Hug that job!

     

     Hang around long enough, you may even become fashionable.
     I have that thought every time I read something about the new hot trend toward non-alcoholic cocktails.
     "Look at me, I'm a trendsetter," I'll tell Edie. "Beat 'em by about 20 years." (Next month, in fact. How the time does fly).
     I meant to get a six-pack of NA White Claw — aka flavored seltzer — so I could write something using Wood Allen's bit about buying the rights to "My Fair Lady," removing the songs and turning it back into "Pygmalion." 
     But that seemed a lot of effort to recycle a joke

     Saturday I glanced at my email and saw that clinging to your job has finally become fashionable.

     "Job hugging" is the fab new Gen Z term for not hopping from employer to employer.     

     Next they'll be discovering monogamy.

     "The newest career trend," FastCompany reveals, citing a report from "global organization consultancy" Korn Ferry, which seems agitated at the prospect.

     “At an alarming rate, more and more employees are displaying what is colloquially known as ‘job hugging’—which is to say, holding onto their jobs for dear life,” the report reveals.

     Korn Ferry never explains why the pejoratives — "alarming," "dear life." Perhaps we're all supposed to instinctively understand why staying in one position is inherently not a good thing, though they go on to limn those.

     "Experts say that employees putting down roots is not all doom and gloom, and can in fact bring companies some opportunities, beginning with a financial boon: Without pressure to match outside salaries, organizations face less of a need to raise wages. At the same time, with less turnover, recruitment and training costs dwindle."

    You can pay barnacles less, and don't have to constantly explain to newcomers where the bathrooms are.

     Myself, I'm going to miss the job-hopping trend — not that I ever partook. But ... choosing my words carefully ... there was always a certain comfort in knowing that, should you bump up against a bumbling manager — and sometimes there doesn't seem to be any other kind — that if you wait three years, they'll be on the road again, heading for another gig.

     Still. The arrival of "job hugging" does make me feel a little stupid for staying at the same job for ... 38 years and counting. In my defense, I do like my job, most of the time. And did quit, once, though allowed myself to be lured back. And was poised to quit another time, when the New York Daily News started running my column in 2005, which focused the attention of my bosses at the Sun-Times in a good way.

     Plus I took almost two years away from the paper, aggregate, between paternity leaves, time off to write a book, rehab and various surgeries.  Absence makes the heart grow founder, in both directions.

     Still, loving your job (and, if I may, being extraordinarily good at it) does make one vulnerable to experience the pain of job hugging. Sometimes when I really should have at least pretended to be poised to split. But I just couldn't do it.

     I remember some head hunter pairing me with some executives who were — if I recall — breaking away from Sunbeam and forming a carbon monoxide detector company. We had a lovely lunch at RL and afterward they offered me the job as a the communications head of the new enterprise. In on the ground floor, as Sam Wainwright would say.

      I told them I'd need to discuss it with my wife (again, what George Bailey does in "It's a Wonderful Life") and as we were leaving one of them said how impressed they were that I had worked for the Bohle Company in Los Angeles. 

     I froze, like Jimmy Stewart shaking Mr. Potter's hand. I'd hated the Bohle Company.

     I'm sorry, I said. I don't need a day. I don't need to talk with the wife. I can't go work for you. I can't sell carbon monoxide detectors. 

     I walked down Michigan Avenue to the paper, kicking myself, I was a slave. I didn't even try to wrangle a raise out of it. Some of us were designed to stay put. No point in beating myself up over it now.

Flashback 2007: Satisfaction guaranteed

     I was searching the archive and noticed this. Too much fun not to share. The good news is that Archie McPhee is still in business, and still promises to return unsatisfactory or defective items. Alas, the pig catapult must have caused too much trouble, as it is no longer offered among their line of novelty products. No do they notionally employ the fictive Molly Primrose to interact with the public. David Wahl, however, still works at the company. 

SATISFACTION GUARANTEED

     My older son's pig catapult broke. Not surprising, considering the workout he gave it, stalking about a family gathering, peppering his aging relatives with small pink plastic pigs.
     Behavior that a judicious parent would quickly halt — or so you might imagine, until you try actually saying the words, "Stop pelting people with pigs!" Easier to just ignore him. Besides, they're very small pigs, less than an inch long. It isn't as if they hurt.

     The device — sort of a blue plastic handgun with a contraption for flinging — broke very quickly anyway.
     Here the tale might have ended.
     But his mother, always ready to rally behind her cubs, noticed the lad still had the cardboard packaging from the catapult — saved because it has a "Pig Bull's Eye" on the back, to aid in honing his pig-pelting skills.
     She went online, to the manufacturer's Web site.
     "My son recently purchased a pig catapult made by your company," her note began. "The toy was quite fun. However, about one week after he purchased it, the portion that holds the pigs snapped off after the catapult was fired. It appears to have snapped off where the tension rod places pressure on the plastic catapult. Can you please replace this faulty pig catapult?"
     Here again the saga might have ended. One reason our world is so vexing is that companies build their bottom lines by shaving away customer service. It's hard enough to find anyone at Apple to care about your busted $400 iPod, never mind receive satisfaction for a broken $4.95 pig catapult made in China.
     Yesterday, a box arrived. It contained not only a new pig catapult, but this letter:

     "Dear Edie:
     "I am so sorry to hear that your Pig Catapult was defective. Here is a new one for you. Also here is a small gift to say we are sorry for any trouble this may have caused you. Thank you for bringing this to our attention so we could fix it for you!"

     Not quite a second sun appearing in the sky, but close.
     The gift, by the way, was a box of bandages designed to look like strips of bacon. My wife loved it.
     Here too, the tale might have ended. But there was one more paragraph.
     "I have enclosed an Archie McPhee Catalog for your enjoyment. Archie McPhee is our retail business."
     The catalog "of surprising novelties, good jokes and useful articles" hit our household like a t-bone steak tossed into a tank of piranhas.
     How to describe the product line? Simple toys and toys with an edge. Plastic ants and "Just Like Dad!" brand bubble gum cigarettes. Rubber ducks and gummy banana slugs.
     Bacon is fun, apparently. In addition to bacon bandages, there is bacon air freshener, a bacon wallet ("Not made from real bacon"), bacon tape, bacon gift wrap and Uncle Oinker's Gummy Bacon.
     Jesus too, must be amusing, in certain circles. There is the classic dashboard Jesus, plus a bobblehead Jesus, Jesus gift wrap and not one but two Jesus Action Figures, one with wheels "for smooth gliding action," another, deluxe set, complete with plastic loaves and fishes and "glow-in-the-dark miracle hands."
     An invigorating blasphemy pervades the enterprise. Beyond the Jesus goods, there are Last Supper After Dinner Mints ("Tasty & Religious"), a boxing rabbi puppet, Buddha pencil toppers and, so nobody feels left out, Nihilist Chewing Gum ("No flavor -- We don't believe in flavor.")
     Here, again, the curtain might fall. But the letter was signed "Molly Primrose." Must be a made-up name, I decided. A blanket identity to personalize customer service off-loaded to India.
     I wanted to take the catalog to work with me, but any possible argument ("Boys, it's my job") seemed feeble in the face of the passion with which they were selecting and discarding various items from their imaginary orders, toting up the balances so as to absorb every last penny in their possession.
     "Dad," said Ross, as I was leaving, "do you think I should get a Monkey Groan Ball? When you squeeze it, it's like a monkey groaning . . ."
     "Sounds great," I said.
     My morning's work became tracking down Molly Primrose. Such a pretty and unusual name — there is only one person named "Primrose" in the Chicago White Pages — it had to be a fiction.
Hadn't it?
     I contacted the company and waited. Carol Marin envisioned Molly as an older woman, walking a bunny on a leash — a lovely image. I thought of her as mid-20s, tattoos on both arms, bravely trying to keep her poetic soul alive while answering letters complaining about pig catapults.
     Finally David Wahl, Archie McPhee spokesman, called. I could tell he didn't want to say it, so I said it for him.
     Molly Primrose isn't real, is she?
     "It's our contact name for customer service,'' he said, reluctantly. "It's a rotating series of people who do it. We take it very seriously for a company that sells such stupid, useless things."
      Of course, one shouldn't pull back the corporate skirts too much. Still, upon reflection, it struck me that the only thing more wonderful than there being an actual Molly Primrose is there being a business in this day and age that feels compelled to make one up.
     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 24, 2007

An apology to Poland: Smithsonian scrubbing humbles once great nation

 

     Pride goeth before a fall, the Bible says.
     Well, not really. Like many widely-quoted phrases, that's an improvement on the original, polished smooth by longtime use. The actual line in Proverbs 16 in the King James Bible is "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."
     Either way, a reminder to tack toward humility. 
     I try to bear that in mind. But sometimes I get carried away.
     Such as in February, 2021. The future was bright. The Trump era had seemingly ended the month before. If you told me the guy who sicc'd a mob on the U.S. Capitol would sweep back into office in four years, I'd have laughed. America was back, and what better way to celebrate than to brag about our freedom?
     It being Black History Month, I chose our nation's bleakest chapter. My column began: "You know the great thing about centuries of slavery in the United States? The big positive that gets overlooked ... ?"
     A tease — what could be good about slavery? — to draw readers in, leading to the reveal. The good thing about slavery was:
     "That we can talk about it now, honestly, openly, write and discuss, and contemplate our nation’s difficult and tortured past, unafraid. That is an undeniable greatness of America, one to be proud of. Because not every country can manage it."
     To provide an example, I decided to kick Poland, because that winter, two historians, Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski with Warsaw's Polish Center for Holocaust Research, were hit by a lawsuit by the government-funded Polish League against Defamation, which sued the authors, as I put it, "for recounting history that contradicts their sense of unmitigated national glory."
      The column I wrote was peppered with translated quotes from Yiddish letters from my great uncle, Zalman Bramson, about life in Poland in the 1930s. Let's just say Poles didn't need the Germans to teach them to abuse Jews. 
     “The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morale,” said Grabowski. “... which seems to be forgotten by the nationalists.”
     Not forgotten. Actively suppressed. Nationalists have a way of pushing the nations into the abyss. History teaches this, so must be prettied up so as not to give away the game.
     Feeling myself on safe ground, I indulged in some analysis.
     "Like our own country for the past half decade, and nations around the world, Poland fell in the grip of resurgent nationalism. A shameful political philosophy that believes a country becomes great, not by actually doing great things, but through talk, threats and pressure. Their greatness is declarative — tell everybody “We are great!” Over and over and over."
      The nation of Poland, through its embassy in Washington, demanded the column be taken down, while finding nits to pick — this supposed "historians" I cite, his degree was in sociology!

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Flashback 2008: Walter Netsch "He broke out of the box"

     

Walter Netsch's University Hall at UIC's Circle Campus is consistently cited among
the ugliest buildings in Chicago. In 2018, TimeOut Chicago called it "a larger-than-life
Triscuit cracker" and a "rogue domino." (Photo courtesy WikiCommons)

     Tonight's Sun-Times Roast of the Chicago Skyline Cruise is not the first time I've turned to architecture critic Lee Bey to provide insight and perspective. I checked on Walter Netsch's obituary because I plan to talk about brutalism, of which he was the master — if that is the right word; "victim" might be more apt — and was surprised to see Lee doing yeoman's work  lending a hand here as well. I'm surprised I've not shared it before, it being perhaps the most negative obituary I've ever written, except of course for Morgan Finley, that "monument to corruption." 

     Walter Netsch, a controversial Chicago architect whose work was both praised and reviled, as well as a former Chicago Park District board president, died at his home Sunday. He was 88.
     Mr. Netsch specialized in academic structures and designed several significant buildings on Chicago area campuses. He created the tri-towered concrete library at Northwestern University and much of the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.
     An early building that established his national reputation was the soaring U.S. Air Force Academy Chapel at Colorado Springs, which was initially criticized but eventually became an admired tourist attraction.
     His UIC campus, on the other hand, was described as "physically repellent" by university officials who ordered a face-lift when they discovered that prospective students were shunning UIC after visiting the campus because they found its buildings intolerably ugly.
     Prominent Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman once said of Mr. Netsch: ''His buildings create wonderment, in the best and worst sense of the word.''
     In 1986, Mr. Netsch was appointed Park District board president by Mayor Harold Washington. He left the board in 1988 after a stormy tenure, but he is credited with helping to distribute district projects more equitably, focusing attention on poorer areas that had been neglected previously.
     As influential as he was, Mr. Netsch's ideas were often ignored, perhaps justly so. He once suggested closing the two center lanes of Lake Shore Drive and converting them into flower beds.
     Mr. Netsch spent 30 years with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the giant Chicago-based architecture firm. A heart condition in 1979 forced him to retire, and he was plagued by medical problems in his later years.
     He was married for 45 years to former Illinois Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch, who ran for governor in 1994. The two met when the then-Dawn Clark asked to borrow Netsch's art-crammed Lake Shore Drive penthouse apartment for a meeting of independent Democrats in the late 1950s.
     They wed in 1963 without telling friends beforehand. Judge Julius J. Hoffman performed the ceremony in his chambers. Mrs. Netsch had been a law clerk for Hoffman, who would later go on to gain national notoriety by presiding over the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial.
     Mr. Netsch was supportive of his wife's political ambitions, kicking in nearly $1 million of his fortune -- including the sale of an original Frank Lloyd Wright window for $265,000 -- to help finance her failed gubernatorial campaign.
     Walter A. Netsch Jr. was born Feb. 23, 1920, on 62nd Street on the city's South Side. His father was a meat-packing executive from New Hampshire. His mother was a blue blood from a Yankee family that had owned the first car in New Hampshire, and throughout his life the tall, thin Mr. Netsch displayed a certain patrician air.
     Growing up on the South Side, Mr. Netsch said he felt like an outsider. He was unathletic, artistic, frail and highly intelligent. He went to the opera and took drawing classes. He made cardboard houses for his sister.
     "I was a little scrawny kid, so you flaunt what you have," he once said. "But to show intellectual ability -- at that age that's usually considered an aggressive act."
     He studied architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During World War II, he was stationed on the Aleutian Islands.
     After an apprenticeship with a Kenilworth firm, he went to work for SOM, where he maintained his outsider ways, pursuing his own rigorous esthetic system -- called Field Theory -- a concept of design that employs the repetitive use of geometric shapes according to specific mathematical principles to create complicated crystalline structures. Like Mr. Netsch himself, these buildings were bold, highly abstract and full of contrasts.
     "He saw that UIC could bridge the Eisenhower Expressway, and designed a north side of the campus, [and a] proposed performing art center that was a cluster of hexagram shapes," said Lee Bey, executive director of the Chicago Central Area Committee, and formerly Mayor Daley's deputy chief of staff for architecture and urban design. "[Netsch did] really good architecture that presages the kind of anti-box forms we see today."
     Examples of Mr. Netsch's work include the mazelike Behavioral Science Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, the Miami University Art Museum, and the architect's own Chicago home on North Hudson, whose design inspired the home in the film "Torn Between Two Lovers."
     Bey also said that Mr. Netsch had the vision behind the elegant Inland Steel Building at 30 W. Monroe.
     "Bruce Graham gets the credit because he finished it," said Bey. "As contemporary as it looks now, Walter's earlier version was even lighter, even glassier, even finer."
     Not all critics take such a complimentary view. New York architect Robert A. Stern dismissed some of Mr. Netsch's work as "a landscape of the moon" and "twisted and brutal."
     Even his most famous building had its share of controversy. When unveiled in 1962, the U.S. Air Force Chapel was so hated that Congress held hearings on the matter.
     Mr. Netsch's work at UIC was even more harshly condemned. One critic dubbed it "impersonal concrete brutalism," and part of it suffered that worst fate an architect can face: it was torn down in Mr. Netsch's lifetime.
     In Mr. Netsch's defense, money concerns forced the university to scale back on his plans.
     "The one thing to keep in mind with UIC is it really wasn't built exactly to his design," said Bey. "There was a landscape plan and a lighting plan in his original design, designed to humanize the campus, but they were never completed due to budget problems, so it came off being a cheaper, paler version of what he designed."
     Mr. Netsch never took responsibility for the unpopular campus, pointing a finger at poor maintenance and bad publicity.
     "I did not make a mistake," he said of his original plans. "I will not take the blame." When the architect redoing the campus asked Mr. Netsch to consult with him over the redesign, he refused.
     Mr. Netsch viewed opposition to his work as short-sighted philistinism and felt that his buildings would be vindicated by history.
     "I feel I've introduced something that will be more accepted tomorrow than it is today," he once said.
     His widow said Mr. Netsch was "designing conceptually what cities should look like in the year 2020."
     "He broke out of the box," Dawn Clark Netsch said. "He has left a lot of what was inside of him for others to look at and contemplate, and hopefully also to look at new ways of looking at not only the environment but the world."

       —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 17, 2008 

Post-wedding pancakes at iconic Chicago diner

     Nick Snow and Roxane Briones found each other on Hinge, the online dating site. Each liked what they saw, and decided to meet in person at Avec, the Mediterranean mainstay.
     But there are two Avecs. He went to the one in the West Loop. She went to River North.
     "I forgot he is new to the city," said Briones, who suggested the restaurant. "He went to the wrong one. I panicked."
     "I walked into the place, looking to meet, and there's no one there," said Snow.
     A phone call was made, an Uber grabbed, and the couple got together. Magic ensued.
     "We hit it off very quick," said Snow. "We joke, after our first date, we felt like we were dating a month. After a week, we felt it was a couple months. Now it feels like we've been together for years."
     Briones, 31, is a cook at Proxi, the coastal Asian place in the West Loop. Snow, 40, is a filmmaker who spent almost 20 years in Brooklyn before moving here last October.
     "It was time for a change," said Snow, who noted that Brooklyn was getting very expensive. "Try a new city for a little bit.''
     Briones had a bit of a head start, coming here from Michigan.
     "I came to Chicago almost three years ago," she said. "I was drawn to the restaurants, and the people that I admire work here. I just packed my bags and took a train. I didn't know anyone. Had to rent an apartment in Pilsen with two random girls, who turned into my best friends."
     The relationship, begun in misunderstanding, deepened by accident. Literally.
     "In February I was trying to teach her how to snowboard," said Snow. "She had never done that, coming from Nicaragua. I took her to the tiniest little hill in Naperville. I'm thinking, 'She's going to be fine. There's no way she can get hurt here.' She was doing pretty good, she was picking it up, and just fell forward, tried to catch herself and broke her wrist."
     "In two places," Briones added.
     Bad for a cook who spends her days chopping and stirring.
     "Her whole livelihood," said Snow. "She ended up living with me while she was recovering for two months. In a weird way, that really helped us. It launched us into this position where we were together every day and fire-tested the relationship. We hadn't been dating too long. Suddenly we're living together and together all the time. I'm caring for her. It feels so right. It didn't feel like a burden. That was a special sign."

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Rossmönster Baja Deluxe

     Like all small boys, I have an affection for trucks. 

     From when I was very small, and would carry a red rubber fire truck with yellow wheels in my hand at all times, as a general comfort object and ready distraction, something that could be rolled back and forth on any flat surface when an idle moment presented itself.
    To now, when I'll admire a shiny Mac the Bulldog hood ornament on a Mac truck, or the twin chrome exhaust stacks on a Peterbilt, or the man-size tires on an earth mover.
    We were pulling into the Stanley Hotel for lunch after an extraordinarily satisfying morning at Rocky Mountain National Park — Monday's column discussed that. My brother, who always knows what to do next, said that Guy Fieri has a place there, The Post Chicken & Beer, that we must try. I wasn't about to argue.
    That's where I saw it, passing through the parking lot gate ahead of us — you have to pay $10 to park at the Stanley. Their way, I suppose, of trying to both reduce and monetize curious Stephen King fans who want to rubberneck the locale of "The Shining." Taking your $10, they soften the blow by giving you a token good for $5 off your tab at The Post.

     At first I noticed the vehicle itself. How could you not? Just look at the thing. A brawny slab of custom gunmetal gray, with fog lights and rugged bull bars in front. Then I saw the name: "Rossmönster." My older son's name is Ross, and I tucked the term away for future reference, to give as a gift to my daughter-in-law. Not that he is in any way monstrous. Some guys are. Still, the word still might come in handy as a term of chiding affection. "Less Rossmönster, honey, more yes-dear-right-away..."

Chicken, biscuit and waffles.

     Lunch was everything advertised. I'm not really a fried chicken guy. But they did have a pork chop in burnt orange sauce that called my name. I have to admit, I felt a shiver of order-regret when I saw my brother's plate piled with grub. Two waffles and a biscuit. But he generously traded me a leg and a waffle for a hunk of chop, and neither of us left hungry. 

     First-rate food, and the bartender Joel — we ate at the bar — was friendly and efficient. Plus extra points for a new NA beer, Grüvi Golden Era (also with an umlat. What is happening to us? Are we all Scandinavians now? Or is this more of the synchronicity discussed here Tuesday?)
    Back in Boulder, I lost myself in the Rossmönster web site, watching videos about the truck I saw, the Baja Deluxe, a $444,611 custom camper built on a 5500 Ram pickup. 

     Seeing the vehicle, with its solar panels, front winch and Starlink, I initially assumed it was some kind of rolling armageddon bunker. But the marketing seems designed, less toward survivalists, than for those who want to blast across Joshua Tree in the most comfortable tent ever. The company was founded in Boulder in 2010, and the trucks are built there, which is cool. Rossmönster presents dog-friendliness as a core corporate value, including portraits of the shop dogs right after the staff. Hard not to like folks who do that.

     Co-found Ross Williamson includes a deeply sincere video tribute to his own late dog, Bubs, whose full body profile is the company logo. A well-crafted essay in loss that made my wife cry, at first the video struck me as something that one could possibly scoff at — I felt stirrings when I initially watched it — but then realized, when my own beloved Kitty goes, I will be completely devastated and who knows in what fashion I'll respond? Williamson's reaction — handcraft small boxes for Bubs' ashes to distribute to friends — is certainly unconventional, though the third time I watched the video I thought, "You know ... that's a good idea."

    I'm not in the market for a $444,611 mobile home (not as hideously expensive as it first seems, given that a luxury motorbus can set you back $2 million). But I thought I would toss Rossmönster out into the aether, for two reasons. One, as a reminder that people still build stuff in this country. And two, while public displays of emotion are generally frowned upon, particularly for guys, that rule is suspended when it comes to dogs, and for good reason.

     

What if crowds don't have to spoil the view?

 

Emerald Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park.

     Somewhere just past Bear Lake, the realization hit me.
     My brother wanted to go to Boulder, Colorado. To do the hikes we'd done as kids and eat at the restaurants our mother loved, in what I dubbed our "Farewell Ma Tour."
     I let him pick the trails. He chose wisely, starting along the Boulder River behind our parents' old place — where we'd walk to cool off from the inevitable arguments.
     "On your left!" the cyclists cried as they blasted by. They train them well here.
     Next day, Mount Sanitas: think, a mile on a StairMaster. That afternoon, we took an easy five-mile savannah stroll around the Boulder Reservoir — mostly alone.
     Sunday, another five miles across the grasslands around Eldorado Mountain. Sweeping vistas and black cattle — bovine public employees, basically doing weed maintenance for the city of Boulder.
     For our final day, the idea was to go out with a bang at Rocky Mountain National Park.
     Not so easy anymore. Just showing up and going in is very 2010. You can't do it. The park went to a timed entry system in 2020. All the morning slots were gone. But my brother used his apex predator computer skills to find a secondary cache of available slots for Bear Lake Road.
     People must forget beauty. Because even though I'd been to Rocky Mountain National Park many times, the wonder of the place struck me afresh as we slipped in precisely at our 8 a.m. entry time.
     The parking lot was full. We had to take the shuttle bus. Crowds are considered the bane of national parks. Everybody complains about them, constantly. Me too.
     "Hell is other people," I said, quoting Sartre, as we threaded our way along the trail.
     It is a vigorous 256-foot hike from the trailhead to Bear Lake. You can do it in a wheelchair. Parks are designed this way: Put the best views close to the parking lot. The trail was a continuous stream of humanity.
     It began to dawn on me: Whether the others are a blight or a benefit depends not so much on them, as on me.
     Other folks are usually viewed as an intrusion on precious solitude, a disturbance of the beauty of nature that you've come so far to see. It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup.
     Or ... you could consider them part of that selfsame nature.
     The moms bearing their children literally on their backs, like possums. The dads giving pep talks to their tired, balky offspring — I tossed them nods of solidarity. The families, sullen teens, their faces set in "I'm not enjoying this, you can't make me" defiance. The world in hiking boots: Indian college students, Mexican families, prim Japanese couples kitted out in their pricey Mont-Bell gear.

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