…One Less Scene

Found all of these Methow (It’s pronounced Met-How!!) photos at Methow.com.

Skiing Up to South Early Winters Spire, photo by Belinda Denchfield 

I’m one of those people who is just smart enough to understand how really smart some of my friends are. I recently caught up with one of those brilliant friends, a kid that I grew up with in the Methow Valley. We used to run around in the woods looking for gnomes and Indian arrowheads; now he’s a successful investment banker in New York City, while I’m working as a trained monkey in Seattle. I had a chance to ask him about the “scandal” of AIG’s contractual bonuses, and he asked me about riding on freight trains.

Excerpt from his letter, March 29:

“…As far as all the populist outrage around AIG goes, I personally think it’s a complete joke.  The analogy that I use is to tell people to imagine a small town that has a big used car dealership (AIG) than runs into financial trouble and is about to go out of business.  Since the local economy depends pretty heavily on this dealership, the mayor decides that he’s going to try to save it.  The problem is that the dealership’s debts are greater than it’s assets, so what the mayor ultimately has to do is to seize it from the original owners and put a bunch of taxpayer money into paying off enough of the debts so that it doesn’t go under.  It’s expensive, but he figures that it’s worth it, because if the dealership went out of business, the local economy would be in real trouble.

Once the town owns the dealership, the mayor and his staff show up one day and look around at what’s been going on and realize that the people running the place are crooked and have run up big gambling debts in the business’s name.  Furthermore, they figure out that some of the used car salesmen that work there are pretty sketchy characters.  At this point, they have choice to either shut the car dealership down, or try and make a go of it.  Since the local economy depends a lot on the car dealership, and because they just spent a lot of money to buy it, they decide that they had better keep the place open.  The first thing that they do is fire the guys that ran up all the gambling debt, as well as any of the car salesmen that they can prove have been engaging is sketchy business practices.  The salesmen that are left are worried about their future with the company in light of everything that’s been going on, so they start looking around for new jobs.  In order to keep them around, the town signs contracts with them that guarantee that they will receive decent commissions (bonuses) as long as they sell a reasonable number of used cars and promise to stick around.  The dealership struggles along for a few months and the new management brought in by the mayor repeatedly assures the remaining used car salesmen that they will be taken care of when it comes time for their commissions to be paid out at the end of the year.

Then, somebody on the city council (congress) who’s in a tough race for re-election finds out about the contracts with the used car salesmen and whips the town into a frenzy over how much these guys are getting paid, especially in light of the fact that they work for a business that has caused the town so much grief already.  Furthermore, he points out, since the town put so much money into keeping the dealership afloat, they’re basically getting paid with taxpayer money.  One guy on the city council (let’s call him Charles Grassley) even suggests that if the the salesmen had any honor, they should kill themselves for accepting their sales commissions out of the taxpayers’ pockets.  The city district attorney (NY Attorney General Cuomo) subpoenas the dealership for a list of salesmen’s names and how much they made in sales commissions last year.  He then tells them that if they don’t give back all the money, that he is going to post their names and addresses outside city hall.  Everybody knows that if that happens, the townsfolk will break down these guys’ doors with torches and pitchforks, so most of the salesmen give back the money out of fear of what will happen if they don’t.

That’s where we’re at so far.  Not sure what will happen next, but my guess is that any car salesman who is any good at his job will go find work somewhere else and the business will slowly fall apart, taking all of the taxpayers money with it and taking a big bite out of the town economy.  I voted for Obama and was very happy to see the old republican congress lose power, but am pretty disappointed with the way congress has handled this one.  A couple of very basic facts that nobody in congress seems to be willing to acknowledge are that, 1. the people who caused the AIG mess got fired pretty much on day one and 2. the taxpayers now own AIG, so if we wreck the business by refusing to honor the contracts that we put in place to keep people from deserting the company, we’re hurting ourselves just as much as we’re hurting them.  It does seem a bit ridiculous that some of these guys were getting paid seven figure numbers to stick around, but as someone who works in the business, I can tell you that they would actually have been able to get something roughly comparable elsewhere, as bizarre as that may sound.  It might have taken them a while to find a new job, but they have a pretty specific set of skills and contacts that is very valuable to the right employer.

One other point that I’d like to make is that I don’t want to be the one defending bankers as not being morally corrupt or anything.  In fact, working in investment banking myself, I’d say that being a sociopath and/or a pathological liar is amazingly common for people in the upper level jobs.  I do think that they serve an necessary function for keeping the economy functioning properly however.

Wow, that was an incredibly long email…  Hope you’re still reading at this point.    I don’t normally rant and rave like that (or at least to that extent).  Guess maybe I had to get something out of my system…”

Excerpt from my letter, April 21

oil painting by John Ohanessian

“…it feels like a lifetime ago that I actually jumped on a train. I was on
a road trip once with a friend when I was 20, we were travelling in a
bus and we met a couple of crusty punk girls in Sedona. They ended up
travelling with us for a week or so, and they told us they had been
hitchhiking and freighthopping around for months. I was incredulous
that anyone, let alone two young women, still did that (my dad had
stories, Jack Kerouac had stories, but it seemed like that was a
different America). Anyway, at the end of that trip, my friend and I
were excited about the idea of seeing the country from an open freight
car and we started researching. We also saw a documentary called
Riding the Rails, which I highly recommend if you can find it. The
film was made in the seventies, and basically the film maker goes
around interviewing these old guys that rode trains as hoboes during
the great depression. I’ll never forget one scene in which you see
this seventy year old guy who is taken out by the film crew to watch
trains leaving the freight yard. He hasn’t been in a yard since he was
a young man, and you see him watching the string of cars as they roll
down the track, and he just starts weeping with nostalgia. I was
pretty much hooked after that.

After doing some investigating, we found out about a sort of anarchist
database of yard and train information, most importantly the “Crew
Change Guide to North America.” “Crew change points” are places where
a train will stop to switch crews; federal regulations require all
trains to switch crews every six or eight hours. So, if the
enterprising freighthopper knows where those crew change points are
(they’re usually not in the yard, but near it), it’s possible to pick
out the best car and get on and off the train while the train is
standing still, hence avoiding the danger of trying to jump on a
moving train. I’ve included the top page of this priceless document, a
bible of information that has been in my backpack for thousands of
miles of rail travel. I actually got a little emotional myself when I
pulled out my old Guide, a dog-eared stack of photo copies, complete
with notes in the margins, scribbled while sitting under some overpass
waiting for a train.

I’ve had a lot of great trips through the states, but my best trip was
traveling by myself from Seattle to NYC, via Canada, in the summer of
1998. Riding through the Canadian Rockies on a grain hopper, running
out of water in the plains of Saskatchewan and having to drink my own
urine through a backpacking filter, hitchhiking from Toronto to Buffalo and
walking over the Niagara falls, and riding on top of a load of coal
from Syracuse to North Bergen, New Jersey are a few of the highlights.

Anyway, I guess this was my turn to ramble. Remember that skate ramp
that we built at your house? I was thinking about that the other day.
Do you miss the Methow very much?”