It’s a crisp, sunny late-autumn afternoon in uptown Charlotte, the kind of day the city’s leaders dream about as they try to transform Charlotte into the exemplar of The New Southern City. The sunlight glints off the office towers and freshly constructed museums and catches the bulk of Bank of America Stadium. Here it is, you imagine the folks at the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority saying. No longer are we an oversized small town built on the backs of banking and churches. Here stands a perfect intersection of commerce, culture and entertainment, intermingling until the lines among them dissolve.

That’s the hope, anyway. And in the middle of this vision of soaring glass and concrete sits a peculiar red-tile structure that represents perhaps the boldest gesture yet in the city’s nascent reinvention. On this day, John Boyer swivels from desk to laptop in his third-floor office that overlooks South Tryon Street as he prepares for the Jan. 2 opening of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.

The last several weeks have been hectic, but “it’s going fine,” says Boyer, the Bechtler’s president and CEO. “We’re in great shape with the installation of our inaugural exhibit, which is going to be too beautiful for words.”

It’s taken a long time and years of tug of war among Charlotte’s arts community, city officials and Andreas Bechtler – the retired Swiss businessman and artist whose family collection the museum will house – to get to this point. Now it’s almost ready, a cornerstone of the long-awaited Wells Fargo Cultural Campus of museums, cultural centers and performance spaces uptown. The Bechtler’s main exhibit space has about 70 percent of its art installed. The exterior sports the “Firebird” sculpture, a 17-foot, 5-inch Phoenix of mirrored and colored glass that surely must be the most incongruous creature to ever spread its wings on South Tryon.

Implicit in the sculpture, and its incongruity, is a question: Is Charlotte ready for this?

For the arts, sure. The Cultural Campus includes a new, expanded Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture and a new Mint Museum of Art, scheduled to open in October 2010. But the Afro-Am Center and the venerable Mint have history, tenure. The Bechtler represents, in its presence and its collection, what modern art historians have referred to as “the shock of the new.” Or, put another way: Can a museum housing the works of Picasso, Max Ernst and Andy Warhol thrive around the corner from the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the corporate and tourist heart of stock car racing?

The Bechtler’s challenge from the beginning “has not only been in installing the exhibits. It’s building an entirely new institution from the ground up, both literally and figuratively,” Boyer says, turning away from his computer. “We’re making certain assumptions about our audience and market. Charlotte has the Mint Museum of Art, the McColl Center (for Visual Art), the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, the Blumenthal (Performing Arts Center), even The Light Factory.  That demonstrates to us that there is an appetite for ambitious, potent, meaningful engagement with art in this community.

“I know there have been some jokes about whether Charlotte is ready for the best of mid-20th century European modernism, but I figure they just have to prove to me that Charlotte’s not ready for it.”

Start with the building.

Compared to the other Cultural Campus and office buildings that surround it, the four-story structure at first seems small and undistinguished. Then you get closer.

The exterior and columns supporting the cantilevered fourth floor above the entrance appear to be made of mortarless brick. It’s an illusion. They’re red-clay terra cotta tiles, arranged in steps and grades for texture. Each tile is attached to the building’s skeleton, made of strong but lightweight aluminum armature wire. The arrangement in steps creates the effect of a series of straps holding the building together. The surface also creates its own kind of art, manipulating light and shadow depending on the weather and the time of day – or night.

“At night, it’s absolutely scrumptious, man,” Boyer says, stopping at a fourth-floor terrace overlooking the open-air atrium. “Really, really pretty.”

This is the work of Mario Botta, the renowned Swiss architect and friend of Andreas Bechtler’s. Botta designed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea. When Bechtler was convinced that uptown Charlotte would be a better setting for his collection than his own property at Mountain Island Lake, his sole condition was that Botta be allowed to design the building.

Inside, you’re surprised to find that such a compact structure could contain that much space – 36,500 square feet of it, including 10,000 in the main exhibit hall. It’s designed to catch as much natural and ambient light as possible so the effect, in Boyer’s words, is of a “cube of clay filled with light.” The backbone is the building’s glass-and-steel atrium, which seems to radiate light throughout. If you’re beginning to sense that the building itself is in effect a part of the permanent collection, you’re supposed to.

The floor plan tries to make maximum use of the available space by, among other things, locating collection storage, curatorial offices, the reference library and exhibit workroom underground, freeing up space above ground for exhibits.

And what exhibits they are. In late November, Boyer walked around the main third-floor exhibit space, pointing out the highlights of the Bechtler collection and sounding like a teacher roll-calling the giants of European modernism: Leger. Max Ernst. Picasso. Klee. Giacometti. Miro.

As prominent as the names are, their works are rarer, at least in the United States, than you might think. After World War II, American museums were caught up in a post-war exuberance for anything American, which led them to celebrate and exhibit mainly American artists – Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko. The Europeans tended to stay in Europe.

Which, of course, is where the Bechtlers were. The family, based in Zurich, owned stock in Pneumafil Corp., a manufacturer of textile machinery with a plant in Charlotte. Andreas Bechtler’s parents, Hans and Bessie, came from a family of art collectors who met and befriended many of the artists whose work they sought. (One of the collection’s pieces is a four-panel Andy Warhol portrait of the Bechtlers from 1973; there’s a young Andreas at far right, in jacket and tie.) Over 70 years, the family acquired about 1,400 pieces in assorted media, but mainly by European artists, dating from the late 1930s to the late 1970s.

Andreas Bechtler moved to Charlotte in 1979, then to Mountain Island Lake in 1997; there he founded the Little Italy Peninsula Arts Center, with studio space for artists to work in a peaceful, bucolic setting. A few years later, after his parents died, Bechtler had an idea to build a small museum on the property as an adjunct to the arts center and display the family’s collection.

It seems that more and more bars and restaurants are hiring attendants to … well, what? Make the establishment appear fancier? Be there for moral support? I’ve waitressed in several restaurants and for a long period in my life my entire income relied solely on tips. But I was performing a service: patrons would come in expecting to be waited on, and they needed me, or other servers – to take their orders, refresh their drinks, and bring their food. They couldn’t go into the kitchen and get their own food or go behind the bar and mix their own drinks (though many drunken ones have tried). But is it really necessary for someone to hover over me while I wash my hands, and pump soap into my palm when I am fully capable of doing it all by myself, like a big girl?

“I get so irritated!” says Rick, a resident of uptown Charlotte. “And then I feel obligated to give them money! I started leaving restrooms with attendants without even washing my hands, just so I don’t have to deal with them.”

Gross? Yes, but I, too, hate being put in a situation where I’m pressured to pay for something that I could have done without. Several people voiced their frustrations about these attendants for the same reasons, but others had a different opinion.

“Oh, have you ever met the attendant at Cosmos?” asked my husband. “He’s awesome.” “Why, what does he do?” I ask. “He’s just cool as shit. Always a good time, he brings his own music – it’s like a whole club inside a club over there.” I had to see this for myself.

My friend and I patiently stalk outside of the men’s bathroom at Cosmos until a man emerges, and we pounce. “Excuse me, but could you get the attendant to come out for a minute?” The guy quickly sizes us up, then sticks his head back in. “Hey, Big E! You got some ladies out here!” About 10 seconds later “Big E” appears. I tell him I want to ask him a few questions for an article I’m writing. “Sure – come on in.” He abruptly turns and heads back into the bathroom. Huh? I shrug my shoulders, and my friend and I head into his, um, office.

Once inside, I realize that Big E is the man. He’s been at Cosmos Cafe for three years, and he takes pride in his job. He brings a mini sound system in there and blasts tunes during his shift, and sets up a DVD player on top of it. He’s got Tums, Listerine, cigarettes, cologne, breath mints, spray deodorant – you name it, you need it, he’s got it. He’s not just sitting there wiping down the counter and looking busy; this is a man who loves his job and enjoys meeting new people. “That’s the best part of the job, the people. They’re great. I’ve met celebrities, too – Ric Flair, Patrick Ewing, UFC fighters from NYC.”

“And what’s the worst part?”

We all laugh, because we all know the answer. “You know, I always step outside when that time comes.”

We make note of the fact that there was no attendant in the women’s bathroom that night. “My cousin used to work there, but she stopped. Women don’t tip!” Big E says. It suddenly hits me that he is right. Women are used to going out and having guys pay for them, or not having cash on them. I know I’ve been guilty of wanting to leave a tip and having nothing but my debit card in my pocket, like the time a few weeks ago at BlackFinn. It was a Thursday night, the place was packed, and there was a long line for the bathroom, but the attendant was laughing with everyone, helping fix the ladies’ hair, and just having a blast, keeping the line moving all at the same time. I make a mental note to make sure I carry singles with me the next time I head over there.

I’ve personally never grabbed any of the items attendants have on display, like hairspray, gum, etc., but even so, I almost always feel pressured to leave something just because they are usually standing there watching. However, I decide that if I come across attendants that are as fun as Big E and the BlackFinn attendant, I would have no problem leaving a few bucks.

(I’d like to take a moment to thank my friend Stacy – a friend will barhop with you, but a true friend will bathroom bar hop with you. Thanks for being a true friend, Stac!)

~ Ali Salvatore

What a way to go.

Better to meet your end in this pool than some of the ones earlier in the process though. Where we stood, wastewater collected by the city of Charlotte was more than halfway processed for return to nearby Irwin Creek. I’d take my chances in these brown bubbles in a heartbeat over the sludge pond a few stages back. The site we toured, just off of Billy Graham Parkway, was spread over many acres and has cleaned up Charlotte’s wastewater for decades. Carefully planned stages of treatment separate water from sewage so effectively that, according to Erin Culbert of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities, “The cascade of clear water flowing from the wastewater treatment plant back into Irwin Creek is much cleaner than what is already there. Plus as it flows down into the stream, the water is oxygenated as well, which of course benefits the stream’s biosphere.”

However, many water-quality experts warn that while treated wastewater flowing back into the ecosystem from plants such as this may look crystal clear, there is much hiding below the surface.

A large metal screen catches the “big stuff” as soiled water flows from the city’s sewer pipes into the facility. Bowling balls, shopping carts, and even a 55-gallon drum have been found jammed against the screen, says Mike. Much later in the process, UV light scrambles the DNA of microorganisms, rendering them sterile and unable to reproduce. With such minute life cycles, this clever approach spells certain doom for deadly bacteria and other microbes. Across the sprawling complex, between the metal screen and the cascading waterfall, pools, chambers, and vats of all shapes and sizes progressively separate more of the “solids” from the city’s wastewater. The large majority of the solids will eventually part company with the water, and will be recycled as fertilizer at farms in surrounding counties.  The treated water will eventually make its way downstream toward the next town’s municipal water treatment plants, where it will be prepared for drinking, and consumed again.

But just how clean was the wastewater as it splashed down out of the plant and into Irwin Creek? How many unknown substances will this same water carry when it flows through faucets in the next town over? We should reasonably expect it to be devoid of bowling balls and killer bacteria, but is that good enough? Many of us might not give a second thought to spent water that’s well on its way to the next county.

The problem that every resident of Charlotte should care about, though, is that this same process is used by communities upstream from Lake Norman and Mountain Island Lake, towns whose treated wastewater flows into streams and rivers that feed these two sources of Charlotte’s drinking water.

According to The United States Geological Survey, treated wastewater is almost certainly laden with hundreds of unidentified substances: pharmaceutical drugs, cosmetics, hormones and antibiotics – all of which are interwoven into our image-conscious and highly medicated society. Almost half of all Americans take at least one prescription drug, and one in six take three or more medications. They’re prescribed to millions of Americans every day, but science suggests only a small amount of these substances are actually processed by our bodies. The portions of these chemicals that aren’t absorbed by the body are passed through and flow into wastewater treatment plants. And while these plants thankfully remove things like shopping carts and fecal matter from wastewater before it’s discharged back into rivers, streams and groundwater, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities itself acknowledges on its own website, www.charmeck.org, that these finely dissolved substances most likely pass from wastewater to drinking water supplies both here in Charlotte and across the entire country.
Part of the problem is that to date very little research, and no regulation – local, state or federal – yet exists for the presence of these substances in municipal water supplies. Only a handful of labs across the country even have the capability to test for the presence of pharmaceutical drugs in water. Setting up this type of detection for the labs that are capable is tedious, not routine, and therefore expensive. Indeed, two different quotes by commercial labs that did have the capacity to conduct these sophisticated tests landed in the $6,000 range – just outside of Uptown Magazine’s water testing budget.

Fortunately, a better-funded group – The U.S. Geological Survey – has developed a laboratory analytical method to measure the concentrations of eight widely prescribed antidepressants in environmental waters. Most are from the commonly prescribed class called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, and include Prozac, Lexapro, Paxil and Zoloft. Last year, the USGS applied the new method to samples taken from a stream in Texas, and detected high levels of the substances used to make the most commonly prescribed antidepressants.

Sure, Texas is a long way from Charlotte, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, antidepressants are the most prescribed drugs in the country, and it’s likely that the findings would be similar in any U.S. water samples. Simply, if you drink from the tap, there is a high probability that you’re consuming a cocktail of psychotropic drugs, hormones such as estrogen, and lots of other stuff you didn’t sign on for, which have passed through the bodies of millions of other people.

In compliance with EPA regulations, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities supplies the millions of gallons of drinking water the city demands on a daily basis. Water pulled directly from Lake Norman and Mountain Island Lake will pass through treatment facilities like the Franklin Water Treatment plant on Brookshire Boulevard and flow through a complex series of purification stages to make sure that the levels of microbes, turbidity, copper, lead and disinfectants are within the standards set and controlled by the Environmental Protection Agency. Fluoride will be added to keep our teeth strong. Chlorine will kill tiny bugs that would do us harm. Nearly 42,000 treated water samples taken from the county’s drinking water treatment plants will be tested every year. Indeed, documentation provided by the utility, and readily available to the public, confirms levels of more than 100 regulated substances detected in local samples last year were within EPA standards.

But without EPA standards for pharmaceuticals, hormones, cosmetics, and antibiotics in drinking water, no tests are conducted by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Department to look for these substances. To be fair, with no regulation, it wouldn’t even know what to look for. If it did find 5 parts per million of the chemical in Prozac, would that amount be dangerous? Would drinking a glass of that water stamp a plastic smile on your face, or pass through you with no effect? How about 1,000 glasses of Prozac-infused water?
On a subsequent tour of the city’s shiny new Environmental Services Facility, we saw plenty of beakers and white lab coats and test tubes in action. A chemistry nerd’s dream come true. Most of the thousands of tests performed on the city’s water samples will be conducted in this state of the art quality control center. But even the scientists there acknowledge that there are very likely all sorts of unregulated substances flowing undetected through Charlotte’s water treatment facilities, and all across the United States.
No one can really say for sure what’s in America’s drinking water. Even Uncle Sam doesn’t seem to know.

Thus the ever-swelling business of selling packaged water. Widespread public awareness of common contaminants sprouted demand for drinking water not just with legally acceptable levels of lead and copper, but with zero heavy metals or other pollutants. With their wallets, American consumers have spoken loudly. Drinking water was once the sole domain of municipalities, but now more and more new companies scramble to use clever packaging and relentless marketing campaigns to hawk the earth’s most important commodity.
Huntersville’s Midas Spring is one rare exception. The local bottler’s biggest change in recent memory was making the switch from glass bottles to plastic.

Owner Gianni Liburdi correctly points out that the company is the oldest registered business operating in Mecklenburg County, and unlike national water giants such as Coke, Pepsi and Nestle (Dasani, Aquafina, Deer Park, etc.), Midas Spring has been in the bottled water business since 1871.”Our spring flows up from an aquifer 200 feet below the surface. The water has trace amounts of magnesium and calcium, which are very beneficial to the human body,” Liburdi says.

Some studies do, in fact, suggest that a diet supplemented with magnesium can help prevent heart disease and Attention Deficit Disorder. And it’s no secret how important calcium is.
Naturally, Liburdi was happy to talk at length about Midas Spring, but in the process he also shed some light on the water industry, as well. “Every drop of Midas Spring water comes directly from our spring here in Huntersville. Many of the national bottled water companies, though – the big ones that we all know – some even with the word ‘spring’ in their names, fill their bottles with only a fraction of actual spring water. Demand for their product far exceeds what any natural spring could produce, so the rest of the bottle is filled up with purified water. Typically water from a municipality or even directly from a lake, that’s been stripped of everything – including any beneficial minerals – using the reverse osmosis process.”
Bruce DeBlock has been selling “RO” water for years from a kiosk in the parking lot of Park Road Shopping Center. Water he buys from the city, just like the rest of us, passes through a series of carbon filters, de-ionizers, ozone gas, ultraviolet light and many other stages before producing a finished product at 1 part dissolved solids per million parts water. The very knowledgeable owner of H2Oasis contends that his process, much too advanced and costly to be employed on the massive scale needed by the city, eliminates pathogens, viruses, carcinogens, arsenic, fecal matter, and lead that is present in municipal water in small amounts – amounts that are within EPA regulations. H2Oasis store manager Sonny Kiel assured me their filtration process even eliminates finely dissolved substances such as pharmaceutical drugs from the water his company sells.

Kiel demonstrated in an informal test, with a handheld digital dissolved solids tester, that his purified water did indeed come in at 1 part dissolved solids per million gallons of water. Municipal drinking water drawn from a sink 10 feet away measured considerably higher at 42 parts per million. According to Kiel, quarterly filter changes ensure the high level of purity the business is built on, and those who shrug at the difference between 1 ppm and 42 ppm, need only take a look at the stage 2 filter when it’s replaced. This filter, says Kiel, is positioned early in the process, and “looks and smells like shit” when it is removed for replacement.

But how do we really know that the water in a bottle of Poland Spring off the shelf is hormone free? Or what the 1 ppm at H2Oasis is made up of, or that Liburdi’s calcium-rich spring water isn’t brimming with other stuff that’s not on the label? Unlike municipal water utilities, which are looked on closely by the EPA, the Food and Drug Administration alone has the daunting task of monitoring the goliath industry of purified and packaged water. According to Nestle Waters North America, bottled water sales volume in this country, second only to soft drinks, exceeds beer, coffee, milk and fruit beverages.

In “Flow,” her award-winning documentary about the “world water crisis,” Irena Salina suggests that there aren’t nearly enough inspectors to effectively monitor the entire U.S. bottled water industry. Not even close.  According to Liburdi, an FDA inspector stops by and pokes around Midas Spring on a couple of surprise visits every year. By DeBlock’s own admission, no one from the FDA has ever been to H2Oasis.

The big players in the water business use such vast amounts of water that they often pull directly from the same lake or river that a municipal water utility might. Naturally, their RO purification systems and bottling operations are colossal and set up to meet national demand for bottled water. If there aren’t an adequate number of inspectors, as Salina suggests, they’ll likely be pulling some overtime.

Liburdi was well prepared for my follow-up question about the possibility that his spring could somehow be compromised by an outside source – a toxic industrial spill from a nearby business, perhaps, that could have seeped into the water table, and into the spring. To ensure purity, he says, his water is passed through a series of filters, and a UV light as well, before it’s sealed into little plastic bottles for sale. He seemed sure that his water was also free of unregulated substances, too, and it just might be. But without specifically testing for these substances, he’s in the same boat as the city of Charlotte, H2Oasis, and the hundreds of other entities offering drinking water for sale in this country. Without adequate data on what foreign contaminants might slip through even the most sophisticated purification processes, and a cost effective way to find out if they’re even there, none of them can know for sure, and therefore neither can the consumer.

Perhaps most troubling is that it would appear that the scope of what isn’t known about this phenomenon is enormous – much larger than what is known. Until there’s regulation and oversight, and a financially streamlined way for those who provide drinking water to test for these chemicals, as consumers we’ll remain in the dark. In our sophisticated society, we depend more and more on drugs, antibiotics, and all kinds of other stuff to get us through our modern lives.

But not one of us will live without water.

~Matt Kokenes

Gallis’ passion for exploring history, his ability to see beyond boundaries and identify spacial relationships has made him an expert in his field. He has helped shape the vision for U.S. transportation in the 21st century. His uptown Charlotte firm paved the way for how people commute from New York to Orlando, Fla., to Detroit and Memphis, Tenn., which also has a new economic development strategy thanks to him.

But he is also a writer, working on a book about friends who went to Vietnam and returned very different people. He is a historian, able to quote Bible verses and war battles.  And he is passionate about the environment and the impact of global warming.

“It’s apparent to all of us we have a daunting challenge ahead of us,” he says.

Gallis, 66, was born in San Francisco to a Chinese-born Russian father who operated a general goods and timber company that expanded to Oregon.  When the company collapsed during the Great Depression, Gallis’ father moved to the United States and enrolled in the University of Oregon. His mother was Swedish. Her family operated timber companies as well. The two had met at International House at the University of California at Berkley and married a short time later.

Gallis, who crewed on a rowing team when he was young, also developed an appreciation for history and art, courtesy of his parents who had their own Chinese art collection. He bought his first piece – a pair of African figurines – from an L.A. art dealer he discovered while buying supplies for a freshman architecture project at a lumberyard next door.

“The importance of collecting art from different parts of the world to me is that it was created as a result of different kinds of ideas,” Gallis says.

Today his first floor office in the Boxer Building uptown resembles a gallery, with hundreds of pieces of Tribal and African art displayed on shelves and whitewashed walls. Feathered masks with shells, carved wooden shapes and masks with cutout eyes fill the library.  But the collection doesn’t stop there. Metal statues tucked between floor plants fill the hallways and decorate desks along with a chair hand carved from a single tree. One of Gallis’ favorite pieces of art is a colorful painting of Chinese letters that hangs in the conference room.

“If you only stick to your own culture, you never expand your mind,” he says. “By collecting different art you get a better understanding of your own history and a deeper appreciation for your perceptions and values.”

Gallis studied art history and earned his architecture degree from the University of California at Berkley and a master’s in architecture and planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to teach at the University of Miami and came here in the early 1970s when a college friend asked him to teach at the newly formed college of architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

He was an associate professor there for 20 years before starting his own company, which he called Noah Studios – a name he chose after reading the Bible and recalling Jesus’ first prophet, Noah.

“That little company was our arc,” he recalls. “Noah put trust in God to guide the arc and we left it up to God to get our little company off the ground.”
Decades later, Gallis has been recognized nationally for motivating governments to integrate regional, national and global strategies. His firm’s latest study – the first of its kind – provides insight into coping with nature’s evolution and how man-made systems can evolve efficiently so the two can co-exist.

The framework for his most recent study and those before it stem from lessons learned while watching Charlotte transform from a tiny city into the country’s 21st largest.
Gallis began studying Charlotte in depth in the mid-1980s.  It was transforming quickly from a city to a metropolitan area and people were confused over how to deal with planning as political coalitions emerged and development patterns changed.

“When I arrived here, Charlotte was just a small city with a lot of country roads around it,” Gallis says. “In the course of the next three decades it transformed into a major metro area – it was a great urban learning laboratory.”

His staff crafted a development plan for Rock Hill, S.C. And it was during that research when growth patterns began to emerge.

Using a pen on old hand drawings, Gallis circles little yellow blobs on a map that represents Gastonia, Concord and others. They were getting bigger. And a grid of highways and superhighways was beginning to develop, he says.

The cities were not just growing but they were merging as one big unit or urban network, and the future of any city is related to where it sits inside the network.
This would require new theories and approaches, Gallis says.

A decade later city leaders formed committees to study growth in the region. Rather than build more highways, the Gallis research suggested Charlotte choose building a transportation system along its centers and corridors, which became the transit lines the city has today.

“The key to the future was understanding how these urban networks grew and changed and then how we could affect their future through different policies, regulations and investments,” Gallis says.

He retired from teaching in 1997 to work full time at the newly formed Michael Gallis & Associates, which suddenly began getting nationwide attention for its innovative and efficient strategies.

The firm began studying connections between Connecticut, New York and Boston and discovered relationships between politics, urban economics and geography.  Soon, Gallis and his staff were traveling the country compiling research on numerous regions.

Through this work the firm developed what Gallis calls a systems approach to networks such as transportation, tourism and the environment. The concept is similar to the systems within the human body, each with a purpose and function.

It was through this lens that Gallis and his people determined that the environment was so unique that it should be treated separately.

“We discovered that we knew less about the environment than we did about any other system,” Gallis says. “And it occurred to me that we needed to study the interaction of (the environment and manmade systems), which had never been done before.”

What had been done before simply was man’s impact on the environment such as air pollution and water runoff. But no one had studied how people were building urban ecosystems, Gallis says.

Wearing a crisp white button-down and gray paisley tie, Gallis pops up out of his chair to fetch a book to illustrate his point. He glances pensively through his collection of topics from painting to ocean liners and railroads.  At 6-foot-4, he towers over some of the highest shelves, which include the 1929 plans for New York City, a collection of 19th century atlases and the book that created the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the mash of books, Gallis can’t find what he’s after, but it’s hardly needed. He recalls most of the details he’d hoped and explains how his firm began researching the way cities were growing compared to the patterns of nature. First his staff looked at the Southeast, from Birmingham, Ala., to southern Virginia as well as Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., Charlotte, Raleigh and the Tennessee Valley. On a global scale, Gallis & Associates took the research to another level looking at the relationship between natural and human systems.
“You could see where – as we built human networks such as roads and buildings – we never built either to fit the natural system. We took the environment for granted,” Gallis says. “It is only now we are able to fully appreciate our relationship with nature.”

Currently nature and man-made systems are in conflict with each other, he says.

“We have to move toward co-evolving.”

By identifying effects of growth on the environment such as erosion, depletion, extinction and pollution, Gallis & Associates has identified strategies for action to include new policies, incentives and regulatory procedures up to the federal level.

“The bottom line is we have to rethink the way we manage the growth of our cities,” Gallis says. “We have two systems in conflict and we are facing problems people haven’t grasped.”
Based on its global research and findings, Gallis & Associates is one of several organizations working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to study the physical, socioeconomic and ecosystem impact of significant changes in sea levels along the Eastern seaboard.

“We are looking at some of the potentials of dramatic changes that people think will happen in small increments but could be of significant size,” Gallis says. “If we don’t try to understand them we won’t be prepared for them.”

~ Victoria Cherrie

Ben and the others are Bunong, one of the 26 Montagnard tribes from the central highlands of Vietnam.  The French, America’s predecessors in Vietnam, called them montagnards because of their mountain origin. Like most Montagnards, Ben is short, with a broad face and flat nose. His black hair lies in a fringe across his forehead. Every weekday morning, I teach Ben English in a little apartment in west Charlotte, just off Wilkinson Boulevard, with 42 other refugees.  Ben often comes in holding hands with one of the other young men.

Although North Carolina has many Montagnards, Ben and the others are the first Bunong.  Each tribe has its own language. There are no English-Bunong dictionaries. He has the photocopied primer that they used to study English in the Cambodian camps.  The primers provide translations of commonly used phrases.  They can say, “Quick!  Catch the water buffalo,” “The rice is high in the fields” and “The elephants are angry at the rain.”  I teach them how to say things such as, “Where is the break room” and “Uh-oh! The copier is broken.”  Ben really likes the phrase “uh-oh,” which is easily mastered, covering a multitude of sins.

He and the others don’t yet have the words to explain how they came to the United States, so with gestures and pictures, they acted out the story of the three weeks they walked over the Vietnamese mountains.  By twos and threes, mostly young men, sometimes whole families, they left their longhouses, coming together on the path through the jungle, until groups of 70 or more walked at night, sleeping during the day.  When the Bunong crossed into Cambodia, they settled in refugee camps.  Their limbo ended a year later, when they arrived at 1 a.m. on July 13th in Los Angeles.  All 43 students in my class know the exact time and date.
“Why did you come to the United States?”  I asked.

“Free,” Ben replied.

Ben worries.  He takes jokes badly. After Ben had learned some English, he brought in a driver’s manual and asked me to make a tape for him.  When I handed him the tape, he asked,

“How much?”  I laughed and said $10.  The next day he gave me a new $10 bill.

“Oh, no,” I said, “That was a joke.  It was free.”  He didn’t come to class the next day.  But he must have forgiven me, because for a couple of weeks I would see him walking around the apartment complex in his slippers and Hello Kitty T-shirt, listening to his Walkman, and hear, “No right turn, one way, pedestrian crossing.”  I offered to take him on a driving lesson.  Ben looked very concerned.

The next day, he returned, saying, “Vietnam woman no drive, woman no drink coffee.”  I realized that I was something of a floozy, or appeared to have sexual identity problems, driving to class every day with my mug of coffee.

I tried to reassure Ben.

“Here in America, it’s OK for women to drive.  It’s OK for women to drink coffee.”

“OK?” he asked.

“OK,” I answered.

“OK,” he said.  “You teach me drive.”

So now we are in Ben’s car and nearly out of gas.  I wonder whether he has been waiting to get gas until I can go with him.  Fortunately the gas station is only a block away on Wilkinson.  We drive to the gas station very slowly.  Ben has a definite antipathy for curbs, so we coast down the center of the road.  He appears to be following a different philosophy of driving, one where courtesy dictates that he make a turn incrementally, telegraphing his intentions with the widest possible sweeps of the wheel. He knows oncoming traffic will stop.  I practice yoga breathing.

Ben pulls up to the pumps and turns off the engine.  He gets out and studies the pumps, hesitating.  He finally chooses a gas and begins to pump.  I think he is pumping premium into his old Volvo, but I am a woman.  I’m pretty sure that women don’t tell men what gas to use in Vietnam.  Ben finishes and heads in to pay.  I know the man inside can see how much Ben owes, and I know Ben knows the words for money, so I stay in the car.  I resist the urge to buy some coffee to go.  Ben would not like the trash in his car.

Ben comes out of the little store and gets into the car.  He turns the key.  Nothing.  He tries it again.  There is no sound, not even a click.  He pops the hood and we get out.  Neither of us knows what the problem is, but we suspect it’s in the engine rather than the trunk. He looks intently at the engine to save face, and I look, too, to be helpful.  A man in a flannel shirt and blue jeans leaves the store as we gaze on.  In a second I take his measure – a man who can work with his hands, or at least looks that way.

“Excuse me.  My friend’s car won’t start.  Do you know anything about cars?”  For a moment, I wonder whether Ben thinks I know all men at the gas station or whether he is aghast that I am yelling to a strange man.

“Sure, let me take a look.”  Our flannelled friend joins us under the hood.  “It’s your battery.  See that corrosion?  Let’s move the car over there, and I’ll see what I can do.”

The man and Ben push the car while I steer, and we get it into a parking space by the side of the lot.  Our new friend drives his truck over.  When he gets out he has a couple of socket wrenches in his right hand. I congratulate myself on choosing a man who travels with tools.

“Your terminals are really corroded, but I think if we clean some of the crud and really crank that nut down, you’ll be able drive it.”  He knocks some of the fluff off, and tries to tighten the nut with a wrench.  “These are metric,” he says.  “I need another wrench.”

He walks back to his truck and lifts out the mother of all socket wrench sets.  It’s a yard wide, and when he opens it, we see dozens of wrenches, all sizes.  We gape, impressed.  I wonder whether Ben believes all American men have such riches in their vehicles. Ben takes a step closer, peeking over my shoulder. I feel his breath.

The man reaches for a wrench on the second row, and tries it on the terminal.  This wrench fits perfectly, and he makes a few hard rotations.  I admire his precision, his unerring selection of the exact size needed from the vast array, his ability to tighten the nut without stripping the threads.  Then he bangs the hell out of the terminal.

“Uh-oh,” Ben says.

“Of course, you can’t get it off now, but you’ll be OK for a while. Start it up,” the man says. Ben gets in and turns the key.  The engine comes to life again.

“Thank you so much,” I tell him.  “How long do you think it will run?”

“Oh, months,” he says.  “You’re lucky you ran into a mechanic.”  The man closes up his mammoth wrench set, and puts it into his truck bed.
I thank him again and get in the car. Ben races the engine as we sit for a few minutes.

“What he have?” Ben asks.

“The tool? He used a wrench. Wrench,” I say.

“Wrench. Wrench,” he repeats.

We head to the abandoned strip mall across the street to practice turning and parking.  This will be our first and last lesson together. I don’t know whether Ben is too uncomfortable learning from a woman, or whether this particular outing has been too eventful. In a week or two, our English class will be over. Ben will get a job at a doughnut shop in Charlotte. On his third try, he will get his driver’s license. When I see him in a year, he will be driving the meticulously kept Volvo, careening with young men. But now in the empty parking lot, we see two of his friends walking back from an errand.  They wave and laugh, and we stop. Ben rolls the window down and talks rapidly. The only word I know is “wrench.” He puts the car in drive.  His friends squat on a concrete barrier, knees akimbo, like frogs by a pond. As Ben drives with his grand gestures of the steering wheel, and some double pumping of the pedals, I think about our good fortune. We lurch and whirl across the broken asphalt, the strip mall a blur.

~Kristin Sherman

“A co-worker of mine, an analyst around the same age as me (30-ish), got smashed at our Christmas party. She started a conversation with the head of our department, a much older and well-respected man, to try to impress him. During the conversation he kindly asked her if she had children, and her response was: ‘Oh, no! But I told my boyfriend, if we do get pregnant that baby better not have his big head, because I’m so small, you know? Wouldn’t that be, like, terrible, pushing that big melon out of my tiny vagina?’ I had to walk away, but not before I saw his face … priceless.” – GL

Ouch … I’m sure she walked her tiny vagina all the way to the unemployment office, right after she got canned ….

“My pervy co-worker, who was clearly bombed, told me, ‘You have the face you would see in a magazine. Not your body, just your face.’ Um, thanks a**hole! By the way, I don’t care if you print his name – it’s Ted.” – LS

Sorry Ted, but you deserve that one!

“I went to a holiday party for a radio station in Ft. Lauderdale. It was at a really neat restaurant on the Intracoastal waterway. The owner of the station, let’s call him Vinny, was this really crazy, short Italian guy with a major temper. Vinny walks up to the DJ and demands he play a song, to which the DJ refused. Vinny says, ‘I am the owner of the company and you better play that song.’ And the DJ says, ‘Or what?’ Vinny says, ‘Or I’ll take you outside and beat the shit out of you.’ The DJ replied with a swift ‘F*ck you,’ stops the song playing right in the middle, turns off his equipment and starts packing up. Vinny is livid at this point, and demands that the DJ turn the music back on. ‘No, I am done,’ says the DJ. And they go toe to toe in an ugly, awkward fight, until Vinnie’s wife walks over and tells her old man to cool it. The DJ packed up and left. Vinny just looked at everyone and said, ‘MERRY CHRISTMAS,’ and walked out.” – DD

Wait a minute: a short Italian with a temper problem? Don’t know if I can buy that one ….

“A couple of years back, a female co-worker did ‘The Worm’ at our holiday party and her dress was way too short to be doing that! She flashed the entire company! She’s always good for a laugh when two glasses of wine are involved.” – JW

Why did they stop her after two drinks? I think a third could produce great potential…

“I’m a teacher, and my friend made out with the DJ at our holiday party … like in front of the principal, teachers, all of the faculty … just got hammered and made out with the DJ. So bad.” – KK

Well, at least this DJ was cooperative …

And the grand finale…

“I was working with this one girl who I had a crush on for the entire year, and I saw our corporate holiday party as my time to shine. I kept my cool all night and made sure I didn’t drink too much, and steered clear of all the other idiots getting bombed and looking stupid. I finally approached her and we hit it off – she was going to ride with me to the after party. We were waiting for the valet guy to bring my car around and I noticed my stomach was rumbling pretty bad, but I figured it would pass. He pulled up the car and I opened the door and let her in, and right when I got in on the driver’s side and sat in the seat it happened – I (pooped) my pants. I didn’t know what to do so I told her I was fine when she asked me if I was OK … needless to say, she smelled something funny and politely left, saying she had another ride.” – DM