Viva, Part I: La transportación

We're back from a long weekend in Las Vegas. I'm not sure where to start describing it, but in the end we had a very good time.

After backpacking around Mexico and Morocco on recent vacations, we wanted something with a taste of adventure and a little of the unknown. Somehow, we settled on Vegas. It's adventuresome, no doubt, but in an entirely different way than those previous trips. And it was certainly an unknown to both of us. Still another selling point: it would be faster - and cheaper, we hoped - than another international trip.

First, though, bounce back to last Saturday. After a snowy week in the Boston-Cambridge area, the wakeup call came around 4 a.m. On the heels of a long farewell night out with the Maynard crew, that O-Dark-Thirty ringing of the phone was particularly cruel.

The Chips Quinn Scholars contingent was seven-strong at Maynard Media Academy. From left: Erin McKinney, Maynard; Kara Andrade, Maynard; me; LaSharah Bunting, The New York Times; Minal Gandhi, St. Louis Post Dispatch; Jon Perez, Rocky Mountain News; Staci Brown Brooks, Birmingham News.

Thankfully, though, that call ensured I got to Logan for a 6-something flight to, of all places, Dallas, Texas. That's the city - for reasons both real and imagined, fair and unfair - I despise more than any other on the planet. As travel writer Chuck Thompson said in a hilarious book I finished in this day of marathon flying: "... it's perhaps only outsiders who can completely appreciate the magnificent sense of relief and elation you get watching that fucking town disappear in your rearview mirror."

Now, my apologies in advance for what will turn out to be roughly a four-paragraph aside.

I think the stomach-churning emotion I feel toward Dallas stems from my issues with my own hometown's longstanding discomfort with itself. Hank Stuever has previously summed up that sentiment, however, much more eloquently than I could ever put it. Stuever, the Washington Post journalist extraordinarie and an alum of the same private high school my childhood next-door neighbor attended, was a finalist for the Pulitzer for a piece he wrote upon going home in the wake of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. In that piece, he wrote:

"There were dreams about getting out of here. ... What you need to know about that urban heartland is how it can weigh upon you. What you need to know about the Bible Belt is how tightly it can cinch. What you need to know about a comfortable place is how discomforting predictability can be. Some of us did move away. Others stayed in Oklahoma, opting for a literal and emotional 'Okay,' ... Here is a metropolis that in its wildest dreams that aspired only to be more like Dallas."

So, yeah, I hate Dallas. And I'm reminded of it each time I feel my body tense up when I fly or drive through there. I hate it for all its ego and money, gridlock and greed, sprawl and silicone, peroxide and politics, and the fact that some of my high school classmates went on to embrace all that like lemmings marching over the cliff. At its core, I think, the draw was this: It was just far enough to seem different, big enough to feel like somewhere and money-driven enough to appeal to our baser selves, all while being close enough to crawl home if you fucked it up.

Perhaps that's all some psychoanalytical self-loathing in what could've been the rearview mirror of my life at one point in time. And maybe my friends and family - good folks all - who have lived in or survived Dallas can convince me otherwise. But that was neither here not there when I hit DFW five hours into my long-haul-trucker day of travel. Dallas was no destination. Rather, much like for the bewildered old Amish family fearfully searching for a bathroom in Terminal C, it was nothing more than a piss-'n-go stop.


After a mercifully short layover and a four-plus hour flight, I was happily back in Portland. And as if on cue, our flight touched down in that steady, soft, cleansing winter rain that turns the sky here the same shade of gray as the Columbia River. I swear, upon landing one woman on the plane started talking loud enough for all to hear about how much she'd missed this sweet, sweet rain.

Amy picked me up, we ran home, I unpacked a week's worth of work clothes, did some laundry and repacked some proper vacation clothes. Less than four hours later it was back to the airport for the two-hour flight to what we soon would learn would be a foreign vacation destination after all: Vegas.

But that'll have to be for tomorrow. It's getting late, and we're all - Wiley included - looking forward to sleeping in our bed in our house together for the first time in almost two weeks.