Basin, Range, and the Colorado Plateau

Central Nevada, which, according to John McPhee, is slowly being stretched apart.

Zion: outside looking in

The Colorado by Vermillion Cliffs

Bryce Canyon

Canyonlands, looking out from the Island in the Sky

Delicate Arch, Utah's most famous arch, is on the left. The tiny bumps to the left are tourists more ambitious than I.

Along the Coast

Los Angeles

The Big Sur

Winding along the coast

The Bay Area from the Berkeley Hills

The Golden Gate in its natural habitat

Point Reyes

Redwoods

The middle Oregonian coast

A fishing boat returns to Newport Bay

West to the Ocean

White Sands National Monument

Saguaro outside Tucson

Entrance to the desert in Joshua Tree National Park

The next morning

The Pacific!

Raising Steak

This is a review I wrote for the June issue of the Radcliffe Culinary Times.

When I began my graduate research on cattle ranching in Texas, I thought it amusing that most ranchers I spoke with talked a blue streak about their desire for independence and self-reliance, yet they all dressed, drove, and drank the same. Meanwhile, they eyed those few among them who challenged conventional ranching methods with deep suspicion.

Betty Fussell examines the same dynamic in her wonderful, sprawling Raising Steak, an investigation into the economics, culture, and gastronomy of American beef. How can a good steak symbolize rugged cowboy individualism when its producers are terribly afraid of sticking out from the herd?

The conundrum troubles few people, if the exploding popularity of steakhouses is any guide. Fussell gets right at steak’s raw patriotic appeal, writing, with typical strength and directness, “Real American men, women and children eat steak because it’s red with blood, blood that pumps flavor, iron, vitality, and sex into flaccid bodies. For women, steak is better than spinach. For men, it’s better than Viagra. With steak, it’s easy to get carried away.” I’ll say!

Fussell dates the blossoming of America’s lust for beef to the second half of the nineteenth century, when railroads and industrialism made cheap beef available to the urban masses. Cattle replaced buffalo on the Great Plains, completing the defeat of the Indians and establishing its American bona fides. The actual period when cowboys drove cattle north to the western railroad terminus was a brief interlude, “yet those twenty years [1867-87] had etched a schism in the American imagination…the sudden, invasive presence of the urban Machine created a deep nostalgia for lost Wilderness, which our stories often presented as the conflict of Eastern capitalist against Western cowboy.”

It is a sad commentary on American culture, and particularly masculinity, that our diet is so symptomatic of unfulfillment, but Fussell aptly concludes, “Images eat reality, and we feed our hunger for power and glory more than our need for nutrients when we eat steaks.” Yet despite its many unsettling revelations, Raising Steak is generally upbeat, sustained by Fussell’s infectiously enthusiastic voice.

She is fascinated by the characters inhabiting the world of beef. Crisscrossing the country indefatigably, she interviews an impressive, even bewildering array of sources, from the plucky lady who purchases meat for Peter Luger Steakhouse to Temple Grandin, an autistic animal scientist who designs half of the country’s animal handling facilities. Down-to-earth and witty, she makes the hefty text a fun read, though the vastness of information needs a more systematic presentation than it gets with her travelogue approach.

Fussell, born a Westerner but now residing in Manhattan, is somewhat of a paradox herself, which becomes problematic as she turns from the cattle industry’s history to its present situation. If Michael Pollan brings “an Easterner’s view to the West,” this Westerner is too indulgent toward ranchers. She details how the big meatpacking companies, assisted by the USDA, run their industry as a virtual oligopoly, driving down prices at which they purchase cattle, but fails to note that many rich hobby ranchers often sell cattle at a loss, hurting full-time producers who operate on a narrow margin. The reflexively macho and anti-government rhetoric common among cattlemen only makes truly independent ranchers more vulnerable to exploitation and wary of sissy solutions such as cooperatives. Fussell finds plenty of inspiring exceptions, but I am skeptical that the cattle industry can willingly reform itself without some massive cultural shifts among ranchers as well as packers.

When Fussell does get hot, she is forceful and eloquent. The USDA and the corporations it enables receive much warranted criticism, particularly for their despicable handling of Mad Cow Disease. Isn’t it funny how industry studies have a way of showing that consumers want whatever is cheapest for industry to produce? Money, mixed with a bit of cultural resentment, greases the industry wheels, and towards the end of the book, Fussell’s tone becomes reminiscent of muckraker Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation. She does not outline how she would reform production—her issue with the current system seems to have more to do with its execution and oversight rather than its inherent structure, and she implies that feedlot, corn-finished beef has its place in America.

Fussell is at her best when describing the cultural and culinary habits surrounding steak. She concludes with her own evaluation of the various cuts of beef—a section for which I am particularly grateful—and offers a series of recipes to describe the standard approach to cooking steak among major beef-eating cultures. Ultimately, steak, whatever its cultural and economic meaning, is awfully tasty, and we should honor it for its ability to sustain and nourish us, no matter what our reasons for eating it.

Street Art in the Cherrywood Neighborhood

As a follow-up to my last post, here are some rather less controversial examples of street art in my Cherrywood neighborhood, an enclave of grad students and young families on the western edge of the East Side. The artist has painted over the Neighborhood Watch signs. I like the color and cheekiness, and also that the artist is content to anonymously adorn the local neigborhood.


To me, Austin's charm lies mainly in those of its residential neighborhoods that maintain an unassuming and relaxed atmosphere.


I took this photo in the Blackland neighborhood, a few blocks to the south. What a vehicle!

Gentrification and Weirdness in Austin

There are many blue college towns in mostly red states, but people in Austin are particularly aware of their plight. In the 2004 election, Travis County was one of a handful in Texas that Kerry carried. The city’s motto, “Keep Austin Weird,” is partially a commentary on the perceived homogeneity of the rest of the state, while also referring to the city’s status as a center for hippies, alternative country music, and racial openness during the sixties and seventies.

In 1984, Michael Dell began selling computers out of the Dobie Center, UT’s skyscraper dormitory that looks as if it belongs on the set of Blade Runner. Nine years later, he moved the company to Round Rock, a northern suburb, where it matured into one of the largest corporations in America.

Austin has experienced enormous growth since Dell expanded the city’s economy beyond the administrative and academic spheres. Austin is not a town with a rich legacy of historical architecture, but even so, the proliferation of one-story houses in sprawling suburbs is remarkable. The city has made some sustained attempts to foster tighter development, including preserving the marvelous riverside Zilker Park and, more recently, building a light rail line between the northern suburbs and downtown, but opposition to zoning is so vehement that development continues apace. The most rampant construction has occurred to the west of the city, in the Hill Country, where views and lake access have drawn many of Austin’s wealthiest citizens. Meanwhile, on the East Side, in a geographic region known as the Blackland Prairie due to its rich soil, property values have until recently stayed quite low, despite the excellent access to downtown. The inhabitants were mainly black and Latino.

City-wide property values rose so high, however (housing prices have fallen less in Austin than in most cities; there is little evidence of recession here), that some affluent Austinites, especially those with a taste for the urban and hip, began pushing into new real estate territory. Their energy is transforming the city. A bevy of new condominiums, as tall as anything on the skyline, have ascended over the past two years, leading locals to quip that the town bird is “the crane.” They are thickest in an area near the river known as the Warehouse District, which has outlived its appellation and centers on a cluster of new retail developments, including the headquarters of Whole Foods.

Meanwhile, the East Side is transforming, lot by lot, into a center for contemporary architecture. Dusty old Victorian shacks sit across the street from plastic and glass cubist creations. While the money that has moved into the downtown condos is ostentatious, the East Side has acquired a hipster veneer. Tattooed bicyclists wait in line at East Side Pies, while old black folks eat barbecue in the shade outside Louie’s on MLK.

These two new housing trends have caused quite a bit of consternation among native Austinites. Concentrated housing is demonstrably healthy for so sprawled and parched a city, but on the other hand, the locals like their yards, and they resent the nouveau-riche atmosphere around the condos. On the East Side, things are uglier due to the racial and class nature of the competition. A number of graffiti have appeared, warning yuppie whites to keep out, but migration has not been staunched. The new light rail, which was built on an existing right-of-way, actually travels through the East Side, oddly missing such obvious destinations as the University due to its eastern arc. It is, however, attracting new development to the East Side, as new condo complexes, with their signature New Urbanist combination of commercial and residential space, are springing up around stations such as the rather conscientiously named Saltillo Plaza.

It has been intriguing to watch white Austinites, usually a very proud species, struggle to reconcile the tensions between their liberal impulses toward environmentalism, multiculturalism, and fairness that are, in this instance, competing. My own feelings are that while gentrification is causing a great deal of disruption on the East Side, it benefits those locals who are willing to sell out, since the property values are now so high. Austin is a surprisingly segregated city, and the mixing that is going on among blacks, whites, and Latinos, is probably a good thing, though it may be short-lived. Change is inevitable; stasis is impossible, though that does not condemn the East Side to becoming an enclave for the rich and hip.

In any case, Austin may have been “weird” back before Michael Dell got started in Dobie, but these days, it faces the same raft of challenges as all other western American cities that are coming of age. Last November, Obama managed to capture Harris (home to Houston) and Dallas Counties, as well as a wide swathe of counties in the Rio Grande Valley, but Austinites almost seemed miffed that the blue of Travis County was not alone in a sea of red.

The Guadalupes

In mid-May, I spent a few days in the Guadalupe Mountains and Carlsbad Caverns to kick off the post-Masters era (let us hope that my affinity for blogging revives). Tom Barnett, with whom I traveled to Big Bend after the fall semester, joined me, while Professor William Doolittle came along in spirit.


Guadalupe Peak is the highest summit in Texas. Like the Chisos Range in Big Bend, its ecosystem changes with elevation, becoming far wetter and more forested as one ascends.


I hiked to the Basin shortly after we set up camp. It is the only area in the range high and flat enough to support alpine meadows.


We camped at a site called Pine Top, about 8000 feet high and across the valley from "Guad" Peak. I did not bring enough water and spent a rather parched night.


The next morning we descended and drove west, passing some salt flats.


On Googlemaps, I had noticed a lush patch of green to the west of the Guadalupes. It is Dell City, an isolated farming town of about 500 people. On our way through the outlying fields (all watered by pivot irrigation), we passed several abandoned cotton gin mills. Many fields lay fallow. But in most cases, the desert still blooms, and the enchiladas at the Spanish Angels cafe downtown were the best I have had in Texas.