more odes, and my upcoming homecoming

"The Chick is on my Disk": An Ode to Kiwis. I am pretty sure that in my adult life I never had the occasion to meet any Kiwis (New Zealanders) prior to coming here. I was missing out, I have since discovered. New Zealand has a strong presence in the Emmanuel MCR, belying a population size that is microscopic in global terms (4 million). The Kiwis I have gotten to know here are incredibly fun and easy-going people, and they have one of the world's most entertaining accents. Kiwis sound a lot like Australians, except that they tend to swap around some of the vowel sounds; i's sound like e's and e's sound like i's, for instance. The president of our MCR is a Kiwi-- I call him "Mr. Prizedint"-- as is one of my co-social-secretaries. During one of our committee meetings, my co-social-sec informed our prez that "the chick is on my disk," which of course meant that the check was on his desk. You can also watch the first minute of this to get another humorous illustration courtesy of Flight of the Conchords, the Kiwi comedy duo that did that silly French video I posted a while back.

"Remorseless": An Ode to Peter Nolan. I would be remiss if I did not pay tribute to one of my favorite Cambridge characters. Peter Nolan is a professor at Cambridge's business school, a leading expert on Chinese industry, and the main lecturer for a Development Studies course I am taking on big business, globalization, and developing countries. His course is open to several different MPhils, so his lectures usually pack in a couple hundred people, but he's so good that it's well worth the lack of personal interaction.

Standing in front of a lecture hall, Professor Nolan looks less like a business expert more like a beatnik poet in a blazer, with a wild mane of silver hair, a perpetual five-o-clock shadow and a deeply corrugated brow. As he lectures he paces back in forth across the front of the room, as if he's formulating his arguments as he goes along, and occasionally gazes off somewhere far away as he's making a broad point. His most endearing feature is his wealth of Nolanisms, including his tendency to call everything a "two-edged sword" and to regularly use emphatic adjectives such as "intense," "enormous," "fantastic," and my personal favorite, "remorseless." I didn't realize I become a leading Peter Nolan impressionist until one of his later lectures this term, when he referred to "this two-edged sword of capitalist globalization" and at least a half-dozen of my classmates looked at me with smirks on their faces.

Professor Nolan is one of two people in the Development Studies faculty whom I would call "big idea people": professors who, in addition to presenting the gamut of theories in their particular field, have their own grand theory that they subtly or not-so-subtly try to inculcate into their students. Professor Nolan's basic shtick is that, for better and for worse, most of the innovation and dynamism in the global business arena comes from competition among a small number of big oligopolistic firms in each industry. The "two-edged sword" metaphor is a favorite of his because he seems to believe that globalization is both really, really good and really, really bad, and that there's no contradiction in affirming both stances. I will probably come back to this subject with my own thoughts in a later episode.

Back to the States. I am heading back to Massachusetts for Christmas on Thursday, so I don't know if I'll have a chance to post again before then. I am already trying to de-program certain bits of British vocabulary that I have picked up here that will make me sound ridiculous at home: "queue" and "keen" and "trousers" to name a few. I am looking forward to it, for all of the usual reasons, and also because I find that returning to one's home country after some time away brings many revelations.

ode to mill road

When I have occasion to explain to somebody how far from the center of Cambridge I live, I usually give them this metaphor: if Cambridge is the solar system, and you take King's Chapel as the sun, I live a little bit past Saturn. There are plenty of people who live farther out in the sticks than I do, but I still have a pretty hefty commute to most places. That's the downside of my living situation.

The upside is that I get to live half a block off Mill Road, which is Cambridge at its most multicultural and bohemian. Mill Road is roughly two miles of nonstop restaurants, shops, bakeries, cafes, pubs, and small ethnic grocery stores of every variety. It has banks, hookah bars, a thrift store, churches, a mosque, and a cemetery. Here is a true story from Mill Road: after purchasing Filipino beer at the Chinese grocery, I walked past the Polish grocery to a French-themed, Moroccan-owned cafe, where a cute Lithuanian barista serves me Costa Rican coffee. It's the kind of place that would make Thomas Friedman pass out with excitement. A friend suggested I should send him this anecdote and perhaps it could be the basis of a new book. The World Is Mill Road?

My favorite Mill Road haunts include Carlos' Kebab King, where a garrulous Turk serves up delicious £3 falafel, and CB1, which claims to be the world's oldest internet cafe. (The name comes from the first three characters in the postal code that covers this part of Cambridge.) CB1 started mixing coffee and e-mail in 1995, and during the Mill Road Winter Fair this weekend they displayed some of their original computers in the window. The one on the far right is the original Apple Macintosh, which I remember from my elementary school days:


The above-mentioned Winter Fair was a great way for Mill Road to strut its stuff, and the chronically busy sidewalks were even more jammed with humanity than usual. During the fair, as I walked over the railroad bridge that roughly bisects Mill Road, I happened on a scene that captures the spirit of the neighborhood beautifully. There was a band of about 50 or so t-shirt clad people of all shapes, sizes, and ages playing drums and other percussive instruments. There was a small crowd gathered around, with hippies and church ladies and little kids boogeying to the music, and bubbles floating through the air. It sounds ridiculous as I type it out, but I loved it. Mr. Friedman: the Mill Road theory of world peace?

ode to formal hall

I have complained about bureaucracy and kvetched about overcommitment, but as Michaelmas Term '08 draws to a close I thought I'd focus on the positive and pay tribute to some of the things that make Cambridge special. The first installment of a multi-part series: an ode to formal hall.

Each and every one of Cambridge's 31 colleges have some version of formal hall, which is a regular, highly ritualized multi-course dinner. I've already described formal hall for you once, but at the time I didn't appreciate what a central feature of Cambridge life it is. No joke: I eat an extravagant, sumptuous, Thanksgiving-sized meal here at least once per week. Every college does it a little differently, and the character of formal hall is a little window into the soul of a college. Some colleges hold formal hall quite often, others quite rarely; some require academic gowns, others do not; some seat the fellows (i.e. teaching faculty) of the college at an elevated "high table," others are more egalitarian; some have their own port and a cheese course after dinner, other's don't; some have multiple elaborate graces in Latin, others have a pithy two-word blessing. Most colleges have pre-dinner drinks and post-dinner parties in other spaces on the college grounds.

I would guess that the majority of Cambridge grads go to formal hall at their own college with some regularity, and it's also possible to attend other college's formal halls either by getting a friend to bring you as a guest, or through "formal hall exchanges" between colleges. Some M.Phil students set the ambitious goal of dining at all 31 colleges during their year. I haven't adopted that goal for myself, but I have been to six so far, so I'm on track to hit up more than half of the total by the end of the year. Here's a photographic tour of five of them:

Newnham is one of three all-women's colleges at Cambridge, but they sure seem to import a lot of guys for formal hall. There was much fodder for stereotyping: the hall itself reminded me of a wedding cake, and after the final grace the head of the college delivered an unusual pep rally-style speech about what a great term it's been. I went with four of my Development Studies classmates, two of whom are members of Newnham.

Trinity is among the oldest, wealthiest, most prestigious, and most traditional of the Cambridge colleges. I ate my dinner with a large group of fellow Gates Scholars under a looming portrait of Amartya Sen. Sen is a former master of Trinity College and Nobel Prize-winning economist/philosopher whose thought is the basis for one of the courses I've been taking this term. Some of his most pathbreaking work has been in the area of famine, and the obvious irony did complicate my feelings about our opulent feast. I suspect that's just how Professor Sen would like it.

Churchill is a relative newcomer, founded in 1958. Named for the former prime minister and styled as England's MIT, Churchill has a large male majority, but only because of its emphasis on engineering and other high-tech fields. Churchill is also one of the more secular colleges. The pre-dinner grace is just two words: benedictus benedictat. ("May the blessed one give a blessing" or something like that.) After dinner, the students traditionally raise a rather sedate toast "to the Queen," followed by a rambunctious toast "TO SIR WINSTON!"

Peterhouse is the oldest college in Cambridge, and the fact that they've had eight centuries of practice doesn't mean the food was good-- in fact, it was pretty awful. The hall is entirely candle-lit and reminds one of a medieval castle, which I suppose is pretty close to the truth. As the fellows were filing out at the end of the meal -- a ritual obliging the students to stand in silence -- somebody knocked their long bench over, sending it tumbling to the stone floor with a tremendous thud. As soon as the door closed behind the last fellow, the hall erupted in repressed laughter.

And last but not least, the best college, Emmanuel! We have "MCR formals" every other Monday, which means that we pack the hall with grad students and have some kind of theme dinner and after-party. I really do feel that Emma has some of the best food around, and the formal dinners always conclude with a cheese course and a glass of Emmanuel College port. (Yep, someone bottles it just for the college.) As one of the new MCR social secretaries, I'm now the one responsible for coordinating the MCR formals. But that's a tale for another post.

my second expat thanksgiving

My second Thanksgiving outside of the U.S. of A. certainly lacked the ambassadorial zeal of my first. I was in the Philippines for Turkey Day '05, and I took it as an opportunity to share a bit of American culture with my coworkers. The biggest challenge, as some of my dear readers may recall, was finding a turkey. Filipinos don't have much use for the bird, so I had to travel to a supermarket in a well-heeled part of Manila where the Americans tend to congregate.

No such heroics this time, perhaps because Americans are a dime a dozen in Cambridge and my raison d'être here isn't primarily about bridging cultures (though I suppose that can be part of it too). I was thankful to be invited to a party that someone else was organizing, and thankful that for the first time in four years I was not the one responsible for the turkey. I shared Thanksgiving with about fifteen Americans and a couple of curious non-Americans. We were mostly Williams and Harvard kids, and we space in which we convened is one those delectable Cambridge oddities: John Harvard's room. The founding benefactor of Harvard University was an Emma guy, and each year some lucky Harvard grad gets chosen through an elaborate selection process to live in what was allegedly his room.* Actually it's more like a suite, with a large wood-paneled living room, a kitchenette, a bedroom, and a guest room. The only drawback is that there's no bathroom... in fact, you have to go down the stairs and across the courtyard to get to one, just like in the good old days. But the big perk of being the "Harvard Scholar" is getting an entertaining budget for the year, and ours has been particularly good about spending hers on entertaining.

I volunteered to bring mashed sweet potatoes with maple syrup, and I committed a small act of blasphemy by purchasing Canadian maple syrup, which was all that was available at Tesco. (I wonder if Big Maple has some kind of protectionist racket going....) I tried to atone by buying a bottle of California red to bring for the festivities. The food was great and the conversation lively, though somehow it felt a lot less like Thanksgiving than any other Thanksgiving I've had... including the one in Southeast Asia. We put a little bit of a Cambridge twist on it by having a glass of port with our pie at the end of the night.

While we're on the subject of thanks, I'd like to thank all of you for reading! While I like to tell myself that this blog would still be worth doing even if nobody was really reading it-- since in that case it would basically function as a journal, which isn't a bad thing to keep-- getting the occasional posted comment or mention of the blog in an e-mail or phone conversation helps me to stay motivated. Hope you all had a lovely holiday!

*There's reason to believe the provenance of the Harvard room, like so many other cool stories around here, is bunk. Like the story about the undergrad who demanded "cakes and ale" from an astonished proctor during an exam and cited an obscure, 400-year-old, never-revised university statute saying that gentlemen who sat for exams in excess of three hours were entitled to request cakes and ale. I wish that one were true!

mail from bill gates sr.

We're getting into that gnarly part of the term these days, which is why the quantity and quality of my postings have been going downhill lately. Apologies for that. It seems like everyone here is in treading-water mode for the last couple weeks of lectures, and then there will be lots of essay writing before we all disperse for Christmas.

Anyway, for now I thought I'd share a remarkable piece of mail that arrived in my "pidge" (a.k.a. pigeon hole, i.e. my mail slot) last week. It was a very personalized letter from Bill Gates Sr., the father of the philanthropist and Microsoft founder, in response to a thank-you note that I sent in October. I thought it would be in good form to thank the guy who is paying my bills this year. I wrote the letter with Bill Gates fils in mind, though in retrospect it probably could have read equally well as a letter to Bill Gates père, and in some ways it's more appropriate that way. The elder Gates is famous mostly for being the father of his son, but he was a high-powered lawyer and pillar of the Seattle community before retiring to help run the Gates Foundation.



As mentioned in the letter, Bill Gates Sr. does visit Cambridge every spring, and as an officer of the Scholars Council I'll probably be in a good position to interact with him. Everything I've heard from the other scholars suggests that he's just a terrific man. Bill Gates Jr. is rumored to be planning a visit to Cambridge in 2010 for the tenth anniversary of the scholarship, which would mark his second visit here since the program's founding. It's also rumored that former scholars (I'll be one of those by then) will get subsidized tickets to fly back to Cambridge for the festivities. But then again, it could just be one of those legends that tend to percolate around here...

more election updates

Alaska voters, in the end, opt for accountability. Good on 'em, or should I say us. My personal contact with Mayor Begich was pretty limited, since most of our advocacy was on federal and state-level policy, but I count myself as an admirer and I think he will do a great job.

And on the less-important elections front, I ended up winning the development studies student rep position after all, in spite of my efforts not to advance my own candidacy. The other new rep is a Brit and is also 26 years old, which I think puts us a couple years past the median age of the group. (Probably not the mean, though-- there are a few 30-somethings in the mix.) In any event, I was sorry not to see any developing country representation, but I'm flattered by the election and will give it my best shot. So my trifecta of positions is complete, and one of them is already giving me serious headaches. As my dad pointed out, I've had many models of professional and civic overcommitment, including Dad himself and my former boss from Alaska, so I'm proud to carry on the tradition.

mental health break (7th-grade knowledge of French helpful)

If only my trip to France went like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5hrUGFhsXo

My favorite line is "bonjour, mon petit bureau de change."

quelques dépêches de Paris

I just got back from a trip to Paris, and I really should be doing work... but writing about Paris just seems so much more fun than writing about the development of the state in post-colonial countries. So here we go:

General impressions. We had a crew of six Gates Scholars, three guys and three ladies. I endured repeated insults as the "old man" of the group throughout the weekend, mostly because Europe has decided that 26 is the age when one no longer merits free museum admissions, discounted train fares, etc. We took the high-speed train that goes through the Chunnel and connects London and Paris in less than three hours. It's all so easy it's a little hard to believe that you've gone to another country. Physically, Paris reminds me of nowhere as much as Washington, DC, which is perhaps not surprising because the latter was designed by a Frenchman. Both cities feature wide boulevards, with diagonal streets criscrossing the grid, and long parks that afford clear lines of sight between the major landmarks.

Bad art at Versailles. We spent the better part of one day at the palace of Versailles, the absurdly opulent home of a succession of roman-numeraled Kings named Louis. Versailles is best known for the Galeries Des Glaces, the mirror-lined hall that hosted the signing of the peace treaty that ended World War I. Being a French monarch entailed living in some pretty sweet apartments but also giving up any vestiges of personal privacy. Even royal births and deaths were witnessed by crowds of spectators filing through, to ensure the legitimacy of the line. Versailles is currently hosting an exhibition of the works of the modern artist Jeff Koons, whose work consists mainly of kitschy sculptures. So as we walked through the royal apartments we were treated to such masterpieces as a statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles the monkey, giant balloon animals, and a bust of the artist himself. I love modern art and I'm all for subversion in art, and I might have enjoyed some of his stuff in a museum, but I found the exhibition to be pretty irritating, especially given the otherwise very earnest curation at Versailles. I asked our tour guide about the exhibit and she briefly rolled her eyes, so I was glad to know I wasn't the only one who felt that way. This is my favorite picture of the weekend:

Other staples of Parisian tourism. OK, I really should do some work, so I'll let the pictures do most of the talking from here on out. We paid an evening visit to the Louvre, which stays open late two nights per week and offers steeply discounted admission (and just as importantly, smaller crowds). Here's me and Mona, who is remarkably small in person and has something that looks like an altar and a communion rail around her:

On our last morning we went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, which dominates the city much more than I had imagined. It has to be one of the most recognizable structures in the world, but I found that the closer you get to it, the more alien it appears.

We finished with a walk down the Champs-Elysees and the perfect conclusion, a stop into Notre Dame:

from the less-important elections desk

Elections are in the air in Cambridge, and it's not just because of the latest round of regime change in the U.S. (and New Zealand!) After a not-so-suspenseful election, I am the new treasurer of the Gates Scholars Council, which organizes all of the social events, speaker series, publications, and other services provided to and by Gates scholars. I won this post through a Soviet-style election in which I was the only candidate, which was true of about half the Council positions. However, I did win convincingly over RON ("re-open nominations"), who is an option for every office. In my case, RON went down 95 to 1. RON got at least one vote in every race, leading me to believe that either (A) each of the new Council members has at least one archenemy or (B) somebody is making a statement for electoral competition.

After another, only-slightly-more-suspenseful election, I am also one of three Social Secretaries for the Emmanuel College MCR this year. I say only slightly more suspenseful because although there were four candidates for the three slots, one of them chose not to submit a "manifesto" (Cambridgespeak for a candidate's statement), which is tantamount to running for president and not campaigning. The planks of my platform included an Emma community service day, an Iron Chef-style cooking contest between graduate houses, and more opportunities to interact with Master Richard Thomas James Wilson of Dinton and other college muckymucks.

A third election is underway for two student reps to the Development Studies committee. I'm not really interested in this one and did not nominate myself, but someone put my name in. There are ten candidates, and unfortunately only one of the ten represents a developing country. The rest are mostly from the North America, the UK, and the Netherlands. Not to be ungrateful to whatever kind soul(s) nominated me, but I did not vote for myself and am hoping that I will lose. As an aside, I have a colorful tradition of occasionally not voting for myself... there is one particularly embarrassing story from my childhood that my mom likes to bring out if she feels that some embarrassment is in order.

In other news: I'm going to Paris! I'm taking the high-speed train to the City of Lights tomorrow night with a small posse of Gates people. Updates on our très excellente adventure to come soon.

scoundrels!

i. Guy Fawkes -- The night after the election was Guy Fawkes night in England. If you've seen V for Vendetta, you may recall that the character "V" wore a mask modeled after Guy Fawkes, and you may also recall a little rhyme that starts out like this: "Remember, remember, the fifth of November / The Gunpowder Treason and plot / I can think of no reason the Gunpowder Treason / Should ever be forgot."

The objective of the plot in question was to assassinate King James I and blow up the Houses of Parliament in London, in response to the anti-Catholism of the Crown and the government. It failed, and the conspirators were executed. Fawkes was not the ringleader of this band of 17th-century Catholic terrorists, but he was the one caught with the explosives, so it is his name that has gone down in history.

Naturally, Fawkes is remembered here as the villain, not the hero, of 5 November. Today Guy Fawkes night is marked with fireworks, bonfires, and burning effigies of Fawkes. By now the night has lost most of its original political content and is basically an excuse for pyrotechnics and merrymaking. I attended the festivities in Cambridge, still in an exhausted stupor from the election all-nighter. It's a pretty big production here, with roughly 20,000 people crammed onto Midsummer Common and all manner of carnival rides, games, and booths. When you're so engrossed in university life, it's easy to forget that people actually live in Cambridge, so I was glad to share in a local and national tradition.

ii. Oliver Cromwell -- Craving some solitude on Saturday afternoon, I hopped a train for a short trip to Ely (EE-lee), a small town two stops from Cambridge on the northbound line. (The intermediate stop is a conspicuously landlocked placed called Waterbeach.) Ely is famous primarily for its magnificent cathedral, which I did visit, and slightly less famous for being the home of Oliver Cromwell when he launched his political career. If you're not familiar with Cromwell -- and I believe most Americans are not -- he's thought to be part of the reason why the Founders of the U.S. initially avoided a strong executive under the Articles of Confederation.

A half-century after the Gunpowder Plot, Cromwell and his associates actually did succeed in killing the King--this time for being too Catholic. He was a member of Parliament and a devout Puritan who thought King Charles I was introducing a little too much pope-ish stuff into the liturgy and suppressing religious liberty. Cromwell became a leader of Parliament's army during the English Civil War and was one of the signers of Charles' death warrant. The country had a brief period of commonwealth government under an ineffectual Parliament, which Cromwell eventually dissolved, making himself "Lord Protector." He wielded near-absolute power for five years until his death. His son Richard took over before a brief spell before England reverted to the old monarchy under Charles II.

I visited Cromwell's house in Ely, which is now a museum. In various rooms you can try on period dress (with helmets!), vote on whether Cromwell was a hero or a villain (roughly 50/50 according to monthly tallies), and view a bizarre replica of Cromwell on his deathbed. Probably the most memorable part of the visit was a book I saw in the gift shop, called Oliver Cromwell's Warts. The double-entendre refers to both the Lord Protector's moral failings and the actual warts that dotted his face. The book jacket provides a wealth of gee-whiz facts about Cromwell, including a claim that he "once attended a party covered in poo." I would love to know that story, but "poo" was not listed in the book's index, and I didn't have time to look the hard way.

One gee-whiz fact about Cromwell that I can verify is the undignified fate of his earthy remains. Since he died before the reinstated monarchy could bring him to justice, Charles II had him exhumed and then posthumously hanged and beheaded. His head eventually came back to Cambridge, his alma mater, where it was reinterred at Sidney Sussex College. This plaque commemorates the occasion. It is said that only the Master of Sidney Sussex and a couple other college bigwigs know the actual location of the head, but I suspect that's a bit of Cambridge lore -- of which there are many -- that might not withstand scrutiny.

the election from over here

I haven't said much about the presidential election in this blog, but it has obviously been on my mind every single day I have spent here. The level of awareness and knowledgability about the election among my non-American friends and classmates has been amazing, and I have been startled by how much everyone feels is at stake for themselves and their countries. They have watched the Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin SNL clips, editorialized in student newspapers, and followed this fall's debates. Even before I left the States, I knew that the outcome of this election would have an enormous impact on how non-Americans would react to me. The last six weeks have proven that I was not only right, but underestimated the impact.

Yesterday and today, I have been getting high fives and congratulations everywhere I have gone. For the first time in my adult life, there's some serious cachet in being an American in Europe. And I don't think the enthusiasm is excessive. People here are realistic, as I believe I am, about what Obama's election means. Nobody believes he is a messiah, or that he won't make mistakes or always take the course that will make him popular abroad. America's image has gotten so bad under the Bush administration that merely the repudiation of the last eight years is itself a huge relief. There's a recognition, voiced by Americans and non-Americans alike, that President Obama will have very little to work with given the poor economy, the debt, and our military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. But above all, I think people are just impressed with who Obama is. I don't think the phrase "American dream" will be used in an ironic way here anytime soon.

I spent election day in a weird state, full of nervous energy but mentally in a fog. It was the first time I can remember since high school when I worked out twice in the same day, with a swim in the morning and a run in the afternoon. Most polls on the East coast didn't close until 1 a.m. GMT, but luckily I had some evening entertainment to keep me distracted: a James Bond "Casino Royale"-themed formal dinner at Christ's College, to which Emma's MCR was given an allotment of tickets. After that it was back home to change out of my tux and then to the college, where I was hosting the election night party in the MCR.

I stayed up until 6 a.m. with a small but hardy band of Emma folks who wanted to hold out for the speeches. I thought John McCain was incredibly gracious. He could have dodged the momentousness of the election, but he embraced it. Unfortunately, his supporters were ugly, and I think it bodes ill for the Republicans if this is what's left of their rank-and-file. I also thought President-elect Obama's speech was great. I expected I might cry, and I did tear up at one point... I'm a little embarassed to admit it, but it was when he told his daughters that they could have a puppy in the White House. I guess it was a combination of the overwhelming significance of our first black president, my sense that the "moral values" that I subscribe to finally carried the day, and a tender moment that tapped into my own ambitions for fatherhood.

The news wasn't all good-- the loss for marriage equality in California and the congressional races in Alaska put a damper on my glee. But on the most important battle, for the first time since I gained the right to vote, I feel like the good guys won. I am proud and thankful to be an American every day, but today there's just a little bit of extra relish.

quintessential cambridge experience #2: punting on the cam

Punting has to be one of the most preposterous modes of transport ever invented. Among ways of getting from Point A to Point B that are faster and easier than punting are: walking, swimming, somersaulting, and doing that inchworm dance. Punting, one might say, is the ultimate celebration of British inefficiency.

And yet we do it and love it; it's THE activity for tourists in Cambridge. So what is punting, you ask? It consists of guiding a big, awkward wooden boat (a punt) along the river by pushing an enormous pole into the earth at the bottom of the river. It's only possible on an tiny river like the Cam, which can't be more than 20 meters across at its widest and is so calm that standing on the shore it can be hard to tell which way it's flowing. The mighty Mississip it ain't.

Last Sunday I went punting for the first time with Shannon and Christoph from my MCR and Christoph's girlfriend Miriam. I led off as "punter," and it only took a few minutes for me to tell that I was way out of my element. The punter stands precariously on the stern of the boat and tries desperately to maintain forward motion, not crash into the bank, and not fall in the water, while the passengers laugh at his/her misfortune. I did have one scary moment where the pole got momentarily stuck in the mud at the bottom of the Cam and I almost stayed behind with it-- there was a gasp from the rest of the group as I crouched down to steady myself.

Things got better when I had one crucial realization: you need to treat the pole primarily as a rudder, not as a motor. Pushing off the bottom of the riverbed is all well and good and easy enough, but the placement of the pole in between pushes makes the difference between smooth sailing and drunken zigzags. We punted along a famous stretch known as "the backs," a collection of neatly manicured lawns, ancient colleges and chapels, and numerous bridges. Everyone took a turn at the helm, and I'm sorry to report that the two Germans far outshone the two Americans in the punting department. A few pictures of the experience:


Along the Backs.


Christoph and Miriam with the "bridge of sighs."


Shannon and me with King's Chapel, which is Cambridge's most famous landmark.

matriculation

I have a backlog of quintissentially Cantabrigian experiences to report to you on, so I begin tonight with Matriculation. It's one of those wonderfully tradition-encrusted institutions of Cambridge life, and it marks the official beginning of membership in one's College. I've never read any Harry Potter books, but there were lots of elements of the experience that made me think of Harry Potter. (Quick review: Cambridge has 31 colleges, and each grad student is affiliated with one of them, more for housing and social life than for academics. Mine is Emmanuel College.)

The ceremony began with a group photo in the front court of the College, in front of the chapel. We were required to look respectable--dark suits for gents--and wear our academic gowns, which are a must-have unless you're at one of those "modern" and "progressive" colleges. Before the big group photo, I organized a smaller photo of the eight new Williams people at Emma this year. Unfortunately, the chapel is totally washed out in the late afternoon sun, but you can at least see the silly robes they make us wear:

Observant family members may notice that I'm wearing the "Nana tie," which just happens to be the Emmanuel College colors, pink and blue!

So, now the Harry Potter-esque part. The kernel of the Matriculation ceremony is signing your name in a big book as the Master of the College and the Graduate Tutor look on. Before they started calling us upstairs, we received very specific instructions: we were to write our full names, undergraduate institutions, and places of birth. For those born in the British Isles, that meant the "historic county" of birth--which led to puzzlement for those born in London, which has apparently devoured a lot of historic counties around it. Those born in the U.S., Canada, and Australia wrote our birth states or provinces, and everyone else was supposed to just write the country. A Russian student asked if that meant the country as it now exists, or as it existed at the time of birth, and I'm not sure if she got a satisfactory answer.

The head porter called us upstairs in alphabetical groups at five-minute intervals, whereupon we were ushered into an opulently furnished room with lots of portraits of dead Emmanuel fellows on the walls. We signed a bunch of papers that said we would uphold the values of Cambridge, pay "due respect and obedience" to the vice-chancellor and the university, and all that jazz. The Master, Graduate Tutor, and the book were in the next room at the head of a very long table, and the dean of the college called us in there one by one.

Finally it was my turn, and as I started writing in the book, the Master asked how many names I had. I informed him that, regretfully, I only have three, but it was my understanding that his full name is rather impressive. (His wikipedia page identifies him as "Richard Thomas James Wilson, Baron Wilson of Dinton GCB.") We chatted briefly about how I was getting along, and he congratulated me and said, "you are now a member of the College, and will be for the rest of your life." For some reason, I thought of that kid from The Sandlot going "FOR-EV-ER. FOR-EV-ER."

Naturally, when everyone has signed the book, a lavish evening of drinking and eating ensued. The end.

stephen hawking: "totally overrated"

I enjoyed this bit of cheeky student humour from Varsity, one of the Cambridge University newspapers. The story is about the announcement of a gigantic bronze sculpture that is being planned to honor Stephen Hawking, the famous Cambridge theoretical physicist who has been almost completely paralyzed by ALS for decades:

The sculpture has sparked debate amongst students. One finds Hawking
underserving of such a tribute: "He seems totally overrated when compared
to, say, Newton." However, a graduate student commented that "he deserves
much more than a paltry 10ft statue."

I passed by Professor Hawking on the street this weekend, which I suspect is the closest I will ever get to having contact with him. As you can imagine, he's one of Cambridge's most famous characters, and he seems to inhabit an intellectual universe that the rest of us can only guess about. You can read his account of his astonishing life with ALS here.

in search of "development"

So you've probably noticed that my blogging has been quite sporadic, and the reason is one that I predicted when I started: my life here makes lousy blogging material. An illustration: last night somebody asked me what I did all week, and I found myself totally at a loss for words. I think I said something about lots of reading and then changed the subject. From time to time there will be lots of scintillating travel blog material as I trot off elsewhere in the UK and Europe, and to Africa (more on that later...). In the meantime, I think the only way for me to keep up my blogging mojo is to share a little bit about what I'm reading, writing, and thinking about at Cambridge. I will try to keep it interesting, and if anyone out there feels inspired to respond or question, please fire away.

First, a little bit of background. My program is an M.Phil in Development Studies, and if you don't know what "Development Studies" means, you're in good company-- I encounter a lot of puzzlement from fellow Cambridge students, usually those in the sciences or humanities. The type of "Development" in question is not the development of children, nor is it much concerned with nonprofit fundraising. In this case, "Development" refers to the project of raising standards of living in the non-industrialized countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The development project really began in the churn of world events after the Great Depression and World War II. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were established to provide funds for reconstruction and to prevent another collapse in the worldwide financial system, respectively. (The extent to which both institutions have since drifted from their original missions is a fascinating topic in itself.) The success of the Marshall Plan, the U.S.-led and -financed effort to rebuild Europe after the war, made the idea that rich countries could help poor countries grow their economies seem attractive and realistic. In his 1949 inaugural address, President Harry Truman called for "a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas." As usual, there was a large dose of enlightened self-interest mixed in with the benevolence: aid would become a potent Cold War containment strategy as the U.S. wooed developing countries away from the Soviet sphere of influence.

Sixty years later, it's amazing how many of the fundamental issues surrounding development and international economics remain unresolved. Our current international financial crisis has loomed in the background, and sometimes taken center stage, in most of the lectures I have attended so far. John Maynard Keynes (the economist I mentioned in last week's tea-drinking episode, and one of the fathers of the above-mentioned World Bank and IMF) wrote a lot about the causes of the Great Depression, and substituting a few words you could make him sound like he was writing about what's going on right now. Karl Marx is enjoying a bit of a renaissance as well. I'm happy to be in grad school right now for job market reasons, but it also seems like I've come here at the perfect time to revisit all of these great political-economic-philosophical debates.

I should also mentioned another, more contemporary debate that has attracted my keen interest--to the extent that I suspect whatever conclusions I arrive at for myself will heavily influence what I do with my working life. In this corner we have Jeffrey Sachs: economist, UN advisor, friend of Bono, and the man that I once said was "who I want to be when I grow up." And in this corner we have Bill Easterly: economist, critic of Bono and Jeffrey Sachs, who was essentially chased out of the World Bank for his contrarian opinions. To boil them down to one sentence apiece: Sachs believes that we already know what needs to be done to achieve big development goals, and what we need is more money, more effort, and more willpower from the international community. Easterly believes that big development plans are doomed to fail, and that the people who really make development happen are not the "planners" but the "searchers" who experiment on the ground and find smaller-scale solutions that work. You can see why the Sachs view wins on emotional appeal and is more likely to be embraced by the development "industry," but in a lot of ways I find Easterly more persuasive. The planners vs. searchers dichotomy is a little bit artificial, of course, but I have a feeling that someday I will face career decisions that will present some variation of this question-- and I want to be ready to make the choice when that time comes.

fresher's week dispatches

A financial bailout. So far I have been able to avoid the worst of what Cambridge's bureacracy can dish out, but I had a close call on Thursday. After getting out of my morning lecture, I hustled down to the Language Centre to sign up for a French class. The enrollment hours were brief and deviously inconvenient, and the place was jammed with people when I got there. Finally I made it to the front of the line and explained my dilemma. The class cost £100, payable by cash or cheque, but I couldn't come up with the payment that day. I had signed up for my bank account the previous week, but they hadn't sent me my chequebook yet. I had deposited my Gates stipend at my bank on Monday, but it takes cheques at least four days to clear in the UK, so I couldn't withdraw cash from the ATM. Knowing that my situation was not my fault and that lots of new Cambridge students must be in a similar boat, asked if I could reserve a spot in the almost-full class and pay at one of the later enrollment days, emphasizing all along how committed I was to taking the class.

To paraphrase the response: "not a prayer, buster-- come back when you have the money." Crap. I knew that the class was going to fill up, and it was now or never. A few moments of desperate haggling and attempts at negotiating failed. However, I was in luck-- there was another Gates Scholar in line behind me, whom I've known since we interviewed in Annapolis in February. She spoke up and offered to front me the money; she had gotten to Cambridge long before I had and consequently had a chequebook. I gratefully accepted and paid her back as soon as my cheques arrived, enclosing my repayment in an effusive thank-you note with a promise to buy her a cocktail at next week's Gates dinner cruise on the Thames.

If I had been shut out of the class, it would not at all have been an atypical experience for a Cambridge student. There are just so many uncoordinated moving parts around here, so many offices and institutions that don't talk to each other, so many delays intersecting with deadlines. Most people manage to scrape by, but you do hear the occasional horror story, and my missing out on the class wouldn't have been so bad in comparison to other possibilities.

A stroll to Grantchester. On a much happier note, this weekend I rounded up a posse to walk along a footpath on the River Cam to the tiny hamlet of Grantchester. The village is home to a teahouse known as The Orchard, which once played host to a remarkable group of friends. For the half-decade preceding WWI, The Orchard was a hangout for a subset of the Bloomsbury Group-- including the philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the novelists E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, the poet Rupert Brooke, and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Amazingly, they became friends before most of them had done their most significant work. Keynes is of greatest personal interest to me, as an economist with whom I have a lot of intellectual sympathy. (Hint: he's pretty much the boogeyman among the "just let the market run its course and everything will be fine" set.) I'll close with a shot of some contemporary Cantabrigians following in their leisurely footsteps:

4 glasses of wine + orientation

After a week in Cambridge I am just beginning to wrap my mind around the innumerable ways in which the whole approach to education here is different from what I am used to in the U.S. It will take several posts to digest and share my thoughts, but I'll start with one of the most interesting features of Cambridge life -- the college system -- including a "not in Kansas anymore" experience from the other night.

This thing called "The University of Cambridge" is basically an administrative shell for an unruly collection of institutions, including 31 self-governing colleges, various academic departments and committees, and a wide assortment of other entities (such as the Gates Cambridge Trust). As our Gatesian elders warned us during the Lake District trip, navigating this often baffling system is one of the primary challenges of our lives here and an excellent education unto itself.

For grad students such as yours truly, the 31 colleges exist primarily as centers of residential and social life. The colleges vary widely in personality, age (ranging from 31 to 724 years) , wealth (£8 million to £700 million), and student body composition (grad vs. undergrad, male vs. female, home vs. international). Reflecting the pious history of the university, six colleges are named after Jesus or God in some form (Christ's, Corpus Christi, Emmanuel, Jesus, Trinity, and Trinity Hall). Other colleges bear the names of monarchs, clergy, famous alumni (Darwin), and political figures (Churchill).

When I was applying to Cambridge, I had to rank my top two college preferences. At the time I didn't know any of them from Adam -- from Adam's College? -- and frankly didn't feel up to sorting through the morass. Luckily, I had a lazy but defensible way out of making a real decision. For historical reasons I won't bore you with, nearly all Williams alumni at Cambridge are at Emmanuel College. Indeed, "Emma" is a veritable Williams-in-exile, typically with about 20 Ephs in residence at any one time. The current crop consists mostly of 07's and 08's, and I actually knew a few of the former the last time we shared a campus. And Emma just happens to be a great college for lots of other reasons-- it has a rich historical pedigree (founded 1584) without being snooty or overly traditional, it's centrally located, reasonably wealthy, has very pretty grounds, and is neither too big nor too small. Of course, it seems that everyone at Cambridge believes their college to be the best college, so maybe it's just the brainwashing setting in.

Now, say you were a college administrator and you had to put the following activities in a suitable order: (A) dance party, (B) introductory remarks by college bigwigs in an auditorium, (C) multiple-course dinner with multiple courses of wine, and (D) cocktails. In America, surely, the order would be BDCA. Apparently that's not how it's done in Britain, though, because on Monday night we had all consumed at least four servings of alcohol before the bigwigs spoke.

The evening began with the cocktails, followed by the first MCR* formal hall** of Michaelmas Term.*** The food was actually quite good, and we were served a glass of wine with almost every course: white wine with the appetizer, red with the main course, port with dessert. The Master**** of the College said grace in Latin before and after the meal. I was seated next to a very sweet Scottish girl who, sadly, I had a very hard time understanding due to her accent and the horrible acoustics. Her failure to touch her wine led to quizzical comments her friends on the other side of the table, and I watched in amazement as she put away three glasses in rapid succession and then continued our conversation without missing a beat.

Once we were, ummm, warmed up, we proceeded to the auditorium for welcoming remarks from Master Wilson, the Senior Tutor*****, the Head Porter******, and the president of the MCR. All of the speeches were actually quite funny and entertaining... but it could have just been the wine. The Head Porter, who bears a striking resemblance to Terry Bradshaw, was particularly funny. Finally, at the end of the evening, we proceeded to the Old Library (where we started with the cocktails) for a 90s-themed bop******* under the eyes of the dead white guys whose portraits hang on the walls.

And yes, you read that right: all of this happened on Monday night. Apparently the idea that most of one's drinking should be done on the weekend is an American invention too.

Vocab:
*Middle Combination Room (MCR): refers to the social organization for the grad students and the grad students themselves as a unit, in addition to the physical room where they congregate.
**Formal hall: a sumptuous multi-course dinner, eaten by candlelight in formal dress and academic robes.
***Michaelmas Term: October to December.
****Master: like a college president. Ours is a member of the House of Lords who has worked for Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
*****Senior Tutor: an academic who oversees the welfare of grad students in the college. Ours is a chemist, and it seems like an odd feature of the UK system that he has to spend some of his time assigning us rooms, but that's how it works.
******Porter: no equivalent in the US system, porters are responsible for security, locks, mail delivery, and otherwise keeping the gears turning.
*******Bop: dance party. I didn't need a footnote for that, I just wanted to use seven asterisks.

lake district recap

I am back in Cambridge for the madness of "freshers' week" after a fun but soggy few days in the Lake District. A few thoughts before I return to the more mundane tasks of assembling my life:

The Scholars. I traveled with 100-odd Gates scholars, most of them freshly minted like me, but there was also a number of returning scholars doing multi-year degrees who served as our chaperones/tour guides. I referred to them as "the elders" until I realized that I am older than most of them; one, in fact, is younger than my youngest sibling! For those not familiar with the program, the Gates Cambridge Trust can theoretically support scholars from any country except the UK. Our group was roughly half Americans, but it included students from countries ranging from Canada to Zambia to Croatia to Malaysia.

Poets and opium-heads. Our Lake District amusements included orienteering in the rain, hiking in the rain, kayaking in the rain, visiting a gingerbread bakery in the rain, and touring the former home of the great poet William Wordsworth in the rain. Wordsworth's house began its life as a pub and hosted a number of colorful men of letters as long-term houseguests. Sir Walter Scott, who tried his best to be polite but could not abide by the Wordsworths' teetotaling and twice-daily consumption of porridge, would sneak out the window of the guest room each morning to get a proper English breakfast and a pint of beer before his hosts woke up. Another guest, Thomas de Quincey, penned Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, possibly launching the addiction-memoir genre that has more recently given us Augusten Burroughs and James Frey.

Encounters with bad British food, volume 1. On the way to the Lake District, we stopped at a park for a picnic lunch. We were each issued the kind of lunch you carried to school in 3rd grade: a sandwich, a bag of "crisps," a juice box, fruit, and some "biscuits," all in a brown paper bag. The first unusual thing I noticed about my tuna sandwich was that it had corn in it, which seemed odd but wasn't a dealbreaker. (The Subway chain has stores here, and it has corn in its lineup of vegetable toppings.) A few bites in, however, I noticed a taste that was vaguely familiar, mildly unpleasant, and definitely out of place. I puzzled aloud about the taste until a nearby scholar, an Irish woman, filled me in on the mystery ingredient: margarine. Tuna salad, white bread, corn, and margarine-- yuck. Fortunately, the names of the crisps and the biscuits provided some comic relief. The flavors of crisps included "Ready Salted" and "Prawn Cocktail," while my cookies carried the appetizing name of "Digestives."

The family name. Perhaps as some kind of karmic compensation for elementary school taunts about my last name, the Powers name won me an unprecedented degree of cachet with the Gates crowd. A few of the returning Gates scholars who organized the trip told me that they were eager to meet me because of my name. I accepted the compliment as graciously as I could, but mentioned that my name couldn't stand up to that of one of my Alaska friends, Dan Stellar. The name Daniel just sounds like a winner all around, and when combined with a last name that's a synonym for "awesome," it's pretty much impossible to compete.

hello goodbye

I made it, and this may be my last chance to post for the remainder of the week, since I'm leaving tomorrow for a Gates Scholar retreat/orientation in the Lake District of northern England. The retreat is a chance for the Gates folk to bond for a few days before the term officially starts, not to mention visit a beautiful corner of the island where Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others went for inspiration.

To make Cambridge any cuter, I think you would have to tear the whole place down and rebuild it out of candy. I arrived by bus -- called a "coach" here if it's a long-distance trip -- to a scene of people lounging and playing football on the lush grass of Parker's Piece. (Parker's Piece, I have since learned, will play a starring role in my daily commute.) The town's winding, narrow, frequently-name-changing streets are packed with shops, restaurants of every ethnic variety, and centuries-old churches and academic buildings. I'm living in a house of eight people on a residential street, a bit of a hike from most of my other buildings of interest, but that should get better once I have a bike. I have met two of the housemates so far, an Italian and a Brit, who by pure coincidence are both studying aerospace engineering.

Unfortunately, I have been thwarted so far in most of my efforts to piece together the logistical elements of my new life. I am still without an e-mail password, a bike, a "mobile", a "chequing" account, an academic gown, a key to most of the buildings at Emmanuel (my college), and various other critical things-- mostly thanks to my having arrived on a weekend, but also in part because of Cambridge bureaurcracy. Trotting off to the Lake District for a few days won't help matters either, but I will at least have Friday and maybe part of Thursday before things really get hectic.

Given my seeming preoccupation with border security, I would be remiss if I didn't discuss my customs/immigration experience. I had a layover in Dublin, and the Irish immigration officer spent a total of about 0.01 second glancing at my passport, remarking that I was moving on to the UK, stamping it, and sending me on my way. At Heathrow, much to my surprise, I didn't pass through immigration or customs at all, presumably because of the EU common travel area. Much different from my '05 experience, when I was doing the opposite-- a layover in Heathrow en route to Dublin-- and I had what felt like a long Q-and-A session at both airports. If I didn't already have a shiny student visa, I might have been disappointed about not having a stamp to commemmorate my official arrival in the UK.

That's all for now... there's been a lot coming at me, so hopefully I will have my head more in order on the far side of the Gates trip. More soon!

pictures: south dakota to chicago

Attempting to cook breakfast in high winds. In the background, our teepee.


In the foreground, the model of the finished Crazy Horse memorial. In the background, actual progress to date. (See that little spot of sky that will eventually be between Crazy Horse's arm and his horse's mane? You could put a 10-story building in there.)


Looking presidential.


Badlands sunset.


Adorable Badlands critters.


Clark Griswold Awards I: Wall Drug.


Clark Griswold Awards II: The Corn Palace, in transition from its 2008 to 2009 version.


Clark Griswold Awards III: The Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, MN. We're between his legs, to give you a sense of scale.



The crew at Monoma Terrace, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building in downtown Madison. We got an impromptu tour from a talkative Gambian (not to be confused with Zambian) man who worked at the parking garage. Seeing my Alaska license plate he announced, somewhat improbably, that Sarah Palin is his "shining star." To my chagrin, in the days since then I've realized he has lots of company.


Me with the Chicago Powers clan by "the bean" in Millennium Park.

pictures-- alaska to montana

Danvers, Massachusetts / Mile 5,883 -- Sorry for the delay in getting these posted. Here's the just a teeny sampling of pictures from the first leg of the trip (more to come later-- unfortunately it's a little tedious uploading these to blogspot and getting them to stay put):

Feeding fry bread to Obama at the Alaska State Fair, Palmer


This is more or less what the Alcan looked like for the last two hours before the Canadian border.

The border: I am in Canada, Sam is in the U.S., Elise is in some kind of legal black hole.

Roadsize hazards in the Yukon: buffalo!

Liard River Hotsprings, BC, in all of their stinky glory

The Athabasca Glacier, which is along the road connecting Jasper and Banff National Parks

Lake Louise, Banff. The picture really doesn't do justice to the freaky blueness of the water. But I love how it looks like me, Elise, and the boat were photoshopped in.

I still like my "leaning piles of tiramisu" analogy. Left, pretty Banff scenery + me being a jackass. Right, a delicious dessert.

Our final morning in Banff.

The Continental Divide in Glacier National Park (Montana).

Along Going-to-the-Sun Rd. in Glacier. If you have a magnifying glass, you can see my car in the lower left.

Cheyenne graves at Little Bighorn (added in 1992 if I'm not mistaken).

the magical mystery tour's hard day's night in suburban chicago

Niagara Falls, Ontario / Mile 5,273 -- It has been an eventful few days, so I’m going to breeze over a lot… several Midwestern states may get short shrift. Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan: sorry, guys.

But I did want to report on our weekend in Chicago, which, as expected, was one of the major highlights of the Great American Road Trip. We stayed in the suburb of Highland Park with my Uncle Kevin, Aunt Robin, and cousins Rachel (10) and Aaron (6). Kevin and I have managed to cross paths several times in the last year with weddings and football games and such, but I don’t get to see the rest of the family very often. Rachel and Aaron are adorable and precocious kids and great fun to be around. I viewed the Chicago leg as family time and didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what we might do, but we did check off a fair number of sights within the Windy City, including an night at a couple of jazz clubs, a walk around Millennium Park, and a trip to the top of the Sears Tower.

On our second and final night we enjoyed an evening of refined suburban debauchery. Just steps from Kevin and Robin’s house is an outdoor concert venue known as the Ravinia, where almost every night during the summer the locals spread blankets out on the lawn and enjoy food, booze, and live music. On Saturday, a Beatles cover band called American English provided an eerily perfect imitation of the Fab Four, and in period dress and hairdos to boot. Along with a bunch of Kevin and Robin’s friends, we ate, drank, and danced the night away. At one point Elise expressed amazement that Kevin and I come from the same stock, and she remarked that I have an “inappropriately funny” family, a comment that I took with tremendous pride.

Unfortunately, Samantha had to bail in Chicago—something about having to work on Monday, I didn’t really understand—so now it’s down to me and Elise. After getting our state-visitation cards punched in Indiana (at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore) and Michigan (old town Lansing and riverwalk), we arrived tonight at Niagara Falls, the first place on our route since Glennallen, AK that I have already been to. The falls were not part of the original plan, but Elise had never been and wanted to see them, so here we are. Tomorrow night we descend on Williams College and crash with my brother, and then Tuesday the Great American Road Trip finally comes to an end.

the clark w. griswold jr. awards for excellence in roadside attractions

La Crosse, Wisconsin / Mile 4,382 -- Just so you know that our trip hasn’t consisted entirely dour and depressing stuff, here’s a few of my favorite screwball attractions from the last couple of days, all of them worthy of National Lampoon’s Vacation.

• Wall Drug. The Paris Hilton of roadside attractions, Wall Drug is famous for being famous. At one point it really was just a drug store. Its notoriety began when the owners, struggling with lousy business during the Great Depression, starting giving out free ice water to passing motorists. Since then it has grown into a tourist monstrosity, with dozens of stores and restaurants, mechanical dinosaurs, fountains, photography exhibits, and a player-piano-type contraption with all the instruments of a bluegrass band. Its notoriety rests mostly on the Wall Drug billboards that litter I-90 in both directions. (I saw one as far back as Montana.) The amateurish billboards advertise Wall Drug’s offerings of cowboy goods, 5-cent coffee, free donuts for Vietnam vets, and often just the glory of Wall Drug itself. The place is incredibly tacky, but you have to give it props for marketing genius. If it’s not in every business school textbook in the country, it should be.
• The Corn Palace. Erected to the greater glory of corn, the Corn Palace is a multi-purpose civic center in Mitchell, South Dakota, that has been decorated every year since 1905 with murals made almost entirely of corn. Each year, the murals follow a different theme, and the corn artists are currently transitioning to 2009’s theme of great American attractions. (Naturally, the place of honor belongs to the Corn Palace. Mount Rushmore comes in second.) How dominant is the Corn Palace in this community of 15,000? On the front wall of Mitchell’s City Hall, located right next door Corn Palace, is a large billboard advertising the hours of the Corn Palace—presumably so that it wouldn’t need to take up precious space on the palace itself.
• The Jolly Green Giant. As was the case in Wyoming, we did not spend a night in Minnesota and had no planned stops there. Since I-90 passes through a fairly uninspiring band far south of the Twin Cities, we were hard-up for a roadside attraction that would allow us to claim to be visitors to the Gopher State. Luckily, the travel gods arranged for us to get low on gas right around the wonderfully named town of Blue Earth, home to a 54-foot likeness of the Jolly Green Giant. We took some pictures with His Jolliness, and we also found an exhibit commemorating the completion of I-90. Much like the transcontinental railroad, I-90 was built from two directions at once, meeting on a gold-painted stretch in Blue Earth that was meant to evoke the golden spike. I was shocked to learn how recently the interstate was completed: 1978. We further burnished our Minnesota-visiting credentials by once again reading the state’s history from Lonely Planet, listening to A Prairie Home Companion from Samantha’s iPod, and listening to John McCain’s acceptance speech live from St. Paul.

"the red man has great heroes too"

Interior, South Dakota / Mile 3,709 -- This leg of our road trip was supposed to be mostly about great scenery and gigantic presidential heads, but for me the real show-stealer has been the heartbreaking history of the Native American people in this region. I don't think I was completely prepared for the emotional impact of that history. Perhaps it's because in Alaska, the Native community has fared well in comparison with the lower 48. Don't get me wrong, the Alaska Native community has serious problems to contend with, and the list is largely the same as in the rest of the country: poverty and unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, and the loss of language and culture among the youth. But due to a number of factors -- geography, Alaska's relatively late annexation by the white man, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act -- Natives are numerous, relatively prosperous, and a force to be reckoned with in Alaska. That's a very far cry from the status of Native people in South Dakota.

About ten miles from Mount Rushmore stands the world's biggest sculpture, a massive and massively unfinished statue of Crazy Horse that is being carved painstakingly into the Black Hills. Currently, only Crazy Horse's face is finished; the head of his horse is the next step. The statue is so huge that each of Crazy Horse's pupils is 5 feet in diameter, and the hole in the mountain that will eventually be the space between the man's arm and the horse's back could hide a ten-story building. The four heads of Mt. Rushmore could into the single head of Crazy Horse. I'm sorry to say that we never actively planned to visit the Crazy Horse monument, but I am glad that we did, and I might have placed a higher priority on visiting if I had known that I am part of the memorial's intended audience.

You might think that the Crazy Horse statue is in some ways a response to Mt. Rushmore, and you would be right. Construction began in 1948, seven years after Mt. Rushmore was completed. The Sioux chief Standing Bear, who commissioned the work, told the sculptor, "my fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know that the red man has great heroes too." Crazy Horse, a warrior chief, was never defeated in battle, never consented to live on an Indian reservation, never signed a meaningless treaty, and most likely was never photographed. (His likeness is a composite made from oral descriptions from elders who as young men saw him in the flesh.) The sculptor, a Boston-born Polish American named Korczak Ziolkowski, also had a compelling story. He began work on the monument with rickety equipment and only mountain goats to keep him company. Since his death in 1982, his wife and seven of his ten children have carried on the work. Korczak reminds me a lot of Rodney Clark, a dear soul with whom I worked in Alaska, and who possessed a lot of the same qualities: grand ambition, wild-eyed optimism, involvement of his entire family, and the willingness to adopt other people's causes as his own.

I think the Crazy Horse monument captures the pride of Native Americans very well, but it's a sad pride, a pride rooted more in the past than the present. It also seems fitting somehow that the monument is unfinished and doesn't seem likely to be finished in my lifetime. Naturally, the monument and everything else we have been seeing inspired some pretty intense discussion among the three of us, particularly as we puzzled over what the appropriate response of a 21st-century white person to all of this might look like. We've all spent the last few years in "helping" professions of one kind or another, so our discussion about Native issues fit in with the larger questions we share about the appropriateness of the kinds of "helping" that we have been doing--and whether "helping" is even the right approach to the world at all, or if we should aspire only to not be part of the problem.

We did visit Mount Rushmore too, and despite the complications to one's American pride that this part of the country can bring, I enjoyed that monument as well. It helps to remind myself that human history has been about 95 percent barbarism, and the American experiment -- however many glaring imperfections it has had in practice -- is a rare flash of light in that darkness. The dead white guys on the mountain were far from perfect, but as Standing Bear implicitly acknowledged, they're "great heroes" too.

indian country

A teepee, near Custer, South Dakota / Mile 3,539 – In trying to reconcile my American pride with the darker chapters of our history, nothing presents quite as big a challenge for me as the shameful treatment of Native Americans. Perhaps slavery is a bigger source of cognitive dissonance for many Americans, but the lasting effects of slavery are at least still part of our national discussion, and it still feels possible to heal those lingering wounds through social and cultural change. On the other hand, there would appear to be nothing that we can do now to erase the stain of centuries of large-scale killing and dispossession of the Native peoples. Indeed, America as we know it would not even exist without it—and I don’t know if I could un-wish it without running into some kind of logical contradiction.

Those kinds of thoughts were bubbling through my mind as we visited the memorial to the Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as Custer’s last stand. The battlefield is located among the starkly beautiful, rolling brown grasslands of southwestern Montana. Given the cognitive dissonance mentioned above, I was curious as to how the battle would be presented to visitors. For the most part, I found the displays to be evenhanded, in a bad way. The battle was some kind of “clash of cultures” rather than a tragic event where lots of men on both sides died because of greed married to the apparatus of the state. I was encouraged, though, to learn that Congress and the first President Bush had the park renamed in the early 1990s. (Prior to that, the name had memorialized Custer). More than a century after the fact, a monument was erected to the Natives killed in battle, and red headstones were added to the places where they died just as white headstones mark where Custer and his men died. A typical headstone reads something like this: “Closed Hand, a Cheyenne warrior, fell here while defending the Cheyenne way of life.” It’s sad that this kind of recognition took so long to happen, but it provides a much more true, more useful, and ultimately more interesting story.

South of Little Bighorn, I-90 leaves Montana and lops off the northeastern corner of Wyoming. We weren’t going to spend a night in the Cowboy State, nor did we have any particular stops planned there, which gave rise to a discussion of under what conditions one could say one had “been to” a particular state. None of us had been to Wyoming before, and we all wanted to add it to our tallies with a clear conscience. Clearly airport layovers don’t count, and we all agreed that a drive-through alone is not sufficient. Beyond that, our criteria differed. Elise had the most permissive rules, to the effect that merely peeing in a state qualified one as a visitor. Mine are a bit more stringent; if a night was not to be spent in the state, then a visit to some site of historic, ecological, or cultural significance would most likely be required. The town of Sheridan looked promising, but our turn off the highway yielded nothing more than a drive through a very empty downtown (it was after 5 p.m. on Labor Day) and a stop at Starbuck’s, where we all became official Wyoming visitors by Elise’s rules. As we continued down the highway, I read aloud Lonely Planet’s segment on Wyoming history, and we listened to Wyoming public radio. (Fun fact: Wyoming gave women the vote and the right to run for office a half-century before women’s suffrage became part of our Constitution. Wyoming’s motivations were not entirely magnanimous—the all-male legislature was hoping the gesture would help reduce a 6-to-1 gender imbalance—but it was a progressive move nonetheless.)

By that point I was beginning to feel like I had officially been to Wyoming, but we made one final stop at a dive bar in Gillette for dinner and, I hoped, a local brew. Unfortunately, the bartender informed us, Wyoming does not produce any beer; “Wyoming is not that cool,” she said. This bar had a feature I had never seen before: a blackboard in the men’s room, which at that time attested to a certain gentleman’s eagerness to perform unspeakable acts and listed said gentleman’s phone number. Perhaps the blackboard is an effort to reduce graffiti by providing a different, um, creative outlet? At any rate, after witnessing that and having a bizarre encounter with a drunken local, I decided I would officially claim to have visited the great state of Wyoming.

dispatches from big sky country

Missoula, Montana / Mile 2,753 –

An unexpected visitor: “Shawn, there’s something circling our tent! It sounds like something big!” Samantha’s voice woke me in the predawn gloom on our last morning in Banff. I tend to treat animal-outside-the-tent worries with skepticism, whether they’re coming from a tentmate or, more commonly, my own overactive imagination. But there was definitely something going on outside, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. There was a padding sound, first on one side of the tent, then a moment later on the other side. The parts of our tent seemed to be rubbing against each other in a strange way. Finally, Elise—who you'd think would be least likely to figure this one out—realized what was going on. On the last morning of August, a thick, wet snow was piling up on the ground, weighing down our tent fly and periodically falling in big sloppy chunks to the ground. After two years in Africa, Elise said that she couldn’t wait to see and touch snow, and she got her wish.

Banff recap: With or without a layer of snow, Banff is gorgeous. The mountains around the devastatingly quaint Banff town are striped with ancient layers of sediment, and in different places the magma beneath the Earth’s crust has pushed them up in odd angles, so that they look like jagged, leaning piles of tiramisu. On our first day, we went paddling on Lake Louise, which is an impossibly bright turquoise color thanks to the glacial silt in the water. Lake Louise is world famous, but there were also a number of unexpectedly interesting sights. One was an area of land that is still scarred from a 1992 fire that was set intentionally by the Canadian park service. Since Banff became Canada’s first national park, naturally occurring forest fires have been beaten back out of understandable concern for life, property, and nature. The problem is that fires are an important part of a forest ecosystem, so taking them away has produced a lot of blandly uniform climax forest and caused the decline of species that thrive at other stages of forest succession, such as moose. So now Parks Canada intervenes by setting fires intentionally, when conditions are right to keep the fire in control and minimize unwanted side effects. It was just an interesting reminder that even what we think of as “wilderness” almost often bears the marks of its neighboring human society. Banff’s forests are no less a product of human intervention than another forest that has been clear cut by loggers.

Crossing the border II: Is it a job requirement for border control officers to be assholes? Or is that just part of their training?

Glaciers, under destruction: We spent our afternoon today in Montana’s Glacier National Park, and thanks to some very uncooperative weather, we only saw one glacier through a layer of fog. Before long, however, people will count themselves lucky to see even that much. According to the (U.S.) National Park Service, Glacier is projected to lose all of its glaciers by 2030. I have seen evidence of retreating glaciers firsthand in Alaska, but nothing quite so depressing as the thought that the national park that is named for glaciers will lose them all before my 50th birthday. The park is using the receding glaciers pretty aggressively as an educational opportunity, which I think is the best outcome that can be hoped for at this point.

holy %^&#: palin fever goes national

Banff, Alberta / Mile 2,160 – Obviously, we're going to have to shelve the Great American Road Trip for a minute and talk about Sarah Palin.

I'm shocked and oddly excited about McCain's choice, even though I'm not particularly a fan of Sarah Palin, nor do I think it was a smart decision on McCain's part. Maybe it's just because somebody I've actually met is running for the second-highest office in the land. It may also be a little bit of Alaska pride. Alaska often seems to feel, with some justice, like the neglected youngest child in the family (and it's spoiled like one too). Having the governor as a major-party veep candidate is sure to electrify the state, especially at a time when Alaska's national reputation has been sullied by scandals, indictments and the "Bridge to Nowhere" brouhaha.

There's no question that Sarah Palin is a gifted politician. She obliterated a sitting governor in the Republican primary and saved a corrupt and arrogant state party from itself. She promised cleaner government, and she has by and large delivered on that promise. (There is currently a scandal afoot re: whether her administration pressured a police commissioner to fire a trooper who was involved in a nasty custody battle with the Governor's sister, but I suspect there's more smoke than fire there. She's too smart to do something so transparently stupid... probably the work of an overzealous "Palin-bot," as they are called in Alaska.) And, as the media never fail to point out, she is hot. I never would have expected that the sentence "Don't look at the Governor's legs" would pass through my brain, but it happened.

That's about as much as I can say in her favor. My biggest beef with her... well, my biggest non-ideological beef with her... is that she also came in promising a government that would listen to the public, but her administration has been just as opaque and imperious as the one it replaced, albeit in a different way. She's mercurial, often needlessly confrontational, and attention-hungry, and it's not at all clear who she listens to or why. Granted, it's impossible for me not to evaluate Alaska politicans through the lens of how they treat my former employer and its clients, and she disappointed me on that front.

Taking off my erstwhile-Alaskan hat and putting on my armchair pundit hat, Palin's selection strikes me as a desperate choice by McCain. Faced with an opponent who is both the potential first black President and a reincarnation of JFK, it looks like he decided that a ticket of two old white men wouldn't cut it. Sarah Palin brings youth, diversity, and flash to the ticket. But with her experience limited to less than two years as governor of a small and idiosyncratic state, along with a couple terms as mayor of a small town, it's hard to imagine that voters will want her to be a heartbeat away from the launch codes. I also suspect that those Republicans who hoped for a "real conservative" to balance McCain will be disappointed when they look at her record in Alaska. Just before I left, she championed an expensive government handout-- a $1,200 "energy rebate" for every man, woman, and child in Alaska, which will be added onto a Permanent Fund Dividend that is already likely to top two grand. (Note: I am not opposed to energy assistance per se, I just think the government can do better things with that money than shelling it out to people in my income bracket and richer. I won't be getting the rebate or a PFD myself.) I also suspect that Biden will clean her clock in October's vice presidential debate.

Despite that electrifying-the-state business I mentioned earlier, the reaction in Alaska has not been uniformly positive. The outgoing Senate President -- a woman, by the way, and a Republican, who represents the Governor's home town -- said she thought it was a joke when she heard the news, and asked, "Look at what she's done to this state. What would she do to the nation?" The Speaker of the House -- also an R, but a man from Valdez -- helpfully observed, when asked about the Governor's qualifications to be veep, that "she's old enough. She's a U.S. citizen."

Perhaps what is most disappointing to me is that there is another Republican woman from Alaska who would have been a great choice. Everything I know of her, including many interactions with her in person, have convinced me that she's smart, principled, and sincere. (Obligatory disclaimer: she's been great to my former employer.) She's Lisa Murkowski, Alaska's junior Senator. But McCain didn't go that way, so we're going to see how Sarah does.

with obama in canada

Jasper, Alberta / Mile 1,959 – I am sitting in a bar in Jasper town, slightly delirious from fatigue after a grueling 30-hour, 1,200-mile push from Whitehorse. Miraculously, your three weary travelers are still friends after so much quality time in my little Honda Accord; I believe the fact that no eyes have been gouged out is a testament to the character of everyone involved. (Don't worry, Mom, I didn't do all the driving myself-- Samantha and I took turns, and Elise would have helped too except for the fact that a theft in Zambia robbed her of her license.) We were treated to a menagerie of critters that included fox, lynx, elk, deer, a porcupine, and several herds of buffalo, some of which wandered onto the highway. Along the way I discovered many new techniques for remaining alert during a monotonous nighttime drive. One of the best tips I can offer is to put your iPod in random mode, because nothing will keep your brain alert than not knowing if you're going to hear Vivaldi or Modest Mouse next. I also conjugated Spanish verbs, recalled the handful of poems I have memorized, and reconstructed my daily class schedule for every year from sixth grade until senior year at Williams. Your results may vary.

Over the last two days, we drove the Alcan all the way to its over-hyped origin in Dawson Creek, B.C., and then crossed into Alberta en route to the first of two magnificent national parks. We stopped for a picnic in a kitschy "forest" of random road signs from around the world, and we took a relaxing soak in the warm, stinky waters of Liard River Hot Springs. Among the many roadside attractions we passed, only the hot springs, in my humble opinion, is worth its salt. (Calcium sulfide, to be precise.)

During many of those blank miles, Barack Obama was on my mind-- and not for the reason that you'd think, as the news coverage of the Democratic convention up here is basically nil. Before leaving Anchorage, Samantha and I bought an audiobook of Dreams from My Father, with Obama himself doing the reading. We popped the CD in during the long and desolate stretch where the Alcan weaves back and forth between the Yukon and British Columbia, where a lone trash can merits a roadside pullout and signs for two kilometers in either direction.

Dreams from My Father, for those not familiar with the book, is Obama's memoir of his struggle for identity, written long before his political career took off. The book is a far more candid and real glimpse into the character of a presidential candidate than we can probably ever hope for again. Nobody who knows me would doubt that I'm rooting for Obama in November, but listening to Dreams has made me really, really, really want him to be President. Above all, I was struck by his ability to sympathize with, and manage the dialogue between, all of the wildly different characters in his life story--black and white, American and foreign, rich and poor. His is the very antithesis of the with-us-or-against-us attitude that has so completely squandered America's moral leadership and the world's good will toward us over the last eight years. It seems easy to dismiss Obama as a smooth-talking peddler of empty bromides about change and bringing people together. But give the man a microphone for a few hours and listen to him talk about his life, and it is not hard to imagine him calming the passions of belligerent world leaders or presiding over a vigorous debate in a Cabinet of the best and brightest. There's more to say, but it's long past time for me to go to bed... more from Banff in a couple of days.