Yet again, Iowa comes out a little ahead of its competition in terms of recruitment in all ways, except maybe cash on the barrel head.

I got an email from a former student at UI/Boyd, who is now practicing in northern Virginia with Arnold & Porter, one of the bigger law firms in the U.S. I sent him some questions, as well as my schedule that week in case he wanted to call. Within three hours, he did just that.

He graduated in 1998, and I can't imagine what realistic incentive the school offers to compensate him for the hour he spent talking to me. The guy probably bills at a rate of $250 an hour or more, and it's not feasible to have him or someone like him call each admitted student. He said that he wanted to call out of admiration for the school and the education he received, and that's the most logical answer.

All the people I've met in conjunction with UI/Boyd have been terrific, and there's a lot about the program that excites me.

Now all I need is a small discount.

Oh, and Jen - I will endeavor to find you some Steely Dan that you can play without pain or shame later this weekend.

I don't usually buy into a notion of a certain place or region having a homogenous set of manners and behaviors. Were I to break from this, I probably shouldn't do so on the strength of twenty-four hours' experience with a place.

As the title implies, I will now do exactly that.

I was late arriving at CID, and had maybe an hour and fifteen minutes from leaving the airport's parking lot to reach 320 Melrose Avenue, site of the University of Iowa's Law Admissions bureaucracy. Having left the directions inside my trunk, I took the first exit into Iowa City from I-80E, and stopped at a little chain deli in a shopping center.

I asked the girl at the counter whether she could help me find Melrose Avenue. She apologized, saying she wasn't a local, but she knew the cook was. She sends the cook out to my table, and the cook provides clear verbal guidance on how to get to Melrose Avenue and the law school. That would have been enough, but he went back into the kitchen and reappeared three minutes later with a hand-drawn map, complete with landmarks. I made it with time to spare, in spite of myself and American Airlines.

The second half of my story involves me being an idiot. I find myself headed out of town on State Route 1, which is 30 degrees east of I-380, along which my hotel is most easily found. I turn off on a side road, and begin a three-point turn in the middle of the road because I wasn't smart enough to use a driveway a hundred feet east of me. As I begin to back out, I realize I have absolutely no traction, because my left front tire is doing nothing but agitating two or three feet of snow in a ditch.

So then Alice comes along. I don't know Alice's last name, but I do know her cell number. She proffered rock salt from her trunk (apparently this happens enough in Iowa), and then called her son to find a number for a towing company. She apologized for being unable to wait until the tow truck showed up, whereupon I assured her that she had gone far beyond the requirements of good citizenship for the day, the week, the year. She then gave me her cell number in case I needed anything else.

While I waited for the tow truck, four separate people stopped to offer help. The last car, an SUV with a trailer hitch, was driven by someone named Dan. Dan laid prone behind my car, and knotted some kind of ballistic-nylon strap around my rear axle. Having freed my car, Dan would then have untied the knot, had I not been absolutely sick of Iowans helping me as though they were being paid by the random act of kindness. I laid down, unwound it, and handed back the length of nylon to Dan.

The comic denouement to this is the towing company calling my cell number, and giving me shit for being unable to call them off before they drove twenty minutes north of Iowa City. Had I been thinking about it - like an Iowan - I would have relayed the information through Alice. But I'm a foreigner in this suspiciously friendly country, and was unused to the custom.

The law school tour and meetings with admissions officials were fine, but honestly, the residents of the city have done more to sell the law school to me than all my planned exploring of the campus.