanted to get upstairs before a DJ plugged in in the lobby to kick off sweet 16 party that the desk clerk had warned me about.

Instead of a drawn out aimless Sunday afternoon in Douglas, I decide on taking the long arc to the west to get to Nogales. Nogales on the Mexican side is one of the more notorious border towns. In Nogales, Arizona, the assistant police chief swears by low crime stats that indicate his city is one of the safest in the whole country, according to the Nogales International newspaper. But residents often hear gunfire, smell gun powder, and they don’t feel safe visiting their sister side on the other side of the line, according to the article.

Across the entire 2,000-mile stretch of the U.S-Mexican border, Nogales is one of the busiest crossings, rivaling Laredo, El Paso and Hildago Texas, and San Ysidro, California. The freezing late February rain and snow flurries don’t help, but I find zero romance in the sprawling city of 189,759 people. This time I walk across the border. It’s part of my plan: Sunday afternoon should be the safest time of the week to stroll on your lonesome in a border town. Mexican families are out and about shopping, despite the wet, dreary weather. Nogales is too poor for a car culture. Long lines wait for buses, white and blue rickety old school buses, and jitneys. I see no lovers holding hands. No smiles. No laughs. It’s grim. You get hustled immediately. “Taxi, taxi, you want taxi?” To go exactly where? My Internet research says never hop in a cab unless it’s called from a restaurant or hotel. Too much kidnapping. Vendors in booths, stalls, and cramped shops shout like carnie barkers: “What do you want? What do you want? Pills. You want pills? Come on, boss, see my stuff. Come in. See my store. What you want?”

A Cuban cigar is all I want. Cuban imports are banned in the U.S. But Mexico has little problem with Castro and I figure I should be able to score a legendary Cuban smoke. Soon enough, not five minutes into Nogales, I find a Cuban cigar cart. Again, Internet research says to always barter with Mexican vendors. Don’t wimp out; they expect it. One guide states you should pay only half of any stated price. I settle for two cigars, one light, one moderate. Very likely I overpay. And I wonder, are they truly Cuban? Are they five years old? I don’t believe anything I’m told by loudmouthed, in-your-face hawkers. A salesman is a salesman, in Nogales, Mexico, Las Vegas or the French Quarter. The harder they sell, the less I believe.

The best way to experience a border town like Nogales is to find an insider or a guide. They take you beyond the blending in scheme to go behind the scenes. They know of charming alleyways, the few that they are, the best, hidden restaurants, the authentic craft shops. Travel writers often use these guides, maybe from the local tourism bureau or chamber of commerce, and wind up writing appropriately glowing accounts. I read a few on the ‘Net about Nogales, and they were notable for what they didn’t say. The hard stares from old, leathery men. The small cluster of guys I wouldn’t walk near in the dark. Pathetic poverty. Nogales sits in a north-south valley with steep hills. Hills crammed with box shanties painted bright orange, blue, yellow, green, red, purple. I want to walk up worn steps along side streets to get a closer look at some of the pillboxes but, no, this is not my neighborhood. A gringo walking these hills is like a tourist staring at the Amish, or Indians on the rez. Except the natives are more restless here.

According to an unofficial tally by Radio XENY in Nogales, Sonora, a surge of violence in 2009 brought the number of homicides to 136, up by six from 2008. One Saturday, near midtown, neighbors looked on as a 28-year-old was assassinated inside his older-model Buick Century, according to a newspaper account. Witnesses said the car was sprayed with at least 30 bullets. A popular taco stand in mid-town was sprayed with machine-gun fire. Three were killed and five others injured. One Monday three bodies were discovered on the streets of Nogales, all victims of strangulation. Two men were found executed at a department store on the south side of the city. Two other men were killed and another injured the same day in the parking lot at a grocery story. The next day, a “convoy” of gunmen arrived at a drive-through store, doused the inside with gasoline and torched the building, according to news reports.
I pull my Senor Lopez hoodie over my head as far as I can so you can’t see my face easily, pull my hands inside the long sleeves, and put on a serious game face. I’m a 55-year-old suburban family man and my get-up would have my wife and my kids and my boss rolling their eyes. Suburbanites don’t blend well into the Philadelphia street scene, let alone a Mexican border town. I leave my camera in the car and walk with the straight-ahead stare, a hard-ass look I see worn by many of the men in town. It’s cold and wet. I keep walking. I watch out for cars that are not watching for me. Many are old models packed with passengers. I read where a 23-year old Mexican male was stopped in Mesa, Arizona. He tested twice the limit for alcohol — and had seven kids in his car, three in the trunk. My walk aims for a Coca Cola billboard sign, then further to a large Burger King sign. I pass a dead dog on a sidewalk.

The further from the line you go, the deeper into town, the vendor hassling drops off to almost nothing. Only narrow, twisted alleys littered with trash, tires and puddles. Bars, some blasting beats, clubs, movie houses, porn shops, diners, nail salons, hair salons, plenty of pharmacies, grocery stores, department stores, banks. It reminds me of walking in Times Square in the 1970s, long before the cleanup.

I’m also thinking of another movie. The famous three-minute uninterrupted crane tracking shot that opens Orson Welles’ noir classic Touch of Evil. A doomed couple in a flashy convertible cruise at night down four blocks of a border town amid flashing neon signs, blaring Tex-Mex music, shouts and crowds. The car stops at a border checkpoint, proceeds out of frame, and then blows up.

It is the atmosphere conveyed in that scene that I see around me in Nogales on a gray Sunday afternoon in February. Crumbling steps, potholed streets, side alleys, rusting cars. Nogales certainly cannot be captured in four blocks. It is the largest port of entry in Arizona. Four million people a year crossed the border on foot at Nogales in 2010. Millions more by car and truck. Most of the traffic seems to be Mexicans heading El Norte, certainly not Americans going south. I think of thin, middle-aged wives wearing designer scarves and jangling jewelry while their husbands fiddle with golf bags at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. No, they’d never go slumming down here, trying to hide their tans.

Walking into Mexico is a breeze, just flash your passport and driver’s ID to the U.S. guard. Coming back across is more time-consuming. I wait in long line of pedestrians, mostly Mexicans, for 20 minutes before pushing through the turnstiles and again waving passport and ID at the stone-faced U.S. guard. Coming back into Mexico are huge, boxed flat screen TVs from Wal-Mart pushed on dollies, and cases of bottled water in shopping carts from Safeway. Six or seven lanes of vehicles, mostly worn, faded sedans, SUVs, pick-ups and semis, stretch back a half-mile into Mexico. Like the Holland Tunnel at rush hour, but even more gridlocked.

There is obvious madness on the border. The beheadings, slaughter, blood feuds and people mad to escape into the states. There is media and political myth-making, too, much to the chagrin of southern Arizona tourist promoters, law enforcement officers, and elected officials. More than 80 percent of the 15,600 drug-related killings that took place in Mexico in 2010 occurred in only four of the country’s 32 states, and Sonora, home to Aqua Prieta, Cananea and Nogales, is not one of them. Highway crashes kill many more Americans than bombs or bullets. Tucson’s police chief said in a newspaper article his town is victimized by home invasions and kidnappings related to the drug trade, but “most of those committing the rip-offs are American citizens.”

The border is not a line in the dirt, a steel fence or cement wall. It is, as a Customs and Border Protection commissioner said, “a third country that joins Mexico and the United States.” The 2,000-mile corridor is poverty-stricken, desperate and full of fear on the Mexico side, and on the U.S. side it is heavily guarded, largely barren, with the faded glory of the Old Tucson movie set (which hasn’t seen any filming since 1997). Most American tourists will fly over this third country on their way to a South of the Border resort compound, if they go at all. That makes sense. The tranquil clarity I love about the west becomes something edgy and murky on the border.


Close encounters of the cacti kind

From the parking area of Gates Pass, a hilly area aptly named the Tucson Mountains just east of Tucson, Arizona, dotted with thousands of saguaro cacti, a hike up to a ridgeline about a half-mile away looks like a gradual slope, certainly doable. This so-called minor range has peaks from 2,000 to 4,600 feet. The climb I scope out gets steeper near the top, but that’s to be expected. Only later, after I spent an hour scrambling, often hand over hand to reach to top, and another half-hour sliding mostly on my butt coming down, did I read in Backpacker magazine that “overconfidence” is one of 52 common mistakes hikers make. About 42 percent of rescue calls in Utah national parks are due to fatigue, darkness, and insufficient equipment. The bottom line: foolhardy planning.

Guilty as charged. I came to the pass on the last day of February with no plan, no map, no route, no water bottle, no watch, no compass. It was just a brilliantly blue sky Monday morning, cool, cloudless, with the famous Arizona sun creating a picture postcard. It was early, around nine a.m, and mine was the only car in the lot. I had Gates Pass to myself.

And if I had a plan, it was simply to hike up a slope on the north side of the pass, snapping pictures of the saguaro forest all the way to the rocky top. There was no path, I’d choose my own zig-zagging angle of ascent, which had appeal. Little did I know I was ignorantly committing a “crime of fashion,” according to Backpacker. “Ever notice how many stories about rescued hikers include the line, ‘The missing man was wearing jeans and tennis shoes.’?” Uh, that would be me. The tennis shoes, or sneakers as we call them back east, would be my worst clothing faux pas.

Hiking up the reddish-brown sandstone slope took about an hour. Technically, this was an easy, pedestrian walk in the sun. But my sneakers offered no protection against the saguaro needles. Let me explain: The saguaro is the cacti most often used as an emblem of the southwest in commercials, movies, TV shows and tourist propaganda. These plants are light green columns, large and tree-like, with long vertical rows of needles an inch or more in length. Some saguaro grow arms generally bent upward. Some have as many as 25 arms; others have none. Saguaros can grow, very slowly over decades, to heights of 40-60 feet.

I had no trouble walking my way around these stunning plants, sometimes ducking beneath their arms. To see thousands of them on rolling desert hills on a clear, cloudless morning is to experience the power and glory of nature. But if you are out of fashion in your hiking gear, most importantly footwear, you have obstacles, enemies, that you most often don’t even see. Saguaro are very slow growing cactus. A ten-year-old plant might be only 1.5 inches tall. Time and again I’d feel a sharp pain, look down at my feet, and these damnable pincushions, like prickly green golf balls, would be stuck to my sneakers, with needles piercing through to my skin. “Where the hell did they come from?” I’d curse. They also proved adept at affixing themselves to my jeans and hoodie sweatshirt.

Prying them off was no easy deal. I couldn’t simply grab them and yank them off. I swear what seemed like hundreds of needles in each small, round ball of light green had little hooks on the end and extracting them was like pulling teeth. And I couldn’t grab the prickly devils with my bare hands. I needed a strong twig or a rock to scrap them off.

Still, the hike up was enjoyable — a good test of overall fitness, plus agility, flexibility, balance, strength, endurance, and best of all, the mental concentration. The concentration comes into play trying to figure out your best line, your clearest, most stable path, up through the saguaro, giant sage shrubs, ironwood trees, gullies and chunks of rock. Which rock to grab. Where the footing looks most secure. Is that branch strong enough to pull you up? You also look and listen for any signs of rattlesnakes in particular, under rocks, also maybe gila monsters, horned lizards, squirrels and rabbits. It’s like chess: do I make this move to the right, the left, or straight ahead? You are, as psychologists call it, in the “flow.” In the moment. A painful moment when stung by one of those youthful saguaro, those damnable burr balls..

I lounged at the top of the ridge for 20 minutes or so. To the west I could see the Old Tucson movie set. Down below snaked the Gates Pass road. To the east, ten miles away, was the min skyline of downtown Tucson. Homes dotted the hills to the north, with the Saguaro National Park further north, and to the south the Sonora desert stretched into the blue-gray of Mexico, some 110 miles off.

My descent was more treacherous and unfortunately involved a series of dork moves on my part. Again, there was no beaten path to follow. I quickly learned my sneakers provided no traction on the loose gravel and shale. I should have read the Backpacker article before my trip. Mistake number 41: Stepping carelessly. “About 77 percent of the 306 injuries recorded in Yellowstone in 2003-04 were leg sprains, strains, abrasions and lacerations,” said the article. “Watch you step. Wear high boots and use poles to prevent stumbling.”

I had no boots, no poles, and a sore butt from falling backward. About halfway down I realized the best tactic was to descend side-step fashion, one foot crossing over the other. Better traction, but still it didn’t prevent the biggest tumble, when I completely lost my footing and fell against a saguaro. Must have taken ten minutes to pry the pincushions off my sneaks, jeans, hoodie, fingers and scalp. Some of the most stubborn needles are still embedded in me, I believe, as I write this

Coming down I also committed mistake number 20 — getting disoriented. I had no compass and did not leave marks on my hike up that I could follow coming back down. I lost sight of the Gates Pass parking lot, and as I got lower, the Gates Pass road itself. Giant saguaros could serve as landmarks, but hiking through thousands of them is like a maze of mirrors. For the most part, they all look the same, that iconic symbol of the west.

Finally I found my way to the road, about a half-mile east of where I had started my hike from the parking lot. It was close to noon. Gates Pass was now being challenged by a steady stream of seriously committed cyclists. You know, the ones with zero body fat. The pass has been considered an extremely dangerous road due to a switchback slope that occurs midway through the route, with 58 wrecks reported between 1996 and 2001.

All in all, I considered myself beaten but lucky. I did the hike by my lonesome. The weather was gorgeous. I had no broken bones, twisted ankles, sprained knees or elbows. No snake bites. No bobcat or mountain lion encounters. No fateful blunder. But honestly, I was a foolhardy tenderfoot, a 55-year-old suburban baby boomer imposing another age-defying test on myself. Would I do it again? Not without a lot more foresight. Once pricked, twice shy.


Cochise gets the last laugh

It’s right there on the map of Arizona, in tiny red type that strains my 55-year-old eyes: Cochise’s Stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains, about 140 miles southeast of Tucson. It is the remoteness of the spot that draws me more than Indian lore. You see, I get excited by little dotted lines on a map. That indicates trails, not highways. The only way to Cochise’s Stronghold, either from the west or the east of the Dragoons, are primitive bounce-along trails.

There is a problem, though, I have the wrong vehicle to go off road. At Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport I was upgraded to a silver Mustang convertible, “a great deal,” I was informed. Has a kick-ass sound system, I’ll give it that. But it is so low-slung in design that it has but four inches of clearance beneath its underbelly and the road. Utterly wrong for the rutted, rock-strewn off-road desert rambles I planned.

I flew to Arizona from back east, Philadelphia, to see if I could find what hard facts might lie behind or beyond the myths of The Old West. Cochise County seemed as good place to look. It is the home of Tombstone, the “town too tough to die,” Boot Hill, the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Mexican border towns, and ghost towns like Gleeson and Pearce. Cochise’s Stronghold, just a tiny red square on the map, was ground zero for my exploring the Sonora desert country.

At the Tombstone Chamber of Commerce building I asked how to reach Cochise’s place. I pointed to a dirt trail, Middlemarch Road. “Will this get me there?” A rangy old-timer behind the counter looked at me strange, as in “Why in the hell do you want to do that?” “Well, yeah, I guess that’ll work,” he said. I was not reassured.

He’s the native here. But it was an optimistically bright late February Saturday afternoon. I lowered the convertible roof and took off down dusty Middlemarch Road. A yellow warning sign said: “PRIMITIVE ROAD. Caution. Use at your own risk. Surface is not regularly maintained.”

Just the welcome I was waiting for. The joke was the 35 M.P.H. sign beneath the lettering. Not in this Mustang. I crawled along at about 10 M.P.H., not wanting to owe Budget more than the price of my whole vacation. Every driver of a pick-up or SUV I passed heading the other direction would casually wave as we passed. Made me feel part of some dusted-up fraternity, a less of a jackass for being out here in a got-it-all-wrong Mustang convertible. I passed not a single sedan off-road. A Border Patrol pick-up, white with a large green slash running down both front doors, crept up behind me and followed for some time. Probably thinking I was either drunk or lost.

The Mustang bounced east along Middlemarch Road for ten miles, which took almost an hour to drive. The Mustang’s low clearance made the ten miles seem like one long cattle crossing rumble strip. Then Middlemarch Road came to a fork. I could continue on straight, or turn left onto a narrower trail with a sign indicating mountain views. There wasn’t a house, animal or human in sight. Just low trees, desert scrub, winter grass and the Dragoon range ahead. I was getting closer. The sun was still high. I figure on taking the mountain view. I had no GPS, but out here I don’t know if a satellite would find me.

It took some time for it to dawn on me that I had made the wrong turn. Sure, this trail was much more rocky than Middlemarch Road, which seemed like an interstate in comparison. And it wasn’t much wider than my Mustang. The few jeeps or SUVs coming the other way forced me up on the road’s shoulder.

But I was having fun figuring what imaginary lines to follow to miss chunks of junk rock, skirt gullies, ride the edge of old ruts; in other words how to avoid getting stuck. Up, down and around dry gulch beds the Mustang banged and clanged. I wasn’t driving, I was creeping under 5 M.P.H. Up a jagged incline and down a twisted hill. I was in the middle of the Sonora Desert and often couldn’t see 20 feet in front of me, what with the trail carved low, the bramble brush, boulders and tall grass. Got out and took a photo of the Mustang; all you could see was the windshield in what looked like a trough. Cochise’s Stronghold… I didn’t have a clue.

Cochise is a truly legendary figure, if you go by the formal definition of “legend”: someone forever talked about but never once photographed; someone actually seen by few people. A Chiricahua Apache, a solid warrior standing about six feet tall and 175 pounds with long black hair, his name “Cheis” meant “having the quality or strength of oak.” That would come in handy out here. His father was murdered by Mexican forces, and his brother and nephew were killed in battles. Cochise seemed to me a guerilla fighter or a frontier terrorist, a freedom fighter, supposedly unequaled with a lance. Something of a Native American Renaissance Man, a naturalist, spiritualist, philosopher and warrior.

“When I was young I walked all over this country, east and west, and saw no other people than the Apaches,” he once said. “After many summers I walked again and found another race of people had come to take it. How is it? Why is it Apaches wait to die – that they carry their lives on their fingernails? I am alone in the world. I want to live in these mountains. I have drunk the waters of the Dragoon Mountains and they have cooled me: I do not want to leave here. Why shut me up on a reservation? Let us go around free as Americans do. Let us go wherever we please.”

Sounds fair enough to me. Cochise lived to be about 70, and was secretly buried in the hostile, unforgiving terrain at north end of the Dragoon range, which I was attempting to navigate in a convertible sports car. I imagined Cochise up in the sky getting a good laugh out me. This little ant of a tourist from frilly Philadelphia inching his way between the broad boulders of the big man’s rock fortress.

I don’t know how they ever got Cochise out of there. The so-called stronghold is a jumble of 50- to 100-foot high slabs of dull red and gray granite, bunched together in slanted columns. In February the tall grass is yellow and the iron wood trees, well, leafless and looking like they’re made of iron.

Cochise used the stronghold as his cover and base from which he attacked white settlements in the 1860s and early 1870s. Arms, even artillery, could not dislodge him, but a treaty did, negotiated between a U.S. Army general and Cochise, then in his 60s. Maybe he had just run out of gas. Or room. He retired to where the present-day stronghold is and died in 1874 of natural causes.

I wasn’t close to running out of gas, but daylight was another matter. Clouds were rolling in and the light was beginning to dull. I was at the walls of the stronghold, but I’d have to hike to get in, and I didn’t have the time. Damn. I didn’t have a clue where this winding trail was leading. I kept imaging a nice two-lane asphalt state highway always around the next bend. Didn’t happen.

After bounding along for about an hour, I finally came upon humans. Young eco campers sitting around in the late afternoon, parked beneath a copse of trees. They turned and stared at the Mustang like it was a spaceship. “Excuse me fellows, but where the hell am I?” One camper in a wooly cap with flaps down over his ears said: “Go 500 yards and that’s the end of the trail, turn around there. Take this road back 12 miles and you’ll come to Middlemarch Road, much wider. Take Middlemarch to Route 80 and head south to Tombstone.”

Damn, a full retreat. And I never set foot in Cochise’s stronghold. A gloom set in. I was out of my depth. Had the wrong car. Misjudged the map. I’d be lucky to get out without rolling off a shoulder and being rescued by the Border Patrol. On my way back I passed a campsite of Boy Scouts settling in for supper. One of the men leading the pack slowly watched my drive by with a stare that said, “You tenderfoot fool. What the hell do you think you’re doing out here in a convertible?”

A few times the Mustang lurched down into a rut or flat ran over a rock chunk. There go the shocks, the suspension, the paint job. My only hope was to get the car so mud splattered and covered in grime any small dents and scratches would be camouflaged.

I made it back to State Highway 80 to see one of those famous Arizona sunsets. The hills turn to purple haze and the sky layered with streaks of burnt red, orange, yellow, then sky blue, deep blue and if you look straight above, stars are out with a clarity you will never back east.

I had about a 70-minute drive on 80 to the border town of Douglas, where I would stay the next two nights exploring the borderline. In the growing darkness I considered those Wild West myths and legends, how Cochise went from feared terrorist to having a county named after him, as well as a community college. He’d get a laugh out of that, too. First we killed his people, cornered them, defanged them, then turned them into what we call nowadays revenue streams. Wild Bill Cody showed off old warriors in Europe as part of his touring show. Back east in the late 1800s, publishers of so-called dime novels cashed in on pulp fiction heroes and villains of the Far West. Cochise, Geronimo, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, they have been mythologized for more than a century now. Hollywood made millions off them. In the 50s and 60s TV couldn’t broadcast enough westerns. When Disneyland opened in 1955 one of the most popular attractions was an hourly Indian attack on a beleaguered but brave fort. This little fling of mine through southern Arizona provided just a glimpse of the barren, simple living behind the myths. Most tourists would sleep their way through this kind of hard country. Wake me up when we’re at Universal Studios.

Afterword

Arizona is the closest state in the U.S. projecting a third world vibe. You have the sprawling country club that is Phoenix. Gated communities like 500 Club at Adobe Damn, Antelope Hills, Apache Wells. Scottsdale’s walled in wealth — “plenty of late night partying and a buzzing hotel scene,” says The New York Times. Scottsdale is 90 percent white, with a median family income of $92,000. Stunning Sedona where retirees find the sunset is 92 percent white, with the median age of 50. Upscale resorts and fashion malls pepper Phoenix and Tucson: the Biltmore Fashion Center, Desert Sky Mall, Foothills Mall. Out in suburban Glendale sits a hulking silver aluminum space ship, an enclosed stadium with retractable roof and a grass field that can be rolled outside for cultivating. It is where the Arizona Cardinals NFL team plays. You have Arizona State and University of Arizona, hip campuses, “flipflops in February” is how they are marketed in the Midwest and East.

Then there is the legion of immigrants, legal and illegal. Douglas is 80 percent Hispanic. There is what is left of the Apaches, the Navajos, in isolated towns like Kenyatta up north and Nogales Arizona on the border. Residing in the middle class is Cliff the clerk at Budget Rent A Car, a 22-year veteran. “Recovery, yeah, sure, whatever,” he tells me. And Phyllis Little, who owns with her husband Rich the High Desert Antiques store on the small main drag in Benson, 40 miles south of Tucson on I-10. “You wouldn’t believe the rent here,” she says. She and her husband are hanging on. Not making money, not losing it. Tourism hasn’t come back, she says.

There is middle class life in new adobe subdivisions outside of Douglas. A Wal-Mart and Target and Safeway have done their damage, draining the life out of downtown Douglas and G Street. Phoenix is ringed by suburbs: Mesa, Carefree, Paradise Valley, Sunrise, Sun City, Goodyear, Chandler and Tempe. It’s all good.

But you’re never far from the edge between gated comfort and grinding poverty. A gap-toothed Mex with a loopy smile rings up a case of Bug Light at a Circle K convenience store. Asked his age, he says 35; he looks about 50. Two teens come in asking for firewood. Creepy. And I’m suburban Mesa.

The booze flows easy out here. Stacks of beer, hard liquor, jugs or minis, and racks of wine at any Circle K or Safeway supermarket. That’s a lethal combo, easy booze, guns and poverty. Put Tombstone on the map, and still is making news today.

On a cloudless Monday morning, I pull out of Douglas at 6:30 in the morning, frost on the car, 22 degrees outside. Driving west the sun begins to climb from the flat desert behind me, a blinding orange and yellow orb. The sky above turns rich blue. I want to grab a handful. The air is clean and clear and the road empty. The Chiricahua, Dragoon, Huachuca, Whetstone and Santa Rita mountain ranges rim the horizon. Who needs myths when you have mornings like this.

Soundtrack CDs for a southern Arizona road trip:
Outlaws musicians wealthy enough like Willie and Waylon to live outside the lines, and others who don’t make dough and don’t give up: Simon Stokes with his biker white beard. Ronnie Elliott playing lounges in Tampa. Brooding bluesman Charlie Musselwhite. The soundtrack from the film Get Low. South Memphis String Band. Jerry Garcia, live from Berkeley in 1975, an outlaw from the world of fluorescent office lights these guys will never and could never see. Sufjan Stevens. Richard Hawley’s “Truelove’s Gutter.” The Kills (for all you who think rock and roll guitar music is dead and gone), jazz pianist Fred Hersch, the soundtrack to the remake of “True Grit” (but of course).

Father and son racin’ around

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.

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.

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.