Under the Baobab TreeUnder the Baobab Tree: February 2006
Under the Baobab Tree
Friday, February 10, 2006
Picking up where we left off, recall that we were in Atlanta getting ready for a jury exercise to occur in New York.
So Friday night I fly back from Atlanta and Sunday morning bright and early I head up to NY. The exercise involved three days of case presentation to about 8 mock juries. We had lawyers from our team playing both the plaintiff and defense side, with a total of 90 minutes of go time for each. The event took place in a monstrous Times Square hotel -- we had the presentations going in a giant ballroom and the rest of us (about 50 lawyers including client, all told) were all assembled in the giant ballroom next door listening and watching on closed caption plasma monitors. Then the jurors would go into separate conference rooms spread out around the hotel and deliberate -- we would listen in from our ballroom with headphones you could tune to various channels depending on which jury you wanted to listen to.
This all sounds fine except that a) the jurors had no idea we were there, and b) the jurors thought the exercise was real, they didn't know it was fake. So we had to engage in clandestine tactics. None of us could talk to each other in public in the hotel, for fear a juror might see us and start wondering why plaintiff and defendant were so cozy. We had to do our ritual fire brigade trips to the nearest watering hole at distances far from the hotel. We ate our team dinners at non-descript Chinese restaurants far from Times Square so that no-one would see all 50 of us together whooping it up (or trying to anyway). We had to try to slip into our ballroom undetected and incognito -- would not do to have jurors see everyone going into the same room and wonder what was up. We could not take a hotel elevator with anyone else on our team. We could not get into the same taxis as one other, etc. Most of all, we had to be quiet as church mouse in the ballroom so they would not hear us through the fake wall. At one point, I was in the presentation room helping the fearsome blond bombshell put on her presentation against, of all people, my boss, and she said something rather humorous about my boss. Such as, "Mr. Brown may be a nice enough person when you get to know him, I don't know." Which was funny because of course she knows Mr. Brown extremely well and because Mr. Brown is, in fact, rather nice when you get to know him. This made all our colleagues in the next room hoot with laughter -- which we could hear quite clearly in the presentation room. Did the jurors figure out that the laughter was a response to what was going on in their room? Who knows.
The effect of three days of this was a feeling that we were living in a science fiction movie. Three days in a row with headphones on staring at plasma screen TVs watching jurors dissect your presentations (a very painful experience) was disorienting. Three days of trying to pretend you have never even met the people with whom you spend most of your waking hours is also strange.
And jurors complain about everything -- the clothes someone was wearing, whether someone's suit looked too expensive or threadbare, people's accents -- many of which have nothing to do with substance. Jurors make things up. People became completely convinced of some facts that were not in any presentation made by anyone and that are not, strictly speaking, true. Jurors ascribe all sorts of evil motives to the most benign situations. Jurors complain about being talked down to, as they gaily make a complete hash of the simplest, most basic facts. Jurors say terrible things about the lawyers, especially when they think the lawyers can't hear them. Spending three days watching one's case be dismantled and one's colleagues be ridiculed was extraordinarily depressing. By the end of day 3, we all sat in our ballroom slumped in our chairs, lukewarm hotel coffee and half nibbled Danishes strewn about, discarded jury notes made some lawyer fed up with the display (i.e., "Juror number 12 is an IDIOT!"). We had entered a collective twilight zone -- even though we were smack in the middle of Times Square, we might as well have been in a nuclear fallout shelter deep below the Rocky Mountains.
Eventually we could no longer speak to one another at all, we were too demoralized. After the end of Day 3 we all fled first the hotel and then the City. We needed to talk to normal people about normal things. We needed to be outside instead of stuck in a windowless ballroom. We needed to talk to people who liked us, at least a little bit. My closest friend on the team and I said "bye" in a rushed and desultory fashion in the middle of Times Square. He went to find his non-lawyer brother for dinner before going back to Baltimore. I gave up on humanity altogether, and got a train to come home and see my horse.
Several of you have asked if I’ve either stopped writing a travelogue or stopped traveling. Neither. All that has happened is that my work traveling has fallen into a regular rhythm of trips to New York every other week or so, usually with pretty much the same cast of characters. Most of the time it is pretty ho-hum.
But a few interesting things have happened in any event. For example, in late January, I spent two days in Atlanta getting a colleague at another firm ready for a jury exercise we were planning to conduct in New York (which will be the subject of a separate report). I had not been south in almost two years and as soon as I landed in Atlanta, I realized what a grave mistake that was.
I love the South. Not because I was born in the South or went to law school in the South. Not because my great-great grandmother, White McRorie, was minding her Ps and Qs outside Charlotte, N.C. during the Civil War when she got carried off to Newark, N.J. by a Yankee soldier (by great-grandfather) and ended up with a gazillion bluestocking New Yorker in-laws. And not because most of my family still lives in the South. I love the South because of the loblollies.
Loblollies pines grow tall and straight and they don’t branch out until they are well off the ground. Loblolly needles are long, soft, and pale green. Loblolly wood orange, loblolly cones are reddish brown. Some people call them rosemary pines, or Indian pines, or Bull pines. They line cotton fields and corn fields and soybean fields and interstate highways. They can grow over 100 feet high. According to the dictionary, a loblolly is “a lout or clownish fellow, a thick gruel, or a mud puddle.” According to the Natural History of Trees, “a loblolly is a natural pocket or depression,” which is where they start out growing before they take over abandoned, worked-out, cut-over, or burned fields on the costal plain.
Once when I was on a business trip to Savannah, I found a 19th century engraving of a row of loblollies dividing two plowed cotton fields. My framer in D.C. framed it in a thick redolent dark wood frame with whorled gold flakes – bringing out the movement of the loblolly needles. The image could be nowhere else but the Southern coastal plain. Again, the Natural History of Trees: “in the southern landscape [the loblolly] is second only to Longleaf in beauty – grand in its trunks like marshaled columns, colorful in its bark. So Loblolly gives to the vast, somewhat mournful coastal plains that loftiness, that movement and singing, which one longs for there, and seems to people with noble lives the sun-bitten stretches where so often no people live.”
Whenever I see a loblolly, I feel uplifted. My sister-in-law once took a picture of me hugging a very large loblolly on the grounds of the Pinehurst, North Carolina polo grounds. When I was in law school, I lived in a little cul-de-sac of loblollies on the edge of the Duke Forest. My last September there, Hurricane Fran came through and snapped my favorite, giant red loblolly in two. My grandfather could not believe it. He said to me on the telephone – “Pine trees don’t break. That’s why they make ship’s masts out of them.” One New Year’s my brother and sister-in-law and nieces and nephew drove across the border to Camden, South Carolina to a little-known Revolutionary War battle field. The battle field was an overgrown field, ringed with loblollies.
I spent the whole ride in from the Atlanta airport with my nose pressed against the taxi window, starting at the loblollies.
My time in Atlanta only got better after that. I spent all day working with my colleague on the 52nd floor of a building that a panoramic view of Atlanta. We were on the conference room floor and we seemed to be the only people up there. It was a very southern conference room floor – nice colonial furniture with tiger claw casters, pastel upholstery, bright chintz floor-length curtains, pretty yellow carpets, paintings of old men in green pants. More like the club house of a golf club than a law firm. When we got tired of working, we would tour the floor. My colleague showed me all the Olympic sites, the locations of the most controversial new Starbucks, the huge massive park that bisects much of downtown Atlanta (full of loblollies), Stone Mountain in the distance (scene of Revolutionary War and Civil War activities), the baseball stadium and the airport. It was beautiful.
My colleague is the first woman to be on her very Southern law firm’s executive committee, a 50-year-old blond bombshell who towered over me in very high heels and bent everyone in the firm/on the road/on the telephone/at the restaurant to her fearsome will. Her secretary was so terrified of her I thought at one point she might walk backwards out of the room in bare feet, mumbling. My colleague would call her up on the phone and make what must have sounded like very odd requests but which were actually quite necessary to our jury exercise preparation – “Find out if anyone in Atlanta will sell me a copy of the 1939 original version of the Wizard of Oz!” Or, “Bring Kim a chicken pesto sandwich immediately!” Or, “Call Bell South and tell them I’m busy!” Or, “Kim is till hungry – bring lots of potato chips!”
That night she took me to an exceedingly trendy little restaurant in Buckhead. It had numbers in its name and you entered by going through a heavy velvet curtain. It was misty outside but there was a fire in our trendy restaurant – which dried us out but also suffocated us because I guess some of the mist got into the chimney or something.
We had a long leisurely dinner during which my colleague told me what it was like to be fearsome and imperious as one of the first famous female trial lawyers in the south. She recently married for the first time to a very rich man who is much older than her and does not live in Atlanta. Perfect. As she told me, “honey, like I always said, he’s gotta have one foot in the grave and one foot on the banana peel!”
Being fearsome and imperious apparently also comes with very poor driving skills and an inability to clean windshield wipers. As she drove me home from our trendy nightspot to my hotel, I couldn’t look out the front of the car – too scary. I looked out the side, at the loblollies rising blackly in the misty night. The windshield wipers made hideous screechy scratchy sounds all the way back uptown, making me wince. Every time I winced, my colleague would shriek with laughter -- “Doesn’t that sound just absolutely HORRIBLE?!”
The last thing worth reporting on is the hotel itself. It was one of the (if not the?) oldest hotel on Peachtree Street. It was where Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable stayed during the premiere of Gone With the Wind. It resembled a wedding cake very much. It was not exactly “up to date,” although the bathrooms had recently been renovated, it appeared. My room was about a 45 minute walk away from the elevator. It was larger than my house in DC. Part of it was a turret. The turret had about 5 windows all facing southeast. My bed was placed in the middle of the turret room, equidistant from each of the 5 windows. The bed was one of those Swedish mud mattresses that form to your body and have no springs – like climbing onto a very comfortable pile of clay. Within seconds I was asleep. I woke up the next morning to the southern sun streaming over miles and miles of loblollies through the 5 windows of my turret, right onto my Swedish mud bed. I was very happy.
Eventually we could no longer speak to one another at all, we were too demoralized. After the end of Day 3 we all fled first the hotel and then the City. We needed to talk to normal people about normal things. We needed to be outside instead of stuck in a windowless ballroom. We needed to talk to people who liked us, at least a little bit. 
