All my respect, Dr. King.

I spent a summer setting traffic counters in dirt roads for an air quality study. We placed counters all over California. It was a lot of driving; I learned early to listen to books on tape. One day I left Sacramento before 4:00am. I had to collect a counter in the lower Sierras, cross at Kennedy Meadows, drive up the 395, plant a counter west of Mono Lake and cross back on the 80. I got home at 10:00pm, wrung out, shaking and crying.

That day, I’d chosen to listen to a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was as beautiful as you’d expect, with long excerpts from his speeches. It was fourteen hours, moving towards his assassination. I’d read pieces of his most famous speeches, of course; I knew I’d be moved by those. I hadn’t known how prescient he was. In the last years of his life he was turning his attention towards urban poverty in the north; we lost so damn much when he was killed early.

I’d never driven Kennedy Meadows, which were green and open and gorgeous in July. But much more than that, the 395 tore me open. High deserts are the landscapes that own me. With the high, stark Sierras on my left, I stopped at Manzanar, because I had never been and I wanted to see our shame. I left feeling even guiltier, because for all that I knew the Japanese suffered during their internment, I thought it might be one of the most painfully beautiful places I’d ever seen. It would be a mixed sentence to confine me to Manzanar for years. I stopped at a fish hatchery, to see the WPA stone buildings and ponds, and wonder why we don’t spend the labor to make our useful things unreasonably balanced and graceful anymore. I saw the Owens Valley, an even more personal responsibility for a water girl from LA, emptied, dusty and poisonous. I saw Mono Lake, whose heavy water does reflect the mountains and the sunset in deeper colors than other lakes. Mono Lake is proof that hope and work based in well-documented science will make bureaucracies change course. I set my counter in the last of the light, on a dirt road I couldn’t find now, near cattle grazing in the type of meadow valley that would trap the people living there. That much beauty must be addictive, but ranching is a hard, hard way to pay for it. A black bear crossed in front of my car.

Any of those things would have been the emotional event of a week, but they happened on one day, as Dr. King spoke bravely and truly for hours, until they killed him for it. I was a wreck. It took me several days to recover. I did though, got back to my usual cheerful self. One thing changed though. After that day, I was always deeply and fiercely proud that I went to a law school named King Hall. I never thought that was hokey again.