N.B: I graduate from law school today, and I was selected to serve as the student speaker. I am posting the text of my speech because I think it is important for people to consider the role of lawyers and what it means to become one.
Whatever my graduation says about me, it indisputably says a great deal about my parents, two loving, courageous, brilliant people whom I respect more than I could ever express. I have pursued my goals with zeal because to waste all that my parents have given to and done for me would insult their hard work and commitment to their children. I also wanted to succeed at school because I owed it to my sister, a witty, strong, and indispensable best friend who always believes in me. I am as fortunate as I am happy today.
Commencement Address
Despite what the publishing industry would have you believe, there is, in fact, no manual for law school. I know because I came to St. Louis with a basic problem: I hadn’t the faintest clue about what I was supposed to be doing while here. Something about reading a lot.
I received no shortage of suggestions. One friend told me to remember that the first year, they would scare me to death, the second year, they would work me to death, and the third year, they would bore me to death. I wasn’t quite sure who the “they” in that sentence was, but I got the point. Another friend sent me one of those vaunted guidebooks, Getting to Maybe. I read the first five pages and got to bored. Still more: treat law school like a job; use the IRAC system; take bar classes; take what you like; never take tax!
All of this conflicting guidance worried me. Like any proper law-school-bound neurotic, I needed a plan. On the eve of school, salvation arrived via email: a link to a Slate column by Dahlia Lithwick entitled "Letter to a Young Law Student." After months of boogiemen, warnings wrapped in jokes, and heavy declarations running the gamut from “all lawyers hate law school” to "you’ll meet your wife there," Lithwick, herself a lawyer, granted me license to stop worrying. Cloaked in sarcasm and disdain for the legal industrial complex of big law firms, her message was clear: make law school what you want it to be.
In Lithwick’s essay, grades didn’t matter and everyone got a job in the end. Nothing better captured the subversion she endorsed. Reflecting upon it now, that was easy for her to say. She wrote her column in 2002, and she had graduated from Stanford ten years earlier. Her experience surely reinforced the veracity of her own thinking.
Perhaps Lithwick would counsel us differently had she enrolled in law school amid historic financial upheaval and later marched from her graduation into the uncertain economic conditions that greet our class. Cynics might insist upon this revision, but to the contrary, more than ever, we should stop to appreciate Lithwick’s rousing insight. And I do not propose that lightly, so as to marginalize the jobless, for I was among them until this time last week, and I long envisioned that I would deliver this speech without an answer for the question of what I would do in the fall.
We should return to Lithwick’s letter because it hints at what made this experience rewarding, even if not always easy. Offering an antidote for law school’s prosaic rhythm, Lithwick advised that rather than replicate scenes from Paper Chase or succumb to the hysterical culture of competitive legal learning, students stop to question. She encouraged students to cultivate friendships, to ignore a hidebound industry and investigate the world. Like the many here who have studied abroad, completed internships, played intramural sports, volunteered, run student organizations, or even just gone to bar nights, I tried to heed this recommendation. In general terms, this is the engaged, larger life that a lawyer can lead, and no time has ever demanded this from us as today does.
The United States is a country in which seemingly no one understands what judges do; a country where reform in response to documented financial misfeasance cannot defeat entrenched special interests; a country where disenfranchising voters is as common as election day. This state of affairs is endemic of an unaccountability culture that imperils our way of life, and attempting to understand the severity of these threats can breed hopelessness.
As lawyers, we can complicitly extend the status quo rather than challenge it. It needs us, after all. If we work hard, keep our heads down, and earn our small slices, we can insulate ourselves from what it is that these challenges--political, social, cultural--represent, and the role that the law plays in them.
That shouldn’t be good enough for anyone here, though. Enriched by coursework and experiential learning, by conversations with each other, and by years spent in a city with complicated demographics, our class has seen the ways in which each of us can make a difference, however incremental. I am not inclined toward cloying optimism, and I am not inviting you to join me in the streets. I won’t be there. Instead, we all must apply the analytical skills, circumspect reasoning, and ethics that we take from law school to our everyday adult lives and lead by example. Lead as lawyers who remember that we are people, and as people who believe in the broad, valuable application of our legal training.
The graduating class is a bright, energetic group. I have seen it, and I am confident that we can carry this burden, even if only in small ways that ultimately add up. I find this heartening because the mechanics of legal education foolishly distract from its admirable goals. To wit: I don’t anticipate that our respective futures will include many instances when we feverishly type for three hours while consulting an outline containing a universe of issues related to a four-page set of facts that we read in five minutes.
However, we can connect seemingly disparate ideas at work. We can strip arguments down to their core, even if only to prove that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David really are appropriate authorities on everything. Please remind my mother of this. We can look forward to a lifetime of understanding why convictions were upheld and stocks were bought back. Our legal education has gone far beyond briefs and contracts. It changed my own thinking, worldview, and personality for the better. I hope that everyone graduating today has enjoyed something similar, and that we all fight a good fight steeled by what truly mattered during this experience.
Over at the GQ NBA Playoffs blog, David Roth put together an oral history of Zach Randolph. I was asked to contribute some thoughts about Z-Bo from his tenure with the Knicks. You can read the entire post here, and you should, because some fantastic writers chipped in with other perspectives about Zach.
David did his usual best, wrangling many verbose writers and distilling the submissions into a potent collaborative effort. For those so inclined, I am also passing along my raw submissions, two epistles on Zach which I sent in as the post came together. I have made them one essay.
On Zach Randolph and the Knicks:
Unavoidably, watching NBA basketball can feel like measuring height with funhouse mirrors. Winning and losing distort perceptions so severely that divining an accurate portrait of a player often requires the light of day only available on the other side of the ride.
Zach Randolph has looked tall in the playoffs this year. Following a regular season during which his characteristic production helped to lead a winning team, Randolph's stature has grown as the Grizzlies have beaten the Spurs and assumed, largely without intention, the persona of plucky upstart, a rare and cherished NBA archetype. The impact of such favorable lighting and illusory effects will only become greater if Memphis beats Oklahoma City in a series that already suggests we will miss it dearly once over. It turns out that thrusting your shoulders into a defender’s chest, leaning back from twenty feet, and flipping up shots that require special knowledge of physics can look great. Those mirrors can be slimming, even.
Not long ago, Randolph appeared much shorter, of course.
To make a splash during his first month as New York Knicks president, Isiah Thomas brought Stephon Marbury home from the desert. The Knicks acquired not only Stephon, a talented malcontent with a huge contract whose previous teams all had improved once he left, but also Anfernee Hardaway, a name that greatly exceeded its actual value. The price paid to Phoenix for this championship nucleus was steep, naturally: Antonio McDyess, Charlie Ward, Howard Eisley, two first round draft picks, and two Europeans.
The Stephon trade was archetypal Zeke--mortgage the future for a high-priced, overvalued present composed of retreads, questions, and strife. Marbury’s tenure in New York went according to that plan, and disastrous personnel decisions became a New York signature. Eddy Curry, Maurice Taylor, Steve Francis, Jerome James, Jalen Rose, Jamal Crawford, and Jared Jeffries followed. Never forget, New York. With the ever-approving reinforcement of basketball slumlord and rich man’s son James Dolan, Isiah’s inept basketball choices were matched by the depravity of the franchise’s culture, one that countenanced a slash-and-burn approach to everything and always assigned blame for the consequences to someone else.
Zach Randolph joined the Knicks during these dark days, and he symbolized another elaborate mistake that perpetuated the misery. Recall that the Knicks acquired Randolph on draft night in the summer of 2007. By then, Zach had punched teammates, toted guns, and been accused of intimidating witnesses and sexually assaulting strippers. Z-Bo’s regular-season Knick debut came that fall, a month after a jury had awarded Anucha Browne Sanders more than $11 million as compensation for Thomas’s sexual harassment and the Knicks’ organizational hostility. The previous year, the Knicks had fought the Nuggets en masse after Isiah had told the team to do so. Foolish, incompetent, gallingly expensive losers, the Knicks were loathsome. Acquiring Randolph for Francis, two players with outrageous contracts, reinforced the common wisdom that Thomas mistook activity for accomplishment while tilting toward a windmill no one else saw. New York had devolved into a pathetic farce steadily, and Randolph’s arrival was another episode in a historically indecent series.
With Z-Bo on the team, the Knicks started 1-9 and lost a November road game to the Celtics by 45. That same month, Stephon Marbury took a two-day leave of absence from the team after reportedly exchanging punches with Thomas on a team charter flight. Into this toxic culture, the Knicks had inserted a player known for his indifferent defense, high-volume shooting, and confounding personal life, one further marred (and also made hilarious) by skipping a 2007 Trail Blazer game so that he could spend time at a strip club while on bereavement leave. The Randolph Knicks would go on to lose 59 games in a wash out of embarrassment, injury, and ugly basketball.
Amid this haze of dysfunction and losing, Randolph was odious, a reluctant passer and defensive liability. Jump shots early in a possession were infuriating, and his floor-bound post game usually inspired curiosity, disdain, or both. Z-Bo’s disorienting defense was a fitting complement. He played little of it, and just as some of his offensive decisions were met by blank stares of disbelief, so could his defensive apathy and lapses inspire incredulity. He wasn’t the only offender, but as the most recent addition to the marquee, Randolph was an easy target at which Knick fans could direct their seething enmity for Isiah.
So unfortunate was his tenure in New York that Randolph’s physique, alone, summed up that bitter era. Randolph has never been a chiseled physical specimen. He does not have an average athlete’s muscle definition, and at times, he has been out of shape and overweight. While playing for the Knicks, Zach was a ready physical symbol of the team’s faulty culture and absent professionalism. Fair or not, it was convenient to regard Zach’s body with contempt, to see it as proof that the Knicks simply did not care. And playing alongside Eddy Curry, so dense and massive that “black hole” is not merely a pejorative basketball metaphor, did not help. A weak bloated front line suited the weak, bloated roster. Things have changed in Memphis. Winning has made Randolph’s unique offensive style appealing due to its limitations. No longer some overpaid, stumpy jump shooter, Randolph is a post-game J.J. Barea, plucky and successful in spite of his physical limitations. With a coach and teammates who won’t accept only playing on one side of the floor, Randolph is a more willing defender who has found ways to use his size without relying on leaping or blocking shots. No longer a reflexively derided doughboy, Randolph’s body instead gives his salvation story a sense of youthful innocence, while also making his success even more captivating.
Knicks fans should look on with muted satisfaction. It’s the right thing to do. Randolph may have contributed to the Knick malaise that sunk the franchise for a decade, however he was neither its root cause nor its primary accelerant. As is often the case on a losing team, he was both a reason and a victim. Randolph deserves esteem for rehabilitating his image and career. He is perhaps the most persuasive argument for never abandoning hope: If Z-Bo can get it together like this, so might the Knicks one day. And everyone would be well served to remember Randolph as an object lesson about the way we watch the NBA.
At the end of the day, most of Odd Future's music is not inviting. Rappers like Tyler are gifted lyrically, and the themes are momentarily gripping for their audacity, but the overall aesthetic of too many OFWGKTA tracks is harsh and discordant. The Frank Ocean record is a noteworthy exception, however obvious, and it portends more interesting, thoughtful music that is accessible. I actually like listening to Frank Ocean. I can't say the same of a record like Goblin. I was happy to have listened a few times, but now that I've scratched that itch, I look forward to spending time with the great volume of music that doesn't leave me disappointed by the production and overall sonic experience. I will not delve into a lengthy exploration of Odd Future's appeal, or pick up the complicated racial subjects that have surrounded their rise. That has been done many places. I will add, briefly, that the fascination with a group of teenagers among internets twenty- and thirty-somethings suggests that a sizable portion of OFWGKTA's appeal owes to a yearning among an older set of fans who grew up with hip-hop to stem the senses of alienation and aging out. If you own that new new, or at least proclaim to do so, it might make you feel like you're still in the vanguard, and that you do, in fact, get it.
Vices vary in hip-hop, and maintaining a grip on youth is one more form of the escapism that rap has always offered. Most music can transport a person in that regard. Were this not so, the well-worn notion of the petulant, overwhelmed teenager retreating from an unaccommodating world into his room to blare that loud, angry rock music would not exist. For me, at this point, and perhaps always, an enduring hip-hop indulgence is unaccountable hyper-masculinity. Rap music is still a place where you can smack a woman, beat a man, drink recklessly, slang drugs, fuck as you want, and indulge every other most basic impulse. Rage and greed find a constructive outlet in these fictions. No one--no one--stitches together these images like Sean Price.
Describe him as you will: street, hood, tough, gully, real. Sean P creates the most visceral music experience available, and he does this by flaunting the fantasy power of hip-hop. A Sean P verse is almost always grim, angry, aggressive, and explicit. With specificity and a detailed sense of the quotidian mechanics that go into all the bad things rappers like to rhyme about, Price offers his fans a safe space for danger. I have no actual desire to be a domestic abuser, to sell drugs, to lose myself to daily exercises in violences. The specifics are unappealing, frankly. Enjoying access to a place where I can let my guard down and dispense with the decorum and civility that inhibit thoughtless instinct is seductive, though. Sean Price takes me there. I would wager that despite the kernels of lived experience which inform his music, P knows full well that this is the dream world which his audience craves. And, I would guess that he also understands that he is so popular with a certain set of fans like me precisely because so many of us know better than to ever do what he says.
My road trip ended yesterday in the place where it began, St. Louis. The final day was uneventful--lots of trees and cows from Oklahoma to Missouri. Below is a compilation of the updates filed from the road.
The Big Texan Steak Ranch is nothing if not enthusiastic about itself. Beginning around Santa Rosa, NM, the Big Texan promises that free steak lies a mere three hours due east, in Amarillo, TX. It makes this promise over and over again on countless billboards as the miles wind down. Free steak is only two hours away! Free steak in 90 miles! Free steak in 45 miles! The billboards all feature a fire-seared steak, a cartoonish cowboy, and the old-timey western motif of yellow and brown with a saloon-door font. As an emissary from the great state of Everything Is Bigger, the Big Texan proudly perpetuates all of the stereotypes. Few businesses would be as willingly and unwaveringly hokey.
First opened in 1960, the Big Texan is a north Texas institution, a big, gaudy fish happily swimming in a small pond along I-40. The restaurant, also a motel and opry, is most famous for its Texas King challenge: if you can eat a shrimp cocktail, salad, set of dinner rolls, and seventy-two-ounce steak in an hour, you can dine for free. (See--free steak!) If not, you can pay $72 and tell your friends about the most outlandish expensive meal you ever ate. Kitschy and over the top, the Big Texan has cultivated cult status, and word-of-mouth incredulity spreads the small-time legend in the few ways that the relentless marketing campaign does not. I, for example, had planned my road trip with the Big Texan in mind after a friend told me about her time there.
The Big Texan delivered on the expectations created by those billboards. Upon pulling into the parking lot, my friend and I found a motel with pastel facades fashioned to look like an old-west town, a paper-mache cow the size of three cars, and the Big Texan, which resembles a cheesy museum of western culture crammed into a massive barn. The front porch had a stage-coach love seat, goofy signs, and a door bearing a handle that is a twisted piece of wood. The door handle was emblematic of the entire experience: deliberately planned, of a certain western theme, and a little nonsensical all the same.
After entering, it isn't immediately clear where the eating happens. To the left is a souvenir shop underneath a sign that declares you're entering the "trading post," a cherished southwest euphemism for general store. The trading post has bumper stickers, jerky, toys, knick-knacks, and vaguely offensive American-Indian exploitations. To the right is the fudge counter, and it is like every other fudge counter you've ever seen, replete with stale-looking loaves of fudge, prices per pound that are more than you'd want to pay, and a strong smell of burnt sugar. Why this "steak ranch" feels compelled to peddle fudge is unexplained, other than the fact that the Big Texan's primary theme is extracting money from customers in every way possible. To see this common element in the experience, a person need only look straight ahead when entering. There are slot machines, coin-operated video games, one of those worthless contraptions that crushes perfectly good coins into embossed sheets of trinket metal, and a terminal at which dollar bills can be converted into the quarters necessary for all that waste.
Eventually, hungry and intrigued guests can locate the main dining room down a corridor on the right. As you approach the hostess, be sure to tether your horse to the hitching post--Big Texan restaurant policy. The signs say so. Once you've dismounted, the hostess will show you to one, or two, or perhaps twenty of the 800 seats in the facility, depending upon your party size. At your table, you'll find a place mat that catalogues the many ways you might be up-sold--collectible cups, cowboy boots, old-west paraphernalia--and a tub of individual butter packets. At the Big Texan, you are encouraged to indulge yourself, surrendering to financial and nutritional profligacy.
Settled in amid saloon-style wooden panels and a pantheon of dead and stuffed animals, the important work begins. Your first decision is whether to remain a simple guest or to ascend into Big Texan folklore by gorging yourself on five pounds of food in an hour. Choosing Option Two will either cost you $72 or earn you renown among Big Texan staff, Big Texan regulars, and the other piqued travelers who research just what they'll find at exit 75 in Amarillo. Before deciding, please remember that Option Two also brings with it a seat at an elevated table in the dining room and an appearance on the webcam that streams Texas King events. My friend and I decided that our wallets and our stomachs could not suffer the calculated risk, so we chose a tamer adventure.
Nothing too tame, though. For $12.95, I ordered a lunch special: an 8-ounce strip steak seasoned with an array of spices and cooked until only the faintest trace of pink remained (which is how I like it since I have been known to suffer psychosomatic food-related episodes); a sweet dinner roll that I could have overwhelmed with butter drawn from the butter tub; and a choice of two sides, which I turned into mashed potatoes and cowboy beans. In other words, I had an entire dinner at 1:30 in the afternoon for the price of a sandwich at some of the lunch spots that cater to businesspeople in New York. My buddy had the prime rib, the roll, beefsteak tomatoes with onions, and macaroni and cheese.
While dining, we politely declined overtures from the roving cowboy bard who sashayed across the dining-room floor with a guitar over his shoulder. For $5, guests could hear a personalized song from the range and lose themselves a little more in the Big Texan's theater; the roving guitar man was dressed in overalls and a cowboy hat, after all. We also struck up conversation with our waitress, who would intermittently share Big Texan history with us in between runs to the kitchen to bring out more sweet tea. When she wasn't doing those things, she was trying to get us to buy desert, buy fudge, buy souvenirs, buy whatever. She just wanted us to spend more, because the Big Texan will do almost anything within reason for a predetermined price.
Lunch eventually ended with a whimper, not a bang. Seeing that we were disinclined toward any add-ons, our waitress allowed the conversation and attention to peter out. My friend and I finished our meals, took some final glances around the room, and then walked past the frontier-town shooting game, the over-sized rocking chair, and the cigar-store Indian statue to wash up in the restroom. Bathrooms appear to be lost from Texas history because the facilities at the Big Texan were standard. No signs with bad puns, no sculptures, no jokes. The sinks even were lined by motion-sensor paper-towel machines and the soap dispensers that dole out foam, not merely liquid. If anything, the past that the Big Texan ferociously fights to maintain ends at the bathroom door, turning that threshold into a space-time wrinkle.
Satisfied but not blown away by the Big Texan, my traveling companion and I got back onto the highway and drove to Oklahoma City. After so much anticipation and a mild case of synthetic-culture shock during the early portions of lunch, the Big Texan receded into memory fairly quickly. It was replaced by Thor, which is a dumb movie that nonetheless establishes the character and dispenses with the exposition fairly well. At day's end, excitement about a smartly fashioned Avengers movie had made the Big Texan seem pretty small.
One day sometime after my sister had moved to California, I jokingly asked if she had seen any pickup trucks rolling around with Mexican day laborers loaded into the back. I am not sure what answer I expected, but the question was only partially sincere. I had watched enough television and movies to think that the proliferation of this phenomenon was overstated for dramatic purposes. Moreover, the Mexicans who live in New York are hidden in plain sight, integrated into the city’s rhythm. Many of them work specific kinds of jobs, so to that extent they are easily stereotyped, but they, like so many other groups, are firmly woven into New York’s cultural pastiche. This does not mean that New York isn’t segregated, because it is, and this does not mean that New York is without racial problems, because it isn’t. What I mean is that for various reasons, the general niche that Mexicans have carved out in New York does not fall under everyday scrutiny. Accordingly, I spent so little of my time in New York specifically thinking about Mexicans that I wasn’t sure if what I asked my sister sounded racist, or at least lazy.
California is different, a place where Mexican immigration is a prominent part of the narrative. For some Californians--perhaps many--the state’s diversity registers in the same way that New York’s does with me. But for outsiders, immigration is a headline of the story, and I don’t believe this to be the case for New York. Certainly not for New York’s Hispanic population.
My sister responded with a knowing chuckle. Yes, she had seen trucks with Mexican immigrants in the back riding to work. In fact, she witnessed this scene most mornings as she passed by the Home Depot. Her chuckle meant many things: she recognized all of the white, liberal guilt and apprehension buried in my question; she recognized that I am so inculcated by media that this is what I think to ask; and she recognized that the answer was, in some ways, an unfortunate affirmation of an outsider’s presumptions. My sister doesn’t dwell on this topic, though, because it is commonplace, just as the taquerias across San Francisco, the nuanced Mexican socioculture, and living inertly alongside this growing population have become. For my sister, my Mexican question was innocuous because her life in San Francisco is like the one I led in New York--there is nothing extraordinary to observe.
To my surprise, that is what Arizona felt like for much of my time this week, and the seamless Mexican cultural assimilation has only been more apparent in New Mexico. In Arizona, there were no billboards about immigration problems. Nor were there loud public figures deriding Mexicans. From what I could tell, it was standard for Spanish and English to mingle, for American and Mexican culture to mingle in commercial settings, and most importantly, for the people to mingle in public spaces. Perhaps everyone goes home to places where they can let out the rage and ugliness. This seems likely, just as it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that I missed a meaningful portion of the Arizona experience since I was merely passing through. I understand that, and I expect that my attitude would be very different, if not opposite, had I spent a week in, say, Tucson, and not just one day. To be fair, someone visiting New York would not appreciate the complicated social layers of neighborhood demographics after only a day.
Still, I was surprised that the ethnic tension which simmers over steady heat in national media was not hotter and more volatile. I found it counterintuitive: national media tend to simplify stories, losing some of the local intensity as the information travels up the news chain. On the other hand, national stories also tend to sensationalize as they simplify, so perhaps immigration, ripe for fear- and hate-mongering, falls into this latter category and not the former.
All of this makes me sound like some simpleton rube, or maybe a condescending elitist who expected to enjoy a craven kind of cultural tourism while traveling. Come out to the West and enjoy a safari into the heart of racial tension! Gasp as the oppression and ignorance take place right before your eyes. But do not worry--you’ll stay out of harm’s way. I get it. However, I live in a place now, St. Louis, where the first hour leaving or the final hour coming along I-55 consists of billboard after billboard advocating against abortion and for Jesus. St. Louis is a market where groups, often with children, picket outside of the local Planned Parenthood every day. In my home city, folks ride around in cars with angry, aggressive political messages about guns and taxes on their numerous bumper stickers. To the east, in south and central Illinois, roads are lined with other blatant, easily observed signs of political animus. Yet there aren’t national news stories about abortion, or soy battles, or the other fires that burn. My own experience made me believe that something so heavily reported and depicted as deeply acrimonious would all but burn me as I approached the flames.
My only encounter with anything that came close to approximating what I expected happened this morning. That was the only time when immigration wariness was palpable. Driving north from Las Cruces, NM, which is about as close as you can get to Mexico without being in it, my friend and I slowed down as we hit a highway bottleneck. Every car was steered toward a Border Patrol checkpoint. Greeting us were serious men in green uniforms who seemed to enjoy walking their drug-sniffing dogs along the car queue a little too much. When it was our turn for a window-roll-down interrogation, I answered confidently: Yes, we are Americans; No, we hadn’t been in Mexico; Yes, I just finished law school and was on a road trip with a friend; No, we had not recently met, but were friends from college.
My answers were insufficient. I am not sure if the luggage in the trunk made our car an easy target, if we were merely unfortunate, or if my friend, who inherited dark skin from an Indian mother and South-African father, triggered some misguided, inexcusable bias. Regardless, we were asked to pull over and get out of the car. (Did they think my friend was here to avenge Osama?) A Border Patrol officer asked if we had weapons (strong “no” on that one) and told us to stand alongside the road with our hands visible. That last instruction was eerie, even if expected. The officer proceeded to ask us a series of questions that were facially harmless but delivered with a deadpan tone that hinted at the expectation of an indicting slip up. The officer asked where we had been and why. He wanted to know where we had stayed, perhaps hoping to catch us without a detail necessary to sell the story.
At one point, the officer asked us, explicitly, “Are you guys smoking a lot of dope? Traveling with large amounts of cash?” I almost started laughing, then lecturing, and then raising my voice. The questions were insulting, and my suspicions about racism were growing stronger by the second, not because of the questions but because our answers did little to assuage the patrol people. Among other things, I wanted to ask the officer if he thought we’d answer affirmatively if we had, in fact, been getting high all morning and set out with stacks of hundreds taped underneath the dashboard. Prudently, I refrained.
While my friend and I were questioned, a dog leaped into my front seat and starting sniffing around. I was doing, and had done, nothing illegal, so I was unconcerned about the investigation. Secretly, I hoped the dog would find a granola bar containing chocolate, eat it, and get sick. You see, I hate dogs. They are loud and unruly, they shed fur everywhere, they defecate on the sidewalk without paying taxes, and you cannot reason with them. I am scared of them, they bite me, and the entire dog thing has always eluded me. The only thing about which I feel as strongly is protecting my car as I see fit, a task that Sisyphus, himself, might not undertake. So imagine my horror as I had to glance on, powerless, while a dog slobbered on the seats and shed his black fur.
Almost as unnerving was the feeling of alienation. In our own country, having done nothing wrong, my friend and I were subjected to the kind of impersonal, unexplained, disconcerting police activity that makes people mistrustful of the country’s legal enforcement mechanisms. Two students, one a lawyer and another earning a Ph.D., were pulled out of a car for no reason and intimidated for intimidation’s sake. Perhaps it speaks to blind justice and the equality of the law’s tactics. It also speaks to the culture of fear that police people perpetuate for reasons that aren’t always so clear. That, more than anything, is what I felt this morning.
Unsurprisingly, the investigation ended in a cold trail. Those bathing suits and souvenir t-shirts hid no contraband. It turned out that the college buddies who told the police exactly what they had been doing were not, in fact, putting one over. We headed out silently into the unyielding New Mexico desert. In Arizona we had found natural beauty and unexpected landscapes that were arresting at times. In New Mexico, we found sand. To wash off the lingering morning filth, my friend and I stopped in Truth or Consequences, NM, where we spent some time at a natural hot spring before continuing on to Albuquerque, which is beautiful and livable in ways for which it does not receive credit.
One final, unrelated note: never go to Red Rock State Park. As gorgeous as the rocks are, you can see them from the road, and the park, itself, is like a horror movie. You show up and no one is there. You speak to the rangers, and they are terse and oddly sterile. You then set out to see mountains but are instead greeted with terrifying warnings:
- There are rattlesnakes on the loose.
- Mountain Lions don’t want to eat you, but they might.
- Scorpions and poisonous spiders live here and are entitled to do so. You owe it to them to behave.
- Never leave the paths, lest you disturb a killing machine, giving it an excuse to kill you and the parks service a means to avoid liability.
- There is poison ivy everywhere.
- Enjoy!
It was awful. I spent forty-five minutes counting my steps, staring down at the dirt, flinching every time I heard any noise, rarely seeing anything red or rocky, and generally hoping that I wouldn’t die. Just go to Sedona instead.
I was on a plane a few years ago when I read a New Yorker profile of Arizona's Maricopa County and its sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Until that plane ride, I primarily knew that Mexican immigration had steadily transformed the demographics in the southwest United States. I otherwise had taken little time to think about it, aside from occasionally marveling when I would hear or read that by such-and-such date, white people would be a minority in places like Texas and California. (Frankly, that struck me as cool, and maybe even a bizarre form of comeuppance.) I suppose that such a unique and observable phenomenon failed to inspire anything more than passing thoughts because whatever was happening felt far away. I only had been to San Francisco once, Boulder for a weekend, Eugene for a football game, and Seattle for work assignments. That was the entirety of my western life. With the shifting population far away, I easily could ignore the xenophobia and prejudice it engendered. However, by the time I had landed, my attitude of Arizona was changed.
The New Yorker piece depicted Arpaio as an audacious, unapologetic zealot who fomented anti-Mexican sentiment to grow his power. Stopping just short of state-sanctioned hate crimes, Arpaio did everything he could to protect us, the whites of Arizona, and implicitly, America, from the awful, rising threat of them, the Mexicans. The story observed that as dismaying as Arpaio's actions was his popularity among the white people he served in Arizona. Already affording little attention to the ins and outs of life in Arizona, I internalized the Arpaio profile as an indictment of the place that gives us John McCain and Jon Kyl, so it seemed reasonable. I figured that in this large country of ours, regional differences are perpetual, plenty of bad things fester, and I shrugged that I'd likely not spend much time in Maricopa County. Arizona was filed away as a strange, aggressive place rife with an emblematic racial tension that seemed almost comical at times. Then the immigration bill happened, the Giffords shooting happened, and things got no better for me and Arizona.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself joyfully shooting down a natural water slide in a state park just outside of Sedona yesterday. To travel from Flagstaff to Tucson, the latest stop on my trip, my friend and I took a route that bisected Arizona and included stops at Slide Rock State Park, Sedona, Red Rock State Park, and, finally, Tucson. We opted out of Phoenix, and that seemed fine as we used the ten-lane highway to get through a place that appears to be a massive insult directed at city planners. Here is what I learned about Phoenix as I drove through it: every national brand maintains a presence there, the city has about a dozen buildings with more than ten stories, there are sections of sloping asphalt that resemble the Los Angeles River, and you have to drive everywhere. Las Vegas might be dopey, but it's fun and purposely opulent. Phoenix just seems dopey, a drain on resources built inefficiently in the desert. Someone disabuse me if this is the wrong impression.
The rest of the Arizona I saw yesterday was something nicer. At Slide Rock, the air was 75 degrees, the water 52, but we were undeterred. Outdoor swimming, after all, is a luxury enjoyed only in warm weather, and we weren't going to waste such abundant sunshine. Sliding down the rocks was invigorating and disorienting. The water was so cold that my body was tense all over, and there were moments when I was worried that I might forget how to breath. Ever the neurotic, I also was concerned that perhaps I'd slam my foot into something jagged and unforgiving. Yet these thoughts never controlled how I felt because every few seconds, any discomfort or anxiety was obscured by the exhilaration of shooting along a small river and painlessly gliding over the rocks.
When the water slide ended, I fell into a small pool, ten feet deep and clear, of sparkling water. In my normal life, I spend down time thinking about the most efficient ways to walk from my couch to the sink if I also want to pick up something from the ground, replace a book on a shelf, and grab three items to wash. Other times, I calculate weekly budgets so that I can safely sneak off to the movies, or I think ahead about how I'll fold my laundry. I also will meticulously pick through the upcoming DVR schedule, read an Economist while trying to track how many concepts I'll need to wiki, or work through all of the steps required to register for a bar exam. In that pool of water, cold but happy, my mind was blank. I just stared at the rocks and the water while feeling fortunate to be so free. I was truly on vacation.
Sedona and the Red Rocks were beautiful, but the pictures do the talking. So enjoy a few. Tomorrow is Cinco de Mayo, and we'll be in New Mexico, the American state with the highest per-capita concentration of Hispanics. I suspect it will be an experience that further calls forth some thoughts on Arizona, Sheriff Joe, and immigration. We'll see.
Also help yourself to the real desert, the one that goes on for miles and is composed of little more than sand and junior-varsity vegetation.
(N.B: I recommend clicking on the photos to enlarge them, particularly the photos of nature.)
The weekendin Las Vegas came and went. Though time in Las Vegas is unlike time elsewhere, the Vegas excursion was fairly typical. One special moment: while playing poker at Caesar's Palace, I had the misfortune of sitting next to someone who looked like John Travolta in Swordfish and talked like Val Kilmer, only stupider and more tone deaf. I didn't sit down to play until 12:30 in the morning on Saturday, and the room was fairly quiet. My table was especially tame. Players went about their business solemnly, and there was no conversation. Occasionally, someone would nod at an opponent after a good hand, and sporadic chuckles filled the awkward silences that followed the dealer's jokes. To his credit, Silvio was working hard.
Val Kilmer was the exception. He was chattering incessantly and inanely, but largely to himself. In a span of ninety minutes, I turned $100 into $167. Kilmer, meanwhile, spilled a vodka tonic on his lap and unbuttoned his shirt to inspect if his pants were wet. Don't even begin to argue with or work to comprehend his methodology. The man was not of this world. He then nervously talked about how expensive his shirt was, as though that would make us forget that he'd spilled on himself and then conducted the world's worst fact-finding mission to uncover the truth about his pants and wetness.
Time wore on, and he jibber jabbered, no longer concerned with his clothes. On hand after hand, he'd provide running commentary of his own decisions before conducting post-hand interviews with himself. When he won--which was fairly often since he was playing against zombies and had a chip stack six times the size of anyone else's--he would wink at the dealer and toss him a tip while saying to no one in particular, "That's why you work at it. And man if I didn't have that gut shot." I was seated immediately to his right, so he couldn't see my eyes rolling. When he lost, Kilmer would revisit his missteps for ten and fifteen minutes, sometimes allowing the post-hand analysis to extend for three and four new hands at a time. "If only you'd bet like you were supposed to, dear, then I wouldn't have stayed in for the river."
The best part was when he started going around the table guessing where everyone was from. It was as futile as you might expect, and nothing Kilmer did indicated that he was especially gifted at this kind of guessing game. When he arrived at a silent Asian woman, he said to her, "You must be from Asia. I can just tell. Is it China?" The woman nodded, likely hoping he would move on. She was wrong. "I knew it! Let me guess--Beijing City!" The woman stared at Kilmer and did nothing else. He stared back, mouth agape, waiting for her to validate his suspicion. She never did, perhaps because she couldn't recover from the fact that he thought that big city in China is called "Beijing City."
So that was Vegas. I made my peace with it, said my goodbyes, swapped out one friend for another, and started the return trip home. The excitement was far from over, though.
My return trip runs through the southwest and takes me to exciting destinations, known and otherwise. To celebrate such exciting terrain, I thought a photo essay at the outset might be more useful than my usual long-form musing. Photos seem most appropriate because on Sunday and Monday, I visited two well-known monuments commemorating the power of the Colorado River, one created, the other demanded.
To the photos and narration we go...
The first stop on the long way home was Hoover Dam (no "the" before the name, as I learned), and to get there, we passed through suburban Las Vegas. Las Vegas is not really a city, of course. It is an amusement park with planned communities and synthetic neighborhoods built around it. Vegas has suburbs, though, and they are as American as it gets. I thought that I knew about car culture when I lived in Ann Arbor, but then I moved to St. Louis. In Ann Arbor I walked places--to the corner store, to the other side of town, to restaurants in commercial districts. In St. Louis, I walk nowhere, and I assumed that I had received a necessary education in automobile life. But then I saw the Vegas suburbs and felt like a dropout. Outside of Vegas, the concrete is new and bright, so very much so that the strip malls and pavement seem like a cartoon. The car wash above fit in nicely.
I knew nothing about the dam other than what I had seen in a National Lampoon movie: Clark Griswold once got lost there. I also knew it had something to do with the Colorado River. Signs that the dam was close sprang up around Boulder City, NV, where power lines are the dominant landscape feature.
Boulder City looks like anywhere in the southwest--mountains lingering in the distance, trees looking lonely, power lines ignoring it all.
The town gets pretty as Lake Mead--the largest man-made lake and reservoir in America--approaches on the left. Even better, a breeze picks up, and suddenly, what is otherwise an easily dismissed outpost of stereotypical living gets transformed into something vaguely European. Boulder City can feel a little like an Alps town set against a lake, particularly because the lake comes into view as the road descends.
Here we have a Western Area Power Administration electricity field in its natural habitat, directly across the HINO from a visitor intake center that introduces people to Hoover Dam.
The blue on the horizon in this shot is more of Lake Mead. That big concrete structure holding back all that water--trillions of gallons!--is Hoover Dam. This photo was taken on the Pat Tillman Bridge that now spans the canyon in which the dam is located. Until six months ago, the only way to drive from Nevada to Arizona while visiting Hoover Dam was to drive on top of the dam, itself, and that created traffic that unintentionally honored Boston before the Big Dig.
More Hoover Dam. I am not the sort of person who visits landmarks and walks away with serious reverence for human ingenuity, but the dam is among the few truly awe-inspiring things I've ever seen. A massive banner that said something like "Engineers FTW!" would be entirely appropriate were that sentiment not self-evident.
Please notice the access road above the dam that abruptly ends in the right side of this photo. The Tillman Bridge flies high above the Colorado River, and the elevation, the inherent precarious nature of dams, and a mind fueled by action movies all made me a little nervous the entire time. Seeing a road end without any warning, rhyme, or reason only enhanced the tingle of danger that was unavoidable.
But don't tell this girl. She and her adult supervisors thought it was a good idea for her to sit on top of a wall that separates bridge foot traffic from the westward-bound cars that fly by at sixty-five miles per hour on the two-lane highway that the bridge supports. Did I mention that tremors run through the walkway as the cars rumble along? To be fair to this woman and her entourage, it was totally worth it. As you can see from my own photos, the extra two feet of perspective she achieved by sitting above certain death was warranted. How else would you see Hoover Dam from that bridge?
That poor girl and her foolish supervisors were only a few of the colorful folks one finds at Hoover Dam. Witness Exhibit B above, and Exhibit C below...
Yes, those are the Aqua Teens bearing arms. Naturally, I gave the dude a shout out for his shirt. I wanted to talk in a Master Shake voice, but the tour was starting.
You didn't even know that we had a Bureau of Reclamation, did you?
Here's the deal: the Colorado River is pretty much unfuckwithable. It provides water (and now electricity) to Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, California, and Utah. It is so powerful that it created the Grand Canyon over the course of six million years (science!) and regularly flooded towns, destroying farms, roads, buildings, and infrastructure. As mentioned before, the Colorado River demanded a solution, and Hoover Dam is what this country came up with. Hoover Dam makes the Colorado River more predictable and allows for regular distribution of water and electricity. I promise I wasn't paid to write this. I merely learned these lessons on my tour of Hoover Dam and feel that the river gets short shrift outside of the states it directly affects.
Side note: the rhetoric at Hoover Dam takes relativism to a whole new level. For instance, Lake Mead's volume was put into some kind of a context by telling visitors that it holds enough water to cover Pennsylvania in one foot of water. Hoover Dam? It has enough concrete to erect a four-foot-wide sidewalk around the Equator, and it weighs as much as eighteen Empire State Buildings. You know, because everyone has a good sense of what this all means.
Anyway...
Here is where the next James Bond movie will be filmed.
In this shot, James rams a henchman's head against one of those blue centrifuge arms while some hot woman never to be heard from again gets in trouble and causes James to make a tough choice.
That computer is left over from the Dharma Initiative.
At the end of a Hoover Dam tour, participants can retire to a modest museum to learn more about Hoover Dam history. Some of it is fascinating. Boulder City, NV was established to support all the workers required to build the dam. Special machinery was invented to bore holes into the canyon walls. The dam was completed in five years, two ahead of schedule. The concrete poured for the dam would have taken 100 years to cool had a one-inch metal pipe not been inserted into the middle of each section. Instead, those pipes formed a plumbing system through which cooling water passed.
Other parts of the museum are straight up propaganda, and it's hilarious. But hey, America loves its own mythology.
Once you finish a Hoover Dam experience, you either go to Nevada or Arizona. We chose the latter, because Arizona is on the way to St. Louis.
Heading east into Arizona, the desert opens up. Mountains still frame all views, but they are farther recessed from the road. The extra space is ably filled by shrubs and sad grass. As in southern Utah, there are miles upon miles without traces of life, human or otherwise. However, not far away from Kingman, AZ, something curious and, frankly, unnerving starts to happen: Trailers pop up. Without roads, stores, subdivisions, apparent sources of water, badges of government, or anything else that connotes municipal life, the trailers start. They run for a while, sometimes sparsely, sometimes densely. It looks as though people decided to park in someone else's lawn.
The phenomenon is unnerving for a number of reasons. First, land ownership expressed through the built environment is something I take for granted. Thanks to buildings, fences, signs, posts, lawns, parking lots, and so many other constructed elements, I almost always know who owns what land. And absent that specific knowledge, I still can tell that someone owns what I am looking at, even if I can't identify the person or entity. In Arizona's desert trailer parks, the demarcated order of ownership is not nearly as easy. This arouses anxiety, however slight, because the absence of ownership hints at lawlessness. After all, who would enforce the rights connected to a building, or a patch of land, or that broken down truck? It's hard to tell. Similarly difficult to discern is who, exactly, is in charge. There are no schools, city halls, municipal names, hospitals, police stations, or anything else in this part of America. These communities feel permanently temporary, like extended camping trips that happen to also serve as vacations from order.
Another reason it felt creepy was that life in this part of the country seemed unlikely to resemble anything I have known or seen. "Seemed" because I, of course, only drove past it. However, in Kansas and Colorado, the small towns I saw were different but recognizable. In Utah, I saw nothing, and that, too, was something. But these RV Bedouins were doing something completely alien.
This trading post in Golden Valley, AZ provided some answers, but only a few. A woman in the store said that on a typical Sunday, she and her husband, a documentary filmmaker, would commandeer an abandoned building four miles away and show his nature videos. "It's a ghost town. Really. No one is there very much and the buildings just sit around. Sometimes old people like to dress up in western-themed clothes. You should just go in and sit down. No one will care, and the admission is free." We declined and moved on, still perplexed. What do these folks do for jobs, for schools?
Sunday night ended in a motel a few hundred feet from the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, but along the way, we passed through Seligman, AZ, the self-professed historic home of U.S. Route 66. We stopped at the Roadkill Cafe for dinner. I believe it's a chain, but we were fooled. While dining, I received three phone calls about Osama bin Laden. I asked the waitress to switch the television from Sunday Night Baseball to a news network, and the other diners heard my request. A few people joked that finally, terrorism was over and we could get back to fighting Russia. (That might have been me.) Someone else said we should unfurl a "Mission Accomplished" banner. And a few more people seemed excited. But then everyone went back to eating.
Yesterday, Monday, was spent at the Grand Canyon. My buddy and I hiked down into the canyon before driving along a scenic route that offered multiple vantage points. Hoover Dam affirmed man's power, but the Grand Canyon affirmed nature's, and nature is winning. After all, Hoover Dam only exists because it has to. The Grand Canyon is so staggering that it defies description. It even defies photography. Not even a panoramic lens coupled with expert narration that brings the Grand Canyon to life could adequately capture what it is like to behold something so massive and majestic. My buddy and I, normally capable of lengthy conversations about anything, spent most of the day silent as we attempted to fully appreciate and comprehend what we were seeing. A visit to the Grand Canyon could take weeks if a person so chose. We spent a night and a day.
On the way out, we stopped at Desert View point. This portion of the canyon lies in the east and hosts something famously and descriptively called the Watchtower. A five-story stone building that is round and offers views of the expansive desert that lies to the north and east of the primary canyon gorge, the Watchtower is a great stop, but a little removed from the rest of canyon life. The Watchtower also tries to pay homage to American Indians by peddling real and fake Indian goods downstairs and relying on an American Indian decoration motif. Sadly, like many of the white man's efforts to acknowledge American Indian culture, the Watchtower felt kitschy and silly. Kitschy because of the omnipresent commercialism, and silly because I couldn't resist thinking, "It's nice that the National Parks Service has honored American Indians by giving them one goofy, remote building in the middle of nowhere."
From the Grand Canyon, we drove to Flagstaff, AZ and ate dinner at Granny's Closet. I had the chicken parmigiana and the salad bar add-on. Love those baby corns, bad blue cheese, and entry-level pasta. We watched the Hawks win and Dirk Nowitzki elbow Ron Artest.
