It's Not About Me

Ruled That Out!

I did a bit of moonlighting in one of our local hospital's urgent care clinics this afternoon. I needed the money and with the swine flu epidemic, they needed the help. When you are in the middle of a flu outbreak (and this one's a doozy) you have to be careful that you don't just diagnose influenza in every case and miss something that might be more serious, and so it was with an eight-year old who came in with the complaint of abdominal pain.

When I walked in the room this little, skinny guy was lying rigid on the table, straight as a soldier, pasty colored and not looking well. I took the history - nothing there to rule in or rule out an acute abdomen (ie. appendicitis, bowel obstruction or other bad stuff). Examination of the abdomen was unimpressive. I thought maybe just some bad constipation and sent him down to radiology for a single shot of the abdomen. Twenty minutes later I came back to his room after looking at his film. The previously sick young man was now lying spread-eagle, arms and legs askew with all his weight centered on his belly, doing 360s on the exam stool and having the time of his life.

I told his parents I thought they could all go home for dinner.

Top Ten Sounds

One day Lauren and I were out driving and we started to compare our favorite sounds. We shared many of the same. These are my Top 10:

10) Phil Keaggy's finger-style guitar.
9) Crickets on a summer night.
8) The purr of an old, British sports car.
7) The slow, regular breathing of a sleeping child.
6) The rustle of aspen leaves in a gentle breeze.
5) Rolling thunder.
4) Joni Mitchell finishing "You Turn Me On I'm A Radio" on her "Miles of Aisles" album.
3) Wind swishing thru long-needled pine trees.
2) The drumming of rain on a North Carolina tin roof.
1) The sound of my daughter Sarah's laughter!

 
 

Hitchhiking With Girls (Hitchhiking Part 2)

My worst day of hitchhiking ever was in Otta, Norway. I had just wound up a hike through the Jotunheim or “Home Of The Giants”.  This is one of the more spectacular regions of a country where every bend in the road is just one more spectacular vista. Getting rides was no problem when I was in the middle-of-nowhere Norway, which is typically the case – the more rural the area, the quicker the rides. Now that I was making my way back to Oslo and on a busy highway I was stuck. Eight hours stuck. Eight hours standing in the sun stuck. I was about to give up and do the unthinkable - pay for a train ticket when an older gentleman finally picked me up. He took me all the way in to Oslo while lecturing me on the need for staying hydrated. (I think he saw my color deteriorating as we took curve after Norwegian curve.)

Standing there, on the fringes of Otta, going nowhere, I knew that if I were in the company of a woman I would not be stranded. That is of course common wisdom, but hitching with a female carries its own risks. More about that later. 

It was 1973 when I first stuck out my thumb, but it was not until the opening week of September 1987 that I hitched my first ride with a girl. That girl was my wife of one week. She was a MacDonald, I a Cameron. We thought that a pilgrimage to Scotland was a fitting way to spend our honeymoon. No sitting on the hot beaches of some Caribbean beach for us - or at least for me. We would begin our life together on the edge of the road enduring horizontal rain in the Inner Hebrides.  Common wisdom did not fail me. The rides came lickety-split as the locals of Mull and Skye had mercy on us despite the fact that each of our packs singly were larger than their cars, not to mention a wee bit soggy.

We returned from our romantic interlude to northern California and had no further need for the kindness of strangers, at least when it came to transportation. My little pickup and Jo’s Toyota, fondly known as “Arf” (the first three letters of its license plate) got us around just fine. Besides, who would be foolish enough to thumb the Bay Area? It was not until we did a multi-day backpack through Yosemite that it was time to hitch again.

The plan was to start walking from the northwestern region of the national park, near Tuolumne Meadows and make our way down to the Yosemite Valley. The trip was glorious, with one highlight being a hailstorm that ripped apart thousands of leaves of some tree species unknown to us. The hot sun that came right behind the storm vaporized aromatic oils from the leaves. The olfactory effect was like God’s own aromatherapy.  We enjoyed the valley at the end of our hike, played tourist, for a bit, but then it was time to figure out how to return the 50-some miles to Tuolumne where our truck sat. I had hoped there might be a bus that served the park. They do it at Denali, but no such luck in California. Time to hitch.

Common wisdom proved itself once more as a full-size pickup stopped and did just that, picked-us-up. There were three seemingly pleasant guys in their 20’s who were in the cab. They said that there was no room for us inside, but if we wanted to sit back in the open bed, we were welcome.  It seemed like a good ride to me. I wouldn’t even have to make conversation with strangers for the hour or so trip. Jo and I settled in for the ride enjoying the cool breeze after a hot day.

I’m not sure what started making me nervous. Maybe it was realizing that we were back in the middle-of-nowhere or maybe it was the paucity of traffic on the road, but I started recalling the story of Abram and Sarai when they made their way into Egypt at a time of famine. Abram realized that his wife was beautiful and he began to fear that she might be taken and he eliminated.  He concocted a scheme that in retrospect was not flattering to the father of three major religions.  I wondered if my choice of this ride would end up not flattering either.

As I contemplated the situation my heart leapt to my throat when the truck pulled off to an isolated rest area. My only weapon was a steel ski pole that doubled as a hiking staff. If things got ugly I would tell Jo to run into the forest and I’d take them on with my push-stick. Guys popped out of both sides of the truck. I got ready and then the driver must have figured out the threatening appearance of the situation. He reassured me that they were just changing drivers. The ride turned out to be eventful only between my ears, but that was the end of hitchhiking with girls. 

"You'll Never Get Rich Dreaming Your Life Away"

This is one of those tales that sounds like an urban legend and so I would have thought, but it came straight from Grandma’s lips and she had the black-and-white to prove it.

Somehow growing up this story wasn’t talked about, or if it was I was just too little to have it register. After Grandpa died, Grandma moved back to Sweden to live near her sisters in the village of Nykroppa. I made several visits there and on one of those stays she pulled out a scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings from all over the world about Grandpa’s dream.

Grandpa and Grandma emigrated from Sweden to the United States in the early part of the last century. Grandpa Ray came and joined his brother Gust in Pittsburgh and did a short stint as a steel worker. He must have tired of that as he made his way west to cowboy in Idaho. It is very possible he would have made his life out there, but on a vacation back to visit Gust he met Tora, they married and he went back to work in the mills, Jones & Laughlin to be specific.

I don’t remember all the particulars, but some time in the 1950’s J&L had introduced new machinery in its cold-rolled steel mill that got the product from one part of manufacturing to another. After installation however a gate or switch in this process didn’t work right, halting production. Apparently the engineers came in multiple times to correct the problem, but the same issue arose after each modification.

Well, my grandpa liked to take a nap on Sunday afternoon. As a little guy I could not fathom why he would waste a perfectly good hour resting his eyes, but he did it anyway -almost without fail. It was during one of those afternoon naps that the solution for the problem at the mill came to him in a dream. The next morning he presented his fix and lo and behold it worked! 

J&L had an employee suggestion process in place and the award for saving the company’s money was determined by a set percentage of the savings over one year. The check came in around $15,000, an amount one newspaper article stated was the second highest award in the country that year. Adjusted for inflation, that is around $140,000 in 2008 dollars. I don’t know where all the money went, but I do know that it took care of a cruise for an extended visit back to Sweden.  The story made the AP wire and went international. Grandma received clippings from all over North America and Europe. It was with 87 year-old hands that she turned the pages of the scrapbook and passed on the story.

            

Stuck In The Middle

Adventure tourism may have existed in 1979, but not if you lived in Pittsburgh. Folks from that town were not a traveling people. Growing up, most individuals I knew considered Six Flags a major adventure vacation. The trip of a lifetime was to Las Vegas, after which occasion you came home and waited to die. These days, with no corner of the globe untouched by tourism, the decision to bicycle through Alaska alone would not be that exceptional, but at that time it was a bit edgy.

This story is not about the bike trip, but about the trip to the bike trip, or at least one night on the trip to the bike trip. The plan was to drive across country with Bob who was moving back to Seattle and Barb, an old friend from UConn who would accompany me as far as Haines, Alaska. Bob had an old, green Chevy pickup with a camper top on the back. He had all of his life belongings in the back, plus Barb’s backpack, plus my bicycle, plus a two-wheeled Cannondale pull-behind trailer for the bicycle and other assorted gear that filled the truck bed to capacity. And so it was that we cruised across the heartland with our nation in the throes of the oil crisis and Carter malaise.

The Shah-na-na of Iran had been over thrown, the first Ayatollah had ascended and a petroleum panic ensued. All this commotion led to the hording of expensive petrol, gas lines and service stations closing early ‘cause they were out of product. What’s this have to do with a bike trip? Well mostly it caused us to fear that we would be in the middle-of-nowhere, in the middle-of-the-night, stuck and out of gas. We were however not afraid enough however to camp over night. This was gonna be a 4-day trip to Seattle and that would require night driving.

All was well until about midnight of our second day out. We were well past Kansas City, right smack in the middle of the United States when the right, rear wheel went flat. It was a good twenty miles to the next town and it looked to small to have any all-night auto service. No problem, Bob’s truck had a full-sized spare tire bolted to the front of the vehicle and it would surely sustain us until the morning.  Ooops, problem. The jack was at the bottom of the truck bed as far forward from the rear gate as you can get. That would mean emptying the entire back of the truck. Out came the assorted gear, then the two-wheeled Cannondale pull-behind trailer, then my bicycle (in parts) and then all of Bob’s life belongings, out there, on the side of the road.

No problem now. We’ve got the jack out, ready to lift the truck. Ooops, problem. This was not the correct jack for the truck – too small. It would not reach the frame even fully extended. We would need something very solid to put underneath the jack to get it high enough to do the job. There was nothing in the pickup that would fit the bill. However, I had noticed that the guardrail was constructed with an 8x8 wooden post buried in the ground and the corrugated steel rail was bolted to that post with another 8x8 wooden block between the upright and guard rail. So at this point I began to deconstruct a section of guard rail so as to obtain two of these wooden blocks that enabled a platform tall enough to reach the truck frame. That done we successfully raised the truck, removed the back wheel, removed the spare from the front, tightened the lug nuts, lowered the pickup back to the ground and watched in shock and awe when the spare flattened as it took the weight of the truck.

At this point Barb and I were starting to get a bit annoyed at the lack of our friend’s planning. Never the less, we had Iron City beers, still nicely chilled from the cooler. The temperature was perfect and we were enjoying a gorgeous show of lightning down south Oklahoma-way. We had gotten this far. There must be a solution. And of course there was. Attached to my bike was a Zefal high-pressure tire pump. It was however designed to inflate skinny bicycle tires, not a large truck tire. We had no choice however, so I connected the Zefal and began to pump. Well it took an hour and a half of pumping to get the tire looking like it was road worthy. We all took turns, sipped the Irons, watched the lightning and figured this would be a good story – some day. Once reloaded  we headed down the highway as first light started to show on Kansas’ western horizon.

 

                      

       The truck's odometer turning 100K later that day in eastern Colorado.

Papa's Day 2009

With one in California and the other in Northern Ireland, this Father’s Day is a bit quieter than those that have come before.  The remaining child has no clue that this day, beside being a Lord’s Day, not to mention Midsummer’s Day, is also a day to honor our fathers. A smile from her however is compensation enough for the lack of official recognition.

 

Parenting, whether it done by father or mother, is hard work. At one time, long ago, I questioned God’s wisdom in giving such remarkable responsibility to the not-so-responsible and not-so-experienced young.  I am learning the hard way that responsibility and experience don’t always make up for the vast difference in energy between 20 and 50. I often feel that I am short changing my 12-year old with my 53 year-old lethargy.  Never the less, I push on. As Doug Wilson has pointed out, once you become a father, you are always fathering. You are either doing it well or you are doing it poorly. You can’t decide that you are tired and you aren’t going to do it anymore. Even the father who has left his family, by duty, death or decision continues to father – his absence speaking even though his voice is not heard.

 

At dinner today my wife pointed out to those fathers present that we could not claim such a title if it was not for the mothers. Point well taken (and likewise!), but fathering has its own unique responsibility in that many reflect on God the Father by what we have learned from our earthly fathers. Those that have matured under the reign of an unloving or distant father may reject without reflection the Father who is the great motor of love. Jesus speaks fearful words to those in such a situation: “It is inevitable that temptations to sin will come, but how terrible it will be for the person through whom they come!  It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin.”

 

So, with that Hallmark moment of levity, I shift to Father’s Day cards. I’m sure I’ve received many funny ones over the years, but two that I saw today are outstanding. The first from my daughter, in an envelope that arrived with the Queen’s stamps on the envelope, featured the following picture, and on the inside stated:

 

                                       

                           "No one makes breakfast like Dad!"

                                               

 

 

           

 

 

The second was to one of the other dads at dinner today:

 

 

                        

Good Rides, Bad Rides (Hitchhiking Part #1)

(Kids Don’t Try This At Home. For Historic Information Only.)

Last week as I watched Lauren disappear over the arched bridge to Concourse A at Denver International I flashed back to a morning where my mother was dropping me off on my way to Europe. There was one slight difference. I had watched Lauren make it successfully thru security  -  my mom had left me at the intersection of Route 8 and I-80 in northwest Pennsylvania. I was hoping to hitch a ride east to Connecticut and then take a bus to JFK.  It wasn’t my first hitch, but it was my longest.

Where I grew up, north of Pittsburgh, nobody I knew hitchhiked. Every guy had a car or access to one. Some kids did hop freight trains and ride them a ways, but that was much too scary for me. It took just one story of someone slipping and having their legs taken off at the femur and I knew that ride was not in my future.

It was in Storrs, Connecticut that I first stuck my thumb out. I had no wheels my freshman year and it was often the only way to buy hardware or get to the package store at this campus in the woods. Hitching at this time in American history was not necessarily insane, although it was not something I would have recommended to my younger brothers.  Around the university some hippie or some professor would pick you up quickly, everyone knowing that the ride would be short and the risks low.

The following summer I made my first trip to Europe, flying Pittsburgh to New York to Brussels and spent two months safely hopping trains with a Eurail Pass. The buzz was that hitching was safe in Europe, so when I was in rural areas without rail service I tried my hand at longer rides. It was a great way to meet locals, even in those days when it was common to get a lift with folks who did not speak English. 

I worked most of the summer of ’75, but had a serious case of travel fever left over from my Euro wanderings of the previous summer.  In the meantime I had picked up a yellow, ’68 VW Bus and christened it “Gus The Bus”. It seemed wise to finish up a summer of labor with a good, long, Gus road-trip to the Canadian Rockies.  The plan was to drive the 2000 miles basically non-stop to Banff with two guys from Pittsburgh and two from Connecticut.  We had plenty of adventures along the way, but we were about two miles from our border crossing at Sweetgrass, Montana when I spied two young ladies who were hitching their way into Canada. I passed them by, not wanting to be joined by strangers for our trip thru customs, not to mention wondering how I could possibly fit two more people and their packs into the crowded bus. I was of course loudly overruled by my companions when they learned of my stupidity.  I turned around, drove back and before letting the girls in the van asked them if they had any thing on their persons or in their packs that might prove problematic at the border. They assured me they were clean.  I was stupid, I let them in.

So there we were in the middle of the day, in the middle of the prairie, in the middle of the continent. A white Cadillac driven by a 60-something couple was being taken apart by the Canadians. I couldn’t even imagine what they were going to do with a hippie-bus, full of seven 20-year olds.  It is still unclear to me what these customs guys were thinking, but they asked us our destination – “Banff”.  “Purpose of your trip?” –“Backpacking.”  “Do you have any firearms?” – “No.”  “Well then, have a good time!” “Thank you, sir.”  I kept driving and after about a mile the “ladies” broke out two joints and asked us if we’d like to partake.  I went nuts.  I could have lost my bus, not to mention spending my college years in a Canadian jail. They were left off shortly at Milk River where they could hitch west to Waterton Lakes.  The story wasn’t over however. A week later as we hiked through August snow in Jasper National Park, we followed bear tracks into the campsite where we were planning on tenting that night. My friend Michael informed me then that he was glad he had brought along his father’s pistol and that he would move it from the bottom of his pack to the top.  I guess bad riders can be friends as well as strangers.

The most unusual ride of my hitching career also involved a gun and was in the fall of ’75.  I had moved out of the dorms and was living back in the woods in a tiny cabin on Dog Lane, exchanging janitorial service for rent with the Lutheran church that owned it. Being off campus I had the opportunity to bring my shotgun to Connecticut and enjoy some hunting in the gorgeous forests of the eastern part of that state. Gus may have been temporarily dead. He did that, but for some reason I had no transportation. I convinced my roommate to drop me off at a state game lands with the plan that I would either hitch a ride back, or if unsuccessful, walk the 4+ miles back to the cabin. I’m not sure why I thought someone would pick me up with a shotgun over my shoulder, but apparently my hunting gear and blaze-orange vest convinced a little, old, Volvo-driving lady to stop and take me home that fall evening. Her brothers had been hunters and I guess I was a pleasant reminder of those days back in the 1920’s.

There were plenty of other good rides, but as the “Summer Of Love” faded into the storied past and the ‘70’s got weirder, so did some of my rides. 

Long, Long Ago In A Galaxy Far, Far Away

                    

                            Yours truly, Dolly Sods, West Virginia, 1975

Our House Was A Very, Very, Very Fine House ...

      

            Grandpa Donaldson pushes grandson down Pine Tree Road, 1997

Sense Of Place

P = MV. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Right now my momentum is in the reading of books. Maybe it’s the Kindle, maybe not, but I’m like many readers who go on literary binges only to alternate with periods of print sobriety. The heavy, spring snow last week also kept me in, giving me a much needed opportunity to clean up my study. In doing so I came across an unread freebie, “Eternity In Our Hearts” by RC Sproul, Jr. The cover painting of Van Gogh’s “The Siesta” and its subtitle “Essays On The Good Life” were enough to pull me in. 

In 1996, Sproul the Younger left Orlando in search of a sense of place and a sense of community. He found it in the mountains of Virginia. It was the description of his discovery that inspired this post:

“What we love about our little community is there is a here here. Where we are is distinct from everywhere else. Some of those elsewheres are also distinct, but such places are fewer and fewer….”

“We run into our friends in part because we do not live in a megapolis. Our circles are small enough, and we live close enough to one another, that our paths cross even when we don’t plan for it. We run into each other at the grocer and at the diner. We pass each other on the road, and no matter how many more miles we have to go, we know that we are home…”

“Home is sweet, not spicy. This sense of place gives a sense of peace. It is more an anchor than a big wave to surf, more the strong tower than the bungee ride down. We have this sense of place because we have sought it. For many of the locals a sense of place is as natural – an as unnoticed – as the air they breathe. We came here, however, because there was no air to breathe in the many places we came from…”

“Our children will forget when we arrived, and like a child in a dream, even as they grow older they will believe that they have always been here. This place will be to them as the water is to the fish, as it has become to us, a source of daily life. And so they will certainly fail to thank us. But their peace, their sense of place will be all the thanks we need.”

So it was with me in January 1981. My friend Soko and I took a three-day train trip from Pittsburgh, PA to Pasco, WA to visit our friend Rick. We were well stocked with Christmas fruitcake, smoked salmon, red wine and I forget what else. We toasted to our trip, “The Paso Fiasco”, in Amtrak paper cups. Let off in the darkness of the eastern Washington desert, we spent the night at some friend of Ricks and were fresh for the early morning trek across the Blue Mountains.

The landscape was entirely new to me. Instead of viewing just a few degrees of sky thru the thick forest of Pennsylvania, I had 180 degree vistas. Instead of being able to see maybe a mile at some break in the trees, I was able to look from the top of Tollgate across the bulk of Washington to the glistening volcano caps that marched north thru the Cascades.

We wound down that mountain and stopped in the tiny town of Elgin. I could already sense that there was a here here.  Then it was back up and across the ponderosa and wheat savannah that separates the La Grande valley from the Minam River drainage. Once down in that narrow, forested canyon I knew I was home. I hadn’t yet made it into the Wallowa Valley, but I was sure that this was the place. It took me nine years before I could actually claim an address there, but each time I visited I knew that I was home. It was sweet, not spicy. Each time I left, I knew I was leaving home. Somehow I also knew that my time there was not forever. It is still good to go back. I breathe easy, settle in and know that my sense of place is real.