Diary: Presidents Day and Beyond

　

1.

The week after Valentine’s Day, I drove about 1200 miles in six days and took eight depositions.

2.

I am working on two big cases – one involves two women incinerated in a fire that took place at a hog barn near the border with South Dakota; the other lawsuit arises from brain injuries suffered by a young man when his car collided with a garbage truck. I have other substantial litigation as well. As a lawyer, I have never been more busy.

3.

Travel was complicated by a harsh winter. At intervals of two or three days, storms pulsed from west to east, smearing sleet on the highways and, then, deep snow. Unrelenting cold gripped the upper Midwest – the rivers were frozen solid and 94% of Lake Superior was locked under thick ice. In the respite between storms, the skies cleared but were full of raging torrential winds. The wind dropped the temperature far below zero and blew the snow over the fields and rows in dense, impenetrable clouds. The drifts along the freeway migrated from the ditches into the lanes of travel and were ground down to the slickness of a ballroom floor. Trucks scuttling along the interstate cast up fogs of snow and created white-out conditions and there were hundreds of crashes: small cars pitched into the deep snow in the median and almost swallowed, snow-bound to the windows, trucks jack-knifed or spun off the road into wind-ravaged shelter-belts, multi-car pile-ups with vehicles locked together over several linear acres of freeway, hoods smoking and people huddled together on the roadside.

4.

On Monday, February 18, President’s Day, the office was closed but I worked all morning preparing exhibits for the deposition in Omaha on Tuesday. I put my exhibits in numbered manila folders in a plastic crate. Then, I dragged the crate and my brief case to the car and set off for Omaha.

5.

The trip to Omaha consists of two legs. The first, and longest, part of the journey passes along I-90 to 35 and, then, south to Des Moines – this is a distance of about 150 miles, across completely flat terrain. There is a one bridge over a big lake nine miles north of the Minnesota border, a body of water poised near the state line like a kind of greeting: Welcome to Minnesota – Land of 10,000 Lakes. It’s gusty on the bridge riding low above the icy desert of the lake and, then, after a low hill, the terrain is completely flat and the highway straight as an arrow running 130 miles to the northern suburbs of Des Moines. The level, unbending highway is hypnotic, soporific – it urges the driver into dizzy reverie. Along the horizon, sometimes a grain elevator makes an obscene gesture at the white and hazy sky and, at the edge of the white snowy fields, the rotors of wind turbines are whirling. Somewhere in the middle of the drive, a county highway crosses the freeway on an elegant concrete overpass, great pillars on concrete installed at intervals under the curve of the elevated road – that’s the only landmark on the route.

6.

The second leg of the trip to Omaha is due west along I-80, a freeway crowded with heavy and fast-moving trucks. This part of the journey traverses the ancient loess hills, dirt blown across the plains from the Rocky Mountains and deposited in a series of ridges running north and south across western Iowa. The loess hills rise trough to crest about 150 feet, an undulating landscape of identical valleys and ridges. The valleys are about six miles wide and this makes for interesting driving challenges. The huge trucks using the freeway struggle on the upgrade and, invariably, you pass by them as they labor to the crest of the ridge. But from the ridge-top down into the valley, the trucks toboggan downhill at high speed, zooming past you only to labor and almost stall on the upgrade once more. And, so, it goes for another 140 miles until higher bluffs and steeper, deeper valleys complicate the terrain and the freeway drops down onto the wide Missouri river plain on which Omaha is located.

7.

Blizzard snow had fallen over Omaha on the weekend before President’s Day. Forlorn-looking cars crashed in drifts alongside the road marked the way west over the loess hills. The sky was slippery white and every hilltop was plinth to three-hundred foot tall wind turbines, an army of colossi overlooking the barren, snow-clogged valleys. Many of the trucks were immense, carrying 150 foot rotors shaped like the aluminum and steel wings of an immense jet airplane. The trucks carrying the rotors used linked flatbeds and seemed to be the length of a football field.

8.

Omaha was still digging out from under the freshly fallen snow. The sidewalks were treacherous with alluvial fans of glass-slick ice and some of the walkways were blind, ending in heaped turrets of snow and road ice. There was no way out of a sidewalk blocked in that way and, if you found yourself, trapped by an igloo-shaped wall of grey snow and yard-long blocks of ice, there was nothing to do, but reverse your way and walk in the opposite direction.

9.

Savage cold burned like a torch between the buildings in downtown Omaha. I got lost looking for an Old Town steak-house. This part of the city seemed to have been bombed-out – whole blocks of buildings had been eliminated in favor of snow-mounded empty spaces and big parking lots, all of them mostly empty. There were 12 patrons at the steak house, eight of them cheerful and noisy Japanese tourists. I sat at the bar to eat. The hostess was dark with lustrous black hair and she looked Middle Eastern – on the wall, there was a large, colorful map of Iran.

10.

The deposition the next morning took place in a small custom slaughterhouse that had been converted into a labyrinthine office building – the walls were heavy with brick and mortar and the room in which we took the deposition was long and narrow with an exercise bicycle mounted like a piece of sculpture at one end of the space. The toilets were factory-cold and utilitarian. I led the questioning and the deposition continued for six hours.

11.

Omaha was under a blizzard warning. Another storm was whirling across the high plains, aimed at the city. Snow was expected to start around the evening commute, that is, between five and six pm. When I stopped for gas, one of enormous trucks hauling an equally enormous wind turbine rotor, had also chosen that exit for respite from interstate traffic. The trucks traveled in a small caravan of amber-flashing pilot picks, a couple vehicles ahead and behind the over-sized load. When the rotors were hauled off the freeway, turns were problematic – the big rotor swept like a clock-hand across the landscape at the corner, sheering away signs and clipping of the tops of passenger cars. Ambulances and squad cars were poised on side-roads and it took the truck fifteen minutes to execute the right-hand turn. Overhead, the sky boiled with angry grey storm clouds.

12.

The deposition was finally done at 3:00 pm. I drove back to Austin ahead of the storm. In western Iowa, the freeway passed under illuminated billboards that read Blizzard Alert: snow commencing at 6 pm and continuing overnight. On the straight, hallucination-inducing freeway running north to Albert Lea, the billboards warned: Blizzard Tonight: snow commencing around midnight.

13.

I had depositions scheduled for Rochester on Wednesday. I reached Austin, my home, around 8:00 pm. Stopped long enough to pack a bag and, then, continued to drive, this time east over the windswept Dexter ridge, another army of wind turbines on that height of land, and, then, to Rochester. The plan was to stay ahead of oncoming storm.

14.

I reached the Doubletree Hotel in downtown Rochester about 9:30. At check-in, the desk clerk gave me a warm cookie.

15.

The next morning, I walked through the skyways around 8:00 am, looking for something for breakfast. The skyway bridge over the street showed heavy snow falling in white clots and clumps, cars and busses crawling along over white, rutted streets. The facades of the buildings were a brown or grey backdrop against which balls of sticky snow plummeted straight down onto the sidewalks and roads.

16.

The Doubletree Hotel is three-blocks from the Mayo Clinic, second floor skyways connecting the downtown buildings together. Mayo Clinic consultants with lanyards swinging from their necks were hurrying through the skyways, walking at a high speed consistent, I suppose, with requirements for a cardiovascular work-out. Mayo Clinic consultants tend to be athletic-looking with studious glasses and they wear expensively nondescript grey or black suits. Of course, many of them are Asian, although all speak excellent, agitated English – they tend to move about in groups of two or three. In general, the consultants and the accountants working for the Mayo Clinic, also easily recognized by their lanyards, ignored the flurry of falling snow and the chaos on the streets where cars and buses were battling the blizzard.

17.

In the old days, Mayo Clinic docs (now called "consultants") worked all the time. Before dawn, they did surgery, in the afternoon, their schedules were crowded with patient consultations, and, after dinner, they did rounds in the hospital primarily to assess how their surgical patients were progressing. The docs were earnest, humorless, people who read no books because they had no time to read – saving lives was their vocation. All of them had written hundreds of papers, generally each with a half-dozen collaborators. When these surgeons and specialists had time to compose these publications was unclear to me –presumably, they dictated their contributions in traffic or between the hole and tee-box ath the country club. The Mayo Clinic is nominally non-profit but now "the enterprise" as it is called by its officers and business representatives seems primarily designed to funnel vast amounts of money to its upper echelons of management. In bygone years, the docs were always "on-call" and carried pagers in holsters strapped like pistols to their hips. The docs are not really "on-call" any more – the profession of "hospitalist" now exists to manage the post-surgical care of patients requiring intensive, or other in-patient, care. The financial guys now carry the pagers – they are "on-call" at all times in the event that something might go wrong with enterprise’s investments or bill collections or invoicing or its allocations of government and private grants.

18.

The dying or medically damaged people who come to the Mayo Clinic are, often, potentates of Middle Eastern nations or Russian oligarches or other specimens of the super-wealthy. (The chief of "the enterprise," Dr. John Noseworthy announced publicly that the Mayo Clinic didn’t want to treat "Medicare patients" because the fee schedules for payment for services for those patients were not adequately remunerative. When the royalty of Saudi Arabia travels to Rochester, the entourage rents an entire floor of the Kahler Hotel for the various emirs, viziers, harem girls and wives, and assorted regents, princelings, and crown princes. The entourage always makes a trip to the Mall of America 80 miles to the north in Bloomington before returning to Riyadh or Abu Dhabi or wherever they come from. These kinds of patients, of course, have brought to Rochester various elite shops – there are custom leather goods available in the skyways, jewelry stores, antique dealers, vendors of Louis Vuitton bags and other accessories, all sorts of boutiques selling astronomically priced gear to people who don’t care about the price. Some of these stores cluster around a vertical atrium called the Galleria – most elite shopping areas are named "Galleria" (have you noticed?) A scatter of tables fronts the escalators in the atrium and, at one of those tables, a homeless man is sleeping vertically, a battered suitcase on rollers between his legs. He is wrapped in a torn snowmobile suit and his red face is tilted back. The consultants and suits ignore him – hustling past the man as if he were a potted plant.

19.

Somali women in hijab are mopping floors in a food court. A burrito place is open and a husky Mexican man sells me breakfast. None of the other shops are doing business – I suppose the early bird gets the worm and, perhaps, the Somali char-women will get hungry and buy something for their breakfast, although this seems doubtful to me: the women are too earnest and skinny and energetic to be hungry. The burrito is excellent and I sit for awhile enjoying my food.

20.

On the way back to the Doubletree, I venture into a shadowy corridor strapped like a belt to the back of the hotel. The skyway passage leads to a parking lot and it’s quiet and poorly lit. Some shapeless bundles rest against the side of the walkway. Glancing at them, I see boots, a gloved hand: more homeless people sprawled in featureless heaps of blanket and coat, heads hidden under hoods and piles of garments. At first, I can’t recognize the bundles as sleeping people – it’s simply too alien to me, too unexpected here in a skyway on the backside of this luxury hotel. A faint feeling of dread suffuses me. Around the corner, there are more bundles, packages of ragged cloth zippered into cocoons, inert and inchoate. The bundles are motionless, headless, without shape. The skyway ends in the grit of a stairway dropping down to the sidewalk. I retrace my steps, cleaving to the center of the walkway, to avoid approaching the contagion of poverty strewn against the walls – pads of newspapers as blankets, styrofoam cups next to the formless caterpillar-shaped piles, no sound at all coming from the sleepers, perhaps, they are dead or comatose or holding their breath for fear of offending me. Like a toadstool or an umbrella the mighty Mayo Clinic rises in terraces above the center of the city but there is no place for these people within its galleries and plazas. Dread has settled into these skyways, deep and appalling dread.

21.

The hubris of lawyers knows no end. So we reached Rochester and have a room reserved for the depositions but this is all supremely impractical because, of course, you can’t have a deposition without witnesses and the witnesses have to appear to testify and it’s forty-five miles for them across rural winding roads that go up and down in the clouds of blowing snow. The witnesses can’t make the deposition – there’s no way for them to even get their cars through driveways submerged in snow. But we make due. Someone sets up a cellphone on the middle of the table in the conference room and we take the depositions by face-time, the court reporter leaning forward to hear and lip-read the little talking head on the screen of the telephone.

22.

The drive back to Austin is slow. At the Dexter ridge, the blizzard has seized the freeway and pumped a gruel of icy, wet snow down its gullet. The car skids underneath me. Crashes line the ditch.

23.

The next afternoon, I drive 175 miles to Rock County on the South Dakota border. The sky is clear and I pass through an elaborately sculpted landscape, alabaster drifts sanded by the wind into graceful waves extending out to the spectral white gusts blowing along the horizon. The sun is setting in a red haze of ice particles and each drift casts a perfectly blue shadow mottling the vast plains with white-caps curling scarlet above the slate-blue sea. Winter would be beautiful if it weren’t so very terrible.

24.

Another blizzard is on the way. We take the depositions at the old courthouse. The place smells of coffee, antiseptic, sweat. Sometimes, rain splashes against the windows of the law library where we are working.

25.

With the darkness, more snow is expected. The rain will freeze. I am running in front of the storm, eastward into the shadows of night.