I didn't really grasp the concept of elevation until I moved to the West. I understood intellectually that higher elevations meant cooler temperatures and different topography, flora and fauna, but knowing something like that intellectually and experiencing several different elevations in the course of one afternoon are two very distinct ways to comprehend.
Our travels today took us from 2500 feet above sea level to over 7200 feet, then down to around 5,000 feet. The temperature swung from 104 to 72 to 86. Desert scrub and sandy, barren mountains gave way to tall pines and green-carpeted slopes, which in turn transformed into the dusty greens and gently rolling contours of the high-desert railroad towns along Route 66. The air stopped sucking the moisture out of everything not already bone-dry and started hydrating skin and tightening curls. (I imagine the wildlife also differed significantly from elevation to elevation, but I'm not particularly interested in fauna, and we saw neither snake nor mountain lion nor buffalo.)
Unless I've forgotten or something's changed in the last five-and-a-half years, one cannot travel by car from Chicago in any direction and encounter in the course of a single afternoon meaningfully higher elevations. (Lower elevations need not be mentioned; Chicago is barely above sea level.) So my Midwestern-born-and-bred understanding of elevation was based on book knowledge and the intelligence gleaned from travels by plane. Taking a plane to a destination that's novel, whether by reason of elevation or other attribute, is not the same as experiencing entirely different environments within 30 miles of one another.
I've been wondering all afternoon what else I might know intellectually, but not truly get because I haven't actually experienced it. I bet elevation isn't the only such thing.
*I really did write this post in Winslow, Arizona. Though I wasn't standing on that corner (or any other) at the time, how could I resist using the title everyone (or at least everyone alive in the 1970s) associates with this sleepy little town full of railroad- and Route 66-related history? Here are a few photos from Winslow:
Well, it was fine spending the last three weeks back in the Midwest. Very relaxing, lots of old memories and a few new ones. But it turns out we really have been climate-reassigned. In addition to the humidity, which we never did get re-used to, there was a problem with clouds. We're accustomed to the desert sun (and to considering it unusual for even one cloud to mar the deep blue perfection of the sky), and we were slightly depressed by 21 days of seeing clouds.It was dark and/or raining as often as it was light. Even on nice Midwestern days, the clouds can't seem to stop themselves from congregating, piling up and occasionally darkening the sky. As I sat in the sunroom and wrote, I was initially distracted and then somewhat mesmerized by the way the waxing and waning ambient light kept causing the backlighting on my computer keyboard to come on, turn off, come on, turn off. And I remember why I never bothered with sunglasses when I lived in Chicago. My Vegas shades had the unpleasant effect of making the Midwestern sky look gray and threatening no matter what the actual weather.
By Midwestern summer standards, though, the actual weather was great. About half the time, we were able to open the house and live in the fresh air. That was a nice change, both from the hot humid Chicago summers we remember and from the four months of nonstop air-conditioning required during Las Vegas summers. (In the desert, we end up feeling hermetically sealed, all but shrink-wrapped, by the time we finally get to open our windows in late August or early September.)
We left this morning, heading west. Destination: Las Vegas. But not before another few days of travel, including some more National Park hopping. Today, we crossed Wisconsin and made our way into Iowa. The western part of Wisconsin is very beautiful and rather European-looking, with its rolling hills, carpets of green, green, green farmland portioned into neat individual farms, grazing cows, pale blue skies and puffy white clouds. A few dozen miles before the Mississippi River, the hills roll more precipitously and the highway starts to feature sheer roadcuts, first of sandstone, then of sandstone and limestone. The geological layers are as clear and evocative as ever. The mighty Mississippi, which helped carve all this picturesque landscape, isn't so mighty this far north. If you've seen it in New Orleans or Memphis or even Rock Island, it seems surprisingly contained in Dubuque, although it's still a perfectly respectable river.
We cross it into Iowa (state of my birth) and the landscape is as gorgeous as farmland gets. Seriously rolling hills, more of the green carpets, but also acres and acres and acres of the cornfields Iowa is famous for. And what a glorious plant corn is. It evidently rained here earlier today and the gold and green corn stalks, with their distinctive tall layered leaves, are practically iridescent. The vistas are long and wide, and the red and white and silver farmhouses and outbuildings seem to have been placed for maximum charm. There's also some low-to-the-ground leafy crop (soybeans, perhaps?) blanketing many of the hills and fields in neat, packed-together rows. These form a lovely counterpoint to the high, waving cornfields. When we crest ridges, we can see that the corn is in rows, too, and that both crops have intricate row patterns, some neat and parallel, some at right angles to each other, some semicircular.
I feel obliged, as a public service, to include both a paean to, and the proper recipe for, fresh sweet corn. I don't think you have to be from Iowa to think the taste of fresh corn in August is one of the best tastes there is.
On the other hand, you might have to be Iowish (as my kids refer to me) - or a member of my family - to consider the following meal the essence of summer perfection, but try it and see what you think. Make the corn the main event. Have 3-4 ears per person and serve them, buttered and salted of course, with two sides: fresh tomatoes, and tuna salad (just tuna, celery, salt, pepper and a little mayonnaise - nothing fancy). Yum.
In any event, here's the proper way to prepare fresh corn on the cob. Depart from it at your peril.
--Buy firm ears of corn still in their protective green husks. If possible, open a top or two to check that you have fresh very pale yellow ears with even rows of smallish kernels. If you do, pop one of those kernels under your fingernail and listen for the little crack - if the kernel doesn't pop like a balloon-skin tight with water, pick a different ear or maybe even a whole different market or roadside stand. Note: your corn should be from Iowa, Wisconsin or Illinois if at all possible. I've had corn grown elsewhere and I don't recommend it. That said, though, freshness is the key. Your corn should have been growing in a field a couple days ago. If you're close enough to IA, WI or IL, great; if not, go with fresh.
--Enlist everyone you're feeding to shuck the corn and smooth off the cornsilk.
--Drop the shucked ears into a big pot of boiling salted water (the kind you cook pasta in) and leave them there for 2 minutes. Not 3 minutes, not 5 minutes and certainly not the outrageous 10 minutes people sometimes speak of. Overcooking fresh corn is a crime and the squishy result should be neither tolerated nor perpetrated. (I'm not even going to attempt to express my contempt for the use of microwaves in the cooking of fresh corn.)
--After the 2 minutes, remove the ears from the water with tongs, give one to everyone, and let them do their own buttering and salting. Eating with fingers is recommended, and plenty of napkins and dental floss will be required.
Las Vegas is the only place I've ever driven where people routinely drive under posted speed limits. This probably isn't the result of an excess of caution or a desire to save fuel by going slower - on the highways, people dart all over the road as speedily (and as blindly) as maniacal bats out of hell. But on main thoroughfare streets, nearly all of which have six roomy lanes as well as wide, convenient and separate left- and right-turn lanes just about anywhere you might think of wanting to turn, drivers tool along between 30 and 35 mph even though the speed limit is 45. Often, there is one such stately driver in each of the three lanes going your direction. It's like being behind the front phalanx in some sort of boring parade. You're just stuck.
I've been trying to figure out why anyone, faced with a stretch of open road, wouldn't promptly accelerate to the speed limit. (I don't wonder why the slowpokes can't just get themselves the hell into the right lane where they belong. It's plain when you look into their windows as you pass them that they are simply oblivious, sometimes because they're gabbing animatedly on cell phones, sometimes because they just have that look of a person who might as well be living alone in the world for all the consideration he/she shows for everyone else.)
I think the explanation may have something to do with how people react to wide open spaces depending on whether they've always had them or never had them. Those of us who spent most of our driving time on narrow, crowded Eastern or Midwestern streets where the traffic usually moves like molasses if it moves at all, can't help feeling a surge of joy, followed instantly by a surge of acceleration, whenever we see in front of us a stretch of open road. Is there anything more wonderful to a Chicago commuter, for example, than a sudden multi-car-length open space after an hour of crawling along on the Kennedy behind the same bumper? I don't think so.
(It used to take me hours to get bumper sticker slogans out of my head. Why is it so hard to stop reading those things over and over and over when they're emblazoned on something peeling off a bumper a few inches in front of your car? During my commuting years, I developed a whole theory about the mean-spirited "mine is better than yours" theme that characterizes so many bumper stickers, but that's a post for another day.)
Unlike drivers accustomed to very little in the way of opportunities to go 45 mph on city streets, people who learned to drive in the wide open west (or have assimilated it better, evidently, than I have) respond totally differently to the chance to go fast. They seem to feel no need whatsoever to take advantage of it.
I'm sitting outside a nearby coffee shop, having been routed by my cleaning people. (They're as unobtrusive as any I've ever employed, but the whine of vacuuming punctuated by the occasional alarming crash is almost always enough to drive me elsewhere.) It's a gorgeous breezy day and I'm sipping a luscious green tea and wild berry smoothie - slowly so as not to get brain freeze. My laptop battery is draining its juice at a much faster clip, so in a few minutes I'll have to go inside and find an electrical outlet.
I'm writing a book about a young woman struggling with disappointment. The section I've been working on today takes place in the summer in Chicago because I can't think of a better metaphor for disappointment than humidity. As I wrote about my character heading home from the Loop at the end of a long irritating day, I could feel the hot blasts of air like bus exhaust on the street and the close stickiness on the packed bus she takes. It's one of those allegedly air-conditioned CTA buses, so its windows are tightly closed. Everyone is limp, dispirited and, I imagine, dreaming about cool breezes, cold showers, icy drinks. I don't think my character wears pantyhose, but I'm remembering the precise physical feeling of being slimily encased in those horrible things on hot, humid summer days early in my career when wearing them at least occasionally was impossible to avoid.
Writing this segment put me so convincingly in summertime Chicago that I started to feel bad for all the people actually walking through that sticky air and packed into those stifling buses. Then it occurred to me with a jolt that the real Chicago is still in the throes of winter.
I had the kind of great day yesterday that one can only have in Las Vegas - certainly in February and maybe any time of the year. A Chicago friend of mine who is visiting family in San Diego decided to fly in to have lunch and spend the afternoon with me. She, like other Midwesterners, has been enduring an epic winter, so she was pretty happy to get to San Diego where, although rainy, it was 60 degrees. She was overjoyed to get here where it's 67 and brightly sunny.
I picked her up at the airport after her 1-hour flight over the very beautiful scenery between San Diego and Las Vegas. Getting in and out of McCarran Airport is unusually easy and convenient for a busy airport. Long-time locals will tell you it's terrible compared to how it once was, but they say that about the traffic too and, let me tell you, if they think the traffic here is a problem, they would think the traffic on the Kennedy in Chicago was other-worldly.
I had decided on lunch at the Bellagio because it's the most lovely, if not the most spectacular, of the Strip properties. ("Spectacular" is most definitely not a synonym for "lovely" where Las Vegas is concerned.) We had a fabulous lunch at a gorgeous restaurant overlooking the ridiculously named, but dazzling Lake Bellagio (yes, the one with the fountains and the music that you remember from the end of Ocean's Eleven). Eating in Las Vegas is a treat: there are countless superb restaurants. I've been eating here for three years now (and I have a lot of wonderful memories and, unfortunately, a few extra pounds to show for it), and I've barely scratched the surface. Dining in Chicago was great, too, but its restaurant scene lacks two of the best features of the restaurant scene out here. In Chicago, there was not a concentration of magnificent restaurants all located on one boulevard (with easy, free parking everywhere) within 20 minutes of my home, and nothing good is open 24/7. We don't crave great restaurant meals in the wee hours or on Easter very often, but it's a kick to know that, if we do, we're in business.
While my friend and I were waiting to be seated, we sat just outside the Bellagio and enjoyed the balmy weather, the mosaic tile floors, and each other's company. After lunch, we decided she couldn't spend an afternoon on the Strip without gambling a bit. At the Bellagio, high-falutin' establishment that it is, you can't play blackjack for a reasonable minimum bet without playing at a table with one of those monstrous auto-shufflers. I know suckers exist to be exploited, but come on - the game already favors the house without skewing the very mechanics of card delivery to further that advantage. So we retrieved the car from the valet and drove over to the Venetian, my favorite place to gamble on the Strip. There, we sat down with some very nice people and a dealer who remembered me (a phenomenon I'm not sure whether to be pleased or alarmed by), and I taught my friend to play blackjack. We only had half an hour to play before I needed to get her back to the airport and, obligingly, she got a couple blackjacks and drew to 21 a couple times in that short time. As we walked back to the car, she sounded just like a real player and I'm confident I've found (created?) a new gambling buddy.
Even at 4:45, the short drive to the airport was a breeze and so were my car trip back home and her flight back to San Diego. It was a perfect day. The weather here is undeniably a big draw, but it's only the tip of the enjoyment iceberg.
When I used to take commuter trains to and from work in Chicago, I typically encountered an ilk of businessmen whom I came to think of as "suits." The men wore suits (it was many years ago), but the label in my head was more about how they were than what they wore. They had an identical-ness of demeanor, look, haircut, briefcase brand, even diction and laughing style that made them instantly recognizable and more or less indistinguishable from one another. They always traveled in packs, and a domineering, "it's our world" attitude oozed from their every pore. As if the trains were private coaches rather than public transportation, they left their feet and sometimes their briefcases in the aisles. They imbibed drinks they'd bought in the station and brought on board as they made serious, self-important proclamations, then in progressively louder voices convivially exchanged business-jargon-rich bon mots. They never got out their monthly passes and put them in the little holders designed to streamline the conductor's job; instead, they dug in their pockets once the conductor was at hand, tapping his foot. And periodically they issued from their throats, like the mating calls of so many birds of a feather, those too loud and, to my ears, artificial sounding "heh-heh-hehs," less spontaneous bursts of laughter than declarations that seemed intended to convey to all and sundry both how delightful they found one another's company and their kinship as fellow masters of all they surveyed.
I've been in Chicago this week and I discovered that the suits have changed their clothes, but not their stripes. At lunch yesterday, I was temporarily distracted from my own companion when two men sat down at a nearby table. At first I thought they were identical twins, which was what caught my eye. Then I realized they were different sizes and didn't, physically at least, look like each other at all. One had a controlled profusion of curly hair, the other had straight hair and the distinct beginnings of male pattern baldness. One looked like a weekend sports warrior, the other was pasty and soft. But both were wearing blue shirts, rumpled light khaki pants, and those dark brown loafers that don't really go with light khaki pants. Both sported very expensive watches. Before they settled down to lunch with each other, first one, then the other pulled out the coolest new cell phone model and chatted on it briefly (while the waitress stood patiently by). Both failed to use their "inside voices." And periodically throughout their lunch, they boomed those trademark heh-heh-hehs, that unmistakable call of the suit.
I remember from my working days that things quieted down significantly on Fridays during the summer. Some people didn't come to work at all; most showed up, but moved at a leisurely pace and spent more time catching up than making forward progress. It was a good day for a long lunch or, if you were feeling virtuous, for cleaning up your office. Evidently, that trend has continued and accelerated, if such an active word may be used for such a languid phenomenon. I've noticed that email now slows to a crawl by late Thursday afternoon and on Fridays behaves pretty much like raindrops in the desert, which is to say it spatters occasionally and mostly ceases to occur. Interestingly, my website gets lots of hits on Friday afternoons - is that one of the things people are up to while they're not emailing?
In an unrelated summer observation, it turns out that 100 degrees in the desert feels cooler than 80 degrees in the midwest. Seems impossible, but we personally experienced it yesterday, having spent the morning in Chicago and the afternoon in Nevada. Maybe reasonable people can differ on this (perception being, after all, totally subjective), but during an admittedly gorgeous week in Chicago we retained at all times a certain dampness that promptly evaporated the minute we got off the plane in Las Vegas. And, as my resident Mr. Science tells me at least twice a week, evaporation is a cooling process.
It was cloudy here yesterday. That bright kind of cloudy that makes you reach for sunglasses if you get in the car even though there aren't shadows on the ground. The kind of cloudy that in the Midwest still counts as a nice day - no precipitation, not even grayness. But when you've gotten used to brilliant sunshine and a blue sky that is somehow both clear and deep (and the last time you saw clouds was nearly a month ago), yesterday's kind of cloudy puts you in mind of naps and casseroles and never upgrading what you threw on when you first got out of bed. I read a book cover to cover (On Beauty by Zadie Smith, which I'd been looking forward to because her first novel, White Teeth, was amazing and wonderful; this one, not so much), answered a couple emails, thought about and decided against researching some new stocks to trade, thought about and decided against ordering some stuff online, did a load of laundry, grazed the contents of the refrigerator, exchanged fewer than 250 desultory words with my husband, and watched Mermaids on HBO. Put me in mind of the Saturdays I sometimes had in Chicago on snowy December or rainy May days when the sky was dark and the dense clouds appeared to begin about 13 inches above your upstretched arm. Different clouds here, but the same reaction. It was great. Relaxing, refreshing, solitary, largely non-contributory - a nice retreat. And today? The sun is back and so am I.
Food innovations amaze me, not least because once they exist, it's impossible to understand what took so long. Sliced bread is the sine qua non, obviously, but there are lots of others - not even counting packaging innovations like ketchup in bottles with the opening at the bottom instead of the top or its ugly cousin, peanut butter and jelly in the same jar. Take salt and pepper potato chips, for instance. So simple, so obvious, such a natural extension of the salty snack repertoire - and so long in coming. I love to think about the mindset of the people who come up with these things. Can't you just see them? "Wait a minute, wait a minute...I've got it! Salt AND pepper!!"
My current favorite such innovation is a product called Zingers To Go, which is a cute box of little packets of green tea flavoring for 16.9 oz. bottles of water. I've always been a big drinker of water, but since I left Chicago - where the water is so delicious it's actually a drink all by itself - I've had to resort to bottled water, which is, frankly, really boring. By the time I get to the 5th or 6th bottle of the day, I'm just quenching thirst, not really enjoying the experience. Well, no longer. The little packets are incredible. You just dump their contents in the bottle, shake 'em up, and you have a light, flavorful drink. No calories, no carbonation, no messy decanting of large pitchers of more interesting water-based beverages into glasses for easy drinking. Antioxidants, too, whatever the hell those are. (Apparently, they're somehow healthy; at any rate, the box touts them excitedly.) My particular favorites are blueberry splash and wild berry chill (I think; I'm out of this one), but peach delight is nice, too. And the little packets are a cool shape - a cylindrical, tube sort of affair that puts me in mind of Pixie Stix and that high-rent sugar you sometimes see in tubes instead of packets. They even have quotations on them (most of them weak, but, still, nice idea).
Because I have two kids, a sister and lots of friends in wintry Midwestern locales, my attention still tends to be drawn to headlines like “Heavy Snow Pummels Wisconsin” and “Blizzard Socks Plains” (a particularly hilarious combination of words that deserves attention all on its own). I read these headlines and find myself thinking, “How can it still be winter back there? It’s lasting forever!” It takes a conscious act of will for me to remember that it’s only February. I know the date (those of you who continue to worry that I might transform into Howard Hughes can settle down), but my concept of February doesn’t include sunny skies and temperatures in the 60s and 70s. I’m sorry to sound like one of those good weather gloaters (and even sorrier to have turned into one), but my apparently entrenched Midwestern standards of time and climate tell me it's April or May, not February.
I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of time and the possibility that it can overlap itself. I’m enthralled by movies like Back to the Future, books like A Wrinkle in Time, and even articles on the space-time continuum (which I don’t really understand, but find fascinating nevertheless). I like the idea of time as a loop or a double helix or some other shape that's not a straight line. And the notion that the past and the future might exist at the same time as the present, and that each might have the potential to affect and be affected by the others, is very appealing to me.
Now I’m realizing that my own personal perception of time is also far more dependent on my surroundings than I would have guessed. Like everyone else, I know that time moves like a snail when I'm bored and like a bullet train when I'm captivated. But who knew that physical surroundings could make the passage of two months feel more like the passage of four or five? I've been busy so far this year and I'm not at all bored, but 2007 feels far older than two months.
Credibility is an interesting thing. I’ve given two presentations this week, both well received. At the first, my credibility came from my resume - people were receptive because my career accomplishments are recognizable and because they occurred in a context similar to the audience’s context (law school, then a law firm, then a company, and so on). The second presentation, though, was at one of the law firms where I actually worked. And I noticed a difference – not in the receptivity of the audience (both groups were great), but in the effect my words seemed to be having. There was something about my having actually worked at the firm that personalized what I was saying and prompted reactions that looked to me like epiphanies. I’m pretty sure I saw "Wait – she did that here?!" expressions on more than a few faces and I’m also pretty sure that the messages I was communicating had even more force as a result. It’s much harder to maintain negative thinking, fear and uncertainty in the face of someone who actually accomplished - at the same place and with many of the same people - a thing or two that you suspected might be impossible.
I was in Chicago right before the White Sox made it to the World Series the year before last, and I'm heading to Chicago next week, so I was feeling pretty good about the Bears' chances against the Saints today. Still, you can't be a Bears fan without knowing there's a good chance the horrible team instead of the great team will show up. What a gratifying game for a long-time Bears fan to watch! Solid play throughout, only one penalty, great defense, not-only-not-harmful-but-actually-decent offense - just a thing of beauty from start to finish, right down to the snowflakes, which reminded me of the wonderful playoff game I attended at Soldier Field in 1985 when the Bears shut out the Rams and snow started to fall in the 4th quarter. I hope it's once again the Bears vs. the Patriots in the Super Bowl and with the same result as in 1985-6, too. And I can't wait to see the Art Institute lions wearing their Bears helmets next week - makes it worth it to have to leave sunny Nevada for wintry Chicago. Go Bears!
What is it about fantastic eyebrow waxers? For at least 10 years, every time I've found a great one, she's pretty quickly left town or moved to a different salon (one located as inconveniently as possible for me) or just disappeared like a thief in the night. I call to make my supposed-to-be monthly appointment, which is inevitably more like an every-six-weeks-or-so appointment and I hear, "Oh, sorry, she's no longer with us." Infuriating. I hate having to explain what I want ("as thick and arched as possible, you know, normal") to someone new whose personal eyebrows are all too often a pencil-thin crime.
Anyway, the most recent vanishing esthetician was too good to lose (and smart and kind enough to let me know where she went). And Las Vegas isn't as big or as spread out as Chicago, so I decided to follow her to her new digs. Of course, people here think I'm crazy - who would drive 25 minutes each way for a 5-7 minute appointment? Well, I did just that today and discovered that it's ridiculous how little it takes to make me totally happy. The drive was a pleasure - all 80 mph on a brand new road with no traffic (I picked my time carefully), and simply incredible mountain vistas as I drove north. We had a few clouds today and reddish-brown desert mountains are even more spectacular when there are clouds to contrast the light in the ridges and dips. I was listening to a great mix CD (Ben Folds and assorted country - thank you, Annie). As I drove, I realized anew how much I love my new home in the Silver State.
I routinely drove much longer than 50 minutes round-trip for things in Chicago and the scenery never made my heart sing. Well, ok, coming down Lake Shore Drive with that gorgeous skyline spread out before me and the lake on my left was pretty sweet, but I'd lived there too long. I'd stopped reveling in the beauty. Mostly, I tried to contain my irritation at the traffic and to avoid both the potholes and my tendency to scream words I really shouldn't use. But Nevada is still new. The scenery, in addition to being amazing, is so different from what I spent my first 50 years looking at. Sunshine and mountains and novelty are apparently going to take longer than 2 years to fade into unnoticed background for me. I like that I'm constantly struck by my surroundings and I like seeing things from angles I don't see every day. Hard to believe that driving seriously out of my way for an errand would prompt a singing heart, but it did. And my brows look great, too.
