Don's Blog "Waking Up" 1-21-26

Here is my editorial from Missouri Medicine from October 1991, 35 years ago. This is best read on a computer.

Editors Note. When I was 9 years old in La Grange, Illinois I  would attend the Sunday Evening Club 

in the winter months with my family, two older brothers and my parents. The programs were presented in my high school auditorium just across the the railroad tracks from our home.One of the programs was breathtaking an unforgettable. Two canoeists described their white water canoe adventure on a the Canadian arctic river which to me was permanently captivating. They showed slides and amazing movies. I can see one of the movies even now in my head. I wanted to do that. 

Somehow that dream was replaced by my life as a student, competitive tennis player, amateur backpacker and mountaineer and family man and head and neck surgeon. During the Viet Nam War era I was stationed in Anchorage Alaska with my wife and two young sons. I fell in love with the far north. At age 13 my oldest son went to scout camp in Ely Minnesota where he learned to canoe. He never really ever came home. After college he canoed the length of the Mississippi river from Lake Itaska to the gulf. Save for a few Covid years he has taken or led canoe expeditions on white water rivers in the Canadian arctic every summer. 

It was at that point that he invited me my the first arctic canoe expedition. I had never really forgotten the Sunday Evening program and that yearning to do that adventure myself. The Caribou River expedition described above was the first of nine expeditions to the far north. Arctic fever can be serious. Eight of my trips were paddling on arctic rivers and  saw me traveling downriver going north through 'The Land' and finishing on the arctic ocean. The last trip was a voyage on a small cruise ship with other adventurous elders that started in Greenland, went  across the North West Passage and ended in Nome Alaska. I got to see 'The Land'  from the ocean side and got to visit some of the sites where my canoe trips had ended. What privilege to fulfill a dream.