I learned a lot from debate, but one thing that’s been frustrating for me, especially in the last two years, is how useless certain skills seem to be. It turns out that people’s opinions are remarkable resistant to logical refutation. In other words, it’s entirely possible – common, really – to demonstrate irrefutable logical flaws in a person’s reasoning, and have that person shrug and go on believing just as they were before.

However, I remain hopeful, because I know that debate can change minds. That was one of the effects that it had on me, which I describe in this short piece:

I’d learned a bit about folks like Marcus Garvey and the Black Panthers in history class, but to me they represented failed ideas long consigned to the dustbin of history. I knew nothing about Afrocentrism as a contemporary ideology and was completely unprepared to refute the claims that busing stigmatized black schools, put an unfair burden on black students, and disrupted black communities and their culture.

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How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection? Coretta and I talked the matter over for several days and finally agreed that arms were no solution. We decided then to get rid of the one weapon we owned….

I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.

It’s not really so surprising that any random home in 1950s Alabama would have a gun in it, and I suppose my surprise is a good example of my failure to apply Bayesian reasoning to the question of whether MLK would have owned a gun.

King never says whether self-defense was a motive for acquiring a gun in the first place (the fact that he doesn’t feel the need to explain it is probably further evidence that was commonplace), and if you read this passage carefully, he isn’t saying that he felt safer after he got rid of the gun. To my reading anyway, he’s simply saying that, probably in no small part because of his religious beliefs, he chose not to concern himself with his personal safety, which is certainly a theme that shows up elsewhere in King’s writing and speeches.

In no small part because of my frustration with this country’s current political mood, I decided to turn to my “hero” for advice and inspiration by reading The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s worth noting here that this is not an autobiography in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it’s a narrative pieced together by a King scholar from King’s own words, in consultation with his family.

Nevertheless, it’s an excellent book that had approximately the inspirational and though-provoking effect that I hoped it would. This is the first in a series of blog posts reflecting on some of the passages that were most eye-opening for me.

This first is really something that struck me a few years ago when I visited the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, but it’s a point that King drives home as well. Although I learned about the Montgomery Bus Boycott in school, I didn’t fully appreciate what it entailed. Because taking the bus played approximatly no role in my suburban upbringing, I didn’t have the context to appreciate exactly what it meant for 40,000 people – most of them poor – to go more than a year without using the public bus system.

Organizing the boycott required, first, communicating, largely without the benefit of mass communication technology such as TV and radio, with tens of thousands of individuals, and secondly, finding ways for all of these people to get to work. The African-American community of Montgomery basically had to create its own mass communications and transit systems, from scratch, in just a few weeks, and they had to contend with active attempts by the city government to shut them down. The city, for instance, began enforcing a law requiring taxi drivers to charge a fare, complicating the boycotters ability to carpool. There were also attempts to spread false information about the boycott being cancelled. As King puts it, “The [Montgomery Improvement Association] had worked out in a few nights a transportation problem that the bus company had grappled with for many years.”

King goes on to relate an inspiring story:

[S]o profoundly had the spirit of the protest become a part of the people’s lives that sometimes they even preferred to walk when a ride was available. The act of walking, for many, had become of symbolic importance. Once a pool driver stopped beside an elderly woman who was trudging along with obvious difficulty.”

“Jump in, Grandmother,” he said. “You don’t need to walk.”

She waved him on. “I’m not walking for myself,” she explained. “I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.” And she continued toward home on foot.

It’s not so much that I thought these were all bad ideas, although I did – it’s that it didn’t seem to matter, to anyone, whether they were bad ideas. There was this grinding inevitability to it, like “Of course we’re going to invade someone,” “Of course we’re going to massively expand the powers of law enforcement and intelligence agencies,” “Of course we’re going to make a big show of attacking ‘terrorists'”. The question of whether or not these measures were likely to be effective for their stated purpose, though raised, always seemed beside the point. They were simply going to happen. Congress, famously, enacted the Patriot Act without ever really giving its members a chance to read it.

It was obvious to me and I think many people at the time that, once adopted, these measures wouldn’t just go away. When would we ever be able to declare victory in a war on terror? When has the government ever said, “OK, the need for us to have that authority has passed, here are your rights back”?

Now, 15 years later, there seems little danger that the attacks of September 11 will be forgotten. What I fear is being forgotten is what America and the world looked like on September 10, 2001. Warrantless eavesdropping, the Transportation Security Administration, Guantanamo Bay, and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have become the new normal, exactly as their critics predicted that they would. It feels like a “12 Monkeys” scenario, where we knew exactly what was going to happen but were powerless to stop it.

Even now, there’s no end in sight. With Obama has proving unable or unwilling, how can there be any hope that either of the current frontrunners for the presidency will step up where he did not? And after another eight years, well, the nail will really be in the coffin then.

All of that said, and as much as I deplore so much of what the Bush Administration did in the aftermath of September 11th, I did express some gratitude, yesterday, that at least Donald Trump wasn’t in charge. Here’s hoping we can steer clear of that catastrophe which, though far from inevitable, is still much too imminent for my comfort.

It started nicely, with a trip to visit some old friends. As much as Emily and I have enjoyed living in San Francisco, there are some downsides, most notably the fact that most of our family and friends are on the east coast.

Conveniently, we’re from the same suburb of Baltimore, so it’s easy enough to visit with both of our families during our time there. (Also conveniently, my mother lives about 20 minutes from Maryland Live!)

After a few weeks of that, though, it was time to see some friends who are a bit more far-flung. Two of my best friends from college are married and living in New York with a two-year old daughter. We were able to join them for some camping in the Adirondacks that they already had planned, which was a lot of fun.

From there, we drove to New Hampshire to see my best friend from high school and his family. Although we weren’t camping “with them” per se, their son now lives in what used to be a spare room, and rather than staying at a hotel, Emily and I camped because #nitcast. We were in a state park just across the river in Vermont, and it ended up being a fun spot for all of us to hang out.

The plan was for Emily to put me on a train to Montreal on September 1st and for her to drive back to Maryland. As I was buying my train ticket the night before, I realized…

Emily was a lifesaver here, finding a regional passport office in Vermont that just might be able to get me a new passport before the holiday weekend. The next day, she turned around and drove me three hours back in the direction we’d just come from, to St. Albans, on the Canadian border.

Thankfully, it was a beautiful morning, and despite the stressful situation, we were able to enjoy the drive. There are, after all, worse fates than taking an involuntary tour of the Vermont countryside in late summer.

The people at the passport office were fantastic, and amazingly, I had a new passport in my hands about three and a half hours after I gave them my paperwork. St. Albans was a nice little town in which to spend an afternoon while we waited.

I actually had to do something similar, though not quite so dramatic, when I got this passport ten years ago. I won a satellite to EPT Barcelona and then realized I didn’t have a passport and needed to get one in the next two weeks! Fortunately I lived in Boston at the time, so there was a regional passport office quite close to me where I could get one expedited.

Crossing the border is always a source of some anxiety for me, not because problems are likely, but just because they are possible and if for some reason some power tripping border agent decided to turn me back, it would really suck. We got one of the nicer agents I’ve dealt with, though, and she sent us through without any problems. She even let us keep our bear spray, which technically you are not allowed to bring into Canada, even though you can buy it in Canada.

Our next adventure began when we arrived at the Airbnb I’d booked for my first two nights in Montreal. Because I added those two nights, before the start of the WCOOP, after booking the rest of my stay, I wasn’t able to get them at the same apartment where I am now. And because I expected to be by myself, I went for a cheap place and didn’t do as much research as I would have if I’d known Emily would be with me.

But now Emily was with me, and of course because this was Montreal, the woman I was renting from was a smoker and the place reeked. Emily is allergic to smoke, so we had to find a hotel, and we weren’t able to use data on our phones in Canada, so we were huddled on the tiny back patio behind the apartment using the Wi-Fi there to find another place to sleep.

Thursday ended up being a long day, though we did eventually end up in a comfortable and not terribly expensive hotel by the airport. It wasn’t an exciting place to spend the next day, but it got the job done, and I was able to get some coaching in before WCOOP started, which was a priority for me.

On Saturday we were able to get in to the Airbnb where I am now, and from there everything went pretty smoothly. As much as I enjoy being in Montreal for COOPs, I always feel like I’m missing out, because there are so many good restaurants and fun-looking bars around that I don’t have the time or inclination to go to by myself. Well, we were able to get in four great meals at charming neighborhood bistros before Emily left town, and I even got to introduce her to my Montreal friend Luis!

She left Tuesday morning, and I’ve been focused on poker ever since, though I’m trying to go easy, as the series is only going to get more intense and I don’t want to wear myself out early. Yesterday I finished early after busting the heads up event in Round 2, so I got to hang out at one of those hip bars with Luis. The weather was perfect and we got a seat outdoors, which made for an awesome evening.

Poker-wise, things are off to a good but unspectacular start. I’ve cashed several events already, made two Day 2s, and even Zoom is going well. I’ve played a bunch of interesting hands that I’ll start posting as time permits.

That’s something my girlfriend repeats often; a quick googling attributes it to Jim Rohn, a “motivational speaker and self help guru”.  Human beings are social creatures, and we take a lot of our cues from the people around us. They affect our mood, the way we think, and even our beliefs, as much as we’d like to pretend that we make deliberate and reasoned decisions about what we hold to be right or true.

One of my biggest concerns about playing poker professionally, especially live poker, was that I would end up surrounding myself with deadbeats, degenerates, scammers, angle-shooters, hucksters, liars, thieves, and shallow, one-dimensional, money-obsessed automatons. That concern is not unfounded; there’s no shortage of such folks in the poker world. Of course there are plenty of them in other walks of life, as well, which makes it all the more important to be mindful about the company you keep.

For the first few years of my poker career, the Boston Debate League was a valuable counterbalance. Whereas the average online poker player seemed to me lazy, entitled, and self-absorbed, the average urban debate league student was eager, motivated, and hard-working. Most of them hadn’t had a lot of things come easily to them in life, but they had good attitudes anyway and were working to make their lives better.

Needless to say, their teachers were quite inspiring as well. Not everyone who teaches in troubled public schools is a saint, but by and large, the folks who go the extra mile to coach extra-curricular activities and otherwise enhance their students’ lives are. In my experience even school administrators, who tend to get a bad rap, were largely hard-working and well-intentioned people doing thankless, unglamorous work despite being essentially set up for failure. Easily nine out of every ten people I met through the BDL and other Urban Debate Leagues were uplifting and inspiring and people I was glad to have in my life.

When I left Boston in 2009, I left a lot of those influences behind, and although I had a lot of great experiences, it was a bit isolating at times.

Enter Nate Meyvis and the Thinking Poker Podcast. Even before I met him in person, I was drawn to Nate simply because of his posts on 2+2. I recognized a kindred spirit, and as it turned out, we did in fact have a lot in common. The podcast was a chance to connect not just with him but with lots of interesting and inspirational people in the poker world. I think we’ve proved that they’re out there, even if they don’t always get as much attention as the scumbags.

Nate and I are fond of saying that we started the podcast so that we’d have an excuse to talk to Tommy Angelo, a goal that we accomplished on our second episode, though we keep finding excuses to bring him back.

I think it’s also correct to say that we started the podcast in order to meet Carlos Welch, even though we didn’t know he existed at the time. I can’t think of any better example of how choosing to associate with the right people helps to keep you focused on the right things. If you don’t know who Carlos is, do yourself a favor and listen to the linked episode as well as our other interviews with him. You’ll be better for it for a lot of reasons, but you also might not be able to make too much sense of the rest of this post if you don’t.

He was never a debater, but Carlos embodies a lot of what I found admirable about the BDL students and teachers I worked with. And even though he ultimately left his teaching job to pursue poker full-time, that wasn’t about abandoning his ideals as much as about recognizing that the system simply wasn’t set up in a way that made realizing those ideals possible.

I talk a big game about the “nitcast” and all that, but the truth is that having a bit of money in the bank has made me soft. I still think I’m more careful with money than a lot of poker players or other people in my tax bracket, but I routinely spend money on stuff that I would have rolled my eyes at ten years ago. I also know that I’m lazy, in a lot of ways, about doing what’s easy in life rather than thinking rigorously about my priorities, and that I’m too influenced by social norms and what other people will think.

Carlos forces me to confront all of these things. It’s not that he’s pushy or outspoken about his life philosophy; in fact, part of his charm is that he’s not invested in changing anyone else. He’ll dispense opinions and advice if they’re solicited, but he never proselytizes. Just by living his very unique life, he worms his way into your brain and serves as a constant reminder and example.

It was with great pleasure that I got to bring Tommy Angelo and Carlos together on Monday. The result was electric, for me at least, but I think for all three of us.

We met for lunch near Tommy’s home in Oakland, and almost immediately Tommy began finding similarities to Carlos. It’s not just that they’ve both done more than their share of deep thinking and decided to prioritize happiness over money or “normality”. As he pointed out, they began their careers at the same time in life, and in some of the same ways (they both left a house, a more traditional job, and a woman behind). After lunch, Tommy drove us to Temescal Regional Park, where our conversation continued as we walked around a small lake.

Whenever I’m with either of those two, I find myself wishing I had a recorder running, because they’re both  so quotable. With the two of them spitting wisdom, I was torn between trying to remember gems to share later versus sitting back and enjoying the experience. I can’t do it justice now with half-remembered anecdotes, so you’ll just have to take my word that it was transcendent. It helped that the weather was perfect, roughly 70 degrees and sunny.

At some point, Carlos paused, grinned from ear to ear, and said, “Man, I just realized today is Monday. I used to hate Mondays.”

That sums it up better than I can. In some sense, it was nothing remarkable, just lunch and a short walk with some friends. But that’s the magic of surrounding yourself with the right people: they make you appreciate those simple moments.

A pile of blankets on the floor is the only sign that Carlos spent the last few days at my apartment. Of course he’s far too classy to carve anything into the wall or the hardwood floors, but scrawled across my brain, I can clearly read, “Carlos was here.”

Saturday, June 1st

“I’m paying for that tear gas! I buy it with my tax money,” a protestor screams in Turkish.

Another, wearing jeans and a scarf over his nose and mouth, picks up the superheated cylinder and hurls it back in the police’s direction.

I’m disoriented – coughing and crying. Emre runs into a Macdonald’s. They are taking people indiscriminately. I escape up the alley beside it.

We talk by cell phone five minutes later. He’s fine, I’m fine. I tell him to be safe; he will protest deep into the night.

It was ten in the morning when we first saw a huge mass of protestors marching up Istiklal Avenue, mostly young men age eighteen to twenty-four. An armoured car with mounted water cannon is in pursuit.

We take to a side street. Protestors scurry further up the alley, out of sight.

“Don’t run,” Emre warns.

Fleeing would make us a target for the riot police rounding the corner. They don’t fire gas at us, but canisters are launched further down Istiklal. Tourists are very close to the impact.

The protestors swarm from every tributary. The police, and the hose, open fire. Again we are relegated to fleeing, lying in wait.

The din seems unbroken for ten minutes. When it finally stops, we wander back into the street. Amateur photographers record while some pedestrians naively resume their activities. Shattered glass lines the street.

The water cannon and its riot police retinue decide to fall back; catching us between them and Taksim Square. We scurry down another empty backstreet to avoid confrontation, slinking behind a cash machine. When the armoured car passed, the hose aims in our direction, but we’re shielded.

That’s when police decide to fire gas twenty meters behind us, erasing our escape route. The side street opposite gets equal treatment.

Forced back onto Istiklal, we make for the next block. But it is too late; the burning overcomes me out of nowhere. It would be twenty-five minutes before the symptoms subside.

“There was a lull in the afternoon when police were mingling with us at McDonald’s,” Emre recounts.

Before nightfall, with surging momentum, the protestors retake Taksim. The riot police fall back. They are pursued into neighbouring Beşiktaş, which houses Prime Minister Erdogan’s Istanbul offices (the seat of government is in Ankara). The spontaneous demonstrators celebrated in the square all night.

But in Beşiktaş, things get ugly. Rocks are thrown. The gas is more intense, different even, taking a toll on Emre. One barrage leaves him blacking out, suffocating.

“It felt like I was dying. I thought that was going to be it. I accepted it.”

Riot police surround a mob over ten thousand strong, bottlenecking them between an Ottoman palace and an army base. This corridor is typically reserved for Beşiktaş’ fervent soccer fans to march to their stadium on game days. Tear gas is deployed relentlessly. These were the most militant protestors and in the following week the area would remain a hotbed for the ardent and the extreme.

“No one stampeded. I was surprised no one did something stupid. Everyone recognized the threat of people being trampled. We huddled together and moved as a group, despite the gas, to safety.”

Monday

Emre returns from work after nine. He slides our glass door closed.

“There is tear gas in the district.”

Across Istanbul in residential Beylikdüzü, a concert rehearses every night, the entire district banging pots and pans as loud as possible. Copycat protests across the country continue, those in Ankara reporting intense clashes between police and demonstrators.

A few weeks ago the government passed legislation placing a variety of limitations on alcohol. One clause bars Emre’s department from promoting the wines they purchase for retail, another restricts alcohol consumption within one hundred meters of any school or mosque. Erdogan labels the national drink not the inebriating raki, but rather ayran, a dull yogurt beverage.

Tuesday

There is tension in Taksim today.

A clearly overtired youth is violently incensed with another protestor. He is soothed and held back by his compatriots. In Gezi Park, some have been here five days, and often it smells like it. Starbucks has been supportively patient, their Taksim storefront occupied – converted into an outlet for first aid and medical supplies.

A yogi holds class for twenty, switching between Turkish and English instruction seamlessly. Spectators applaud each pose. Doctors and nurses make rounds in the park to frequent adulation. There are gay and lesbian activists here. As is the original kernel of environmentalists, whose defense of (and forced expulsion from) the park inspired the initial large-scale rioting on Friday.

Chants spread quickly, “this is just the beginning,” a common theme. A troop begins a song bouncing on their knees, low to the ground. Slowly they rise, pulsing. They finish jumping, hundreds of people skipping over an invisible rope.

An older woman wearing a hijab claps in unison while being interviewed through a translator by a western journalist. The photographer gets a group shot of her with her three friends. But he oversteps going for an individual close-up, which she refuses, happily waving her finger as he ineffectually sweet talks her in the wrong language.

An entrepreneur spreads out ‘anonymous’ masks and swimming goggles on a rug. Suits pass through without being harassed. Erdogan’s stewardship over a decade of fantastic economic progress made him thoroughly re-electable. But for all the protestors, Turkey does not have to accept a creeping Islamist agenda to sustain economic progress.

The improvised barricades at Taksim’s entrances are detritus and rubble. The government has the force to crush the occupation, but western reporters are here now, and all cameras point to Taksim. Erdogan names twitter “the worst menace to society.”

Thursday

I read Stephen Kinzer’s Crescent and Star on the commute. He interviewed Erdogan shortly after the Prime Minster won office almost exactly ten years ago.

“My political views have always been in a state of constant evolution,” he is quoted at the time.

“That’s true, but over ten years he’s lost touch,” Emre asserts.

Kinzer’s romanticism of Turkey is self-professed, but one piece of analysis is prescient. On Erdogan he writes, “He seemed to see himself, not his party or his government, as the force driving Turkey.”

Street musicians have returned with tear gas themes. In the Gezi Park camps, Tuesday’s uncertainty is absent, replaced by routine and productivity. With no winter coming people are getting organized. Young women collect garbage in pairs, plant flowers, and hand out food. During working hours the space is filled by students off for the summer, some as young as twelve.

In the park, though, there is no unity. Fringe political parties and organizations of all kinds hang flags from a nearby building overlooking the square. Each group has carved out a space for their organization, their petitions. They are united in their opposition to Erdogan’s moves against the founding secular vision of Turkey. But some present are committed to a politics without compromise. One banner states the only alternative to neoliberalism is socialism. Between the Turkish flags and the leftist banners, there is a lot of red.

The scene isn’t simply a menagerie of radical malcontents but Erdogan characterizes it as such. He has major influence over Turkish language media. CNN Turk, hamstrung the government, infamously showed “The Life of Penguins” during the clashes over the weekend.

The Turkish ambassador to Canada, when interviewed on TVO, tries to defend the proposition that Turkey has a “semi-free” media. The phrase “Turkish Spring” makes headlines globally. But this seems to overlook the fact that AKP, Erdogan’s party, was elected freely, one of three major parties earning parliamentary seats in 2011.

Erogan’s deputy and other government leaders have made reconciliatory statements regarding the magnitude of police force deployed. Gezi Park construction has halted. But Erdogan himself insists it will resume, that nothing can change that. It is unclear if this is a good cop, bad cop routine or a fissure that might indicate he is on his way out. Ten thousand protestors meet him at the airport returning from a diplomatic trip. Two protestors and one police officer have died this week. Hospitalizations and injuries number in the thousands.

Friday

Emre has his two month evaluation today – if all goes well his future in the wine procurement business will be secure. I agree to meet him on Istiklal for dinner, drinks, and protest. There is not much of the latter, the boulevard an archipelago of quality cafes and bars in a sea of commerce. We smoke banana shisha while bands in adjacent venues compete for patrons – dancing spills out into the street. An irresistible aroma drifts through the square as cooks grill kofte (meatballs) for sandwiches. Beer is consumed openly while red sky lanterns ascend overhead. Some set up stands with shot glasses and tequila as the night wears on. There is no sign of police, no central authority. Turks lock arms and dance in circles of twenty or more. Merriment pervades –the angst the Gezi Park occupiers should entertain deferred for at least one more night.

Addendum

Gareth is no longer in Istanbul. He tells me that on Tuesday night, Erdogan’s riot police moved in to Taksim Square.

Though long, hot, and largely devoid of human settlement, the drive through the desert was much less tedious than the plains we crossed east of the Rockies. It may seem empty and featureless at first, but there’s actually quite a lot of texture and character to the desert:

Much of the drive is actually through a Navajo reservation, and unable to find anywhere shady to pull off the road, we ended up eating lunch in the parking lot of a Burger King on the reservation. There was actually a small museum inside of the BK with memorabilia related to the Navajo Code Talkers who served in WWII, curated by the son of a Code Talker. We didn’t actually buy anything there, but there was a steady stream of tour buses discharging passengers into the shop, so it seemed like they were doing OK.

As we ate our lunch, a dog stood in an adjacent parking lot eating an ice cream off of the ground. He didn’t have a collar and his owner, if any, was nowhere in sight. He never did anything remotely aggressive, and yet his presence was disturbing to me and many of the other passers through (Emily thought he was cute and felt sorry for him). I guess I just saw no reason why he shouldn’t be feral, and I didn’t want to risk provoking him. He represented some sort of fundamental, unregulated wildness that I always feel hovering in the air when I’m in the desert. There was actually another stray dog wandering the parking lot of a Navajo gas station where we stopped an hour later.

We ate dinner at an – actually, it was the, as in the only – Indian (as in the continent of India) restaurant in Flagstaff. As we were finishing up our meal, the owner came over to ask how everything was. Then he asked where we were from, where we were going etc. He got very excited when I mentioned poker and asked me what my trick was for winning, and also whether I ever lost.

I told him of course, and my “trick” was not getting upset about losing. Plenty of people can play cards, I told him, but it’s much harder to continue playing your best when frustrating things happen.

“I understand completely,” he assured me. I could tell he was restraining himself from asking about the most I’d ever lost. Instead, he asked if I had a favorite Indian restaurant in Las Vegas.

“I can’t say I’ve been to many. I really like Indian food, I just haven’t done much in Vegas other than play poker. There was an Indian place at the Rio, where they hold the World Series of Poker, that was my favorite place to eat in that casino. But it closed last year.”

“Yes, Gaylord. I know it. It closed?”

“Seemed to be. It wasn’t open during the WSOP last year.”

“Yes, yes, I know the owner. He always eats here on his way to Las Vegas. I do not think Gaylord is closed.” That was an encouraging bit of news!

The next morning Emily dropped me off at Budget Rent-a-Car, where I caught the last day of a special where you could rent a car in Flagstaff and return it in Vegas for less than $20, a service that usually costs about $100. I guess they’re trying to get cars to Vegas for the summer. I said goodbye to her and took off on my own for the last leg of my journey.

The drive started off beautifully, along I-40 through the Kaibab National Forest. I grew up near the eastern terminus of I-40. To me it was always a neighborhood road, and not a very pleasant one at that. It felt strange to be driving through a beautiful forest on the other side of the continent on a road that I knew so well in such a different context.

Soon the road descended – Flagstaff sits at about 7000 feet above sea level – into the desert and got a lot less scenic. I’d been in such a hurry to escape the congestion of Flagstaff that I hadn’t gotten anything to eat for lunch, and now it was too late. Once again, I could see for miles, and there was no sign of human settlement in sight.

At last I passed a highway sign for “Picadilly Circus Pizza and Subs”. It didn’t seem like I was going to do any better than that, so I exited the highway. The place was closed, as was most of the town of Ash Fork, but I spotted some signs for a “Welcome Center and Route 66 Museum”. They pointed down a gravel road, which was suspicious, but the welcome center signs did look official. I was intrigued, and I needed to use the bathroom.

Mine wasn’t the only car in the parking lot, so that was a good sign. I opened the door to the building, and when the hostess turned to greet me, then man she’d been talking to took the opportunity to make for the door. That was a bad sign. Wary of being drawn into conversation with an attention-starved state employee (or worse, volunteer) I quickly inquired about the bathroom. When I emerged, she was seated at a desk and made no attempt to engage me, so I wandered the museum, which was weird and wonderful.

It wasn’t so much about Route 66 as it was about the town of Ash Fork during the “Route 66 era”, though I guess lying along that road probably is about all Ash Form ever had going for it. Anyway there were a bunch of artifacts from that era recreations, some in miniature and others life-sized and creepy. The largest such scene depicted several poker players around a table, but somehow the pictures I took of that disappeared. Here’s the one that survived:

I ended up getting lunch at a truck stop Subway. I timed it well, because just as I was leaving a busload of German tourists was forming a line out the door.

As I descended from Flagstaff and entered the Nevada desert, I watched the temperature outside steadily climb from a comfortable 80 degrees to a scorching 99 when I finally reached Las Vegas, though at least according to the car it thankfully never cracked triple digits.

My first destination in Las Vegas was the Budget Rent-a-Car at McCarran International Airport, where I returned the car from Flagstaff. Then I caught a cab to a neighborhood Enterprise location, where the rates were cheaper than either any airport car rental or the car I’d brought with me. There, I picked up the car that I’ll have for the next three weeks. Finally, I met the owner of the condo where I’d be staying and picked up the keys. I was “home”.

I decided, however, to skip the first few events and accompany Emily to Mesa Verde instead. There were two reasons for this. The first was that it wasn’t going to be cheap or easy to get a flight from anywhere near Durango. Second and more importantly, Mesa Verde is a really freaking cool place. I mean, it’s a 1000+ year-old “lost city” built into the walls of a canyon. Just speaking objectively, that has to be one of the coolest things there is. I’d been there once before, but it was about 20 years ago, and the main thing I remember about it is being upset that there was no television in the lodge.

To be fair, the official lodges in the national parks can be a disappointment to those who don’t know what to expect. Building a hotel inside of a park is no longer consistent with the National Park Service’s philosophy, but they do allow previously existing lodges to continue to operate because they are often part of the history of the place. That means that these hotels are by definition old, and what passed for luxury accommodations fifty to one hundred years ago hasn’t necessarily withstood the test of time. Of course the lodges still tend to be expensive, since unless you want to camp they are the only place to stay inside of the parks, so sometimes people come away thinking, “I paid $300/night for no air conditioning, a creaky room, and a toilet that doesn’t flush properly?”

The lodges are both beautiful and historic, but you don’t have to sleep in them to appreciate that. Our usual MO is to camp but hang out in the lobby of the lodges in the evenings. Once again working her magic, though, Emily found that the lodge at Mesa Verde was running a two-for-one special, and also that the campground was poorly reviewed, so we stayed there both nights that we were in Mesa Verde.

“Maryland?” asked a very friendly woman at front desk. “I don’t imagine you drove all the way out here?”

“We did, actually.”

“How long did that take you?”

“Ten days. We were only averaging four or five hours per day.”

“Wow, that’s great. And you were able to get off of work for that long?”

Which led to me explaining that I was actually headed out west for work, so to speak. Turns out she used to be a dealer but quit when her casino started pooling tips. As a friendly and attractive young woman, she was probably one of the biggest earners in the room, so it’s not inconceivable that a change like that could have resulted in something like a 50% reduction in hourly rate for her. Pretty brutal, especially knowing that that money is going to others who aren’t making as much of an effort to improve the players’ experience.

Having hit it off with her, we were able to get into our room well in advance of the check-in time, so we ate lunch on our tiny balcony and enjoyed the view. Then we went for our first tour, of a “neighborhood” called Cliff Palace. All of the coolest stuff in the park is accessible only via ranger-led tours (which cost a very reasonable $3/person) because people just can’t be trusted around these delicate, irreplaceable structures.

Getting to wander past and occasionally through these old buildings is awesome in the most literal sense of the word, so even though our guide was pretty lackluster, it was an amazing experience. Even when you know better, it’s hard to avoid thinking of people who lived hundreds of years ago as somehow less intelligent than yourself. Of course they were less technologically sophisticated, but that only makes the feats of engineering and resource management that they accomplished all the more impressive.

For me, the most memorable example of this came from a stick jammed into a crack above one of the caves in which a particularly large collection of structures has been built. These caves are formed by sandstone that eroded away over time, eventually causing a portion of the cliff face to tumble into the canyon below and leaving an inviting little alcove where as many as two hundred people may have lived. If that stick ever fell, it would mean that the sandstone overhead was loosening and it was time to abandon the dwelling.

In the evening, we drove to a picnic area not far from the lodge, set up the stove, and made dinner as the sun sunk lower in the sky.

Our guide for the next day’s tour, of an area called Long House, was somewhat better than the last. Her emphasis was on sustainability and what a small amount of water counted as a bonanza for the Ancestral Puebloans who lived at Mesa Verde. The erosion that created these caves was caused by seeping underground springs, so the caves not only made great shelter from the elements (and possibly from other people – opinions seem to be mixed on this point), they also provided easy access to fresh water, not an easy thing to come by in the arid region. By modern standards it would be a feeble amount of water for a single family, but it was enough not just to sustain but to be considered luxurious for dozens of people.

That was a morning tour, so we’d brought sandwiches to eat afterwards. I’d also brought the aeropress,which caused a bit of a stir in the picnic area. A rancher and his family at the next table over started talking about how good it smelled and ribbing me about not bringing enough for everyone.

It’s revealing of more of my own biases that I would have expected a rancher to see this as some sort of new-fangled, possibly effeminate doohicky and that instant coffee or maybe coffee boiled in an iron kettle was good enough for him. In fact the whole family seemed fascinated by the ingenuity of it, and he commented that I “would be the most popular man” on a cattle drive. So that put a pretty big smile on my face.

We took a hike to yet another set of ruins before heading back to the lodge. It’s worth mentioning that although the ruins are the primary reason for the park’s existence, it would be a beautiful place to visit even without them. The geology of the region (which is actually a cuesta and not a mesa, because it slopes on one side) makes for some amazing scenery.

Returning from our second picnic dinner in the park, we got to talking with a midwestern woman in the parking lot of  the lodge who commented on our Massachusetts license plate. She, too, had traveled a lot by car and really did seem to be interested in our whole story: where we were headed and why, why we chose to drive, the route that we took and the places we’d stopped, etc. The conversation was cut short by her friend reminding her that, “it [presumably the poorly reviewed restaurant at the lodge] closes at 9”, so she had to scurry.

The town of Pagosa Springs is named for the many natural hot springs in the area, and there is a park/spa that channels the water from those springs into something like twenty different baths of varying temperatures. Most range from 90 – 106 degrees Fahrenheit (I was surprised by how noticeable a gradation of two degrees was), but there is one in the 40s. The San Juan River runs through the area as well, and there are multiple places where you can dip yourself in the frigid mountain runoff if you want a contrast to the hot springs.

The self-styled spa wasn’t what we expected, though not necessarily in a bad way. For us out-of-towners, general admission for two plus a locker rental came to nearly $50. Because it’s billed as a “resort and spa” and because of the clientele at other springs we’ve been to, we were expecting a pretty froofy crowd. Thanks to the locals’ discount, though, there was actually a pretty strong working class vibe to the place. Several big families were camped out with coolers and picnic lunches, and there were kids everywhere. We found it fun, but I can imagine some people who were anticipating a relaxing atmosphere being disappointed.

Our skill at chatting with the locals must have been improving, because we got to talking with a rancher who was excited to hear that I was on my way to the World Series of Poker. He told me that  he occasionally played a $20 home game with “too much beer and reefer floating around for anyone to take it seriously.” Unfortunately I didn’t get his full life story, but he dropped some interesting tidbits, such as that he attended medical school in Las Vegas before somehow ending up a rancher.

When we moved on to a different bath, he wished me the best of luck and said he hoped I won a million dollars. “I’d settle for half that,” I told him amicably, but he looked genuinely disappointed in me when I said it.

The “spa” was outside, so we’d already gotten a lot of sun before we began our drive to Durango, which felt a lot longer and hotter than it probably would have otherwise.

Durango is a hub for skiing and mountain biking and also the departure point for a scenic train ride to historic Silverton. Consequently, the town caters heavily to the tastes of affluent vacationers who enjoy the outdoors; multiple cars in the parking lot of our hotel had $10,000 worth of bikes attached to their rooves or hitches. These were the people we were expecting to see at Pagosa Springs.

I tease, but the truth is that this demographic augurs well for us. We ate out – only our fourth time in nine days on the road – at an upscale burrito place  and filled our cooler with veggies and non-meat proteins at “Nature’s Oasis”. We were back amongst our people.

Lathrop State Park seemed to come out of nowhere, the sudden high desert terrain with attendant stunted tees and scrubbly brush a welcome relief from the tedium of the prairie. We lucked into one of the best sites in the park – presumably someone had reserved it for Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day, and there weren’t many people looking to stay just Friday night the way we were.

A few trees at the back of the campsite formed a little cove for our tent, so that although the campground was full we could pretend we were out alone in the wilderness. We set up camp and got to work on dinner while a pickup hauling perhaps the largest camping trailer I’ve ever seen provided the evening’s entertainment. They spent literally hours trying to maneuver their behemoth into a tent site – the electric sites intended for RVs were all taken.

There’s just something so absurd and presumptuous about expecting to carry an entire house with you on a weekend getaway. Through the windows of the trailer, we could see a sofa and a full kitchen with more cabinets than we’d had in our Boston apartment.

Of course as usual when I find myself judging someone else, I am really judging myself. Isn’t there also something presumptuous about driving a “small” SUV (which adjective is appropriate only in light of the even more absurdly sized vehicles on the market) three thousand miles across the country? We’re all constantly upping the ante on each other, such that what seems ridiculous at first slowly becomes the new normal, and something even bigger and more absurd comes along to push the limits again. If you can afford it, you can buy it, and you can burn all the fuel you want along the way.

Our other diversion was a nearly full moon, which only a somewhat cloudy sky prevented from illuminating the entire campground with, not exactly the light of day, but a sparkling, surreal blue-white glow. It made the mid-night walk to the bathroom, often one of the burdens of camping, into a mystical experience.

There’s nothing better than waking up to clear skies and pleasant temperature; making breakfast is a pleasure and packing is effortless. If you value your time, then camping, like driving, makes sense only if you enjoy the process, which is why we try to avoid camping in bad weather. For me, being outside in a beautiful place on a beautiful day really sucks the tedium out of daily chores.

Good thing we got an early start because Great Sand Dunes National Park was already slammed when we got there before noon. A line of cars twenty-deep waited to get into the park, and once inside, we could see a steady stream of tiny people marching like lemmings from the parking area out to the dunes, then up and back down the main sand dune.

Giving up on picnic areas proper, we found a quieter parking lot and ate there. Then walked down to the little creek running in front of the dunes. We each carried a liter of water and shared self-satisfied smiles as we watched exhausted, probably dehydrated people marching back to the parking lot.

We took our shoes and socks off and walked into the fast-moving but very shallow and broad water. It felt funny feeling the water rush over your feet so forcefully. That was enough for us. We walked a little ways through the water, then turned around, came back, and took our leave of the park.

It was a hot drive to Pagosa Springs, pleasantly interrupted by the San Juan Mountains with their sweeping views and occasional waterfalls.

Emily had worked her magic and, instead of a hotel, secured for us a one-night’s stay in a luxury home for something absurd like $60. Though a bit further out of town than a shitty motel going for $80/night, the place was awesome, with a full kitchen, porch, luxurious shower and tub, big sunny rooms, and a decent view. The most exciting part for me was that the kitchen included a wok, so I was able to make a proper stir fry instead of trying to cook all of the ingredients in multiple rounds in a little frying pan like I’d been doing at our camp sites.

The only thing that could have been cooler might have been camping at the Dunes, but there was no room at the campground there. The moon was full that night, and the dunes surely would have looked really cool. We were still able to sit out on the porch of the house and appreciate the setting sun and later the moonlight.

Emily’s jack-o-lantern is a tribute to our Europe trip:

And of course it wouldn’t be Halloween without “The R4v3n“. This is seriously a poker comedy masterpiece and you should go watch it immediately if you’ve never seen it (and actually even if you have).

We were pleasantly surprised. We had a great week in Paris, thanks to a couple of factors:

1. Beautiful weather. It was warm and sunny every day we were there, but apparently it had been raining steadily for something like a month prior, so everyone was in a good mood and enjoying the outdoors. The streets were bustling, the cafe terraces were packed, and the parks were vibrant.

2. We avoided most of the biggest tourist destinations. We still did a lot of touristy stuff, but it was mostly “second-tier” attractions, so less crowded. Instead of Le Louvre, we went to the Rodin Museum, the Orangerie, and the Centre Georges Pompidou. Instead of Notre Dame, we went inside St.-Chappelle.

3. I speak a bit of French. It’s beyond rusty, but I studied quite a bit of French in college and can still read and write reasonably well. My spoke French leaves a lot to be desired, but it was sufficient to make an effort and to conduct entire transactions in French if that was what the shopkeeper or waiter or whatever preferred.

4. By far the biggest factor was that several Parisians, blog readers with whom I’d never had so much as a Skype conversation, volunteered to show us around. One even invited us to stay at his apartment on Friday and Saturday nights!

Rodin Museum

We didn’t even actually enter the Rodin Museum proper, as it cost 9 euros but Yelp reviews indicated that the garden, at just 1 euro, was by far the highlight. The garden is huge, with a large pond and fountain, dozens of shady trees, and even reclining chaise lounges where we could get off our feet for a minutes and enjoy the weather and the stately garden. It was a great place to spend a sunny afternoon.

Pierre and Montmartre

Pierre was the first of our local guides. He lives in Montmartre, which as the home of Sacre Couer, Moulin Rouge, and locales from the film Amelie is a huge tourist draw. Pierre took us to those places, but he did it via some smaller streets and more tucked away places, and he told us a lot of everyday life in the area as well. Mostly I was just glad to meet someone even shaggier than myself.

Fabien

Fabien was our next host. He and I actually had plans to meet during an overnight layover I had last year at Charles de Gaulle airport, but it didn’t work out. He more than made up for that by opening the doors of his loft to us. He even moved onto his sofa so that Emily and I could sleep in the larger bed. Paris apartments aren’t large, but Fabien’s heart is, so we all got along great despite the close quarters!

Centre Georges Pompidou

On Pierre’s recommendation, we visited the largest contemporary art museum in Paris. Everything from the building to the curation to the art itself was top-notch. It housed not only contemporary art but a great collection of modern art. Our only regret was that we didn’t have more time to read all of the material provided, because the museum offered remarkably simple and clear explanations of various art movements of the last century and how one led to another.

Île de la Cité

Home to the Notre Dame cathedral, this island in the Seine is one of the biggest tourist draws in Paris. Getting into Notre Dame would have required queuing in the blazing sun for two hours, so we opted for the nearby Sainte-Chappelle, for which we waited only about 45 minutes. Nearly half of the stained glass windows in this immense cathedral were being renovated, but it was still an awe-inspiring site. We saw Notre Dame from the outside, which was good enough for me.

I’ve never been a big Hemingway fan, but I read A Moveable Feast before coming to Paris, and I quite enjoyed it. So I was eager to visit the English language bookstore whose owner used to lend him reading material. Thanks to this history, Shakespeare and Company is now mostly a tourist attraction, though they’ve done an admirable job of trying to remain a real bookstore. They ask visitors not to take pictures on the first floor, which is still a bookstore, though this is largely disregarded. They also host a lot of readings and other events for English-speaking expatriates.

Monumenta

Both Pierre and Fabien recommended this annual public art installation. It’s a great example of how art and culture infuse public life in Paris. Every year the government commissions a famous artist to create some sort of installation taking advantage of the vast interior of an abandoned palace. The annual Monumenta exhibition seems to draw a much wider swathe of the city’s population than I’d expect a similar event would in any large American city.

This year’s piece, by Daniel Buren, is a sort of forest of multi-colored translucent plastic “trees”. When the light from the palace’s enormous windows and skylights shines through them, it creates colorful patterns on the ground, so that wandering through the space feels whimsical and magical (but also hot, because there’s no air conditioning and you’re more or less standing under a giant magnifying glass).

Back on the Tourist Path

We did visit a few of the most famous tourist attractions in Paris. The Arc de Triomphe didn’t do a lot for me, but the Eiffel Tower was a lot cooler than I expected.

Voila, c’est tout! Merci a Pierre et Fabien pour leur hospitalite, c’etait une visite inoubliable!

Emily is a government geek. We visited many of the state capitols during our domestic travels, and we’ve been to the capitol cities (if not the capitol buildings themselves) in every European country we’ve visited except for Belgium, where we spent only a few days. So, she was eager to visit The Hague.

It turned out to be a lot neater than I expected. When you first get off of the train, it looks like nothing but high rises and office buildings, but you soon find that it has a bit more charm than that.

MC Escher Museum

This was a lot more than just a collection of the artist’s works, the most famous of which I was already familiar with from posters in the dorm rooms of college friends. In addition to the pieces themselves, the museum does an excellent job of telling Escher’s story: how he began experimenting with perspective, the mathematical foundations of his work, and the process by which the most famous pieces were created. On the top floor there were even a number of interactive exhibits where we could play around with perspective and optical illusions ourselves.

Binnenhof

The Binnenhof is the seat of government in the Netherlands. As with Muiderslot, we could enter only as part of a tour narrated in Dutch, so that’s what we did. It turned out that the rest of the tour was comprised of a busload of seniors. To their credit, they kept up with a brisker pace than I would have expected and navigated some narrow, winding staircases with impressive agility.

We saw first the Hall of Knights, which is the oldest building in the city and the place where the Queen still gives her most important speech each year. We had plenty of time to take pictures of its impressive interior, because our guide spent a good twenty minutes talking about it in Dutch to the rest of the group. She must have been entertaining, because she got a lot of laughs.

Then it was on to the chamber where the legislature meets. We were able to sit in on a few minutes of a session, which despite being in Dutch was no more boring than sitting in on a session of the US Congress. Unfortunately no pictures were allowed inside. We did, however, have a few minutes to take pictures of the courtyard and the exterior, which feature an interesting blend of architectures from the 13th century all the way up to the 20th.