Joe Stephens

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks?
The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”¹

He was an incredibly imaginative writer, Italo Calvino – the sort of dexterity with words and images that make you want to put the book down from time to time and just clap. In Invisible Cities, he has a young Marco Polo talking to an aging Kublai Khan – the former regaling the latter with some tales of the magic that used to be his empire, so many beautiful moments spun from exploring the simplest of things: bridges, for example. Arches and stones. Eight weeks after the Concho Valley Public Defender’s Office has officially began accepting appointments, those are precisely what I find myself thinking about: arches, and the stones that compose them.

In an earlier article, I wrote about how we had set out to lay the foundation for a brand‑new public defender’s office in rural West Texas. It was an intensely personal piece: one focused on how we sought to discover the values we collectively held dear and rooting our earliest decisions in those values. It dwelt a great deal on the importance, to us, of building an enduring culture – one that emerged in the most welcome way from the collection of people and experiences who had decided, for whatever reason, that San Angelo was the place they wanted to be a public defender. The joy of that stage in our creation was the time we were able to dedicate not just to putting the stones in place in a way that felt right to us,  but finding and examining the stones themselves. And now, it’s the arch that we’re looking at – what does it mean to be eight weeks into an open and operating office, our gaze shifting from behind to ahead, with so many decisions and people gathered in the most wonderfully unique side‑by‑side way. Now that the stones are together, the question: what is their strength? How can it sustain? The line of the arch – is it strong?

Somewhere within these questions lies the thrust of where we are in as an office, the “you’re open, what now?” stage. It is a continual process of examination and re‑examination: those decisions we made, those processes we set up, those values we grounded ourselves in – how are they now that they’re being battle‑tested?

With that, I’d like to discuss what our phase two of opening a public defender’s office has been like: the assessment. And reassessment. And reassessment…

Break things

Some of my more formative professional moments have taken place in restaurants that are about to open. The team is hired and trained, the menu is the product of months of taste‑testing and experimentation, and there comes a moment of recognition that things are as ready as they ever will be. And then, the opening. The kitchen runs behind, the server stumbles with the register, the drinks come out slowly. Depending on the strength of the restaurant’s founding moments, what happens then isn’t a crumbling, it’s a resilience – some recognition that what we prepared for needs tweaking, and it is only on the strengths of our preparation that the swift and lasting adjustment is possible. And, invariably, good restaurants do just that: recognize the failing, pivot to the fix, and ground it all in the notion that this was precisely the un‑ expected turn that a strong operation can handle.

For our office, there was great emphasis on just that, that what we are setting up will, at times, break – it’s bound to. The issue, though, is not in the breaking, it is in the opportunity that presents as a result – how to fix.

Adventurousness

One of the questions that guides our office is: “Whoever wrote the rule?” The task here is to look at a thing we’re dealing with, recognize the traditional forces at play, and then explore space around adventurous solutions. Or, as James McDermott might call this: “Why say no to something unless you have to say no to it?”

An example of this, for our office, has to do with magistration. I have only ever worked in rural public defender offices, and though I have always wanted to be present in some capacity at the moment of magistration, it has never really been functionally possible. As an office, we decided that based on some of the particularities of our service area that we could be present at magistration from day one.

The rule – especially in rural areas – has always been that an assortment of forces has prevented counsel from being able to be present magistration proceedings. We explored this as an office – examined our personnel, the sustainability of our decision, and the role we wanted to play by being there – and decided that it was the right move. And, it has paid dividends – the early data confirms what is hardly surprising: counsel at a bond‑setting leads to good results.

Leadership is a team sport

I will always believe, in every phase of existence, a public defender’s office needs to create space for both delivery and reception of divergent views. Your stroke of brilliance might feel to everyone else as something short‑sighted, and the only way to check the strength of what you’re building is to gauge how comfortably disagreement is voiced, how readily it is welcomed, and what action steps result. There may be no better skill in these moments than some sort of silence, coupled nicely with some follow‑up questions.

Critical to the doors‑newly‑open phase of our office have been the regular meetings of both our leader‑ ship team and entire staff where we have tried to create space to report back on things that work and things that don’t. This can create uncertainty and concern – fine. In an ideal outcome, the temporary nature of each of those emotions turns to reward and confidence when the expressed concerns are attentively handled. There is something transcendently human about being heard, and if it’s something we preach regarding our client engagement, it should certainly be something we bring back to the office.

Humility is a value that matters tremendously to our office, and it means so many different things: that no single person is bigger than what we’re trying to do, that there’s a perpetual recognition of what more we can learn and how much we can grow, and that how we operate – and the decisions that guide our function – are ones that feel most right to us, where we are. The challenge in a series of articles like these is, for me, a personal one: how do I share what feels true for us without presuming that there is some transitive value to everyone else?

And the answer? I have no idea. My hope is that there might be some marginal utility to the simple sharing of a lived experience of assisting in the creation of a public defender office. I have learned there may be solidarity in uncertainty, that there may be comfort in going to bed at night wondering about the rightness of a decision, that there may be calm in knowing that this work can be rugged, and that all of it is magnificently okay.

Stones will gather into bridges – what a privilege it is to do the gathering.

In 1974, John Graves published Hard Scrabble, a wide-ranging series of essays about his ranch near Glen Rose. The writing – “observations on a patch of land,” as he described it – meanders his property beautifully. He offers some armchair history, a lay of the land itself, and spends his time showing you the trees and describing all the birdsong and guessing at why the creek runs differently now than it did before. You’re walking with him, really, and trusting the gentle clip of your nicely-paced tour guide – happy that he seems particularly adept and knowing when to chat and when to let the world speak for itself.

Fourteen years earlier, Graves did something similar in Goodbye to a River. It was his homage to a portion of the Brazos River that he had known and loved quite intimately, one that appeared ready to change course with the construction of a series of dams. So, he took his dog, hopped in a canoe, and spent a few weeks traveling. You’re with him as he hunts, you feel the chill of autumn and the warmth of his fire – it’s as if he handed you a paddle, too, and asked for a little help from time to time.

He did it all again a few years later in From a Limestone Ledge, which, on its cover, was described perfectly: a celebration of “the casual but constant observation of detail, the noticingness of rural life.” More essays, more description, more questions, more thoughts. It was almost as if Graves spent his life quietly watching and hearing, comfortably quiet in his pauses between books, and offering up what I would consider to be the most magical writing about “place” I have come across.

When I moved to rural Texas (Beeville, more specifically) to begin my work as a public defender – what Graves may describe as when I “put my boots to earth with a mingled set of feelings” (Hard Scrabble, p. 44) – I was continually searching for the words that seemed to flow so easily from Graves. I was trying to understand a world I hadn’t known before, and his sentences became the soundtrack to my curiosities – it was as if he had decided to do something that felt resonant: tip the balance in favor of listening and looking and wondering.

On people: “There were cattle kings and horse thieves and half breeds and whole sons of bitches and preachers in droves and sinners in swarms.” (Goodbye to a River, p.200).

On the lovely dynamic between rain and land: “Hence, it depends not only on rainfall year by year but also on the way the land receives and handles the rain.” (Hard Scrabble, p.53).

On aging and time: “’Maybe it is, at that,’ said his grandfather, nudging dark loose earth with his toe and feeling in old hurts the certainty of rain. ‘We feed the dirt, and the dirt feeds us.’” (Hard Scrabble, p. 139).

Rural Texas mystique is (and always will be) a mine for creative plundering. There is a fierce identity to it, and a romance that accompanies its exploration. And, I firmly believe that defense lawyers whose practice carries them into the hard scrabble of Texas, will do well spending time with the likes of John Graves. He is not there to give you the answer, but he does prod you along to truly soak in what’s around.

His genius is to give the lesser known a profound, authentic, feeling identity. With him, you are not between other places, not described in reference to elsewhere, not on a road between somewhere you might know (Fort Worth) and somewhere else you might know (Abilene) – you are in Somervell County, and being there is just right. There is a depth of humanity that exists in each of Graves’ paragraphs, and with a level of simplicity that is reassuring. We, as lawyers, are also at our best when we can take in the complexities that lie before us and speak about them with some combination of plainness and straightforwardness and minimalism.

That Graves writes about rural Texas – and, therefore, the idea that his writing is applicable to it alone – is to miss out on what he teaches about the ways in which we can all find identity (and, in turn, humanity) no matter where our place is. In her brilliant collection On Photography, Susan Sontag offers a mission that defense lawyers can certainly borrow: “There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment.” (p. 122). The humanity of the moment, the humanity of our client – the re-insertion of these photographs into a process built upon its proficiency at stripping away those very things – that is our non-stop mission.