The summer of 1972 brought an experience on a Colorado mountainside that would, years later, provide me the metaphor for navigating the legal ethics system. Here’s how that came to be.
Like thousands of others back then who hit the highways seeking adventure and self, I rode my thumb toward Mexico, savoring new experiences at every turn. Near Denver, I got a lift from a young man who showed me some stuff of local legend. With his car pointing downhill on a sloping mountain road, he stopped and shifted into neutral. “Now watch this,” he said, lifting his foot from the brake. Immediately, the car began rolling backward up the hill and didn’t stop until he hit the brake. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. Every instinct and my own two eyes told me the car rolled uphill, and that we had just defied gravity. My ride called it Gravity Hill, and explained that it was an optical illusion. I would later learn that such gravity hills or mystery hills are not uncommon. They occur where the interplay of features such as horizons, treetops and cloud lines, roadways, ridgelines, streams, strata and other topographical features cause our eyes to deceive our brains into misperceiving a slope.
