Trip to the Alaska Bush Spring - 1969 II

We stop at Nome for the day to change planes. Nome is on the southern coast of the Seward Peninsula. It sits on the coast of the Norton Sound of the Bering Sea. It is incredibly isolated with less than 22 square miles of land and water. There are no ferries or outside roads to the city. Nome is also known for its harsh winters. Between November and March it is common to have temps sitting well below zero degrees and ranging between -10 and -55 degrees Fahrenheit. Nome was not originally a major native trading center and became famous only in the summer of 1898 when gold was discovered in Anvil Creek. Over the next ten years the population grew to 20,000. It became the largest city in the Alaska Territory. There is still gold mining activity. Currently slightly more than half of the population of 3,700 is Native American. We get to walk around this fabled city. Here is what the shore road looked like in 1969.

The city is less than 20 feet above the level of the sound so it needs protection.

Many of the homes are fascinating. Here is one with the multiple racks on the low roof. Some of the racks are red. This means that they were taken recently when the animals (moose and caribou) were coming out of the velvet. The red is from the blood vessels between the bone and the discarded velvet. Compare those with the the white moose rack on the right.

Trip to the Alaska Bush Spring 1969 I

It is time for a Blog change of pace. Here is some personal history and adventure. It is the spring of 1968 and I am in St Louis finishing my residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Barnes Hospital and Washington University Medical School. I am in the McMillan Hospital operating room doing a long head and neck case with my mentor Dr Joe Ogura. I get a phone call from my wife Jan and break scrub to hear, “We’re going to Anchorage!” We are more than relieved as we have been worried about going to war - my previous Chief Resident, Bill Diehl, also in the Air Force, has spent this last year at a hospital in Cam Ranh Bay, Viet Nam. We are excited and energized to go to Alaska on active duty. I am a Berry Plan USAF Lieutenant, soon to be a Captain, and then a Major. After attending two weeks of Officer’s Training including many hours of lectures and some nighttime adventures (in one exercise I was carried on the stretcher because of my age) at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls Texas, I return to St Louis. I pack up the Suburban with Jan and our two housebroken kids, and orders in hand, drive west and then north. The trip to Anchorage takes 13 days and the boys are no longer housebroken. I serve at Elmendorf Hospital in Anchorage, Alaska. In addition to my duties at Elmendorf I am able to attend part time at the Alaska Native Medical Center (ANMC). Thank you Colonel Vandenbos. Along with the usual health ailments the Alaskan Native population has an incredible number of patients with ear disease in need of corrective surgery. For the next two years I do three ear operations every Tuesday morning at the ANMC mostly on children. I also have the opportunity to travel to the Alaska Bush several times where these patients live. Our first trip to the bush was in the spring of 1969. We fly from Anchorage to north Nome and then Kotzebue.

Our team is me as the surgeon and two nurses. One is a nurse anesthetist and the other a surgical nurse. Our plan is to treat Native children with chronic tonsillitis. Leaving Anchorage we fly to Nome. One of the joys of living in the north is that being in small planes allows us to see the Land. We are over a large river on the way to Nome.

We see caribou below us,

and this is the best way to see a large grizzly bear in the bush.

Amaryllis 1-27-23

Last month we had a water leak in the lower level. I moved some bulbs from the dark and they started to sprout. This week one bloomed and is now on the kitchen table.

I love the anazing bloom and the way its organs hang out.

Amaryllis A flower needs to be this size to conceal the winter window, and this color, the orange of a Fiat with the top down, to impress us, dull as we've grown. Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb half above the soil stuck out its green tongue and slowly, day by day, the flower itself entered our world, closed, like hands that captured a moth, then open, as eyes open, and the amaryllis, seeing us, was somehow undiscouraged. It stands before us now as we eat our soup; you pour a little of your drinking water into its saucer, and a few crumbs of fragrant earth fall onto the tabletop. Connie Wanek, 1997

'New kid onthe block' 1-25-23

Here is an editorial from Missouri Medicine, our state journal from May of 1988. I was the newly appointed editor.

Don's Blog 'Home Medical Dictionary' 1-23-23

Do you  have one?

     Home Medical Dictionary

This is not so much a dictionary

as it is an atlas for the old,

in which they pore over

the pink and gray maps of the body,

hoping to find that wayside junction

where a pain-rutted road

intersects with the highway

of answers, and where the slow river

of fear that achingly meanders from organ to organ

is finally channeled and dammed.

   Ted Kooser, 2004

The Infinite 1-20-23

Here is a very old poem.

The Infinite

This lonely hill to me was ever dear,

This hedge, which shuts from view so large a part

Of the remote horizon. As I sit

And gaze, absorbed, I in my thought conceive

The boundless spaces that beyond it range,

The silence supernatural, and rest

Profound; and for a moment I am calm.

And as I listen to the wind, that through

These trees is murmuring, its plaintive voice

I with that infinite compare;

And things eternal I recall, and all

The seasons dead, and this, that round me lives,

And utters its complaint. Thus wandering

My thought in this immensity is drowned;

And sweet to me is shipwreck on this sea.

  

Giacomo Leopardi (1819)

A new teacher sent me this poem and information.

Giacomo Leopardi (1798 – 1837), the greatest Italian Romantic poet, spent most of his youth as a recluse in his home in the small provincial town of Recanati, Italy, where nothing of notice ever happened. Being an invalid, he rarely ventured beyond the walls of his garden. Albeit a virtual prisoner, and probably because of it, he let his imagination space far and wide… What lies beyond that hedge? The Infinite. The triumph of imagination and mind over matter and our physical limitations. Dare to go, you youth, where person has gone before… 

This is a poem all Italian students had to memorize in high school. Not sure they still do now, but they certainly should.  It is one of the first Italian poems in free verse, so it was indeed a very daring composition in 1819.

First Aids 1-18-23

Here is a Missouri Medicine editorial from September 1987. We have come a long way in successfully treating AIDS but the fear and mystery of the Covid Pandemic show that we will continue to be tested by deadly diseases in the future.

"Sons of the Pioneers" 1-16-23

A friend sent me a picture of some tumble weed. It triggered my love for a song from the 40’s. Here is Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers. I grew up with this song. I still know the words. I had two six shooters. I rolled up my jeans just like Roy. I even had a hat like his. Lyrics See them tumbling down Pledging their love to the ground Lonely but free I'll be found Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds Cares of the past are behind Nowhere to go, but I'll find Just where the trail will wind Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds I know when night has gone That a new world's born at dawn I'll keep rolling along Deep in my heart is a song Here on the range I belong Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds I'm a roaming cowboy riding all day long Tumbleweeds around me sing their lonely song Nights underneath the prairie moon I ride along and sing this tune See them tumbling down Pledging their love to the ground Lonely but free I'll be found Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds Cares of the past are behind Nowhere to go, but I'll find Just where the trail will wind Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds I know when night has gone That a new world's born at dawn I'll keep rolling along Deep in my heart is a song Here on the range I belong Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds Songwriters: Bob Nolan Tumbling Tumbleweeds lyrics © Williamson Music, Inc.

Don's Blog 'The Journey' 1-13-23

Its Friday the thirteenth - how about a journey?

  The Journey

One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice -- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voice behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do -- determined to save the only life that you could save. Mary Oliver

Don's Blog Self-Knowledge 1-9-23

Here is an offering about self-knowledge from Kahlil Gibron.

And a man said, Speak to us about Self-
Knowledge.
And he answered , saying:
Your hearts know in the silence the secrets
of the days and nights.
But your ears thirst for the sound of
your heart's knowledge.
You would know in words that which
you have always known in thought.
You would touch with your fingers the
naked body of your dreams.

And it is well you should.
The hidden well-spring of your soul must
needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;
And the treasure of your infinite depths
would be revealed to your eyes.
But let there be no scales to weigh your
unknown treasure;
And seek not the depths of your knowl-
edge with staff or sounding line.
For self is a sea boundless and measure- less.

Say not , "I have found the truth," but
rather, "I have found a truth".
Say not, "I have found the path of the soul."
Say rather, "I have met the soul walking
upon my path."
For the soul walks on all paths.
The soul was not upon a line, neither
does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of
countless petals.

Kahlil Gibron, The Prophet - 1923

Don's Blog The Night Train 1-5-23

Here is another poem by Frederic Hildebrand.

The Night Train

Sometimes when I lie awake
and hear the piercing whistle, 
the night seems blacker,

the desolation of sorrow 
greater. I think of loneliness 
and the vast coldness that can

separate people. These thoughts 
spin like a child pedaling
a tricycle in endless 

circles. Then the train rumbles 
away and the deep silence 
returns. I hear her breathing, 

its peaceful, calming rhythm. 
The space of melancholy grows 
smaller and the spinning stops.

I think of the train reaching 
the next town, I embrace love and hope, 
and remember how fortunate I am.
Frederic Hildebrand, 2018
Published in Verse-Virtual, January 2018

We all have our own stories. Growing up we lived a block and a half from the tracks of the Burlington Route.

The train carried our commuting neighbors east into the city for work everyday. Going west

the train went through Omaha to Denver and on to the pacific coast.

Through the years I watched firemen shoveling coal into the steam engine and later on travelled 

aboard the magnificent Denver Zephyr. The trip into the city became magical with double decked 

passenger cars. 

In my bedroom  in the dark of the evening I could hear the radio as my folks listened to their favorite programs. 

I always had a calm frustration as the train came through and I could not follow the thread of the radio show. It was

worse when a long freight train passed by. And yet when a visiting friend would ask, "How can you stand that 

noise all the time", We would say,"What noise".

We used to put pennies on the track to flatten them out. One day the train hit the family dog. Several summers 

I took the train to Colorado to camp. It was extraordinary and without our parents. We went into the city to board the train

and passed our house heading west. We hung out in the lounge car, ate in the dining car, had our own births in the sleeping car.

I think you  can understand that were I a poet my story of the 'Night Train' would differ from Hildebrand.

Don's Blog "Living your Vision" 1-4-23

Here is my last 1984 St Louis Metropolitan Medicine Editorial.

Please comment you wish.

Don's Blog Addendum to "Creating a Trail" 1-3-23

In studying the information I sent there is an action that is mandatory. In order
to get a Death Certificate the death itself must have a legal pronouncement.
In my area your personal doctor or a Hospice Nurse can do it. That in itself might
be a good reason to be in hospice.
If the death occurs at home then a call to 911 would bring paramedics. In order for them
NOT to start a resuscitation automatically it is important to have a copy of your "Living Will"
(with its Do Not Resuscitate provision) and or a copy of your "Durable Power of Attorney
for Health" (which allows a family to confirm your DNR status). I am not sure who else can
legally pronounce someone dead.
After one has been legally pronounced then your Dr can sign the Death Certificate at a later time.

Don's Blog Creating Trail 1-2-23

Happy New Year.
Last year I took a class in which the following link was made available. For those of you participating in life's finitude you may find it of value. It helped me recall things I had long forgotten. As a compulsive I already had a list and was able to add to that list.