Under the Baobab Tree

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Giants v. Dodgers

Today was a relatively ordinary work day here in SF. I jinxed the weather by saying yesterday that I hadn't seen a cloud in 6 days because this morning the fog starting rolling in under the bridge and there was a marine layer over the western part of the City most of the day. The fog never quite made it down to the financial district, which was good because after work our entire team (3 client reps and 5 C&B lawyers) put on jeans and walked over to SBC Park to watch the Giants play the Dodgers.

I had never been to SBC Park before. It is right on the water within walking distance of our hotel. Our seats were in the sixth row between third base and home plate, in foul ball territory. We looked over the back wall at the ships in the San Francisco Bay. This is the park where kayakers hang out in the water over the wall to catch Barry Bonds home runs (he's a leftie so his home runs go over right field into the Bay). Whenever someone hits a home run the park organ systems blows a fog horn and tall sprays of water spray out of three tall water sprayer things (words fail me here). The concession stands are not just hot dogs, beer and cotton candy. You can also get sushi and edamame and lemon chicken and Napa Valley wines and ben & jerry's and gourment wine and steamed crabs and lobster and the "catch of the day." (get it?) We got hot dogs and beer anyway. The clothing stores sell very chic black turtlenecks with discrete Giants logos on them. Sail boat masts wobble outside the back wall. There's a sign that keeps track of home runs that go over into the Bay; they're called Splash Hits. This season so far there have been 38 splash hits. You can walk around the back wall from which you can see out over the Bay and out over the field at the same time. My colleague and I did that this evening and stood looking at the Bay to our left and at the field to our right and watching the fog pour around the upper decks of the stadium seats and then dissipate over the field.

Back in our seats we spent quite a bit of time dodging foul balls. At one point a ball went up high and started down generally towards my head, or so it seemed to me. My colleagues all lept up around me and started screaming things that male baseball fans scream; guttural noises and vowels sounds but never any words as far as I can tell. I was glued to my chair looking up at this ball aiming towards my head. I cowered. I think I said, "aaaaaccccckkkkk...." I did nothing remotely athletic. I may even have put my hands over my eyes and/or head. My boss looks over and yells out, "Come on, Kim!" The ball kept going and did not hit my head but instead hit the head of some 7 year old boy a few rows up, who was thrilled.

After the game was over the seagulls all flew down into the stands and ate the left over lemon chicken and sushi and edamame and steamed crabs and lobster and the catch of the day. The outfield seats were covered in seagulls. By the time the game ended it was also quite cold. People had scarves and mittens on and woolen hats. I had on a patagonia and the fashionable black nylon topcoat that you will recall I bought in SF in the middle of a freezing cold summer day about 3 years ago now. It's actually starting to get a little ragged.

I also realized during the game what it probably obvious to everyone else already, i.e., that this game was between two team that used to be in New York and were probably great rivals then and now both teams are in California but are still great rivals because LA and SF can't stand each other. The whole stadium was chanting "Beat LA!" most of the evening. I mentioned this to the client who was sitting next to me, who looked at me and said, "uh, duh, are you just figuring that out? Well I guess it's only the fifth inning." Then he laughed uproariously at me.

The Giants won.

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

The Weather Report Says Its Sunny in California

I woke up on Monday morning in the Highlands Inn in Carmel at 6 a.m. because the sun was on the ocean and seagulls were up and making noise. Everything seemed perfect until I realized that I couldn't swallow and my throat had completely closed up. A tan California room service came down the stairs through the cypress woods with a pot of tea and lemon wedges and a tub of honey. I sat on my porch looking at the waves and the rocks and the cypress trees and drank the entire pot of tea in my bright white bathrobe. I knew I had to get up to San Francisco to our office there and start working, and in theory I was expected by 10 a.m. or so. My throat was still closed and my head was pounding. I was in no driving shape. I wondered where I got this cold -- the ancient vents at the Riviere in Palm Springs? The agricultural dust in the rose farms of Wasco? The sudden change of temperature from Joshua Tree to Hollywood? Bottle brush pollen at Cara's house?

Eventually I made it out onto the Pacific Coast Highway in my Kia Amante in search of a drug store with medicine, preferably one near a Starbucks. I pumped up with Cepacol and Sudafed Severe Cold and a venti latte in the town of Seaside (above Monterey) and hit the road north. I took the fast road north, through Gilroy and the Santa Clara Valley. Some of you may recall that I have written about Gilroy before. Gilroy is the Garlic Capital of the World and has yearly garlic festivals in which every food product available is made from garlic. Garlic soup, garlic juice, garlic ice cream, etc. If you drive through Gilroy at the right time of the year the road is awash in papery garlic skin and the fields are glowing white - like the cotton fields way down south in 'Bama. Gilroy is a maligned town - a haven for migrant workers and a bedroom community for service industry workers in Monterey who can't afford to actually live in Monterey. The next town over, Watsonville, is the Artichoke Capital of the World and they do similar things with artichokes there. The hub of all these agrictultural towns is the Mother of All Aggie Towns, Salinas, birthplace of John Steinbeck, setting for his novel East of Eden and his collection of short stories called hte Long Valley, and the site of my speeding ticket the day before. Gilroy and Salinas give way in about half an hour to Mountain View and Sunnyside and Burlingame and Redwood City. These are the corporate headquarters of Yahoo, Oracle, Google, etc. The two-lane road becomes a 6 lane California highway. Within 2 hours the cypresses and rocks and waves of Carmel have been replaced with Interstate 280 and the Embarcadero and the Bay Bridge.

I went straight to the Mandarin Oriental to continue treating my throat. I checked in and the hotel gave me a pot of "Welcome Jasmine Tea." I asked, "Who's Jasmine?" Nobody laughed. My room has a triple exposure. I can see the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, Sausalito, Alcatraz, Coit Tower, Angel Island, Treasure Island, and the Bay Bridge, all from my desk window. Many of you will recall that I spent about a year staying in this hotel every month. This is by far the best room I've had here....

Since then about a third of our our team from Palm Springs has reassembled here in San Francisco for a week of meetings with varrious prosecutors. The work load is fairly light, relatively speaking for us. We've made it out to dinner every night so far, which is more than we can say for the average work night in DC recently. For the current and former C&Bers on this list, last night we found Deb Volland who has gone in-house at Morgan Stanley and ate at Plouf in Belden Alley. That's the closest thing you can get to Les Halles in San Fran, complete with appallingly bad service. Tonight, Rittenberg and Steven Anthony and I charged off into Chinatown in search of a place recommended by Zagat's. We were starved and jumped out of our cab as soon as we saw the sign for where we were going. We get in and sit down and think silently to ourselves, "Wha's the big deal about this place? It's like every other Chinese restaurant you've ever been to." We eat. It's fine. I had Kung Pao Chicken, as usual. We drink Chinese beer. It was okay. We leave. On the way out we pass a really nice Chinese restaurant next door with a waiter in a tux and a wall of fishtanks and a window full of reviews from not only Zagat's but Food & Wine and Frommer's and Gourmet.... We had gone into the wrong restaurant. The three of us stood out on the street in Chinatown and laughed. We coulda had a really nice meal! We coulda been contenders! We consoled ourselves by going to Tosca in North Beach to have a few hot chocolates shot with brandy. We felt better. I told Rittenberg and Anthony that Ted Voorhees made me come to Tosca one freezing cold night about three years ago, and I've made a pilgrimage to the place every time I've been in town since then.

I should mention that I have been out here in California for a week now and I have yet to see a single cloud. The weather in SF is not freezing cold and cloudy, as expected. It is 75 and sunny. All the way from LA to Palm Springs to Joshua Tree back to LA to Grapevine and Wasco and Paso Robles and Salinas and Carmel and Gilroy to here -- almost 700 miles and not a single cloud in the sky. I don't think I'm coming back East.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

The Middle of California

After blasting out of Joshua Tree on Saturday, I drove straight for the Hollywood Hills, new home of the lovely Cara Maggioni. She moved out of the flatlands of West Hollywood a few months ago and now has a fabulous house off Mulholland on a very windy, overgrown street that she shares with some movie stars (don't remember their names but saw their huge compounds). She's so high up in the hills that it's cool up there. She has a big back yard with a BBQ pit, a lemon tree, a bottle brush tree, an herb garden, a giant mimosa tree, and ground covering green stuff everywhere. I stepped out of the car straight from the desert and it
was just like John Steinbeck says, the land of milk and honey. Cara met me with a bottle of wine (a good friend indeed) and we hit the back yard errace under the mimosa tree and stayed there for several hours.

After the sun set and moon rose, Cara's sister showed up and drove us straight down the ountain to an Italian place at the bottom of Laurel Canyon Drive that is built into the Hills. The back of the restaurant is underground. On top of the restaurant is an old timey general store
where you can buy gob smackers for a dime and pop rocks for 20 cents. We bought both. Cara's sister is a TV producer and her conversation actually works into normal conversation phrases like "Debra Messig isn't allowed to work on any of our projects because she wants too much free stuff" and "Jennifer Aniston isn't invited to my Christmas party this year because fired my ex-husband off a project because she didn't like the way the script ended." Somehow this doesn't sound pretentious coming from Cara's sister. The Italian place was also overgrown and
shady, foliage everywhere. We sat at an outdoor table surrounded by bougainvillea. We could barely see the moon through the flowers. The night sky was as it always is in Southern California, very dark blue instead of black. We could have been anywhere in the Mediterranean
rather than in Los Angeles. The air smelled like eucalyptus and jacaranda.

After our lengthy dinner we drove straight back up the Canyon again to Cara's house in the hill, where we all fell into bed like toy soldiers. The next morning Cara's sister showed up once again and we drove down the other side of the mountains to Studio City, where we had breakfast in a Jewish deli that offered knishes and matzo ball soup and eggs benedict with lox, etc. One half of the menu was in Yiddish. I briefly learned the Yiddish word for "aquacade" but I've already forgotten it. Cara's boyfriend was with us by now and he's a talent agent. He and Cara's sister spent most of the breakfast analyzing the financials they had gotten by Blackberry of the new Star Wars movie's weekly earnings. This is serious business in Hollywood. To pass the time while they analyzed the Star Wars financials, Cara and I analyzed our favorite
foods (very long list).

After breakfast, I hit the road north to Carmel. The drive took me through what John Steinbeck called "America's Salad Bowl," the Central Valley that stretches north from Bakersfield to Salinas. I went through the windy and treacherous mountain pass at Grapevine -- six miles down hill on a curvy Interstate at 6 percent grade -- which plants you right on the huge flat plain with mountain ranges running north to south on either side of you. I went through the rose farms in Wasco. Roses nodding for miles, each row a different color. I went through almond groves and pistachio groves and lettuce fields and artichoke patches and fields and fields of cattle pasture. I passed railroad sidings that lead to potato packing plants. North of Bakersfield, about three hours into the trip, I turned west towards Paso Robles. Some of you will recall that I once spent an evening in a vineyard in Paso Robles listening to an Israeli jazz violinist play to a crowd seated on the grass. I was next to an avocado farmer who was enraged at the FDA because it wouldn't let him sell what he thought was a superior avocado but which others felt infected the rest of the national avocado supply with parasites. He gave me one of his avocados. It was tasty.

The drive from Wasco to Paso Robles took me across the Antelope Valley and through the Antelope Mountains. These are soft hills the color of buckskin. Yellow hills with dark green live oaks and tall grass waving. From Wasco to Paso Robles is a good two hours on a perfectly straight road that makes exactly one turn to cross the San Andreas fault on the way through the Antelope Mountains pass. At Paso Robles, traffic was diverted to avoid a brush fire. The fire crews were out creating back fires and dousing homes with retardant. We crawled through the smoke with windows rolled up and the air conditioning off. North of Paso Robles, I passed oil fields and Pinnacles National Monument and horse farms and fig trees. By this time I had been on the road for over 5 hours and the sun was starting to set and I was getting a little drousy.
The road was perfectly straight, as it had been ever since Grapevine, four hours ago. I wanted to get to ocean at Carmel and out of the hot valley. So predictably, outside of Salinas, no more than 10 miles from the turn off for the Monterey Peninsula, the Kia Amante and I get pulled
over for speeding. Which I wouldn't mind so much except in California you can't just pay a fine and go on your way; you have to actually go to court to find out what your fine is. So now I have to deal with an elaborate out of state procedure that requires me calling some judge and
offering to pay huge amounts of money instead of ....what? I'm not even sure what the options are. Grr. The highway patrol guy was nice though, about 12 years old and blond and very tan and sort of shocked that the Kia Amante didn't belong to me and that I didn't live in
Salinas. I began to wonder if he hadn't pulled me over for reasons other than wanting to give me a ticket.

40 minutes after getting the ticket, I pulled into the Park Hyatt Highlands Inn in Carmel. I know I keep telling everyone that L'Auberge Del Mar is the perfect hotel, but actually, the Highlands Inn is even nicer. My room was made out of redwood and jutted out over the Monterey Cypress trees over the rocks and the waves on an isolated part of Route 1 between Carmel and Big Sur. I had a fireplace and the fire was burning when I arrived. The chairs on the porch were facing the sunset over the Pacific. To get to my room you had to walk down six or seven flights of stairs through a garden full of Monterey pines and cypresses and jasmine and fir trees and moss. My room smelled of seashells and pine cones. The linens were absolutely white and crisp. The only sound was the waves and the wind. After the eccentric scuzziness of the Riviera in Palm Springs, I was in heaven. The poor tan California bell boy who had to carry my overweight suitcase down all the flights of stairs through the cypress woods saw my face when I entered the room and said, "you know, you can just stay in here and order room service. Everything will come to you."

So that's what I did. I had a fabulous night alone in luxury with the ocean and the wind and the cypress trees and my white white linens and the dark blue (not black) sky and the stars. The only thing that disturbed me was the moon shining through my french doors from over the
ocean. It was so bright it woke me up.

Monday, May 23, 2005

Joshua Tree

The day after the Palm Springs conference was over, I headed out of town on my way to Los Angeles, with a detour to Joshua Tree National Park. Joshua Tree is right across the San Andreas fault from Palm Springs. Very convenient.

The road from Palm Springs to Joshua Tree goes through a series of junky, trashy, trailer park towns. The road goes up -- Joshua Tree is at about 4,000 feet in the Little San Bernardino Mountains; Palms Springs is at sea level or maybe even below. On the way up it gets cooler. People in Palms Springs say, "Oh! You'll like it up there, it's 20 degree cooler." Which on the day I was there meant it was only 95 degrees in Joshua Tree compared to the 116 degrees in Palm Springs.

Joshua Tree turned out to be a surprise. For one thing, it was blooming -- the entire park was covered in yellow and red wildflowers. When I got to LA later that night, Cara Maggioni told me that Joshua Tree apparently hasn't bloomed in decades. The rains this winter made it bloom so I guess I saw a more interesting park than the average traveler.

But the blooms were the least interesting part of the park. And the Joshua Trees themselves were not that interesting either. As Cara's sister Al and I remarked over dinner that night, "okay, we've get 17,000 acres of Joshua Trees and little yellow flowers here. Next?" The most interesting part of the park was the geology. Scattered throughout the park are massive rock formations that come straight up out of the desert. They are hundreds of feet high. Some of them are pillow basalt -- hundreds of round, smooth rocks piled up on top of each other like marbles. Some of them are igneous rocks that came up out of fissures in the earth under high pressure. These are columns of tall straight, skinny rocks pressed together, like a stack of pancakes turned on its side. Some of the formations are dome shaped and smooth and big enough to qualify as hills. Sometimes you see the pillow basalt piled around and on top of the pancakge stacks. You can also see the layers of rocks in the hills at Joshua Tree, which shows you the tilt of the crust it slammed into the west coast of the US after cruising across the Pacific on the tectonic plate. I took an entire roll of films of the rocks at Joshua Tree. I want to go back there with a geologist.

The other surprising thing about Joshua Tree is there is a place you can drive up to and look out over a large swath of southern California. From the Keys View, you can see the Salton Sea, which is only 30 miles from Mexico. On a clear day you can see Signal Mountain, which is actually in Mexico. You can see down over the valley across the San Andreas fault to Palm Springs and the San Jacinto Mountains. And you can see north to the San Bernardino Mountains and the Big Bear ski resort, less than 100 miles from LA.

On my way out of the park I passed another surprising thing about Joshua Tree. Out among the pillow basalt and the wildflowers and the Joshua Trees, 10 miles easily from civilization, was "pedestrian crossing" sign. It was just stuck in the scrub for no apparent reason. No intersection, no hiking trail. Just acres of wildflowers and stones and the sign. I took a picture of it.

Powerlifters and Prosecutors in Palm Springs

I spent last Wednesday thru Saturday in Palm Springs, California at the annual Health Care Fraud conference hosted by the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association. Palm Springs is one of the few places in California I had not yet visited, so I took to the trip with gusto. It was not at all what I expected.

For starters, the place is unbelievably hot. The first day we were there it was 110, the second day 111, etc. By the time I left on Saturday the high was expected to be 116. I drove out of town at 10 in the morning and it was already 98 degrees. When people say "oh, but it's a dry heat," they are out of their minds. 116 degrees of dry heat is only bearable if you sit under a tree without moving in a rubber suit filled with ice cubes.

The Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce deals with the heat by permitting businesspeople to install misters on the sidewalks in front of their shops and restaurants. The misters sit above doors and windows and spray out a constant, fine mist. When you walk through one (they are everywhere) you are temporarily cool. Outdoor cafes have misters, too, so you can drink your soy chai latte and work on your tan, all while sitting in a plume of water.

Not only was it beastly hot, but the resort we were staying in was probably the dumpiest hotel I've stayed in on any business trip ever. The Riviere's claim to fame is that it is Palm Spring's "oldest and most famous" resort. It was where the Rat Pack would play when it would come to town. Raquel Welch played there. So did Bob Hope, when he was young. Which is great except that the hotel now is almost exactly like it was then -- same decor, same fixtures, same plumbing, same carpet. There was a wall display in the lobby that showed pictures of the Riviera's heydey. The most recent picture on the wall was dated 1971. We suggested to them that they might try to find at least one picture from the 1990s for the wall -- even the 1980s would do. The architecture was predominatly stucco, chrome and glass. The floorplan was mysterious. The registration desk resembled the TWA terminal at JFK airport, and then you had to go up a huge, wide flight of stairs to get to the real lobby. The only way to get anywhere else in the hotel from there was to walk through the back of the lobby and down another huge, wide flight of stairs (chrome railing), and follow a series of long, dark, stale, windowless corridors that lead variously to the pool, the various wings of rooms, the conference center, etc.

The rooms themselves were straight out of the 1965 Sears catalogue. I wrapped each of my pillows in a T-shirt before sleeping on them. I wore shoes at all times in my room. The air conditioning blew air that smelled like it had been in the vents since the Rat Pack's last appearance. It was essentially a very large motor lodge.

The only saving grace was the pool, which was surrounded by palm trees and jacarandas and bougainvillea. From the pool, you can see the San Jacinto mountains, which tower over Palm Springs. The mountains still had snow on them. There can't be too many places in the world where you can sit in 100 degree weather and look up at snow.

Joining the Covington representatives to the conference was a convention of powerlifting officials -- very beefy men in tight synthetic clothing who were having their own conference somewhere on the premises -- and almost every senior government lawyer who practices in the health care fraud area. The place was crawling with prosecutors. Every now and then our team would have an impromptu meeting under a palm tree outside the conference center. We would huddle around the tree and speak in hushed tones so that no-one could hear us. We were nevertheless quite conspicious, because most of the prosecutors knew exactly who we were and who we represent, and in fact, most of the prosecutors are actively investigating our client as we speak. The prosecutors entertained themselves by coming up to our group and hollering, "Alert! Alert! Government lawyer approaching!"

Every now and then a powerlifter would accidentally run into a prosecutor and the two would feel compelled to make small talk. It was very funny to watch. The powerlifters were very large but not particularly athletic looking, and they wore nothing but Under Armor as far as we could tell. The powerlifters all seemed to be traveling with female body builders. The powerlifters and their bodybuilding companions all seemed very happy to be in Palm Springs and they seemed to just love the Riviera.

Between the heat, the prosecutors and the powerlifters, the three days we spent in Palm Springs passed very slowly. It seemed that we had been there an eternity. We lost track of the calendar. We stopped returning office calls. We even turned off our blackberries for long stretches at a time. It was as if were had been teleported back to 1971 and nothing was as urgent or as pressing anymore.

After the conference adjourned, we lined up on chaise longues by the pool and ordered up drinks from the pool bar lady. We applied layer after layer of sun screen and gazed up at the snow-covered San Jacinto's. We looked at all the pale, East Coast lawyers coming out in to the sun, easily identifiably by the sock lines on their legs and the blackberry's on their waistbands. We relaxed. We sat by the pool for about 3 hours. We started giggling at the silliness of it all. We saw a man in Organized Crime & Corruption Bureau T-shirt and a bathing suit walk by with two pina coladas. It was like something out of a thug movie. We got warmer and tanner and sleepier and sillier as the afternoon wore on. Eventually, we no longer looked like the Covington white collar practice group at all -- we looked like a bunch of sun-burned Easterners on vacation together. Some people began to mobilize as the sun set to catch red-eyes back home, or drive to LA, or something. As people started to peel off, we got a little maudlin.

We realized that we didn't really want to leave the wacky Riviera after all. We had started to get used to it.

Under the Baobab Tree

Thursday, May 26, 2005

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Monday, May 23, 2005

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