Free Catherine Price by 101 Places Not to See Before You Die Page A

Roosevelt’s mustache. Each summer Mount Rushmore does offer sculpting classes, but still. Gazing up at the possibility that is Washington’s forehead, I can’t help but think we could do a little better.

    Wikipedia Commons

Chapter 38 Amateur Night at a Shooting Range
    I f I’m going to spend an evening shooting guns, I want there to be plenty of adult supervision—especially if half the clientele has never fired one before.
    This was not the case at Jackson Arms Shooting Range in southern San Francisco where I attended a handgun-themed bachelor party with a bunch of other firearm neophytes. Housed in what looked like an industrial warehouse, the parking lot was full of pickup trucks with bumper stickers not typically associated with the San Francisco Bay Area, and the walls of the lobby and gift shop were lined with rifles. When my husband jokingly asked whether the shop had ever been held up, our teacher didn’t smile. “No,” he said. “We’re all holstered.”
    Holstered he was—when he led our group into a back classroom, I noticed the butts of twin handguns protruding from under his T-shirt. I’d hoped that the fact that he was carrying at least two firearms would mean that he would have a very hands-on approach to teaching us how to use them. But instead, he treated our gun education with the gravitas one might find at an employee training session for a fast-food restaurant.
    “What’s this?” the teacher asked, pointing at the back of the room.
    “A wall,” someone responded.
    “No. The men’s bathroom. Bullets go through walls.” He appeared pleased at this punchline. “Never point your gun at anything other than the target.”
    This was good advice, but I wanted more. I wanted to know how the safety worked, and how to tell if it was on. I wanted to know what to do if the bullets jammed, and where the location of the emergency exits were, just in case the person next to me freaked out.
    Instead, the teacher gave a quick demonstration of how to load the bullets, and explained how to aim (“Point it toward your target”). Then he handed us plastic caddies filled with handguns and boxes of bullets and let us loose in the firing range, a large concrete room divided into lanes. It looked like a cross between a parking lot and a bowling alley, with one important difference: everyone in it was armed.
    Much to my distress, these guns were not tethered to anything, which meant that there was no way to prevent a fellow guest from turning toward you and shooting you in the face. This would not have been such an issue if we had been the only people in the room, but we weren’t. A group of twenty-something men gathered in a lane near us, all jockeying for a chance to shoot. Several loners lurked nearby, making me question whether a violent criminal really would have bothered to tick the box next to PRIOR FELONIES when filling out his liability form. But most frightening of all was a woman standing in the next lane, forty-something years old with dyed blond hair. Wearing a pink T-shirt and glasses that had a line of masking tape across the lenses to help steady her sight, she was taking slow, methodical shots with a .45-caliber handgun—not at a bull’s eye, but at the outline of a man’s torso.

Chapter 39 Ciudad Juárez
    W hat is it about borders? Why are they inherently exhilarating?” asked the New York Times in December 2006 in an article about El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, two adjacent cities on opposite sides of the Rio Grande. Its focus was food, but in recent years Juárez has become best known for crime: between January 2008 and early 2009, more than eighteen hundred people were murdered.
    The majority of these killings are attributed to drug cartels, but there’s a more systemic problem. The Mexican army is in the midst of an aggressive military effort against the cartels, but its soldiers have also been accused of abusing local police offers. In turn, the police force itself