The Mystery of “Type 2 Fun”

The Mystery of “Type 2 Fun”

Essays Featured Psychology

From THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Sept 3, 2021

Last week, two videos landed in my inbox – field dispatches, from two friends who took off on adventures as soon as COVID-19 restrictions eased. One friend was cycling through the Rockies on a one-speed bike, sleeping rough and grinding it out over high alpine passes; the other was traversing the highlands of Iceland with his wife. Theirs was also a bicycle trip, at least nominally, although the couple seemed to be spending as much time carrying their bikes as they did actually riding them. “This ‘bikepacking,’ ” my friend posted after one very hard day, “is kicking the crap out of us.”

It all seemed enormously punishing. And yet, knowing my friends, I suspect that they’ll start thinking about their next adventure as soon as they return home and lick their wounds, expecting that if it’s even half as much fun as their last, it’ll be amazing.

Wait: How exactly does having the crap kicked out of you qualify as “fun”? What you need to understand, says the Colorado mountaineer and writer Kelly Cordes, is that we’re talking about a specific type of fun – what he calls “Type Two Fun.”

Mr. Cordes popularized The Fun Scale, which proposes that fun comes in three flavours. Type One Fun is just pure pleasure: Eating a doughnut, or watching a movie, or flying a kite, or skiing in fresh powder. Type Two Fun is miserable while it’s happening, but fun in retrospect, like my friends’ trips. Type Three Fun is no fun at all – not in the moment, not ever. It just sucks. (For example: A failed relationship that never contained much Type One Fun in the first place.)

Mr. Cordes isn’t a psychologist, but the fact that his Fun Scale resonates so deeply suggests he is on to something real.

The first and third types of fun are easy enough to understand: one is obvious, and one is ironic. But what’s the deal with that Type Two? What are the components of the mysterious equation of pain + time = gratification? Why would the brain invent such a cover story?

One theory is that this is just nature’s way to get us to do hard things. Otherwise no one would ever have a second child, or run a second marathon (which, millennia ago when we were living on the savannah, we’d have had to do to bag an antelope for next week’s dinner).

George Loewenstein, a psychologist and economist at Carnegie Mellon University, explained this through the lens of intense exercise, in a recent interview with NPR. He described how he used to go for lung-busting runs, churning up the steep hills of Pittsburgh, but the half-life of the actual pain would be short, before the happy chemicals hit the body’s reward circuitry like a gong. Almost right away, in the “cool state” of retrospective reflection post-run, Dr. Loewenstein literally could not remember what the unpleasant “hot state” of screaming muscles and oxygen debt felt like – all that was left was the triumphant memory of having done it. “It was all forgotten, within maybe 10, 20 seconds,” he said. The next move was a no-brainer: He laced ‘em up again the next day.

But Type Two Fun isn’t just about self-motivating biochemistry. We humans crave a feeling of progress, and so we also crave tests for ourselves. Ideally, these tests should be passable, but only barely so: the sweet spot that the psychologist Nick Hobbs called “just-manageable difficulty.” A perfect life, then, might be spent skating along the knife’s-edge of your competence. (We are maximally motivated, research suggests, when we reckon we have a 50/50 chance of succeeding.) “When one achieves this fine-tuning of his life,” said Dr. Hobbs, “he will know zest and joy.” (And also, surely, the Third Horseman of Deep Fulfilment – a sense of “liberation,” no matter how brief, from psychological restriction.)

In this finely tuned state, time collapses and we fall into that blissfully familiar state called “flow.” Contrast this with Type One Fun, which is really just quick sensory pleasure; it bursts like fireworks and then is gone, leaving a spiritual carbon footprint in the sky. If Type One Fun is purely hedonism, and Type Three Fun is masochism, Type Two Fun is more like stoicism. There’s a sense that you’ve banked the unpleasant stuff, that you’re somehow better off for having endured it and have now truly earned the joy. In that way, “Are we having fun yet?” also means, “I’m pretty sure we’re building character here, though we have no way to measure it.”

That’s why, when my bikepacking friend posted daily updates from the Icelandic tundra – casting us all as witnesses to an otherworldly landscape but also to the inconvenient rivers and the unrideably steep bits and the winds so fierce they nearly blew them off their bikes – he just tipped his hat to these obstacles for “keeping us honest.” It was clear that for him, Type Two Fun is also an attitude – a philosophy in itself.

Psychologists have a term for how our memory tends to sweeten past events, cherry-picking the good and ignoring the bad. They call it “rosy retrospection.” This isn’t exactly the same as nostalgia, but it’s what drives nostalgia – the dreamy reverie of how much better things used to be before.

But what many people don’t appreciate about nostalgia, notes the psychologist Krystine Batcho, is just how social it is. “It connects us to other people … in many beautiful ways.” When you’re rosily retrospecting, you’re not just thinking about what fun you were having; you’re thinking about who you were having all that fun with, and how you’ll share it with others.

The social dimension of Type Two Fun can’t, I think, be overstated. Even if you’re on a solo adventure, like my friend conquering the Rockies on a fixed-gear bike, part of the payoff is knowing that every squall and setback and close brush with death will make a good story. The stories of our misadventures are like what they say about wood: It heats you twice, once in the chopping and once in the burning. Pleasure shared is more pleasurable, and pain shared is diminished.

A kind of bonding happens when people endure hardship together that’s hard to achieve any other way. And that – exactly what we’ve been missing during the COVID-19 pandemic – is the stuff of good memories. Just ask any veteran hoisting a pint at the legion with old platoon-mates, or battered-and-bruised hockey players passing around the Stanley Cup. Or a couple schlepping their bikes up a snowfield in Iceland. (It’s better than marriage therapy, if you survive it.)

I saw this up-close when I was researching for my 2014 book What Makes Olga Run?: The Mystery of the 90-Something Track Star, and What She Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Happier Lives. I followed Masters track-and-field athletes – competitors who were older than 40 – who travelled from meet to meet – and witnessed a camaraderie the likes of which I’d never seen before in any group of people. Competing at a high level in your 60s or 70s or 80s involves no small amount of pain; the engine doesn’t necessarily want to red line it any more, and if you try, it will make you pay. These folks weren’t competing against each other, I realized: They were competing together against Father Time. By the end of a meet, everybody’s hobbling around – and basking in a level of deep fulfilment that frankly, made me envious.

Type Two Fun can be a way of life for us all – these competitors just take it to its logical extreme. On the last day of the world championships in Sacramento in 2011, I watched two competitors, visibly limping, part ways at the taxi stand.

“Will you be back next year, Bill?” one said.

“Better believe it,” replied his friend. “If you don’t see me, it means I died.”

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V for Vaccine: How we can signal our immunity to each other

V for Vaccine: How we can signal our immunity to each other

Essays Featured

From THE GLOBE AND MAIL, May 10, 2021

One recent weekend, the sun came out, prompting locals to spill out onto the forest trails. I joined them, but I found it a little too crowded for comfort out there, given that we’re still at DEFCON 1 with the COVID-19 threat.

As hikers encountered each other on these narrow paths, many of them unmasked, a question mark hung in the air: How safe are we?

On my walk, I reached a pinch-point, with a couple coming toward me. We both stopped. On an impulse, I raised two fingers, palm out, in a V sign. The man nodded, and his wife seemed to exhale – and on they came, still observing their buffer but no longer visibly troubled.

Now, it could be they thought that I was just being friendly – that I was a hippie-chill North Van guy, communicating peace to my brother and sister. But I like to think they understood my intention: to signal, with that “V”, that I had received a vaccine. If I’d been jabbed twice, I’d have made the V with both hands, for double reassurance.

This is a thing. Okay, it’s not yet a thing, but I reckon it could be a thing. If the V-for-vaccinated sign catches on, it could lower our collective blood pressure until we hit herd immunity – not to mention the possibility of forging bonds between strangers at a time when we need the solidarity more than ever.

But how do you get a gesture to become universally adopted?

In 2014, researchers Xiangling Zhuang and Changxu Wu – a psychologist and an engineer – published a study investigating whether hand gestures might make cars more likely to stop for pedestrians at unmarked street crossings. They invented 11 hand signs and tested four of them – including a horizontal point, a crooked-elbow hitch and “time out” T – on street corners in Beijing. They hatched the signs based on sociologist Kurt Lewin’s theory that an effective gesture must have three components: visibility, clarity, and what Dr. Lewin called “motive power” – that it has the intended effect. It turned out that a couple of the gestures proved pretty effective at persuading drivers to stop. But no pedestrian gesture has really caught on. As far as I know, no one, anywhere, just points or flashes a “T” at oncoming cars at street corners. The pedestrian crossing gesture is a high-five left dangling but the culture.

The V-sign, though, is a different story. It has been part of the human repertoire for at least 700 years, though it has meant different things – many of them extremely rude, if you display it backward. Some say the palm-facing V was exchanged by English bowmen in the Battle of Agincourt, in defiance of the French, who had threatened to lop off the shooting fingers of any archer they captured. The V said, effectively: “Ha, varlots! We are still alive and free and full-fingered.”

But it wasn’t until January of 1941 that the V detonated in a whole population. The instigator was a Belgian diplomat named Victor de Laveleye, who proposed it as a rallying symbol for the Allies – V for victoire, in French, or for vrijheid, which means freedom in Dutch. Remember, this was before social media, or even TV, so he couldn’t plant the image in people’s minds. He simply described it on BBC Radio Belgium. But the idea was so lock-in-key perfect for the moment that it took off anyway. The V became iconic when Winston Churchill flashed it on V-day (and perhaps became a little tarnished when Richard Nixon co-opted it a quarter-century later).

That element of urgency may help explain the difference between a meme that goes viral and one that’s stillborn. It could be dictated by whether a society is in the crucible of wartime, or in some random moment when it will be no less safe to cross the street tomorrow. Does a pandemic qualify as urgent?

When I got home, I told my wife, Jen, the story of my impromptu V on the forest path, and about my rosy hopes to launch the very symbol I was proudly showing her right then.

“Wait, when did you get your vaccine?” she asked.

“A week ago.”

“It’s supposed to be two weeks until you’re fully protected.”

I slowly lowered … one of the fingers.

Her face was a mask.

“I think you need to work on your messaging,” she said.

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Housebound and Bored? Turn Yourself into a Human Guinea Pig

Housebound and Bored? Turn Yourself into a Human Guinea Pig

Essays Featured Psychology Published Stories Archive

THE WALRUS, March 22, 2021

A BASIC RULE OF SCIENCE is the more data points, the better. If you’re working with human subjects, you need enough of them to prove that your results apply not just to these people but to all people. Too small a sample size is a design flaw. But a single test subject—an “N of 1”—can still be useful if you run a controlled experiment for a long time.

When he was about twelve years old, Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, grew tired of his mother’s stern warnings whenever she heard him crack his knuckles: Don’t do that—it’ll give you arthritis. This sounded like BS. The boy was determined to prove his mother wrong. But how? He devised a test using the only guinea pig at hand: himself. He stopped cracking the knuckles of his right hand but continued his cracking habit with his left, making sure to do it at least twice per day. He kept this up for fifty years.

In 1990, Unger—now a physician and researcher—had his hands examined. There appeared to be no difference in arthritis creep. Aha! A triumphant rebuke to his mother—and one borne out, in those intervening decades, by other researchers, in other ways. In 2009, Unger was awarded an Ig Noble Prize, given to those who produce “achievements that first make people laugh, then think.” Unger’s venture is part of a long and storied tradition of folks experimenting on themselves. Plenty of things that have been discovered, invented, or confirmed would never have been without someone applying the basic algorithm: try something; observe results; learn; try again. And self-experimentation has arguably never mattered more. In today’s hypermediated world, with its steady diet of reconstituted information, self-experiments are a corrective. There is simply no substitute for personal experience.

Think of DIY science as a tree with many branches. Sometimes it’s done for high-minded reasons: to help humanity within the constraints of the Hippocratic oath. The Nuremberg code—put in place after the gruesome extent of medical testing by Nazi doctors came to light—forbids an experimenter from making their subject face any procedure they wouldn’t be willing to undergo themselves. Some scientists believe the only way to be totally sure they’re adhering to the code is to be their own test subjects. (Also, human trials require “informed consent”—but, as Nobel Prize–winning physicist Rosalyn Yalow pointed out, nobody can really give truly informed consent unless they helped design the trial. That’s why, she later admitted, “in our laboratory, we always used ourselves.”)

Sometimes, self-experimenting is done in the name of art—say, to test human limits, as Marina Abramović did during a show in Italy, when she allowed herself to be pummelled by strangers for several hours, or as Chris Burden did when he voluntarily took a bullet from close range. In the marketing world, self-experimentation is just good business. It’s dogfooding—a term that may trace back to Clement L. Hirsch, president of Kal Kan, who was rumoured to make a show, at the company’s annual general meetings, of opening a can of dog food and eating it with a fork in front of queasy shareholders. If you’re willing to demonstrate your product on yourself, that cements your credibility. The dogfooding metaphor has raced through Silicon Valley, where people pride themselves on beta testing their own products.

Sometimes, this has ended up working against the brand. Witness the recent parade of social media company insiders and software engineers—the ones who built those sticky engagement features—on the documentary The Social Dilemma, stepping forward, beetle-browed, to admit that they, too, have become addicted to their products. But there’s a simpler reason to experiment on yourself. It falls into the hopper of Why the hell not? There are lots of examples of people who, deep into seemingly interminable COVID-19 lockdowns with not a whole lot to do, found the most mundane aspects of their everyday lives weirdly magnified. Alone with our tics and neuroses, in the laboratories of our own homes, “we have turned into scientists of ourselves,” noted Sam Anderson, staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. Anderson found himself monitoring his intake of Doritos and then carefully, clinically noting how those little rafts of baked corn and flavour dust made him feel—before, during, and after he scarfed them down.

Other inward-bound argonauts have hatched experiments in a similar spirit. Like trying to construct a perfectly optimal day or making a list of things you’ve said or believed that you no longer agree with. As lockdown dragged on and she found herself housebound and mentally underemployed, writer Molly Young found “little harebrained ways to warp reality.” She tried “ground living” (no chairs). She wandered around naked and stayed up all night.

She ate a meal straight from the plate, like a dog, just to see what it was like. (“Sloppy.”) She practised considering doing stuff—making banana bread, investigating that stain on the carpet over there—without actually doing it. She called these little personal experiments “norm-shedding.” Her question to herself was: Does behaving unusually alter our perceptions of ourselves? If we are what we habitually do, then does changing what we do ripple back upriver and change who we are? Act like a different person for long enough and you eventually become one. And then the question is, When the experiment is over and you go back to your old ways—clothing and sleep and forks—do you find your old recognizable self waiting to meet you?

Upon reflection—and ye gads, there’s been plenty of time for it—many have come to realize that self-experimentation is actually just how we live our lives. We try to figure out how to surprise ourselves. We conduct little trials, some in public, some in private, kicking around what will take the edge off the restlessness and the fear. Some things prove reliably beneficial: exercise, facing something you’ve been avoiding, admitting mistakes, trying to make amends. Some of these experiments produce outsize results.

Some interventions, however, are fool’s gold and actually make things worse, leading to addictions and other wrong turns. It’s a trial-and-error world now. We are all Wile E. Coyote ordering stuff from Acme (er, Amazon) and seeing if any of it—the spring-loaded tennis shoes, the rocket-powered pogo stick, the instant icicle maker—gets us any closer to satisfaction.

Of course, what most of us have been futzing with is pretty low-stakes poker. As the COVID-19 crisis deepened, the death toll spiked, and a global all-hands-on-deck scramble for a vaccine ensued, a number of researchers hustled their trials along by testing their products on themselves. And it wasn’t just unaccredited biohackers who were eating their own dog food: it was some of the biggest names in experimental science. Last July, photos circulated of famed Harvard geneticist George Church shoving up his nose a vial of experimental COVID-19 nasal vaccine that he and twenty or so others, members of a rapid-response vaccine-development team, had churned out. When Gao Fu, the Chinese virologist and immunologist who heads the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, disclosed that he, too, had injected an experimental vaccine, he said it was partly to boost public confidence in vaccines. Convincing reluctant holdouts to buy in to COVID-19 vaccines may be the noblest dogfooding application of all: to sell the public on some needed pivot by defusing an unwarranted fear.

Twenty years ago, I carved my own modest notch into the self-experimentation bedpost when I underwent experimental dental surgery for a national magazine story. My reason was no more lofty than curiosity. (And, frankly, I needed the money.) The question under investigation was: To what extent can regular people override serious pain with a little mental training? The procedure, which involved the extraction of impacted wisdom teeth, was done at an alternative dental clinic in Calgary. It was successful only in the sense that I hung in till the end and lived. When I returned to Vancouver, my wife met me at the airport.

“So, how’d it go?” she asked warily.

“Okay,” I said. “I think I got the story. And no one was exploited.”

She said: “Only you.”

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On Pandemic Time

On Pandemic Time

Essays Featured

from THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Aug 14, 2020

Have you noticed you’ve been perceiving time differently since the world turned upside down in March?

Many people report that the first month of lockdown felt like it lasted about a year. But then the clock started speeding up. And now it’s whirring like a propeller.

If that’s been your experience, too, the question is why.

The short answer: because time isn’t real. It’s a social and psychological construct, a “rubbery thing,” as the Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman puts it.

There’s often a pretty significant disconnect between the substantial “truth” of time – as measured by atomic clocks – and how it feels. Time seems to race or drag according to what’s going on around us.

What transpired in the early months of the pandemic was unprecedented in our lifetimes. Everything was novel. And novelty, psychologists have found, stretches time. Things that surprise us seize our attention, and gobble neural energy as the memories are processed. And that makes the weird episodes in our lives, as we reflect on them later, seem to have lasted much longer than they actually did.

Our brains are lazy – er, efficient. When they encounter something familiar, they kind of stop taking notes. Been there, done that. “See yesterday,” the brain jots in the margin, thereby preserving space for the next bit of real news – i.e., something different.

Those crazy, anxious early days of COVID-19 – the alarming numbers out of Iran and Italy, the chaos of everyone’s plans suddenly collapsing – were intense. And intensity of feeling, it turns out, pumps even more molasses into the temporal gears. It may have felt like a Michael Bay movie while it was happening, but in the brain’s director’s cut, it’s more like a Merchant Ivory film, the whole thing unfolding at the speed of a lazy river.

No wonder life B.C. – before COVID-19 – seems like eons ago.

But around late April or early May there was that shift. We started getting used to the weirdness. The shock of working from home and tracking the infection spikes and banging a pot in the evening began to wear off. Routine took hold (at least for those of us lucky enough not to be on the health care front lines). There were fewer unusual events to snag our attention and slow time, so the days started zipping by again.

This is all a fairly new discovery, this elastic property of the sense of time.

In the 1930s, an American physiologist named Hudson Hoagland was attending to his wife as she lay sick in bed with the flu. He nipped away from her bedside for a few moments and then returned, whereupon she remarked: “Where have you been? You’ve been away for ages!” Something was distorting her sense of time. Dr. Hoagland suspected the fever. Could it be there was some kind of clock in the human central nervous system – a chemical pacemaker that can be nudged by outside factors, like, in this case, heat? (Subsequent studies support Dr. Hoagland’s hunch that time slows as our core body temperature rises. So if you thought that Bikram yoga class would never end, now you know why.)

Today it’s clear there’s not just one internal clock governing our judgment of time; multiple systems work in concert. Dr. Hoagland’s original sleuthing sent us down a rabbit hole that is vastly deeper and windier than anyone suspected.

What’s interesting is that, while much of the variation in how we judge time is situational, some of it is not. One constant appears to be our age. Per the cliché, time actually does fly as we get older, studies suggests. This has always made me a little bit envious of kids, in their unleaky little boats. They never seem to lose whole days, let alone accidentally start writing the wrong decade on a cheque. It has been wild, during the pandemic, to think of our nuclear family holed up under the same roof, riding out this historical event together but experiencing it – the pace of it – quite differently.

Science cannot fully explain the generational discrepancy, but a few things may be going on.

One is, again, that novelty factor. Kids are relative newcomers to this planet, so they are still routinely surprised by stuff, and their brains work hard to sort it out. And since each passing hour is a larger proportion of a child’s short life, it may feel longer and more significant. Plus, kids’ attention and memory circuits are still growing, so the transmission of information may actually be physically slower, drawing time out even more.

Another possible ingredient in the mix: digital media. Gen Z is not exactly waiting on the pier for the next instalment of Charles Dickens’s new novel to arrive by boat. They have lived their whole life, as the writer Venkatesh Rao put it, “inside a cage of time made up of 32 satellites orbiting Earth.” What the young want – TV shows, songs, commodities – is available any time, and always has been. So: Less time spent reminiscing plus less time spent anticipating means more time moored in the present. We might guess – from other research – that this too puts the brakes on time.

In the early going of the pandemic, my wife and I got a wee inkling of what it might feel like to be a kid. We were jacked in to their time signature. Too bad it was mostly because we were overloading our circuits being stressed out and rolling the dice on what to do and which experts to believe; the lazy river was full of crocodiles. But as the weeks passed, and normalcy set in, the gulf between the generations began to open again. Time sped up as we calmed down, while they continued on their unhurried course. The kids seemed chill, for the most part – although much more was going on inside their heads.

There is a new word in circulation, hatched not from the neuroscience labs but from the jittery zeitgeist. The word is “shadowtime.” As defined by its creators, it is “a feeling of living in two distinctly different temporal scales simultaneously.” It’s as if two clocks are ticking at once – real time and existential time.

To use it in a sentence: “Kane was intently working on his presentation that was due the next morning, but as he looked up and saw the moon it occurred to him that the moon had been rising and setting for 4.5 billion years, moving ever farther away. He felt shadowtime for the rest of the evening.”

The word was coined by the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a California-based conceptual art project, so it’s definitely more felicity than science. But it does capture the real and uncomfortable disconnect of having to navigate life, in its humdrum detail, while an environmental sword of Damocles dangles overhead. There’s some evidence that younger people sense the anxious doomsday countdown more acutely. They have more skin in the game, after all; it’s their future.

But there’s nothing like approaching one’s own personal expiry date to inject each passing moment with meaning. Gerontologists have found that older people, so long as they aren’t suffering, tend to positively cherish time. “The elders view time like a member of a desert tribe views water,” Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist at Cornell University, told me. “They can’t believe we would ever squander such a precious resource.” To younger people they counsel: “Think small.” Pay attention. Take delight in the hummingbird suspended outside your window. Relish your enchiladas – and the person who just laid them on the table in front of you.

To the extent that it stretches time, paying attention becomes a kind of investment plan.

Maybe the last reliable one we have left.

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The Other Side of 110

The Other Side of 110

Aging Essays Featured

 

from THE GLOBE AND MAIL, Feb 20, 2019.

Like pretty much everyone of extraordinarily advanced age, Dr. Robert Wiener was continually peppered with one question: “What’s your secret?” He preferred to show a visitor rather than tell them. After cordial small-talk about politics and hockey, he slipped into his workout togs and, moving his dumbbells out of the way, hopped on the CCM stationary bicycle that sat next to the window in his top-floor residence overlooking Montreal. And then, with St. Joseph’s Basilica looming below, he demo’d his daily regimen: fifteen minutes fast, then fifteen minutes with the tension cranked up, until he was sweating.

The retired oral surgeon, who died on February 17, was Canada’s only male supercentenarian, a term reserved for people who are at least 110 years old. A highlight of his 55-year career was founding the dental clinic at the Jewish General Hospital for those of limited means. When he graduated from McGill University’s dental school, most people were still brushing their teeth with short pieces of bone fitted with pig bristles or badger hair; the first modern nylon-bristle toothbrush wouldn’t go on sale until two years later, in 1938.

According to the UCLA-based Gerontology Research Group, which tracks and verifies supercentenarians, Dr. Wiener is considered the oldest man ever to be born and die in Canada. There are thought to be between 600 and 1,000 supercentenarians in the world, the overwhelming majority of them women. Dr. Wiener, at 110 years and 113 days, was believed to be the 18th-oldest man on Earth.

Dr. Wiener was fastidious about his healthy habits, including a Mediterranean diet, regular exercise, a cultivated optimism and two squares of dark chocolate a day. His daily perusal of The Montreal Gazette and numerous health journals he subscribed to online may also have been medicine, although he mostly did it for fun.

Robert Manuel Wiener was born in Montreal on Oct. 27, 1908. The youngest of seven siblings (“I was the one who always had to run the errands,” he once told The Canadian Jewish News), he grew up in the Mile End neighbourhood – Mordecai Richler’s stomping ground – an ethnically rich area of fruit sellers and outdoor staircases where his parents, Louis and Anna, immigrants from Poland and Russia, respectively, had settled after moving from Amsterdam, where they met.

In grade school, he and his classmates knit towels for the soldiers in the trenches – of the First World War.

With no mass media as a diversion – commercial radio didn’t arrive until he was 12 – there were a lot of pick-up games of almost every sport. Street hockey was interrupted not with shouts of “Car!” but “Horse!” (A hockey fanatic, Dr. Wiener remembered rising from his seat in the old Mount Royal Arena, then home of his beloved Habs, to watch speedy Howie Morenz take the puck end-to-end himself – a testament to both the centreman’s skill and the fact the NHL didn’t allow forward passing in all zones until 1929.)

He was 13 when Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid opened at a cinema on St. Catherine Street and in his 20s when women became “persons” under the law in Canada.

He followed his older brother Judah into dentistry and his career in oral surgery included teaching dentistry at McGill for 25 years.

One measure of the spread of Dr. Wiener’s life was the number of his Zelig-like brushes with history, as cultural figures one after another somehow ended up his chair.

In 1942, while Dr. Wiener was chief dental surgeon at the University of Chicago, Enrico Fermi and his team took over the squash courts under Stagg Field to make the first nuclear reactor. When Mr. Fermi developed vision problems that no specialist could solve, it was finally suggested they look south, at his mouth. Dr. Wiener took X-rays, then extracted an abscessed molar that was pressing on the optic nerve, restoring the great scientist’s eyesight.

Four years later, the novelist Thomas Mann came striding in. The German Nobel laureate, then based in California but passing through town, complained of a toothache on the left side – just like the character Thomas Buddenbrook in the eponymous novel. (In the book, the dentist buy ambien cr 12.5 mg online wrenches out the tooth and soon after, the man falls dead on the street of a stroke – and Buddenbrook Syndrome becomes a medical term for toothache as a potential red flag for cardiac stress.)

Curiously, Mr. Mann appeared to speak no English, instead asking his wife to translate every question, right down to “Where does it hurt?” But at the end of his last appointment, he extended his hand and said, impeccably, “Thank you very much, Dr. Wiener.” And presented him with an autographed copy of The Magic Mountain.

Missing continuing contact with patients, Dr. Wiener left the University of Chicago’s Zoller Clinic and returned to Montreal, where he set up shop on Mackay Street in downtown Montreal. Dr. Wiener’s easy manner provided a kind of sanctuary unusual for a dentist’s office, and he soon built a client list that included Montreal business royalty – among them most of the Bronfman family.

In 1968, Charles Bronfman, then the new majority owner of the fledgling Montreal Expos, arrived for an appointment. It was stressful early days, with stadium issues and other hiccups making league brass nervous and there was a real chance the club would be moved. Dr. Wiener delivered just the right tonic. “My son’s very excited about the team!” he said. The next day, a limousine appeared at the house and when young Neil opened the door, the driver handed him an Expos cap – signed by Mr. Bronfman himself, because no actual players had been drafted yet.

Four years earlier, in 1964, Dr. Wiener took on a patient whose fine dress and old-fashioned manners belied his day job of sausage-making and intimidation. This was Vincenzo (Vic) Cotroni, a.k.a “the Egg,” the local capo for the New York-based Bonanno crime syndicate at the time, charged with overseeing heroin trafficking out of the port. Some called him the Godfather of Montreal. Mr. Cotroni would arrive for his dental appointments flanked by a bodyguard and accompanied by either his wife or mistress. He always paid cash and was the only patient who ever tipped Dr. Wiener’s assistant.

Twin studies have established that, on average, longevity is around 30 per cent determined by genes and 70 per cent, lifestyle and environment. But considering Dr. Wiener’s advanced age, he was undoubtedly very lucky in his DNA. His ferocious good health spoke to a genetic tailwind scientists are still trying to understand. Indeed, nine years ago, Angela Brooks-Wilson, a geneticist and researcher at BC Cancer, collected DNA samples from both Dr. Wiener and his older brother Dave – a near-supercentenarian himself at the time – as part of her study on “super seniors,” investigating the puzzle pieces of healthy longevity.

There is no known case of two supercentenarian men in the same family. The Harvard geneticist George Church put the odds of it happening at north of one in 100 million. The Wiener brothers – Robert, who was 110, and Dave, who was 109 and 324 days when he died – may have come closest. Indeed, an online community called “The 110 Club,” peopled with supercentenarian enthusiasts and curated by the head researcher for the Gerontology Research Group, saluted the pair in a post on Oct. 27, Robert’s birthday. “Together, they are the oldest known brothers of all time – not counting Joan and Pere Riudavets, who were half-siblings. Happy 110th birthday, Dr. Wiener!”

Even well into his 110th year, Dr. Wiener prided himself in not asking for help with routine tasks; he got himself out of chairs and picked up dropped pencils. Apart from hearing issues, he had no real health complaints until the very end.

The only thing he suffered from was heartbreak.

Ella, his wife of almost 73 years, died seven years ago. In her last years, when he was more than 100 years old, he cared for her by himself. Dr. Wiener was not a religious man, but after she died, he burned the Shabbat candles, not so much in honour of her faith, but in honour of her. Although it wasn’t strictly necessary for support, he often picked up her cane while going out. “It’s like holding her hand,” he said.

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The Cavernous World Beneath the Trees

The Cavernous World Beneath the Trees

Essays Featured Published Stories Archive

 

From HAKAI MAGAZINE, Nov. 20, 2018. Photos by Grant Callegari.

In the twilight hush of the fanciest restaurant in townPaul Griffiths pulls out a tiny device that looks like a primitive cellphone and sinks it in his water glass. He’s trying to figure out where the water came from—here, Campbell River, a small coastal community in British Columbia, or somewhere else?

The instrument, an electrical conductivity meter, reveals the path the water took from its source to Griffiths’s glass by measuring the charged minerals picked up along the way.

“Twenty-two, 23, 24 …,” says Carol Ramsey, reading the display.

A server orbiting past the table stops midstride and stares.

“We’re just testing the conductivity of your water,” Ramsey says cheerfully.

“Do you know where this ice came from?” Griffiths asks.

“Uh … the ice machine? I’m not sure,” the server says shyly.

“Is it possible to get a glass of just tap water?” Griffiths suspects the ice is bringing down the numbers.

Maybe the ice was shipped in from the nearest big cities to the south, Victoria or Vancouver, where drinking water comes from reservoirs. The server returns with a glass of ice-free water. Immediately, the reading climbs past 40. The higher number is a geological tell. It’s proof that the water ran underground through karst, an underground ecosystem of dissolved rock.

“That’s more like it,” Griffiths says.

Something naturally perfect happens to water when it flows through karst. It trickles and tumbles, picking up oxygen, picking up minerals, losing its acidity. The result is life-giving, luring and nurturing organisms from the tiniest microbes to humans to bears.

To be clear, karst isn’t a kind of rock. It’s a topography, one shaped by water that seeps and squeezes through limestone or gypsum or marble or dolomite, creating cavities from the size of the ones in your teeth to caverns the size of ballrooms, filigreed with delicate speleothems, dripping down and growing up and sometimes meeting in the middle. Limestone bedrock—the kind found here—was once alive and in the tropics before plate tectonics ferried it to Vancouver Island 100 million years ago. Limestone, composed of skeletal fragments of shallow-water marine organisms, such as corals and mollusks, is found in your toothpaste, your newspaper, your store-bought bread, and the cement beneath your feet—but the true worth of this karst bedrock includes more than its commercial value. A single subterranean water droplet is an ecosystem of its own. Two drops less than a meter apart have been found to harbor entirely different biological communities. For something that’s mostly nothing, karst contains an awful lot.

This is a chronicle of karst, one of Earth’s most underappreciated ecosystems, so vast and unmapped, many explorers and biologists consider it the next frontier of terrestrial and extraterrestrial discovery. NASA scientists are probing deep into karst systems as part of their research into organisms that thrive in hostile environments to better detect life elsewhere in the solar system.

If a karst landscape and its glorious biodiversity fail to grab the same attention as the Amazon jungle does, that’s because you can’t see the karst. Or can you? A karst biologist will tell you it’s right there in front of you; the forest above is an extension of the karst.

“Say you move vertically through a karst system,” says Griffiths, who is the karst biologist in these parts. “The tree canopy is an ecosystem of its own. The trees grow the way they do because of the karst, but they also influence the development of the karst—it’s a feedback loop.” Below the surface, the tree roots cradle a dense fungal web teeming with microbial life. “So when you’re talking biodiversity, you’ve got it going in both directions.”

That Griffiths has devoted pretty much every spare minute and every penny of his earnings for the past 40 years to karst, well, it’s hard to say whether that speaks more of the karst or the man.


Griffiths, who is 67 and looks a bit like The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, could be called many things. Defender of karst. Explorer of karst. Explainer of karst. He cannot yet officially call himself a karstologist—at least not until the stack of paper piled sternum-high in his Campbell River home transforms into PhD credentials, likely by Christmas. However, his colleague Carol Ramsey, who, in Middle Earth, might be the elf Galadriel’s older sister, is a karstologist—one of a handful of scientists in Canada with that title. In this country, karst studies are typically a subspecialty of geology. In Europe, karst science is well established. Ramsey got her PhD at the prestigious Karst Research Institute in Slovenia.

The PhDs are strategic. Out-credentialing everyone lends this team of two the power to influence environmental practice—in theory. Logging has forever altered much of the karst ecosystem on British Columbia’s coast, particularly on Vancouver Island with its accessible forests. And a ready, aim, fire approach to development threatens to make moot the most basic of questions: what is it about the structure of karst that makes it so sensitive to disturbance? In their fight to protect what’s left of the ecosystem, the pair’s prime tool is data.

We simply do not know exactly how much coastal karst is left. And so Griffiths and Ramsey have made it their task to monitor the bejesus out of their patch: the whole northern half of Vancouver Island. In a project that falls somewhere between a duty, a calling, and a cosmic test of character, they routinely tramp through first- and second-growth fir and hemlock forests, meticulously documenting changes in the topography. They fly over the land snapping pictures to create a photographic time series. They take soil samples from caves where they know logging will happen overhead—before and after the trees are gone. They scan newspapers for legally required notices of independent power projects and suss out whether there are implications for the karst. They lobby for toothier legislation and push for enforcement of policies already on the books. Though Ramsey is no less ferocious in her commitment, Griffiths has the bigger body of work because he’s simply been in the game longer.

Ramsey first met Griffiths while she was studying environmental archaeology at the University of Victoria in the early 2000s. Griffiths, who knew of a cave with the potential for old faunal remains on the west coast of Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, volunteered to take her to check it out. They found bear bones, which were carbon-dated at 14,000 years old—among the oldest recorded bear bones in British Columbia at the time.

Together, the pair has the air of forensic accountants. Or spies. They bat around terms like “swallet” and “ponor” and “hydrostatic head.” It is not much of an exaggeration to say that they live and breathe karst. “When you guys are alone, do you talk about anything but karst?” I asked them once. There was a pause, and then they replied, simultaneously, with either masterfully contained irony or perfect earnestness: “No.”

Personality wise, they are karst and cheese. Ramsey is a quiet, sensitive soul, the person you never know is the smartest one in the room. Griffiths has the charged energy of an entrepreneur, the confidence of a history lecturer safe in his tenure. He is Noam Chomsky by way of Spalding Gray—an academic storyteller. Because stories are the most effective delivery system for big ideas.


“This is the next battleground,” says Griffiths, running his eyes to the horizon. “Or it would be if people cared about karst.” He’s talking about the old-growth conifer forest stretching out below, in a slice of the Hankin Range known as the Kinman, 150 kilometers north of Campbell River. Where he’s standing, on the mountainside, there are no trees at all—just stumps and the odd purple flash of fireweed. Until the early 1990s, this too was old-growth forest on karst. Then it was logged. Then, in July 2014, it caught fire. A fire on karst can easily become a roaring blaze—the air cavities below the ground may feed it with oxygen like a barbecue. In this case, the highly combustible piles of dry stumps and slash left behind by loggers made perfect tinder.

After the fire, the already thin soil layer soon washed through the crenellations in the rock, leaving behind the brain-like topography we’re standing on. Called rundkarren, its haunting beauty is usually hidden under a mossy forest blanket. That’s why Griffiths and Ramsey bring people up here: it’s like peeling back the skin on a cadaver in anatomy class. “I never got karst until I saw a burnt landscape,” says Ramsey. “That was when it came together for me. Okay, this is what’s underneath. Once you get it, there’s no going back.”

Intact temperate rainforest over karst is a rare thing. There’s a little left on the south island of New Zealand and some in Tasmania and a few other scattered places. But fully a quarter of what remains in the world is in coastal British Columbia. Another quarter is in Southeast Alaska.

These forests enjoy a happenstance of perfect conditions—lots of rainfall, yes, but also a way for the water to get into the rock. Tectonic activity along the Juan de Fuca plate just off British Columbia’s coast fractures the rock a little more with every sizable tremor. As a result, the karst is self-draining. The soil never gets swampy. Tree roots get a skookum foothold in the crevices and microcaves, snaking deeper, drawing nutrients out of the ground.

Merchantable timber grows like kudzu on coastal karst. In the early 1990s, Derek Ford a geologist and professor emeritus at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and his colleague Kathy Harding compared trees growing on limestone—this very limestone here, part of the Quatsino Formation—to trees growing on the adjacent volcanic formation. The karst trees grew fat. Irresistibly fat. Left to their own devices, timber companies would cream off the karst forest first.

And that’s largely what they have done. Karst in Southeast Alaska was logged at three times the rate of other areas in the state. Timber companies so reliably cherry-pick the karst landscape that you can sometimes identify the extent of karst from the air. It follows the contours of the cut blocks.

“You can understand the rationale for that kind of strategy—it’s just about the cheapest way to log,” says Tom Aley, a hydrogeologist who runs an independent consultancy called Ozark Underground Lab in Missouri and must be one of the very few people to own his own cave. But clearcutting on karst creates problems both on the surface and below it. Take away the trees and soil is cast adrift. It’s redistributed from where it should be—up top, governing the rate at which rainwater enters the underground streams—to where it shouldn’t be, in the aquifers. In these natural, underground cisterns, a dump of soil deoxygenates the water and starves aquatic organisms. More to the point, logging on karst is a killing-the-golden-goose proposition.

A 1993 paper by Ford and Harding widely recognized as the shot heard around the karst world, had an intentionally provocative title that included the phrase, “Deforestation of Limestone Slopes on Vancouver Island.” Deforestation is an aggressive word. It suggests—as in the Amazon—that once the forest is gone, it’s gone. What comes back in the regeneration isn’t forest. It’s a timber farm. In their research, Ford and Harding studied a karst landscape clearcut in 1907. Ninety years later, “it really hadn’t recovered,” Ford says. When you clearcut on karst, what little soil you had goes AWOL. And the biodiversity is lost.

The rest of the world has been a test case on this for millennia. The lesson goes back to the ancient Romans, who harvested the great pine trees on the Dalmatian karst on the southern tip of Croatia. “As soon as new trees got started, the sheep or the goats ate them,” Ford says. “The word karst means stony ground—stony because they wrecked it.” In the Middle East, the mythic Cedars of Lebanon—believed by some Christians to be the place where the resurrected Jesus revealed himself—grew on pure limestone karst very much like that of Vancouver Island. They were mowed down to build the temples of ancient Egypt and Jerusalem. The soil disappeared and never came back. Around one percent of the original cedars remain, in scattered, protected groves. Slovenia banned clearcutting on karst in 1949—but by then it was too late. There are photos, circa 1900, of babushka-wrapped Austro-Hungarian peasants hauling topsoil back onto the bald karst after it was clearcut.

The Bordeaux region of western France, once home to karst forests also much like Vancouver Island’s, was logged long ago for the wood itself and agriculture. There, too, the soil vanished. Today, Bordeaux is winemaking country, and the big vintners view the region’s thick karst as a built-in soil supplement. Machines grind up the top layer of the limestone, adding calcium to the grape’s terroir and to the Bordeaux brand. But the top few centimeters of a karst system are the biological cream, dense with life. And plowing it like a beanfield makes the karst less porous for decades. “It’s an industrial approach that takes no account of the complexity and delicacy of the environment that they’re smashing up,” says Ford.

We leave behind the grooves and fissures of the rundkarren and head south, bouncing along a logging road until we come to a trailhead pullout. Just inside the forest, an interpretive sign, containing more than a dozen typos and grammatical errorsadvertises the Eternal Fountain—a fairly spectacular waterfall disappearing into a hole in the ground.

Forty years ago, the British Columbia government, together with the now-defunct logging giant MacMillan Bloedel, tried to boost tourism on the north island by bugling the virtues of some geomorphic attractions within a 100-kilometer scenic drive called the Alice Lake Loop. The Eternal Fountain was one of them, along with the Devil’s Bath and the Disappearing River—karst formations all. The attractions were featured on recreation brochures and maps, and even included in the internal newsletters issued by MacMillan Bloedel. Employees and their families dutifully visited them on weekends. But the features have collectively become a kind of cautionary tale, a fact driven home on a cool spring morning when we pay each one a visit.

At the end of a short boardwalk, the Eternal Fountain spills into its underground den as expected. But Ramsey and Griffiths are riveted by something else: on the embankment above the waterfall is a sinkhole, or doline, around two meters in diameter.

“Most holes in a landscape fill up over time,” Ramsey says. “But dolines just continue to grow. That’s why they’re weird.”

As dolines go, the BC coast has some beasts. On Moresby Island in Haida Gwaii, there is a feature called the Great Depression. It is the size of Disneyland. Not far from here, in the Tahsish River valley 40 kilometers to the west, there’s a doline so big, a fall into its mysterious depth would probably be fatal. It’s called Paradise Lost. The doline above the Eternal Fountain is much smaller. But what’s remarkable is it wasn’t here when Griffiths and Ramsey visited two years ago. Griffiths offers his best guess on the doline’s appearance—logging upstream changed the hydrology.

Nearby, similar declivities have appeared—some smaller, some bigger. In one spot, fenced off for safety, is a karst window, a deep hole in the rock giving a peekaboo glimpse of a running freshet beneath. A sinkhole in the woods is like a big Men at Work sign, except the excavator below your feet is water—with implications hard to fully fathom from the surface.

Water runs through karst like a pinball through a pachinko machine. Its route, though tied to the glacial history of an area, is definitively unpredictable. Logging on karst is like bumping the machine, a small change that can radically affect the result. On the morning drive along the loop, between watersheds pocked with clearcuts, we keep crossing bridges over dry riverbeds that once carried the water overland, boinging up and down on roads that were once more or less flat. Rerouted water is changing the architecture below.

The effect on the topography is even more pronounced as we near the Devil’s Bath. It looks like a crater lake, similar to the cenotes on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The bath was once one of the most majestic features on the north island. In 1984, MacMillan Bloedel logged right up to the north rim of the bath. In 2012, the entire area was clearcut to within 18 meters of the observation platform. People mostly stopped coming to visit after it lost its postcard charm, its disturbed setting now the feature’s main trait.

Griffiths and Ramsey have kept tabs on the Devil’s Bath since the clearcut. Two years ago, the mossy forest ground nearby was mostly flat, like a green rug pulled over a toy-strewn floor, but as we bushwhack through alders and salmonberry, across the rolling land, the ground sinks underfoot. Logging in the catchment area rerouted groundwater, Swiss cheesing the bedrock below. The whole forest feels as if it’s about to collapse.

In one spot, the earth has dropped at least three meters. But strangely, Griffiths’s mood lifts at the discovery. The collapse has revealed an entrance to a cave.

Not all caves are karst, but caves are a common feature in karst, and, like an Amazon biologist who discovers that a botfly has laid eggs under his skin, bad news, but too cool not to be excited about. Griffiths has to investigate. He’s just in running shoes because he hadn’t expected to be exploring a new grotto today; there was none here last time he checked. In a flash, he’s down the hole. The glow from his headlamp fades as he descends.

“It goes!” he calls out from inside the cave, staring into the unplumbed depths. “Oh my God!”

A few seconds later: “Woop! Woop!”

“He’s happy,” I say.

“He’s echolocating,” says Ramsey.

It’s completely fitting that Griffiths jumped into a new entrance to the underground. His introduction to karst came by way of caves.

At age six, he discovered his first cave—a one-time refuge for drifters near the train tracks of Hamilton, Ontario, where his family had moved so his father, a professor of French literature, could teach at McMaster University. His father had studied at the Sorbonne, and every summer the family returned to France, where Griffiths linked into the caving network—eventually seeking out luminaries like the famous French speleologist Norbert Casteret. Somewhere in the middle of all those visits to the karst-scapes of France, Griffiths developed a theory about French cuisine. “People can detect calcium—it’s a sixth taste,” he says. “I think about the food there: the pâté, the wine, the cheese. I’ve wondered sometimes if it’s related to the karst.”

The family moved to Vancouver Island, and Griffiths’s father soon settled in for a long tenure at the University of Victoria. For years, up to and including his 25-year-long post as head of the British Columbia Speleological Federation, Griffiths voluntarily mapped every reported new cave on the north island—a painstaking process, involving sketching and measuring in three dimensions. Griffiths attributes his digressive thinking to so much time spent in caves. “In a cave you look left, right, up, down.” His mind likewise follows every spur line.

As an environmentalist, Griffiths realized that when it comes to karst, caves were the best route into the public’s imagination, and, through this engagement, a pathway for protecting karst.

In the 1980s, when he lived in Gold River, over 50 kilometers southwest of Campbell River, monitoring environmental impacts for a timber company, he pitched to the town council the idea of selling the remote village in the middle of the island as a tourist destination—the cave capital of Canada. Then he held his tongue as city officials got a little too enthusiastic about the idea and created a summertime festival called Caveman Days, where folks dressed as Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

Another time, Griffiths and his wife, Karen, from whom he separated a number of years ago, hatched the idea to offer a one-day public tour of the underground glacier at White Ridge, a cave system in the mountainside high above Gold River. Twenty-five bucks got you a helicopter ride up and a guided tour of the caves. The offer proved so popular, two helicopters were kept busy all day long. “Our hidden agenda was, we planned to turn White Ridge into a provincial park, and we wanted to get the town onside,” he says. Mission accomplished; it became a park in 1995. Griffiths later managed to protect, or help protect, karst elsewhere on the island in the same manner: Weymer Creek, Artlish Caves, Clayoquot Plateau, and Horne Lake Caves Provincial Park, one of the most popular guided-cave operations in Canada.

Yet caves, like karst, also have an intrinsic worth beyond their commercial value. The conditions inside a cave—the constant cool, photon-free darkness, the moisture buffered by dissolving salts—are perfect for preserving evidence of habitation, human and otherwise. On Haida Gwaii, expeditions into caves on the west coast uncovered ancient tools and cooking-fire ash, as well as bear bones dating back 17,000 years—even older than the ones Ramsey discovered. Partly because of those finds, the archipelago is further ahead of the rest of the province in its karst protection.

Caves are an even richer lode of rare biology. “If you monitor a cave long enough, you will find a never-before-seen species,” Griffiths says. But a cave’s potential bounty is not enough to keep it safe from disturbance and harm. If a cave fails to prove itself significant for obvious cultural, archaeological, or biological reasons and isn’t actively protected, it’s likely toast.

Back in 2006, Griffiths and Ramsey helped First Nation and activist communities when they ran out of options in fighting a massive proposed golf and spa resort called Bear Mountain, north of Victoria. In the path of the idling bulldozers was a karst cave long used for sacred rituals by the Songhees and Tsartlip Nations. After a bit of low-comedy involving Vietnam-era military logic—the unstable cave was blown up with explosives before geologists felt satisfied they could safely enter it to see if it was worth saving. Nothing of consequence turned up in the rubble. “The government had its hands tied with the legislation,” Griffiths says. “If they couldn’t find archaeology, they couldn’t do anything.”

Just before it was dynamited, Griffiths documented the cave for Chief Chris Tom of the Tsartlip Nation. Then he turned his mind to the funding of Bear Mountain. The project hinged on a half-billion-dollar loan from HSBC. After a little probing, Griffiths discovered that the bank had adopted a policy called the Equator Principles, meaning that it couldn’t lend money to a project that was ecologically irresponsible or was inconsistent with Indigenous wishes. He picked up the phone, but his appeals went nowhere. Now the closest thing to a karst cave at Bear Mountain is the sand trap on the seventh hole.

Caves are good at firing up the public’s imagination, and in a backhand way, inspire people to care about karst. But there is a dilemma.

When you talk up caves to tourists, they want to check them out. Which is a little like getting bulls excited about china shops. “In some caves, the biggest disturbance is a water droplet falling from the ceiling once every thousand years,” Ramsey says. Caves are the last bastion of stasis in a world in flux. Like quietly praying monks, their benefits are sometimes intangible, but most of us value a world that allows them to exist.

Ramsey and Griffiths may know the location of more caves on Vancouver Island than anyone else. That they sometimes hide this knowledge makes them controversial in the caving community. “For some of these caves,” Ramsey says, “the only protection they have is their obscurity.”

“Caves are perhaps .01 percent of all void spaces of a particular karst block,” Griffiths says. If you can’t get a park established, then what? Maybe you create a wildlife habitat area—if there was a cave with bats it would be automatically protected under that legislation. But then it’s about the bats, not the karst.

Still, the karstologists would take any kind of protection. Linking caves to bats is one thing, but linking them to salmon—that would be even better, Griffiths thought.


Griffiths emerges from the new cave he has discovered near the Devil’s Bath in mud-caked jeans, and we head downhill, hiking down to the river where salmon spawn. Exactly where those fish were coming from was a longtime mystery; there was no obvious path from ocean to stream.

A few years ago, Griffiths got the notion that if, as he suspected, finfish ply the subway systems deep in the karst here, then karst is actually a wetland and potentially subject to stricter legislation through Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Whole karst landscapes have been protected because they’re wetlands—in the United States and elsewhere. So, underwater camera in hand, Griffiths hung out in a cave connected to the Devil’s Bath. And waited. Just when he was about to call it quits, two fat coho salmon emerged through a hole in the rock and swam past him.

Griffiths’s amateur photo caught the attention of Canada’s national broadcaster. In 2015, CBC’s The Nature of Things devoted an episode to the biology not within the famed Great Bear Rainforest, a huge temperate rainforest spilling over northern British Columbia and Alaska, but under it. Videographers caught on film, perhaps for the first time, the passage of salmon through a karst system. Turns out Griffiths was right. People on the coast care about salmon. A lot. Back up those emotions with hard science and you have a powerful lever to save the karst as Jim Baichtal discovered in 2001.

Baichtal, the forest geologist for Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska, conducted a tracer-dye study he now considers the game-changing moment for Alaskan karst—the demo that connected the dots between karst and salmon.

Baichtal and a small team injected tracer dyes into forest streams associated with karst features and caves. Within 24 hours, the dye turned up in several fish streams over a kilometer and a half away. That’s fast. And it meant that surface disturbing activities like logging and road-building could send a whole lot of extra sediment along the same route with the potential to clog spawning channels and change cave environments. Also, without the forest to regulate stream flow, logged areas more often experience high flows. Fast-moving water flowing over a layer of sediment loses out on the full karst treatment, which removes more of water’s natural acidity and offers a leg up for salmon fry and eggs.

The scientific work showed that what we do to the karst forest, we probably do to the salmon. A brute trade-off hung in the air: logs or fish.

Logging communities greeted the news Baichtal presented to state government officials with roughly the same enthusiasm as Clarence Darrow met in the Scopes Monkey Trial. “This is contentious stuff,” says Baichtal. “Because I’m not taking out so many acres of bad timber—I’m taking out the crème de la crème.”

Alaska now has fairly robust karst management practices—largely drawn up by Baichtal, with input from other experts, including Griffiths. The US federal Cave Resources Protection Act also helps. Karst in Alaska is not completely off limits to logging. If a karst system is deemed closed—well protected on the surface and relatively self-contained—then it might be tagged “low vulnerability,” and timber companies might get a green light. That’s where the tension lies. Timber companies aren’t wildly eager to okay dye-tracing studies—they worry about the results.

British Columbia, meanwhile, has limited legislation for karst; it only applies to logging and only in six districts. We’d no doubt pay karst more heed if karst water quenched most communities’ thirst. But, the percentage of drinking water in coastal communities that runs through karst is less than two percent. And since it’s tough to vividly conjure images of drought in the damp Pacific Northwest during another record February of rainfall, Griffiths has long understood that if you’re going to play the water card here, you have to play it differently.

While working for the logging company in Gold River back in the 1980s, Griffiths marched into his boss’s office with an idea: the company might make more money by not logging. Instead, he suggested, exploit the karst springs below, the way a little company called Perrier does. The future karstologist soon found himself talking to a Perrier executive in Paris. Griffiths’s timing was good. The company was near maxed out in its bottling operation near Montpellier, France, and was looking to North America. “You would not believe the springs we have on Vancouver Island,” Griffiths said. He framed up the marketing strategy: protect the forest, protect the water. In the end, Perrier decided instead to buy Calistoga Springs, a water bottling business based in California’s Napa Valley. The company had tapped the zeitgeist in the estimation of the Perrier guy. “They’re flavoring the water,” he explained, “and that’s what people want.”

Griffiths’s endless creativity in his quest to save karst has saved only a bit of the ecosystem on the island. In a quiet moment after returning to Campbell River from the Devil’s Bath, Ramsey and Griffiths allow a little frustration to bubble up.

“I keep excruciatingly detailed records of how long I spend in the field—of my data, of my mileage,” Ramsey says. And she’s harbored a secret dream of sending the government a symbolic invoice that would tally what she’s spent monitoring the resource for the past five years. “It probably runs well over half a million dollars,” she says.

From Griffiths’s perspective, the battle to preserve the karst has felt increasingly like a rigged game. Since 1982, when Griffiths persuaded the government to at least create a karst inventory in one area, the rules have continually changed. More recently, the government has put cave and karst protection in the hands of the timber companies themselves. So following the voluntary standards and best practices for karst laid out in the unofficial playbooks written by Griffiths and a few others and released by government in 2003—is something they ought to do, are encouraged to do, but aren’t actually required to do. And so they very often don’t.

Griffiths and Ramsey became karstologists thinking it would give them added pull to assess, and ultimately protect, the karst. But by current convention, pretty much anyone can call themselves a karst expert. Professional certification as a geologist seems to seal the deal regardless of karst qualifications. And, if they do have qualifications, it’s often through a three-day course Griffiths helped design in 2001.

In the mid-2000s, Ramsey was reviewing a draft protection order for karst and called up a government official.

“I assure you, we’ve had karst experts look it over,” she was told.

“With respect,” Ramsey replied, “could you please tell me the names of those karst experts?”

The return email was bracing.

“Keep asking questions like that and you will never get work in this field again.”


This summer, on August 11, lightning strikes ignited a tinder-dry forest on northern Vancouver Island, and soon wildfires were encroaching on the Alice Lake Loop. Fire threatened other nearby karst areas, including Raging River, Tahsish River, and Artlish River, which together constitute much of the island’s remaining old-growth forest. Griffiths pulled up a photographic time series of those regions and matched them against the burning fires. Recently logged areas seemed to be acting as fuses, spreading the fires from one area to the next.

It’s easy to imagine a future where British Columbia’s remaining coastal karst is unencumbered by old-growth forest cover and all trees are fully employed as logs. The land would resemble a feature in Ireland called the Burren—an expanse of rundkarren produced by overgrazing and logging, marked by fissures that hint at the fathomless void beneath. Ironically, today it is the Burren and Cliffs of Moher UNESCO Global Geopark. Travelers hike the ancient trails and perhaps inspect the alvars—plant communities unique to exposed limestone—viewing the rundkarren as a beautiful landscape deserving of preservation.

Like the Europeans, we will recalibrate to what’s left.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Have You Heard?

Have You Heard?

Aging Essays Featured Psychology Science

The old and the young hear an entirely different world. And that’s becoming a problem.

From EIGHTEEN BRIDGES MAGAZINE, Summer 2018     Robert Carter illustration

In 2005, the owner of a convenience store in the tiny Welch town of Barry had just about had it with loitering teenagers driving away customers. So he installed a prototype gadget lent to him by an inventor friend. He booted it up. The kids scattered. “It was as if someone had used anti-teenage spray around the entrance,” one reporter observed.

The device, called the Mosquito MK4, burped out a loud, rhythmic chirping the kids couldn’t stand. But customers over the age of 25 came and went as before. Most of them didn’t hear a thing. That’s because its sonic pulses are in the 17 kilohertz range — well beyond the reach of people suffering even mild forms of age-related hearing loss, called presbycusis. This affliction, which the World Health Organization estimates will affect half a billion people worldwide by 2025, gradually shaves off the higher end of the aural spectrum. Presbycusis is one of the obvious physical signs of aging. The Mosquito MK4 is a Boomer’s revenge fantasy: the greybeards turning the young’s own faculties against them.

What happened next you can guess. A group of young coders took the Mosquito signal and worked it into the customized phone app Teen Buzz. High school students started using it to send text messages in class, under the noses of their oblivious teachers and supervisors.

The elders returned serve. There are now numerous apps that spit out high-pitched squeals with no purpose but to annoy young people. Some of these apps have been built by young people themselves. (The profit motive will usually trump tribal affiliation.)

This whole saga, while funny, is troubling. The wondrous human sense of hearing, weaponized for intergenerational warfare? If anything hearing ought to bind us together, not drive us apart. We have to hear to listen, after all. And hearing is the most social of the senses.

“When you lose your vision, you sever your connection to things. When you lose your hearing, you sever your connection to people,” Helen Keller said. That quote meant little to me when I first encountered it in high school. But stored in the dark potato bin of memory, it put out shoots not long ago when my own hearing began to fail.

The first signs were the mishearings.

“What’ll you be doing on your Quebec exchange?” I asked my daughter over breakfast.

Well, it’s the Winter Carnival,” she said. “We’re going to visit the Plains of Abraham and pee on them.”

That’s very disrespectful,” I said.

What she actually said: We’re going to visit the Plains of Abraham and ski on them.”

Likewise, my weary wife, Jen, who is a teacher, did not reply when I recently questioned her weekend plans to “return to the grave.”

What she actually said: “Return my grades.”

The top end of the sound spectrum is where consonants live. As we age, it becomes hard to distinguish a “v” from a “d.” So in every sentence there’s at least one word that’s a flat-out guess. Without context you guess wrong a lot. But that’s not even the most irksome thing about presbycusis – as Jen would no doubt attest.

One day the dog got into the bird feeder, which held half a pint of seed and suet. That night she whined every hour or so to be let out. Or so I was told. I heard nothing. Jen kept getting up, while I lay in bed wondering, What else am I not hearing? It was – how else to put it?—an emasculating thought. Men who can’t hear, can’t help. We are firefighters with no alarm, sleeping peacefully while the town burns. Not much later, after some prodding, I got checked out. Two hearing tests confirmed everyone’s suspicions. Full-on presbycusis. My hearing through the top third of the normal aural range was basically shot.

Now, if its consequences were limited to annoying family members by passing them a fork instead of the corn, presbycusis could be ignored as a minor irritant. Eventually, though, hearing loss becomes a mental health issue. It’s correlated with depression, born of that creeping sense of isolation. Losing your hearing is like sitting on an airplane in coach. You’re aware of the boozy hubbub coming from the other side of the first-class curtain. There’s a party going on and you weren’t invited.

But the news gets worse. Mild hearing loss, as the Johns Hopkins researcher Frank Lin discovered, doubles your chance of developing dementia. Moderate hearing loss triples it. No one knows precisely why, but there are two main theories.

The first is behavioral. Cut off from the world, people with hearing loss withdraw even further, thereby starving off the experiential input the brain needs to grow. The main stimulus to brain health is interaction with others.

The second theory involves the physics of the brain. Call it the cognitive overload theory. Your mind is working so hard to understand that it’s sucking resources from other regions, including the hippocampus, where memories are consolidated. It’s as if you’re spending every cognitive dollar trying to hear, and putting nothing in the memory bank. When memories aren’t stored, they can’t be retrieved.

Whatever the cause of the correlation, doing nothing about hearing loss is a bad idea, because we are also learning that once our hearing degrades beyond a certain point, no hearing aid can fully bring it back. Not because the machinery of our inner ear is toast (though dying hair cells are part of the story), but because the brain has changed, and can no longer accurately decode the incoming signal.

That’s the gist of the work coming out of Bruce Schneider’s Human Communication Laboratory at the University of Toronto. Schneider, a professor of psychology, leads a multi-university research group investigating sensory and cognitive aging. That includes the social implications of a dialed-down world.

“Hearing loss is a wedge between the old and the young,” Schneider told me during a recent tour of his lab, at the U of T’s Mississauga campus. A starting place for repairing the disconnection, Schneider finds, is to help people experience what it’s like on the other side.

In his undergrad class, Schneider plays an audio clip of a man talking. But the clip has been adjusted. The high-end frequencies in the signal have been dampened by as much as 70 decibels. So the students hear the clip the way an 85-year-old with significant hearing loss would. They can still hear the speaker. But no one can understand him. The consonants are anybody’s guess.

Then Schneider starts to add back the higher frequencies. “Raise your hand when you start to understand,” Schneider says. A few outliers do, followed by the rest of the class at once: the faux-elderly recovering their youth.

Not long ago, a student came to see Schneider after class. He said the exercise had brought him closer to his grandfather.

Later that morning, Schneider ran me through a couple of the same hearing tests he gives his older experimental subjects.

I took a seat in a soundproof room, between two speakers. This is the dreaded auditory interference test. If you’ve ever tried to listen to two conversations at the same time, you know how hard it is. And this task gets tougher as we age. That’s because “it takes a second or two to segregate the voices,” Schneider said.Whereas in younger people it happens almost instantaneously – within 100-200 milliseconds.” The brains of older people are always playing catch-up. Presbycusis makes things worse. You feel like you’re constantly a beat out of step, like a guy in a football crowd standing to do the wave, hot dog overhead, after everybody else just sat down.

Schneider told me I would hear two stories: a “target” story and a “mask” story. But in this diabolical trial, both would be told by the same person and would issue from the same speaker. My job was to listen to the target and ignore the mask.

Within thirty seconds I was in the weeds. I got sucked into the mask story about Mark Twain. Afterward, given a test on the target story, I failed. The whole thing left me exhausted—the way you feel at the end of a day trying to navigate in a foreign city.

Schneider is sympathetic. At 77, he suffers from the hearing loss he investigates. He knows what it feels like to be on the wrong side of that social divide.

“I was at a cocktail party a few years ago, just circulating around,” he told me, “and I thought I heard somebody say, ‘Joseph Fourier changed Canadian Society.’ I thought, Oh, I know him!’” Fourier, the French mathematician who discovered the Greenhouse Effect, also did pioneering work on harmonics. “I thought, ‘This’ll be an interesting conversation to join.’ It took me awhile to realize they weren’t talking about Joseph Fourier; they were talking about Wilfred Laurier. I got two or three minutes into the conversation. Nobody said anything to me. They must have been thinking one of two things: Either Schneider is so obsessed with signal processing that he can’t talk about anything else, or he’s going demented.”

I laughed with him at the conclusion of this story, but its implications are profound. Consider the stakes for an older person going in for a psychological assessment. Many such tests includes verbal instruction. You think exam-taking was stressful in college? Here your performance may determine where you’re going to spend the rest of your life. You’re ushered into a curtainless room with a hard floor — a reverberation chamber. You miss a couple of consonants at the beginning of words, which leaves you fishing for the meaning of whole sentences. You fail the test. A hearing issue has been mistaken for a thinking issue. And your story just acquired a new ending.

One of the strangest and most disturbing things about the early stages of hearing loss is there are times it seems your hearing is perfectly fine. In a quiet room, looking directly at my wife, I cam make out every syllable she says. Crystal clarity, ample volume.

The senses help each other out. Visual cues are vital to accurate hearing. Watching someone speak yields a fourfold improvement in comprehension. Indeed, looking into a speaker’s face is so important to perception that it can trick us into actually “hearing” a different sound than we think the lips are making. This is known as the McGurk Effect.

But get us hard-of-hearing into a crowded restaurant and even visual cues can’t save us. It’s the ambient noise – the chaos of acoustic interference — that does us in.

And interference is the new normal. The open-plan architecture our culture has decided is the most visually appealing creates a sonic environment only a whale could love. Sound pinballs around. At a recent work lunch at a Thai restaurant in downtown Vancouver, I was reduced to cupping my hands behind my ears like Mr. Magoo. I could hear my young colleagues well enough, I just couldn’t tell what they were saying.

There is a reason commercial spaces like restaurants and bars are so loud: it works. Loud works. A 2008 French study found that when bar owners turned the music up, customers drained an equal measure of beer almost 20 percent faster. The retail environment ups the ante. Hip retail chains oxygenate the air with tunes. Some of the loudest stores in the United States are Urban Outfitters, and Virgin, Katherine Bouton reported in her book Shouting Won’t Help.“Adults come out reeling, she wrote. “Kids, the target market, pull out their credit cards.”

The electronic soundscape of modern life—a chorus of the pings and whooshes of handheld devices—is optimized to the hearing of the young. “Someone who’s 80 and someone who’s 12 are going to have different responses to a sound,” Oberlin music theory professor Will Mason said recently. (Google, on this score, is more ageist than Facebook: it has higher-pitched UI sounds.)

All this ambient noise has a side effect. It doesn’t only make it hard for older people to hear, it clouds their memory. Schneider runs his test subjects through a “paired associations” test. Older people “aren’t as able to store unrelated items in memory while there’s noise,” he says. By tailoring built environments to the young, designers are handicapping the old, unwittingly or not. And so the divide widens. One could argue that the biggest architectural change in recent times is the move from physical to online communication. We no longer see who we’re talking to. Which means the McGurk Effect, the Boomers’ ace in the hole, is out of play.

A few months ago, with a heavy sigh, I signed the paperwork for a brand new set of Oticon Opn 3s, made in Denmark. They are so expensive I’m paying for them in monthly installments, like a car.

Back at home, I popped in their tiny batteries and slid the devices behind my ears. And just like that, the aural bridge between the world of the old and the world of the young was magically restored. Although not so gracefully.

Ka-runnnnnch! Whoa. Did I just run over something? No, that was my wife in the passenger seat biting into an apple. We took the kids to the multiplex to watch A Wrinkle in Time. It was hard to tell if the film was any good. All I heard was a riot of rustling Twizzlers bags and snarky comments from the teenagers two rows back.

Home life has become chockablock with the kinds of sounds foley artists insert into movies post-production. Open the freezer door and something’s crackling in there. I can hear the “ultra-quiet” new Blomberg dishwasher from the next room. I can hear body sounds I should not be able to. The dog basically gurgles nonstop. It occurs to me how annoying my casual whistling must be to everyone else.

The Bee Gees have returned to the grocery store. I’d stopped hearing them five years ago. Now here they are again, with their unconscionable falsettos. For once, I feel an affinity for rocker Ted Nugent, who offered to buy Muzak for $10 million, so he could shut it down.

The hearing aids have been, at best, a mixed blessing. I’m coming to appreciate the high-tech listening devices I already owned. They’re called ears. They pair well with that other high-tech listening device, the brain. Even the best hearing aids aren’t nearly as good at filtering what you don’t want to hear. Like the whine of bicycle brakes. The menacing grind of escalators. Your spouse filing her nails. By boosting the signal, hearing aids introduce distortion. Things sound tinny. Your own voice sounds miked. It’s like Dylan going electric in your head.

On the positive side, I’m more alert. Booting up hearing aids in the morning is like guzzling a cup of coffee. The London-based experimental artist Caroline Hobkinson found something similar when she started playing with different tones. “Staccato sounds,” she concluded, “make you much more aware and much more appreciative.” The aging brain is lulled into a kind of stupor as the senses diminish. Restoring the top third of the aural spectrum is like throwing open the blind to sunshine. The stimulated brain suddenly has more to do.

Unexpectedly, since getting the hearing aids, I’ve also lost a bit of weight. Maybe a co-incidence. But maybe not, suggested the Oxford experimental psychologist Charles Spence, when I reached him via Skype.

Spence is best known for his crisps study. When test subjects ate stale potato chips, paired with the sound of a lusty crunch as they bit down, the chips tasted fresh. It turns out bland or bitter foods taste sweeter and better when you accompany them with high-pitched sounds. He calls the phenomenon “sonic seasoning,” and it has implications for design soundscapes from restaurants to elder-care facilities.

When you pump music into a coffee shop, and boost the signal in the upper register, customers put less sugar in their coffee, Spence found. I told him of my weight-loss-following-hearing-aids theory. Could be true, he said. On the other hand, one might also expect the opposite: restoring full-spectrum hearing makes eating fun, a crunchy, slurpy, multi-sensory party. So you might eat more.

Oh yes. Those mis-hearings? Gone. But strangely, I kind of miss them. The world is now a little dis-enchanted. No more “pepperoni tree” in the neighbour’s yard. My daughter’s feet are no longer hot in her boots on account of her “flammable socks.” And that tailback for the Raiders I’d heard a broadcaster call “Buffalo Wildwings”? No mention of him lately. Maybe he retired.

I’d been quite enjoying the Snow Falling on Cedars soundtrack of my pre-hearing-aid life. It seemed a benediction: nature’s way of granting the middle-aged some earned peace and quiet. In the accreting stillness of wisdom, the little true voice inside you – the “target story,” not the “mask” story — emerges. And maybe that’s something you really don’t want to fix. I began entertaining the notion that I’d spent almost five grand I didn’t have to make my life worse.

“How are the hearing aids working, Dad?” asked my 13-year-old daughter one day.

“A little too well,” I said. “I hear things I wish I didn’t.”

“Welcome to our world,” she said.

Thus far, scientists’ efforts to find a cure for hearing loss – from hair-cell regeneration to hormone pills – haven’t yielded much. But that could change. “Hearing loss is becoming more prevalent,” says the North Vancouver registered audiologist Katie Daroogheh. “The next generation is going to start experiencing hearing loss in their 30s and 40s.” That’s because aging isn’t the only culprit. Environmental noise is, too. As a species, we might be at peak noisiness right now. The electric machine revolution that will, many believe, make life quieter, is likely decades away from its full expression.

If the young start needing hearing aids en masse, innovation will surge. And so will marketing. “When enough people wear hearing aids it’ll probably become something like eyeglasses,” says the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer. Perhaps teams of marketing creatives are assembling already, charged with making hearing aids not just less uncool but actually cool. Not “nearly invisible,” as high-end units like my Oticons are pitched now, but fashionably obvious. Even sexy.

I’d like to be listening through the wall on that ad campaign:

Who’s hard of hearing? Every peacekeeper in a war zone, every cowboy on a cattle drive, every member of your favourite rock band. Being hard of hearing means you have lived. You didn’t run from the lion. You stuck your head in its mouth as it roared.

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Adrift

Adrift

Aging Essays Featured

 

from NEW TRAIL magazine, July 2018. Illustrations by Hugh Syme

In June 2015, Megan Strickfaden and her grad student Nicole Gaudet arrived at a little village on the outskirts of Amsterdam with a Harry Potter-ish name: De Hogeweyk. An octogenarian gentleman was visibly thrilled to see them.

This called for wine.

He took Strickfaden by the arm and squired her into the village grocery store, she recalls. He found a nice red and brought it to the till. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and paid for the wine with it. The clerk accepted the payment, bagged up the wine and gave the man back his handkerchief as change.

To its residents, De Hogeweyk — a dead-ringer simulation of a traditional Amsterdam village — isn’t a cutting-edge experiment at the frontier of humane dementia care. It is simply home. They cruise on tandem “cosy cycles” down the cobblestone streets. They munch pastries in the café, catch films at the cinema. They wander among gardens so cunningly designed as to appear limitless. They return to family-sized living spaces that closely match the tenor of the household they grew up in, whether country-cosy or artsy-cultural, full of music and light. Trained geriatric nurses and caregivers form a kind of stealth army of invisible support. They’re dressed not as authority figures but as shopkeepers, neighbours, friends, perhaps relatives.

De Hogeweyk’s reputation rests on what its residents don’t do, says Strickfaden. Based on her observations over two extended visits to the village, residents don’t fall as much or night-wander as much or take anti-psychotics nearly as much as comparable populations elsewhere.

“The place itself is medicine,” she says.

The discovery that environmental “nudges” can boost psychological well-being is one of the triumphs of the last quarter-century of social science. (One of its founders, Richard Thaler, won the Nobel Prize in 2017 for contributions to behavioural economics.) And design elements are psychological levers. By manipulating colours, furnishings, acoustics or the layout itself, architects can send the human mind back in reflection or forward in aspiration. They can slow a frightened heart or stoke curiosity or foster human connection.

Dementia is a syndrome, a deterioration in the ability to process thought beyond what might be expected from normal aging. It affects memory, thinking, language, behaviour and the ability to perform everyday activities.

Source: World Health Organization

People with dementia, it turns out, are especially good candidates for such interventions. “A person with dementia is suggestible,” Strickfaden says. “You work with that.”

Elements similar to the De Hogeweykian approach are being introduced in care facilities around the world. One of these is Canterbury Lane, the dementia wing of the Canterbury complex in west Edmonton. Strickfaden, a design anthropology professor in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences, has been hired to consult on the multimillion-dollar revamp. It will include features such as a garden that allows residents access to the outdoors without having to be escorted. Hallways that don’t dead-end, but loop back into the heart of the action. Little designated spaces for purposeful activity, such as folding laundry. And a cottage system of living spaces divided by theme or feel, matched to the residents’ upbringings.

The renovations will take close to four years. Unfortunately, the resident in one room is unlikely to live to see it completed. That’s just my guess, knowing that resident quite well.

She is my mother.

 

More than 50 million people worldwide are afflicted with dementia right now. And since the human lifespan is increasing more quickly than medical science seems to be closing in on a cure (which is to say, not quickly at all), dementia will be part of all our stories: your story or the story of someone you love very much. “Its shadow lies over us all,” writes Jay Ingram in his book The End of Memory.

So what to do — beyond saying a prayer and giving power of attorney to your most trustworthy blood relative? As recently as 20 years ago, people living with dementia who could no longer manage in their homes were simply institutionalized. In that setting, doctors were authority figures and patients were the passive recipients of meds, directives — and very little in the way of treatment.

But another paradigm is emerging. Dementia treatment is coalescing around the idea of patient-centred care.

In an analysis of dementia care studies published in 2015 in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, researcher Hannah O’Rourke, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Nursing, found four things are of central importance in working with people with dementia. A sense of place. Connection to others. A sense of purpose. And shoring up those three poles of the tent supports the fourth, which is linked to physical well-being: a sense of wellness.

So, while scientists continue their search for ways to prevent and treat the disease (See The Elusive Cure), caregivers are doubling down on tactics that promise benefits right now. Call it the “3 Ws” model of dementia care: focusing on the Where, the Who and the Why of the subjective experience of this devastating syndrome.

Our questions are everybody’s questions: what must it be like to be her? And what can we do to help make this a little more bearable — for everyone?

To family members, the hardest part to fathom about dementia is the staggering difference between Good Days and Bad Days. Good Days make you second-guess your decision to move your loved one out of their own home into extended care. Bad Days grimly confirm it.

On a recent visit, my mom positively lit up when I walked through her door. We spent a great day together, at the end of which I promised I’d be back tomorrow. Ten-kilowatt smile. But when I walked through her door the next day, she greeted me with a face that looked as if a bad fish needed taking out. “What are you doing here?” she snarled.

Mom was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when she failed the “mini-mental” exam 10 years ago, at age 84. Though in truth, we noticed her slipping as early as her late 70s, one “W” after another. The “where” seemed to go first. On an Alaskan cruise, to celebrate her “80th year,” she struggled to find her way back to our cabin and had not cracked the nut even by our last day at sea.

Then the “when” became wobbly. On a visit to the West Coast, she became deeply concerned that we’d miss our flight if we didn’t leave right now. So I raced us to the airport, only to hear upon our arrival: “Why the heck are we here so early?”

Social filters fell away. Mom started making derogatory comments about people standing right next to her. She began repeating herself every 30 seconds. Sometimes she noticed herself slipping. “I feel like … I’m … not right in the head!” she’d say and she could barely contain her terror.

The changes in her reflected the brutally quixotic nature of the disease. Like a tornado through a trailer park, it destroys some faculties while leaving others bizarrely intact. On a recent visit, I told Mom it was our dog’s birthday — we were having a couple of the neighbourhood pooches over to celebrate.

“Penny,” she said, remembering the name of an animal she’d never met. “How old is she, again?”

“She’s four.”

“So, our 28,” Mom said instantly.

Sometimes my sisters and I leave the facility feeling gut-punched, yearning for the sweetness we know is in Mom to surface more often. And our questions are everybody’s questions: what must it be like to be her? And what can we do to help make this a little more bearable — for everyone?

 

Are We Our Memories?

Who are we without our memories? For people with dementia, recovering even some of the experience they have banked is a crucial part of feeling, well, like themselves again.

One theory of dementia-related memory loss is that it’s a retrieval issue, rather than a data-loss issue. In other words, the memories are still in there, only their tags have fallen off. In recent years, researchers have experimented with using sensory triggers to call some of those memories up.

In Scotland, aging soccer fans living with Alzheimer’s are exposed to reconstructions of big games. In North America, people with dementia are supplied with iPods loaded with personalized playlists. Out of Sweden comes an ingenious invention called the BikeAround: a stationary bicycle attached to a wrap-around movie screen onto which a moving landscape is projected. Plug in the client’s childhood-home address on Google Street View and suddenly there they are, back in the old ’hood, cruising down streets they probably haven’t since they were a kid on a Schwinn.

Reminiscence therapy, this kind of intervention is sometimes called — and preliminary research suggests it can not only boost happiness levels but improve cognitive function. This year, the Canterbury Lane staff tried a simple version of it in the run-up to Mother’s Day with a scrapbooking activity. Family members were asked to contribute photos of mom or dad through the years, surrounded, if possible, by the people they have loved the most. “You’re really trying to get them to live in those moments,” activities supervisor Mbalia Kamara told me. “And then to really validate the feelings that emerge.”

For Mom, it was pretty profound. As she turned to a snapshot of her and Dad circa 1980, both of them tanned and smiling in Hawaiian sunshine, she began to cry. A staff member allowed her to sit with that sadness for a few moments, and then steered her toward the light. “He must have been a great guy,” she said. “Tell me about your wedding day.”

The tonic here, as much as the memory work, is the attention. People with dementia often lose their voice as the disease progresses. The world stops listening. “People used to think that because there was cognitive impairment there wasn’t insight — but that’s not true,” says nursing professor and researcher Hannah O’Rourke. “People with dementia still know what they like and don’t like.” To pull that insight out is not that difficult, she says. “You ask. You just ask.”

A couple of years ago, Elly Park, a post-doctoral fellow in the U of A Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine, undertook a project with researchers from Simon Fraser University and the University of Toronto on digital storytelling. Facilitators helped people with dementia create a digital story with photos, music and narration by the participant. “Storytelling is a tool,” writer Ursula K. Le Guin put it, “for knowing who we are and what we want.” People with dementia are no different from the rest of us in this way. Park’s research found that encouraging participants to think about and share meaningful stories enhanced relationships with caregivers, increased communication and interaction, and gave participants a sense of accomplishment. “In several cases, participants said they surprised themselves with the stories they were able to remember,” says Park.

With Mom, I have found that if I press her too much for family history, she often clams up. For her, the fact-finding is stressful. This is not uncommon. That’s why University of Wisconsin theatre professor Anne Basting received a MacArthur Fellowship, sometimes called a genius grant, for her invention called TimeSlips. It replaces “the pressure to remember with the freedom to imagine,” as she puts it. TimeSlips is like a book club where no one has read the book, except in this case it’s a photograph. Each photograph is striking and mysterious. It looks as if it has a story to tell, so everyone makes one up. There’s no way to be wrong, which seems to loosen tongues. “The absolute key to the entire process,” Basting says in a video about TimeSlips, “is that we validate everything they say.” This sounds like — it is like — improv theatre.

Something a little magical happens when we start telling stories to each other, whether they’re true or not. Neuroscience has shown that it boosts the sense of connection between the teller and the listener. As the story unspools, the brains of teller and listener sync up — a phenomenon psychologists call “linguistic alignment.” Another bonus: for people who can no longer have out-there-in-the-world adventures, storytelling is an excellent proxy. It stimulates many of the same parts of the brain that light up when we are actually experiencing things — just as reading does.

For the scrapbooking exercise at Canterbury, not all the families contributed photos. So those residents instead received pages of their scrapbooks with stock photos of a random family. Which sounds a little sad but turns out to be a perfectly serviceable alternative. “Just the idea of family can get people talking about their own,” says Kamara.

For some reason, my own earliest memories of Mom are all tagged to scents: the cinnamon-y Bee Bell Bakery, the chlorine of the Y swimming pool, the baseball-mitt smell of Jack and Jill Shoes. We’d march into these places hand-in-hand and, invariably, she’d spot someone she knew and tractor-beam them in with her smile. She’d let go of my hand — she needed both of hers to talk — and that would be it. I waited beside her as ice ages came and went. Eventually she’d track me down in some corner of the facility. I could smell her coming.

But wait: how many of these details are true? “Every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination,” the neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote. We’re all unreliable narrators. That doesn’t mean we all have neurodegenerative disease; dementia in its various forms is a syndrome with specific physiological signatures. But it does mean that people with dementia cannot be dismissed as Other. Every time we call our kid by the dog’s name or drive off with our coffee cup on the roof, the difference between the two worlds, practically speaking, grows moot. And somewhere a busker plays There but for Fortune.

Our Purpose, Our Selves

“If the residents here were able to describe their biggest frustration, what would they say?” I asked Wendy King, executive director of the Canterbury Foundation, not long ago. “I think maybe they would say, ‘You don’t understand me,’ ” she replied.

Hence, a recent trend in dementia care toward what you might call deep client profiling. In the old days, staff received an incoming resident’s medical charts, some basic biographical data and not much else. Now, families are often asked to flesh out the story of mom or dad. The more data, the greater the likelihood a resident ends up where they belong, doing things that pluck the strings of their hidden enthusiasms.

A “sense of purpose,” as O’Rourke discovered in her analysis of dementia studies, can involve many things: the feeling of contributing to others; a belief in a higher power; some control over how your day unfolds. From a caregiver’s perspective, restoring a sense of purpose is about reconnecting people with who they used to be — placing them back in the vicinity of that intersection where, as American writer and theologian Frederick Buechner put it, their deep desire meets the world’s deep need.

Strickfaden recalls one man at De Hogeweyk who was restless and searching, and a bit aggressive and hard to approach. Staff went back into his file and discovered he’d once been a farmer. “So one day they hid a bunch of eggs all around the courtyard. And they said, ‘We need you to go collect the eggs in the morning.’ And he’d do that. And then he’d be wonderful for the rest of the day. It was something that validated who he was.”

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, accounting for about 60 to 70 per cent of cases. Dementia can also be caused by stroke, injury or other diseases.

Source: World Health Organization

At Canterbury, one resident used to be a millwright, so he’s routinely given things to tinker with. Another was a homemaker who raised a big family. She struggles to find words and can get frustrated and withdrawn, but she positively melts when handed lifelike “Baby Sophia.” She dresses the doll in tiny clothes warm from the dryer, whispering and cooing to her and, after a while, “she’s more open to the activities the rest of us are doing,” says Kamara.

But there’s purpose and then there is purpose — something closer to what the Japanese call ikigai. Roughly: the sense that life is worth living because we are needed here. Japanese research has found that people with ikigai live longer. A study published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2012 found that people with Alzheimer’s who are animated by purpose staved off cognitive decline longer. No one knows quite why it matters to feel as if we matter — only that it does.

“Feeling you matter is at the core of being a person,” British dementia consultant David Sheard often says. “Knowing you matter is at the heart of being alive.” Sheard is the founder of Dementia Care Matters, better known as the “butterfly” model of dementia care. I could see its principles in action the day I visited Copper Sky Lodge, in Spruce Grove, Alta., Canada’s first butterfly facility. Copper Sky’s CEO is Phil Gaudet, well-known in Alberta as the former head of the Good Samaritan Society, a long-running non-profit care provider. But the lodge is mostly run these days by his daughter, Nicole Gaudet. The same Gaudet who, with her thesis advisor Strickfaden, was embedded at De Hogeweyk.

As dementia advances and individuals turn inward, they’re less able to seek out the multi-sensory stimulation they may need. So the stimulation must come to them — as butterflies come to flowers. “Even things like this soft sweater I have on are part of it,” Gaudet says of the fuzzy sweater she’s wearing. “I’ve been getting lots of hugs today.”

At the centre of the butterfly model is emotion. The theory: people will forget what you say, and even what you do, but they will never forget how you made them feel. That’s because feeling is processed in a more primitive part of the brain; it’s protected, in a sense, from the damage to the neocortex that dementia causes. And so the staff at Copper Sky are trained to circulate, alighting here and there, touching, affirming, offering a cup of tea or a taste of mint, introducing short activities. “Ultimately, we are all feeling beings,” says Gaudet. “So if you can connect to what somebody is already feeling, you’re four steps ahead.”

But there’s research and then there’s practice. Changing how we care for people with dementia isn’t easy. After their experience at De Hogeweyk, Strickfaden and Gaudet were gung-ho to update legislation around dementia care in Canada. They soon discovered they were facing frustrating headwinds, some of which were cultural.

A country’s dementia care can reveal a lot about its values. China, for instance, is a culture of service, notes Strickfaden. “But that can actually get in the way of good elder care. People are literally served to death.” The Netherlands is big on personal liberties. How far you want to push your limits is up to you, within reason. Quality of life reigns supreme.

Canada has made a different choice. Here a dementia-care facility gets accredited or not based in part on how safe it’s deemed to be, says King, head of Edmonton’s Canterbury Lane. So De Hogewykian elements like cobblestones, public fountains, accessible barbecues and knives, unfenced kitchens are red flags. In Canada, safety trumps freedom. So does efficiency. Funding here is task-based. “Staff have a task list and a limited amount of time to do it,” says King. “So if a resident puts up resistance, it creates stress — because the staff person knows, ‘I’ve got to go to Mrs. Jones next.’ ”

The task-based funding model is, predictably, frustrating for more progressive voices in dementia care. “You’re regulating to the point of strangulation,” says Gaudet.

After Copper Sky received a poor grade in its first effort to become a certified butterfly facility three years ago, Gaudet spearheaded massive staff retraining. The first thing she impressed on caregivers is that human connection comes first. You are not going to be fired if you don’t get this task and this task and this task done, she told staff. Even though by some measures the extra TLC means more work for them, there’s evidence that such an approach leads to lower burnout, since it puts caretakers’ actions more in line with the reasons they got into this work in the first place.

“I would abolish long-term care in Canada and start over,” says Gaudet, “because I think we’ve got it wrong. We need to be given the freedom to deliver new kinds of care in inspiring environments.”

O’Rourke is cautiously optimistic about the future of dementia care in Canada. “If we — clinicians, researchers, community members, society — can set aside our own fears, assumptions and stigmas about the disease, there is hope. People with dementia have identified many ways to achieve a good quality of life. We just need to listen.”

one recent wednesday afternoon at Canterbury Lane, residents sat drowsing in easy chairs in front of an old Jimmy Stewart movie on the big-screen TV. My mother wasn’t among them. She likes the privacy of her room and to pick her own shows — and to crank up the volume.

On this visit, I had a plan. Having steeped myself in the Alzheimer’s literature and the best ideas of countless experts in multiple domains, I was eager to try a few things. I wanted to help Mom grasp where she is, who she is and why she is. I’d brought an artifact: a tennis racket. Not one of the fancy big ones people wield now but a vintage wooden one. This is what you used in the era when Mom learned to play, gliding around the shale courts of Garneau tennis club, not long after she and my dad met. People can see it on the wall and ask Mom about tennis. And maybe some of those locked-up memories — a serve tossed into the sun, the fitz of a new tin of balls, my dad so gentlemanly out there that he actually cheated against himself — will come rushing back.

Not long ago my sister Lynn noticed Mom paging through a magazine that had a big splash about the Royal Family. Mom pointed to a gentleman in a waistcoat. “That is the man I’m going to marry,” she said. A few years ago Lynn might have laughed or corrected her. But we have learned that it’s not our job to pull Mom back into this world. Our job is to meet her in hers. Lynn raised her eyebrows in enthusiasm, nodded and asked for details about the wedding.

These days Mom’s eyes reveal a lot. There’s not much reminiscing going on. Nor is there planning. The headlights reach to the next bend in the road and that’s it. But this is what people with dementia have, most profoundly, to teach us. They are champions at living in the now. The question, for all of us, is how can we make the now better?

I believe the answer is to just be there. Or in the case of my own too-infrequent visits, make sure I’m therewhen I’m there.

So Mom and I go for silent wheelchair tours to check out the action over in the nearby manor — past the kitchen, down the long, carpeted hallways. Little bios outside each resident’s door tell of their unique strengths. That’s right out of the David Sheard playbook: “Search for the treasure in each individual.”

“I’ve learned that if I attach too much to whether she remembers my visit, I’m going to be bitter,” Lynn told me on the phone recently. So you shift the bar. A cup of coffee, a stab at a cribbage game, a trip to the atrium to hear the piano player plink out Moon River: that is a win. We are not our memories.

Even though it sometimes feels that way.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Long Read: This Doctor Might Have the Answer to the Fentanyl Crisis

Long Read: This Doctor Might Have the Answer to the Fentanyl Crisis

Essays Featured Science

From VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, November 14, 2017

Pooya Nabei photo

“I’m going to be the least compelling speaker you’ll hear tonight,” Dr. Evan Wood tells me as we pull up in front of the Anvil Centre auditorium in New Westminster. People are already trickling in for tonight’s event, Recovery Speaks, featuring inspiring personal tales of sobriety on the other side of hellish addiction.

Wood holds a fistful of titles—including professor of medicine at UBC, Canada Research Chair in Inner-City Medicine and head of the province’s newly established response to the opioid crisis, the British Columbia Centre for Substance Use (BCCSU). He’s giving the keynote address tonight—and he’s going to have to thread the needle.

Many of the attendees here are part of the “recovery community”—their journeys involve getting clean largely via the 12 steps. The path involves fierce personal reckoning and surrender to a higher power until the demon slowly loosens its grip and you get your life back, though with eternal vigilance and abstinence as part of the deal.

“Twelve-step facilitation therapy,” hatched some 80 years ago by the American Bill Wilson (or simply Bill W., as he’s known in AA circles) and Dr. Robert Smith, is still the prevailing model for treating addiction, both in the U.S. and in Canada. It’s traditionally a cold-turkey approach: just you and your god and the dark night (with your support group on call). Wood’s own view is that there’s a less torturous and more effective strategy. Reduced to a bumper sticker, it might read: Get off drugs with drugs.

It sounds like pretzel logic: drink your way to sobriety. Use to get clean. Yet this is the chatter on the frontier of addiction medicine—an emerging field promoting evidence-based strategies to treat addiction instead of the entrenched old ways, no matter how beloved they might be.

Abstinence, the evidence increasingly suggests, doesn’t work for many people. More than 80 percent of those who try it will relapse, some studies show.

The rising death toll in the fentanyl epidemic means it’s never been more urgent to come up with something that works more reliably—and to quickly clear a legislative path for it.

The new thinking, Wood’s thinking, is that, far from being a kind of defect of the psyche, addiction may in fact be an evolutionary inheritance—a deeply human trait that turns out to be ill fitted in some ways to the modern era. Wood is exploring pharmaceutical treatments for addiction, pioneering an approach where abstinence isn’t necessarily the end goal, and even using common street drugs to temper its expression.

All of this would seem to cast him as a fox in the henhouse here. And yet Wood is given a warm setup by the man who invited him here tonight, Marshall Smith, a former top B.C. government bureaucrat whose own lost-now-found story is as dramatic as they come.

Ten years clean after a brutal cocaine addiction that left him unemployed and living in a shipping container, Smith is now in full reboot. He runs a non-profit recovery centre on Vancouver Island, coordinates these speaking events and serves as a senior advisor at the BCCSU, a $10-million provincially funded network aimed at developing an evidence-based framework for addiction treatment. Part of the mandate is to tap the “lived experience” of users to develop effective new strategies, which is where Smith comes in. Wood hired him after he realized Smith’s credibility and charisma could help shape the evolving narrative of addiction treatment in B.C.

It was nuts, both men realized, to present themselves as adversaries—penning opposing op-eds in newspapers, pitting harm reduction against abstinence-based recovery—when all that did was make the entire addiction-medicine space radioactive to politicians and potential funders. “We clearly came from different perspectives, we clearly came from different personal experiences and we clearly represented different constituencies of substance-using people,” Smith says. “But…we were in absolute agreement that the system we have now is failing people at best and killing people at worst.”

Wood steps up to the lectern without notes. Bespectacled and self-contained, he has the air of an uncle about to give a toast at Thanksgiving dinner. He tiptoes through a decent joke before quickly establishing a sensitive, commiserating tone that finds common ground with Smith. “The system of addiction treatment in British Columbia isn’t broken,” he says. “There. Is. No. System.” Sufferers are left alone to figure out their options amid a Wild West climate of murky regulations and an absurd circumstance where opioids are prescribed to people who don’t need them and withheld from those who do, one in which rehabbing users are discharged from detox with a handshake and directions to the bus stop, and where wait-lists for rehab facilities can be months long. Every story he’s hearing, in this room and out there in the world, Wood says, every scrap of data he’s gathering, will go into the batter of this new thing they’re cooking at the BCCSU.

He gets a standing O.

In the Giant’s Shadow

I first met Wood, 43, in his upstairs office at St. Paul’s Hospital, tucked away from the emergency room, where fatal opioid overdoses have become an almost daily occurrence.

His eyes were red behind his spectacles: too many short nights in a row. He was wearing a crisply cut suit in banker’s blue—the better to convene high-level meetings with senior staff of health agencies, convey gravitas in media interviews and beat the bushes for funding. That suit, and his quiet, squeaky-clean intensity, evokes Eliot Ness, the famous Prohibition-era Chicago crime fighter. Only their missions are exactly backwards. Wood is at war against the War on Drugs and all it has wrought—from rampant gang violence to a lethally toxic drug supply. He’s less interested in bringing drug criminals to justice than he is in restoring justice by decriminalizing drugs.

But politics are not his official brief. As head of the BCCSU, Wood’s loftiest goal is to change the way we think about addiction. To make us understand it as a kind of contagion—albeit a social rather than viral one. The best strategy to suppress an outbreak? Deploy massive resources at multiple levels all at once. Toss a blanket over the fire so that it sends out no sparks.

Wood’s job one is to wrangle those resources and channel them toward an effective treatment model. That means training doctors and nurses who work with addiction sufferers on which drugs work best to curb cravings and ease withdrawal, when to use them, and how to wean folks off them where appropriate. It means laying out clear options for users who want to get clean and making sure they have access to them. Right now, it means hosting lots and lots of meetings with addicts and their families, the people whose voices most need to be heard.

Wood’s current position is an evolution of his career at the forefront of public health and epidemiology, but he began by tackling a different scourge.

He grew up in West Vancouver, raised by his social-worker mother. His father was an inventor who designed marine navigation systems and who separated from his mother when Wood was two.

Wood approached the medical-health field in a gradually tightening circle. In an undergrad geography degree at UBC, he did a term project that involved mapping the spread of HIV, which nudged him to pursue medical geography—a subfield that looks at airborne and vector-borne illness. He applied for a summer job at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, where he quickly distinguished himself as a protégé of Dr. Julio Montaner. Hired as a junior research assistant, the young Wood churned out a provocative paper so quickly that Montaner read about it in the newspaper he opened on a flight later that same summer. After Wood knocked off a PhD in epidemiology in 2003, he began publishing at a furious rate. He and Montaner would go on to co-author dozens of influential papers, including two humdingers—one published in The Lancet that helped shape the conversation around AIDS treatment in Africa and another on anti-viral drug strategy, published in The British Medical Journal, that was dubbed Science magazine’s 2011 scientific breakthrough of the year.

In 2005, Wood and his colleague Thomas Kerr—an epidemiologist and now co-director of the BCCSU—found themselves almost single-handedly trying to save InSite, Canada’s first supervised drug-injection site, from a court challenge by the Harper government, which vehemently viewed drug use as a criminal matter. The battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, with Wood and Kerr arguing evidence should trump morality when it came to reducing the risk of disease transmission and overdose.

In the end, their efforts ensured one of the world’s most high-profile experiments in harm reduction, one that has since become a global model in public health, was spared the knife.

In the mid-aughts, Wood interrupted his progress in HIV/AIDS research to go to med school, thinking he would have more impact as a physician. He blitzed through the University of Calgary’s compressed curriculum, putting himself in the comically intense position of being a professor at UBC while a med student in Calgary. He completed his MD in two years and nine months.

Upon returning to Vancouver, however, Wood discovered the fire he was now doubly armed to fight was nearly contained. The death rate from AIDS was down 80 percent, as was the number of new HIV cases. Wood pivoted to apply his harm-reduction strategies to another issue affecting the same at-risk communities he’d come to know through his work with Montaner. He emerged as a leader in addiction medicine around 2010, just as a drug called fentanyl began to show up on city streets, igniting yet another public health crisis and thrusting the issue of addiction into the spotlight. 

What Humans Do

In the lobby of the Anvil Centre, during intermission at the Recovery Speaks event, a woman named Lynn buttonholes Wood. Her 23-year-old son is in treatment, battling a heroin addiction. He’s been in an abstinence-based treatment facility for several months and is due home soon.

Wood listens silently, rabbinically. (Privately, he is a little worried about this young man, who is about to be sprung loose, his tolerance low, onto a landscape mined with fentanyl and carfentanil. “Anyone in that position is just a sitting duck for a fatal overdose,” he tells me later.)

Wood allows that some people do manage to get clean all at once just because they decided to, overriding primitive instructions from a brain that has actually been rewired, by trauma or stress or crushing circumstances, to crave solace. But it’s clear which side he believes the science tips toward. The data doesn’t support abstinence as Plan A.

Lynn tells Wood she has discovered a book touting a pharmaceutical “cure” for alcoholism. You simply take a drug—an alcohol antagonist—an hour before you plan to imbibe, and it whisks the reward off the table. So a drink is just a drink, not a ticket anywhere, and you stop at one or two. Eventually the thrill is gone. You can drink socially without fear of drinking to excess—then taper down to complete sobriety, or not. There’s evidence the drug works for opioids too.

This approach would clearly not be embraced by most of the people in this auditorium. But Wood believes the data shows that you can manage addiction without trying to hold it at bay through brute abstinence. It may even be the more humane tack.

“The vast majority of people who have what we would now call substance-use disorder are working, they have families, they’re going about their life, but they have this compulsion to use,” Wood elaborates later. “They may wish to cut down but have difficulty doing so. They might get withdrawal if they stop. But they’re getting along with their lives pretty well.” In the new landscape of addiction treatment that he envisions, “if people come to a health-care provider, we could offer things to help them cut down, or quit, or reduce their cravings.

“This is really part of the human condition. The oldest written records show people using things like alcohol. We could have coffees in front of us. We could be having a glass of wine tonight. I mean, this is what humans do.”

And here is where Wood and Smith—not to mention the people who have shared their heartbreaking but hopeful personal stories tonight—really do have a common cause. They deeply believe that people with substance-abuse issues ought not to be vilified for being a little more demonstrably human than everybody else.

In a sense, people prone to addiction—and “about 50 percent of the burden of substance use is genetic,” Wood says—are simply exquisitely attuned to the promise of rewards. For most of human history that was a good thing. “Being a good reward appreciator,” as the addiction psychologist Anna Rose Childress put it, would have made an individual more, not less, evolutionarily fit.

Only in the last 75 years, when consumer culture began producing a glut of irresistible temptations, did that trait stop delivering benefits and start creating problems. Now that same quester who was once first to try a new food, a new route, a new mate, is now first to fall hard for the shiny poisoned bauble.

Not long ago, certain variants of a gene called OPRM1 were found to be linked to impulsivity and risk-taking behaviour—and a predisposition for drug addiction.

But, Wood explains, OPRM1 is really an attachment gene. “In rhesus macaque monkeys, having the gene correlates to how upset the babies get when they’re separated from their mother.” The gene is thought to work in a similar way in humans.

“So here you have this attachment gene that makes great sense for survival, so you don’t go wandering off a cliff,” Wood says. “But that same gene, if you get prescribed Oxycontin by your doctor—and Oxycontin is extremely rewarding—it can just grab hold of you.”

Wood works the room. He is adept at saying the right things and leaving out the right things. He chats with the private donor who quietly gave $1 million to his centre and with mothers who have watched their children slip through their fingers—grieving moms have become the face of the fentanyl crisis. Wood’s own kids, aged 4 and 9, are still too little to worry about in this respect.

There’s something almost epidemiological about the way he circulates, each point of contact meaningful in some hard-to-measure way. If the root of all addiction is dislocation, as a recovery-community adage has it, then an antidote for addiction is connection. This is a second belief that both camps share. Indeed, you could say that the secret sauce of supervised injection sites like InSite is not that they prevent substance users from overdosing to death right now (though they indeed do that) but that they bring users into contact with potential social lifelines—health professionals whom they can trust to help them get their lives back on track.

Wood has been welcomed here. The kumbaya factor is high. But there remains one major, lingering disconnect: the God thing.

Another Path to Transcendence

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung advised Bill W. that without a spiritual dimension to AA, it would never work—the roots of addiction run too deep. Many in the recovery movement hold fast to that theory, but the required belief in a higher power also prevents many seeking recovery from buying into the program.

Wood believes there may be a way to square the circle here—to bring God into the picture without losing one’s evidence-based bona fides.

The last five or so years have seen a resurgence of clinical interest in psychedelics—the old hippie drugs that can open what Johns Hopkins psychologist Roland Griffiths calls a “spiritual window” through which deep insight might flow.

“The neuroimaging work that’s being done around this, particularly in the U.K., is really fascinating,” Wood says. One way to look at addiction is as a communication failure on a neural level. The most primitive part of the brain—the instinctive, reptilian part that drives compulsive behaviour—“doesn’t typically talk to the frontal lobe that’s really wanting to make changes,” Wood says. “But on psilocybin, those two brain regions are talking like crazy.” In preliminary experimental trials, the deep emotions that hallucinogenic trips unlock seem to help users reach a profound level of insight into their self and their predicament—which can prove a powerful weapon against hard-to-resist cravings.

Indeed, Bill W. himself experimented with LSD after he became sober, and found it to be such an effective spiritual assist he considered making it a standard part of AA meetings. “So the science is showing that we can probably bring about a spiritual awakening for people at a much higher rate this way than our traditional motivational techniques can,” Wood says.

This spring, the BCCSU announced plans to fast-track hallucinogenic experiments. Drugs such as psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” LSD and/or MDMA (ecstasy) will be administered in a controlled setting—a dedicated, soundproof room in the BCCSU’s headquarters on Powell Street. (Right now the room is bare and clinical; it’s definitely going to need some groovy-ing up—and a bathroom.)

“It’s just a question now of the clinical protocols and then getting them through ethics,” Wood says. “And then getting these medications made by pharmaceutical labs, storing them and then doing the trials” with trained psychotherapists. “But we hope to be doing them in the next year.”

This isn’t something the BCCSU is trying to sneak past the public. The initiative is openly displayed on the website, along with other research such as “Intentional cannabis use to reduce crack cocaine use in a Canadian setting: a longitudinal analysis.”

The message? The road from “sick” to “well” is not a straight shot. For many, the endgame is total sobriety, but for some it will never be. While working at the heroin prescription clinic on the Downtown Eastside, Wood always asked his clients about their long-term goals. In some cases it was as straightforward as “Hey, if you want to see your kids again, this cocaine thing is going to be an issue.” But for others, say, an alcoholic who just wants to be able to drink socially, “recovery” has a different meaning and requires another protocol altogether. A system that can handle both has yet to be developed.

The endgame, which Wood sees as inevitable, is the decriminalization of all drugs along the lines of what Portugal has undertaken. The fentanyl crisis may eventually seal the fate of the disastrous, larcenously expensive century-old War on Drugs, Wood believes, but we’re not there yet.

“If you look at the situation in the States, the opioid crisis is the biggest issue that’s being debated around health-care reform. The Republican base of middle-class white conservative Americans, they’re being hit hard. And this thing hasn’t peaked yet.

“I think fentanyl is going to lead to pretty dramatic changes in Canada, for sure. I think we’re going to see prescription heroin. Investments in things like therapeutic communities”—long-term, professionally staffed rehab facilities—“on the other end.

“Unfortunately, before that happens, there are going to be thousands more dead people than there should be.”

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The Ed and Earl Show: a Tortoise-and-Hare Tale for our time

The Ed and Earl Show: a Tortoise-and-Hare Tale for our time

Aging Essays Featured

 

from THE GLOBE AND MAIL, May 6, 2017

Ed Whitlock, a quiet gentleman of wry British wit, an iron will and a body seemingly purpose-built to run marathons, held 36 age-group world records. He was the oldest person ever to run a marathon in under four hours, and the only person aged 70 or over ever to run a marathon in under three hours. “Ed was really my hero,” said Earl Fee, two days after attending Ed’s funeral in Milton, Ont., just west of Toronto. On March 13, Ed succumbed to a cancer only his close friends and family knew he was battling. He was 86.

Earl, who turned 88 in March, is similarly decorated in his own, shorter-distance events. He holds 15 World Masters Athletics world records. At age 66, in Buffalo, he ran 800 metres in 2:14, so demolishing the world record that officials drug-tested him twice. He is one of so few runners his age who still does hurdles that at the world championships in Costa Rica three years ago, there was no one for him to run against. So race organizers ended up pitting him against world-champion sprinter Christa Bortignon from West Vancouver, then 77. (Earl led for the entire 200-metre race, but Christa pipped him at the post. She leaned in.)

Ed and Earl, Earl and Ed. Two white guys of similar vintage and background – both loners; coincidentally, both engineers – who ran their way into sports history at an age when most of us are comparison-shopping for walkers, if we’re lucky . The two friends present a kind of natural experiment. For beyond these base traits that throw them in the same sample hopper, they are a study in contrasts – and the differences may be telling.

Earl is a devotee of HIIT – High Intensity Interval Training. He hardly ever works out for more than 20 minutes at a time, but he makes those 20 minutes count. He goes for it, typically in a series of sprint bursts – between short breaks – that leave him gasping for air. He is fastidious in his training habits – timing his intervals, salting in weight-lifting and cross-training, tweaking his regimen according to the evolving sports science. What’s more, he gets fairly frequent medical consults, eats half a pound of steamed vegetables with dinner, and takes six supplements.

Ed had long followed a program of LSD – Long Slow Distance running. He tallied endless training laps under Evergreen Cemetery’s tree canopy, patiently building a “race base” – “drudgery,” he called it, but all that mileage was money in the bank which he could draw on round about mile 22, when other guys were crashing. In 2004, in the run-up to the Toronto marathon, Ed put in three-hour training runs, more days than not, for months. Then he duly turned in what was arguably the greatest marathon ever run – 2:54:48, in Toronto, at age 73. Decidedly unfastidious in his training habits, he sometimes stretched on race day, and had seen his family doctor for a check-up exactly once since Trudeau came to office – Pierre Elliott Trudeau. His diet? Ed ate “whatever they’re serving,” he once told me. At meets, he sometimes seemed to subsist on coffee and grilled-cheese sandwiches.

Ed and Earl, Earl and Ed. They were, in a sense, the hare and the tortoise. And their approach to fitness may hold lessons for the rest of us mere mortals – who aren’t aiming to topple world records, just trying to stay young – whether our working definition of that is hanging on to our muscles or our marbles or our sex drive, or even, potentially, keeping cancer at bay.

**

Youthfulness, Part 1: In their only laboratory matchup, Ed takes the lead

Certainly Ed looked older than Earl – at least off the track. But when the starting gun cracked and he broke into a run, he became almost supernaturally youthful, gliding so gracefully, so gossamer-lightly, he looked as if he could run through freshly poured cement without leaving a mark. Earl is all power on the track, but no less “youthful” for that. On appearances alone, you could call it a wash.

But was Ed younger on the inside? Or was Earl? To get a bead on that, it won’t do to look from the outside in. You have to look from the inside out.

In 2012, Tanja Taivassalo and Russell Hepple, then kinesiology professors at McGill (both are now at the University of Florida) did just that. As part of what has become known as the McGill Masters Study, involving more than two dozen participants, aged 75 to 93, they invited Ed and Earl separately into their lab. This allowed for a rare head-to-head comparison of the two athletes, who along with their fellow subjects were submitted to a battery of tests that assessed everything from cardiovascular health to muscle composition, flexibility to brain density.

Unsurprisingly, both men crushed it. More surprising, given the differences in the way they lived and trained, was that their “numbers” were often pretty similar. Both had roughly twice the mitochondria in their muscle cells as did the sedentary controls. That means twice the ability to suck in fuels such as glucose and fat, to make energy – and twice the anti-inflammatory protection against chronic disease in the bargain.

Both men also had NASCAR engines in their chests. Ed’s heart showed no signs of the hypertrophy (dangerously enlarged left ventricle) or arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) that ultra-distance runners are often heir to. His blood pressure was a little high, but that was no surprise to him. “My own theory is that my heart is a bit too strong,” Ed once told me – the pushing power maybe exceeded the width of the plumbing in there, he ventured. “Or it could just be all the salt in my diet.” (Indeed, it is Earl, not Ed, who has inexplicably developed a heart hiccup in latter years. He has tachycardia, a scary condition that can cause the heart to rev for no apparent reason. The times that happens, he says, are the only times he feels his age.)

At one point in the McGill testing, Ed and Earl were ushered into a hospital room, and a scientist brandished a gleaming instrument that looked a bit like a wine corker. He extracted a little plug of muscle from each man’s thigh. (Earl, particularly, had some trouble recovering from that procedure. Back in Toronto, he visited the storied sports-medicine doctor Anthony Galea, who fashioned a little artificial divot out of Earl’s own blood plasma, and plugged the hole with it, to speed healing.) Earl, it turned out, had somewhat more “fast-twitch” fibres in his leg – which provide explosive power, but fatigue faster – than Ed. That’s understandable, since he’s a sprinter and Ed was a distance man. Fast-twitch muscle ratio could be considered a metric of youthfulness: We are young, one might argue, to the degree that we can really bring it on when we need to – even if that just means sprinting for the bus. Then again, endurance may also signal “fitness,” at least in the Darwinian sense: Back on the veldt, it may have been the most important attribute of all.

The biggest difference was their VO2 max scores. That’s a measure of the highest rate that the body can take up and use oxygen. Earl’s score was high. But Ed’s score was literally off the charts – the highest ever recorded for someone his age. VO2 max scores correlate not just with longevity but with basic health – youthfulness, if you like. So much so that a paper published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last month suggested that one’s VO2 max score should be considered a vital sign, as basic as blood pressure or pulse.

Score a point for Ed.

*

Youthfulness, Part 2: Earl catches up

Not so fast, says HIIT devotee Earl: “I believe that to stay young, intensity of exercise is more important than volume.”

Until recently, evidence for that has been circumstantial at best. But last month, data emerged to give Earl’s assertion some real teeth. In a study published in the journal Cell Biology, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., looked at how different kinds of exercise affect aging muscles at the cellular level. In one trial, three groups of older test subjects – 65 years and up – were randomly assigned to one of three experimental groups.

The first group trained like Ed – long, lower-intensity sessions with no breaks. The second trained like Earl – pulses of shorter, harder effort. (The third group did weight training alone.) Biopsies revealed that both kinds of running changed those aging muscle cells – rejuvenating them, in effect – by producing more (and better quality) mitochondria while buy modafinil provigil uk dialling up the activity levels in certain genes.

But the interval training rejuvenated those cells more than the long, slow aerobics did. The intensity seemed to be a tonic that undid some of the cellular damage that naturally occurs when we age.

Score a point for Earl.

The brain: Ed surges ahead

One hallmark of how well we’re aging is what’s happening to us between the ears. How well are we managing practical things, such as recalling names at parties and remembering that we just put a full cup of coffee on the roof of the car? In our brain, that’s largely the job of the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped region in the centre that helps us make and consolidate memories.

We know that exercise beefs up the hippocampus. But recently, researchers from the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland wondered whether any particular kind of exercise is better at building this part of the brain. In a study on rats published last February in The Journal of Physiology, they tested the effect of long, steady-state running (the Ed protocol) vs. interval training (the Earl protocol) vs. resistance training: weight-lifting. (The rats, if you’re wondering, pulled a weight up a ramp.)

The result? Both kinds of running grew new neurons in the rats’ hippocampus. But the Ed workout grew a lot more of them. The joggers’ hippocampus positively teemed with new neurons. The greater the distance the marathon rats travelled, the more neurons they grew. (Weight training alone, by the way, didn’t spark any neurogenesis at all.)

One point for Ed.

Wear and tear: Earl pulls up to the side

What about plain old wear and tear on the body, surely another sign of how well we’re staving off the ravages of time? Turns out, intense interval training – the Earl Protocol – does create greater “impact forces”: sudden compression that puts strain on joints and tendons.

But there’s a coda. “If you’re working out for less time in total, maybe the cumulative loading on the joints is reduced,” says Martin Gibala, head of the kinesiology department at McMaster University in Hamilton, and author of The One Minute Workout. In other words, when you work out like Earl, your moving parts get a rest and your joints are spared the sort of relentless pummelling that keeps orthopedic surgeons in Caribbean vacations.

The data are not unanimous on this, but they tip Earl’s way. Ed, says the science, was an outlier. He could do what he did because he was Ed: a 107-pound package of awesome mechanics. (He dropped to 105 in November, but generally hovered around 110.) And even Ed felt the strain – he had chronic arthritis in his knees. And the main reason he ran his training runs (relatively) slowly, he once told me, was that “my Achilles hurts if I go faster.”

Point for Earl.

Life expectancy: It’s a tie

Running is good. On average, every hour you run lengthens your life by around seven hours, a recent meta-analysis found. Aerobic exercise stresses the body, mostly in a good way. True, it does goose the production of “free radicals” – highly reactive molecules that damage our DNA (and whose accumulation is, according to one theory , the most potent driver of human aging.) But exercise is both the snakebite and the antidote: Exercise itself is an anti-oxidant, mopping up the free radicals it creates, and then some. Almost always, the medicine trumps the venom.

Almost always. Could it be that there’s some tipping point at which aerobic exercise becomes so exhaustive that it stops being protective, and hastens aging more than it slows it? Could it be that all the “oxidative stress” that Ed was subjecting himself to, with all that mileage, was aging him faster than Earl’s 20-minutes-and-done workouts are aging him?

Again, the data are murky. “The idea that oxidative stress is bad, that’s a very challenging thing to sort out,” says Dr Hepple, of the McGill Masters Study. Some studies say it is. But when McGill biologist Siegfried Hekimi increased oxidative stress in his lab mice by letting them run and run and run on a wheel, he found the opposite: They aged more slowly. “If there is a tipping point” where exercise stops rejuvenating us and starts aging us, says Dr. Hepple, “we don’t know where it is.”

Ed and Earl each score a point.

 

The cancer factor: No clear winner

Ed’s cancer diagnosis didn’t just surprise the grieving running community; it surprised Ed.

It wasn’t until last fall, around the time he was casually smashing the 15-kilometre world record for his age at a race in upstate New York, that Ed suspected something might be up. He was having trouble keeping weight on. Then, his shoulder hurt so much that he finally saw a doctor. The diagnosis: prostate cancer that, an MRI revealed, had moved into his spine and bones. “After that, things moved very quickly,” says his son Neil.

In a man with longevity in his family (his Uncle Arthur was actually Britain’s oldest man when he died at 108 in 2000), Ed’s death raises questions about the way he lived his life. Could there possibly be a link between the cancer and the training?

David Agus, a professor of medicine and engineering at the University of California, and a noted cancer specialist, is doubtful. “We know that there’s an association between some cancers and inflammation, but there’s no association we know of between strenuous exercise and prostate cancer,” he says. “Mutations happen. About half of the DNA changes in cancer just happen.”

In a 2008 study on potential links between exercise and cancer, scientists at Duke University in North Carolina found that prostate cancer grew twice as fast in mice that ran to their heart’s content as it did in sedentary mice. Exercise seemed to feed their tumours, perhaps by supplying more blood to them.

But that study comes with a very important caveat. “Those were human tumours that we planted in the mice,” notes Lee Jones, the clinical-exercise physiologist who headed that study. “The only way you can get a human tumour to grow in a mouse is if the mouse doesn’t have an immune system.” Exercise boosts the immune system, but it can’t work its magic if there’s no immune system to boost.

In a subsequent study, in which Dr. Jones’s team planted mouse breast-cancer tumours in mice – thus allowing the mice to keep their immune systems – the running rats showed the opposite result: Their tumours grew more slowly.

“If you life long enough as a man, you’re going to get prostate cancer,” Dr. Jones says. “Eighty per cent of men who are age 80 have prostate cancer. Seventy per cent of 70-year-old men have prostate cancer. The fact that Ed was 86, he probably had prostate cancer for years. But because he was in such a trained state, his body was very likely able to keep that cancer from spreading as long as it did.”

Quality of later life: Once again, a draw

We make a fetish of longer and longer life. But “lifespan” is not the most meaningful metric, argues Stephen Harridge, a respected physiologist at King’s College London. “Healthspan” is.

Actual time above ground means little if much of your Third Act takes place in the ICU. Something happens to our bodies around the eighth decade of life. Most of us tend to just start coming apart like a clock; afflictions compound, slowly choking off quality of life.

But for masters athletes, their slow, linear performance suddenly takes a discouragingly exponential plunge. Ed didn’t have “co-morbidity” issues. One single thing crept up on him right at the end. Like track-and-field legend Olga Kotelko, who died suddenly from a brain hemorrhage in the summer of 2015, just weeks after setting a passel of new world records at age 95, Ed was world-beatingly fit and feted – and then suddenly gone.

“Both of these folks” – Ed and Olga – “compressed their morbidity into a tiny, tiny fraction of their time on Earth,” says Dr. Hepple. And that might be the best definition of successful aging that we have. “Ever since Ed died,” adds Earl, “I’ve been thinking, it’s kind of a gift, what we do.”

In his heroically researched, 664-page book 100 Years Young the Natural Way he presents a kind of template for people to hit the century mark, following a protocol of exercise, stress reduction and strategic eating. Since the book came out in 2011, Earl has tweaked his diet a bit. He has almost entirely cut out fish and chicken, convinced by the data that vegetarians probably live longer. He avoids processed foods that create inflammation. He tends to his gut flora with foods such as sauerkraut and yogurt (although, he acknowledges, “some of that fermented food is not too tasty.”)

Will he justify his book’s title? He hopes so. “I’m still aiming for 100,” he says. “But life can be more fragile than you think.”

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One Memorable Day, Once a Month

One Memorable Day, Once a Month

Essays Featured

 

From PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, Jan. 2017  For a lot of us, a typical day is so full of compromises, distractions, and interruptions that it ends up being neither productive (if it’s a work day) nor relaxing (if it’s a play day). We’re half-on/half-off much of the time, checking emails and running errands, chasing little stuff as if it were big stuff, and losing track of the difference. Days like that end up being, if not exactly wasted, at least forgettable. They run through our fingers and they’re buy cheap tramadol overnight delivery gone. They never make it onto the scoreboard because they were about … nothing.

So for the last year I’ve been trying an experiment: Once a month, I take a day and wrap it in a mission. I give it over to one achingly neglected bit of business. I clear the decks in advance. Unplug the phone. Farm out the kids. Put an “Away” message on my emails. And then, on the appointed morning, dive in.

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YooHoo — anybody out there?

YooHoo — anybody out there?

Blog Entry Essays

 

There’s a famous American clown named Moshe Cohen, who goes by the stage name Mr. YooHoo. In his heyday he travelled widely, plying his shtick before children and adults alike. One time Mr. YooHoo was performing before a big crowd in Chiapas, Mexico. The show seemed to be going well. At the end of it, he announced. “And now for my last trick, I’m going to make you all disappear.” And with that, he took off his glasses.

The gag had always got a laugh. But not this time. Crickets. What was going on?

Mr. YooHoo put his glasses back on and looked out at the audience. And then he understood. No one was wearing glasses. Not a single person. They were too poor to wear glasses. So they didn’t get the joke.

The acting teacher Bernie Glassman tells that story in his book The Dude and the Zen Master (Glassman had himself been a clown, and Mr. YooHoo was his mentor), and when I read it I thought: teachable moment. The lesson is, I guess, know your audience. Make sure you’re not working blue for a Christian crowd, not leaning on pop-culture references for a group of seniors, and so on.

But it occurs to me there’s a deeper way to think about the moral of this story – not as “market research,” but as an exercise in empathy. Think of the people sitting out there. Better yet, actually go out there and sit where they’re sitting. Who are they? What private battles are they fighting? Answering that will help you answer this: What can you give them?

*

I recently exchanged emails with Derek Sivers, an entrepreneur and writer who now earns his beans on the speaking circuit. He often tells the story of how he overcame his stage fright with one simple intervention.

Derek had worked for a dozen years as a circus emcee (that’s him in the picture). In the beginning, buy ambien online with mastercard he’d wanted to put his own stamp on the role. He tried to be all hip and ironic and Letterman-esque. It never quite clicked. He amused himself, but he never really connected with the audience. This wasn’t the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow — this was a traditional circus in the Midwest.

So one day he tried something different. He decided to be the very thing he was hired to be, a circus barker — nothing less and a little bit more. He played that role and dialed it up. People loved it.

When he returned backstage the owner of the circus took him by the shoulders. “There you go!” she said. “You’ve figured it out. That’s why people go to the circus. You gave them what they wanted.”

And that’s when it clicked for Derek. He thought, ‘It’s not about me.’ What the audience wants is to receive something of value that they can take away and maybe share with their family over dinner tonight. They want their pain salved, just for a few moments, with a pleasant distraction. Memo to self, Derek thought: Just give them what they were hoping to get when they showed up here today. But to do that means at least trying to grok, at a fairly deep level, who these people are.

That’s the step that Mr. YooHoo missed. For all his experience, he failed to understand that he couldn’t just deploy a joke that worked somewhere else and have it work here, in front of these people whose needs and whose circumstances he hadn’t really considered.

Derek’s stage fright vanished the moment he realized what his actual job was: “My role is to just be kind of invisible and deliver, like a great butler.”

Mr. YooHoo had it backwards. The trick isn’t to make your audience disappear. It’s to make yourself disappear.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Have Dog, Will Travel

Have Dog, Will Travel

Essays Featured

 

from WESTERN LIVING, July/August 2016

photos by Jennifer Williams

 

1. Sooke dreams

As the Mazda eases through the highway curves near Cassidy, B.C. — not ten minutes into the trip — a curdly tang fills the air.

“Oh gross – Penny just barfed!” Madeline hollers from the back seat. “Lila’s cleaning it up! She’s the one who fed her cheese!”

Penny is our one-year-old golden retriever, and the reason we’re on this kind of family holiday — rural, car-based, close to home,  — rather than the more exotic kind involving air travel, big cities, high culture and people dressed in expensive black slacks.

Dogs are of course awesome, as I don’t need to tell you dog people. But a puppy can disrupt a little family in the following way: you can’t leave her alone — not in the car, not on the ferry, not outside a store. She barks, you see. So, just when you thought the ‘hot-bunking sailors’ stage of married life was over, here it is again.

“Kind of like having a toddler,” a friend suggests.

“Except toddlers grow up.”

Now, you can leave your dog at a kennel come vacation time (don’t try this with a toddler). But the cheapest option, in some ways the easiest option, and certainly the only no-tears option, is to just bring her along.

We’d planned a circle route around lower Vancouver Island — down the east coast, around the horn, back up the west coast and across the interior — but forest fires had closed that final cut-through. So our journey would more closely resemble a smile that we traced and traced again.

Front-loading the indulgence, we booked the first night at the exquisite Sooke Harbour House — a destination more befitting honeymooners, foodies, and mindfulness-meditators than a roustabout family with a big sheddy mutt. You’d normally have to sneak a dog into such a place. But they love dogs at SHH. “We often prefer dogs to kids, actually,” one of the chambermaids told me, sotto voce, as we brought our bags from the car.

Penny must have missed the Cesar Milan episode where the dog waits in the hallway while the owners spread their scent throughout the hotel room: she trots right in. Waiting for her is her own little doggie bed, plus a welcome basket with towels and treats. Outside the French doors, the grounds beckon. The two-and-a-half acres of lovingly tended gardens are locovore heaven. “Eat what you can see” is the mantra here. Penny seems to understand this a little too well; we keep a close eye on her, lest she take a chomp out of one of the driftwood sculptures.

whiffen.spit.8

2. The best damn swimming hole in Canada

The Sooke Potholes are a series of pools carved into the rock by the cascading waters of the Sooke River. They’re one of the great swimming holes in B.C. But to a dog, they must seem even more magical: like a great big toilet you can drink out of.

A bike trail called the Galloping Goose takes you right there from the city, following the gentle grade of the freight-rail line it used to be. All in all a perfect way for a family with a dog to spend a summer day. Once you get on the Goose, you’re golden. It’s finding the Goose in the first place that’s the trick.

On rented bicycles, we white-knuckle it along the skinny shoulder of the highway as five-axle traffic blasts past. I’m trying to steer with one hand and wrangle Penny on a leash with the other. You see people gaily do this in TV commercials for life insurance, but running shotgun is actually a skill the dog has to learn. Penny either wants to pull me into cars, or she wants to stop and sniff. Whenever we leave the highway and try to thread our way through the suburbs, we keep hitting dead ends. It’s not clear where the heck we are.

“Did you know that commercial jets are off-course ninety percent of the time?” I offer, buoyantly. “The whole trip is about making corrections!” Silence. The girls are wondering about the chain of command on this vacation. Even the dog is getting fed up.

But the Potholes, when we find them, are as lovely as promised — the water bracing and ferric — and the Mad and Lila wade in to their chests. Penny decides the water’s too cold and stays on shore.

It’s trendy to talk about domestic dogs as if they were wolves – wired to hunt and roam and jockey for position in the pack. There isn’t a lot of wolf in Penny. Evolutionarily, she’s probably closer to a kitchen appliance. She knows where her dinner’s coming from: a big bag, not her own predatory instincts. This makes things easier in wilderness areas. We don’t really have to worry about her hare-ing off somewhere. Eventually she grows bored, picks up one of Lila’s shoes and drops it in the river.

3. The Big Wild
Luxury digs receding in the rear-view mirror, we complete the lazy drive north, through the Sooke Hills, arriving at dusk to pitch our tent at China Beach.

Dogs are welcome here in Juan de Fuca Provincial Park — as they are, albeit leashed, in all BC parks. This makes camping a pretty good way to go if you’re travelling with the hund. (Camping, when you think about it, is actually more suitable for dogs than for humans: sleeping on the ground in close quarters in a portable den.) The girls take turns blowing into the air mattress while Penny cases the joint. Her nose twitches. A curious expression comes over her face — a cross between approval and admiration. You guys must be more important than I thought, it says. They gave you the best site in the campground – right next to the outhouse.

The big attraction in these parts lies a short drive north of here, near Port Renfrew. And Botanical Beach is indeed high-grade West Coast wild. We hike the loop trail, an easy 4km. We didn’t get the tides right, so much of the big, rich canvas of intertidal life is underwater. But the trees are amazing — not because they’re so big, but because, weirdly, they aren’t. The ancient Sitka spruce are bonsai-tiny. “In a protected area,” an interpretative sign explains, “many of these trees would be fifty metres high.” But because they’re so exposed to the punishing weather, they don’t grow. The hardship stunts them. I half-expect the girls to pick up on this. We too are a bit undersized for their age, they will claim, because of the hardship you and mom inflict on us. Lift the restrictions on screen time and candy and watch us bloom.

4. The Big Smoke

 Penny is starting to smell. In that smell are traces of the trip thus far — top notes of beach goo, the Rottie she wrestled at Whiffen Spit, whatever she rolled in on that farm in Metchosin. The car, meanwhile, is starting to smell like Penny.

But there’s a place in Sooke called Suds ‘n Pups that solves both issues in one go. We first take care of the Mazda with a pressure hose, and then usher a dubious Penny around the corner and give her the business. I can’t say she’s happy about it, but she does take a certain satisfaction from shaking herself dry on us. She has to be presentable, we tell her, for the next stop on the itinerary: a trip to the city.

Not long ago, a team of researchers produced “smellscapes” of a number of European capitals. You can use them to plot walking tours tailored to your olfactory wishes — like Lonely Planet guides, if they were written and published by dogs. Nobody has mapped Victoria yet, but I’ll bet it’ll turn out to smell like salt, tea bags, fish-and-chips and marine diesel. Whatever’s going down here, Penny seems to be thinking as we find a parking spot and disgorge into the tourist hordes on Government Street, she’s all-in.

A sax-playing busker stops her in her tracks. Some sort of mating call, is this? (Actually, yes: it’s John Coltrane.) The lunch-hour crowd eddies around us.

Which raises another issue. We can’t bring Penny into a restaurant: it’s against the Canadian health code. (Even a restaurant in Duncan called The Dog House does not actually welcome dogs, we discovered, after they marched us all right back outside again.) But we can’t leave her in the hot car. At Pagliacci’s, the sympathetic staff pushes two patio tables together on the sidewalk and the waiters serve us out there, in the midday sun. Penny takes refuge underneath while we eat.

And then, for her, the day takes a really great turn. In Chinatown, she follows her nose down Dragon Alley and pulls us right into a tiny shop. The owner, Clayton Ealey, shakes his head. “No, no” he says.

“No dogs in here?” I say, preparing to leave.

“No leashes,” Clayton says.

Penny’s eyes brighten. What is this place? No less than a bakery … for dogs.

victoria.bakery.4

In a display case up front sit rows of jewel-like treats, many of them at nose height. There’s no glass.  Penny stares at them from six inches away. It’s a cosmic test of character. “Usually, they won’t shoplift till your back is turned,” Clayton says. There are blueberry and salmon cookies wrapped in beef jerky,  “meaty muffins” with cheddar and honey and apple. “That’s peanut butter and honey with yoghurt icing,” Clayton says of the cupcake I’m appraising. “More people than dogs eat that one.” I scarf it down when his back is turned. He swings around. “Oh you actually ate it!?” he says, looking horrified. “Just kidding.”

Penny is starting to get used to sauntering right in to stores, Parisienne-style. Could be a rude shock for her to wake from this dream and return home to North Van, where dogs are expected to know their place.

5. Wally World

 Penny prefers to rise around 5am, like Donald Trump. This becomes an issue in a campground — such as this quiet one at Englishman River Falls, near Parksville, where we’ve spent our final night.

She climbs over four sleeping bags and whines to go out. She then sits sentry in front of the tent in the pre-dawn. I can’t leave her out there alone. But it’s too early to start breakfast – we’d wake the other campers. There’s nothing to be done but curl up in a blanket beside her. A light rain falls on the both of us for a couple of hours.

“So this is our last day, girls,” I put it to Madeline and Lila at the picnic table as they chow down on camp cereal. “Now you’re in a position to know: Which is better – holidaying with the dog or without her?”

Madeline ponders this. “Well, you can go more places without a dog,” she says, marshaling eleven-year-old logic. “But a dog makes it all more … enthusiastic.”

There remains one last piece of business. Penny can smell, through the cracked back window, the tidal musk of the best beach on the whole east coast of Vancouver Island. But as we pile out of the car at Rathtrevor, and make a beeline for the surf, a sign catches us up. No pets allowed. Seriously?

There is a saying within the canine resistance: ‘A good dog must not obey the law too well.’

Soon Penny is out there rolling on her back. The kids are doing that game where you strand yourself on little islands created by the incoming tide. Bliss.

Then Madeline points. Two uniformed figures in the distance, screeching to a stop in their Club Car. And now the park rangers walking briskly toward us over the sand-flats.

You know what? It was so worth it, whatever it is we’re in for.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Behind the Cover Story: Bruce Grierson on Ellen Langer

Behind the Cover Story: Bruce Grierson on Ellen Langer

Aging Essays Featured Psychology

 

from the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age. Grierson’s last article for the magazine was about Olga Kotelko, a 91-year-old track star, which became the basis for his book “What Makes Olga Run?”

How did you first hear about Ellen Langer or grow interested in her research?

Ellen must have been hiding in my blind spot. She’s been doing her thing for almost four decades, but I didn’t stumble across her until I was researching my book, What Makes Olga Run? A chapter of that book deals with human limits and the role of the mind therein. I called Ellen up. She told me the story of her mother’s and grandmother’s buy valtrex over the counter afflictions. Then I learned she was contemplating this cancer study. It started to feel like a story.

Did she surprise you in any way?

About 20 seconds into a conversation with her, you know she’s different. She doesn’t sound like a scientist. She speaks in the rhythms of one of those old borscht-belt comics — punch, punch, punch, stop-me-if-you’ve-heard-this-before. There’s almost a narrative intelligence — if that’s a thing — that’s more obvious than her scientific intelligence. She’s an artist — literally (she paints) and also in sensibility. She’d surely agree with Einstein that not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured. She’s fun to be around, but she kind of wore me out.

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What If Age is Nothing But a Mind-Set?

What If Age is Nothing But a Mind-Set?

Aging Essays Featured

from the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, OCT. 22, 2014

One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. This was to be the men’s home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.

The subjects were in good health, but aging had left its mark. “This was before 75 was the new 55,” says Langer, who is 67 and the longest-serving professor of psychology at Harvard. Before arriving, the men were assessed on such measures as dexterity, grip strength, flexibility, hearing and vision, memory and cognition — probably the closest things the gerontologists of the time could come to the testable biomarkers of age. Langer predicted the numbers would be quite different after five days, when the subjects emerged from what was to be a fairly intense psychological intervention.

Langer had already undertaken a couple of studies involving elderly patients. In one, she found that nursing-home residents who had exhibited early stages of memory loss were able to do better on memory buy cheap tramadol tests when they were given incentives to remember — showing that in many cases, indifference was being mistaken for brain deterioration. In another, now considered a classic of social psychology, Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group.

To Langer, this was evidence that the biomedical model of the day — that the mind and the body are on separate tracks — was wrongheaded. The belief was that “the only way to get sick is through the introduction of a pathogen, and the only way to get well is to get rid of it,” she said, when we met at her office in Cambridge in December. She came to think that what people needed to heal themselves was a psychological “prime” — something that triggered the body to take curative measures all by itself. Gathering the older men together in New Hampshire, for what she would later refer to as a counterclockwise study, would be a way to test this premise.

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Chicken Suit for the Soul

Chicken Suit for the Soul

Essays Featured Published Stories Archive

from READER’S DIGEST, June 2014

It promised to be the best job so far that summer—which wasn’t saying much. I’d been scanning the “casual labour” postings at the local employment office, vowing every visit to take something, anything. Already I had unpacked shipments of underpants, been pulled through an active sewer on a rolling sled with a bucket of caulk and a trowel, to seal cracks, and delivered flower arrangements in a car so small half the buds got crushed when you closed the hatchback. At 18, you take what you can get.

That’s why this particular gig looked so beguiling: “mascot.” To celebrate the grand opening of a new Edmonton location in the Red Rooster convenience store chain, the employer needed to catch the eye of passing motorists and was offering two days’ work to a self-starter who could bust a few dance moves on the corner.

I fit the suit. I got the job.

The outfit had clearly been washed fewer times than it had been worn. The oversize head—more chicken than rooster—was sculpted out of wire and foam and sat heavily on shoulderpads, which had been shined and flattened by sweat and compression. The moony eyes didn’t line up right with mine.

It was mid-July. Even the mosquitos were sluggish. A high-pressure system had settled on the city and forecasters were calling for record-breaking temperatures by Sunday. The suit had no ventilation. There was no relief unless you removed the head, which was only allowed during one of two 10-minute breaks, out of public view—lest any children (delicate creatures) be forever traumatized by the sight of decapitated fake fowl.

It didn’t take long for the welcome party to show up. Kids can smell the stress hormones in adult sweat even upwind, and soon half a dozen pre-teens were orbiting as I staked out a spot on the sidewalk and tried to get into character. “Hey, chicken!” one kid taunted. This was a part of town that might charitably be called “emerging.” These were tougher kids than I was used to. “Hey, chicken legs!”

My best defense was to concentrate on the job. I improvised a dance that involved standing on one leg and helicoptering the other leg and the opposite arm—er, wing—more or less in sync. It wasn’t particularly roosterly and it certainly wasn’t manly. Immediately, I could feel a change in the energy of the kids. They were homing in on a new frequency of vulnerability.

The first rock hit me in the back. I figured they were aiming for the head and I actually re-oriented to give them that bigger, softer target.

No cars slowed. A manager briefly emerged from the store, was hit by a blast of heat that lifted his toupee, then quickly darted back into his air-conditioned cave. During break time I closed the door of the store’s stock room, removed my head and hyperventilated.

That night at the supper table my dad said grace. “Lord, bless this food to our use and us to Thy service” — the same grace he had grown up with as a missionary’s son, said quietly to himself in wartime mess halls and still trotted out for his four kids, who were mostly just glad it was so short. Then he asked: “How’d it go?”

To everyone’s surprise—but mostly mine—I started to cry. I described the heat, the stench, the rocks, the sticky pavement under my chicken feet.

“And the worst part is,” I said, “I have to go out there tomorrow and do it all again.”

My father was quiet for a full 10 seconds. Then:

“No you don’t.”

This was unusual. Dad had always believed we kids should keep our commitments. The store had hired me in good faith to be a chicken (rooster) and it wasn’t cool if the chicken (rooster) didn’t show up.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean, you’re not putting on that suit tomorrow,” he said. “I am.”

Dad had wiry black eyebrows and, under them, the kindest eyes. He was 60 years old. “Look, we’re about the same size,” he said. “Who’s to know?”

We’re only lent to each other, the short-story writer Raymond Carver once said. We get to have moments, and all we can do is savour the best ones as they happen: here, now… gone. The part of me that relished imagining my father out there doing the Twist or the Bus Stop, maybe even kind of enjoying himself in the anonymity of the costume, was hard to deny. But there was no way I was letting him be the chicken. The fact that he was willing to be the chicken was enough. The gesture blew new strength into me.

The next day went well. Nothing was different, but everything was. At the end of it I deposited a cheque from Hormel Foods for $86, and felt like a king.

http://www.readersdigest.ca/magazine/ode-dad-three-memoirsFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Aging is an art. Meet three modern masters

Aging is an art. Meet three modern masters

Aging Essays Featured

 

From READER’S DIGEST, January 2015

Dr. Ephraim Engleman is often asked for his advice. The American rheumatologist, who sees patients when he’s not at the prestigious research centre he heads up at the University of California San Francisco, will turn 104 in the spring. A common query: “What’s the best way to stay as cheerfully, productively, healthily above ground as you?” “Choose your parents wisely,” he quips back.

Like many jokes, it contains a grain of truth. Genes matter. But they’re not the whole story, or even most of it. Scientists say longevity is around 30 per cent DNA and 70 per cent other factors, including lifestyle choices and psychological strategies.

We now have reams of data from longitudinal studies and twin studies and analyses of the super-seniors who inhabit the world’s so-called “blue zones” — pockets were healthy centenarians thrive. To boil down all the wisdom found therein to one word seems folly, but here goes:

Adaptation.

Humans need to be challenged. Continually. When we are, everything in us becomes a little more durable. You could say super-aging is about finding ways to grow, even into our advanced years, to offset the forces of nature trying to diminish us.

The principle applies in all dimensions of our lives, even the ones not easily measured by a heart test or a brain scan. Wisdom, character, spirit: whatever these qualities actually are, pretty clearly they anneal in the fire of “just-manageable difficulty,” no less than a marathoner’s cardiovascular system or a chess grandmaster’s frontal cortex. People who find ways to live on what poet Sam Keen called the “green, growing edge,” in all they do, are youthful — no matter what their birth certificate says.

*

Betty Jean “BJ” McHugh’s adaptation involved flipping the usual parent/child motivational paradigm on its head. We try to inspire our kids. But McHugh’s daughter inspired her. Jennifer was a swimming prodigy, a butterfly specialist who competed for Canada in the 1972 Munich Olympics at the age 15. When Jennifer announced she was done with competitive swimming three years later, her mom — who had quietly jogged on the seawall while her daughter churned laps in the pool — realized it was now her time to see how far she could go.

BJ is 87 years old. She is the fastest marathon runner on the planet in her age group by an astonishing margin: during the 2012 Honolulu marathon, she crossed the line in five hours, 12 minutes, smashing the old record by nearly half an hour. (Whereupon she did not light up a smoke to celebrate – as she had after her first marathon almost thirty years earlier. Instead she feasted with her son and granddaughter, who were also in the event.) Since her first road race at age 51, the sprite-like mother-of-four from West Vancouver has set more than 30 world records.

Aging runners are no rare sight in big-city marathons. But there comes an age point—around 80—where the numbers drop right off. Not coincidentally, it’s around the same point that human athletic performance craters. For reasons scientists can’t quite pinpoint, the body starts wearing down in double-time. Muscle mass falls sharply. Lungs lose their elasticity. Mitochondria—the tiny power plants in our cells—degrade. Bones thin. Balance falters. Old age clamps around us like a suit of armour. Anyone who has found a way to stay youthful in the face of this formidable headwind—the BJ McHughs of the world—seem mystical.

So what’s the secret?

For starters, the very exercise that becomes such a struggle when we age. The marathons McHugh runs now are far harder than the first one she ran 30 years ago, even though she’s slowed the pace significantly. Round about mile fifteen, “there’s a little war going on in my mind,” laughs BJ. It takes a mighty will not to stop and walk.

The good news: for most of us, walking is more than fine. National health associations in both Canada and the United States recommend 150 minutes brisk walking — or its equivalent — a week. While some studies maintain that working up a sweat delivers outsized benefits, the secret is finding an exercise you will actually continue to do, one that is pitched at a level that’s challenging but not overwhelming. Most sports-medicine experts recommend adding resistance training as we grow older — to strengthen bones, improve balance, and combat frailty.  After her morning run, McHugh will sometimes peel away from the tight company of her training group and pop into a yoga class. There is a level of productive restlessness about her — the same restlessness that got her into running in the first place, rather than wait in her car for her daughter to finish swimming. And that shark-like need for constant motion may be as important a key to longevity as the exercise training itself. 

McHugh doesn’t park her body for long stretches. She doesn’t sit for long without changing position. The television never comes on before the six o’clock news. She prefers walking to driving, even to her bridge games, which are five kilometres away.

Increasing evidence suggests we need to just move around as much as we need to exercise. Joan Vernikos, the former director of life sciences at NASA and godmother of “sedentary studies” suggests the single best exercise we can do, bang for buck, is standing up frequently. Again, it’s about challenging the body—in this case, with gravity. And standing up repeatedly maintains circulation by keeping blood-pressure sensors in tune. With moving comes energy, and with energy comes, well, if not eternal youthfulness, at least the mojo to be a powerful role model.

“One day out running I saw a truck pull over,” McHugh recalls. “This guy got out and said, ‘You’re BJ McHugh aren’t you?’” She recognized him. A couple of years previous, he had stopped her as she was finishing a long run. “How old are you?” he’d asked. He’d looked rough. But this time he was beaming. He said: “I’ve changed my whole life around and I’ve qualified for Boston.”

Ephraim Engleman isn’t taking on any new patients, and has begun to feel obliged to suggest to his regulars that “perhaps the time has come that you ought to think of getting another doctor.” No thanks, they say: they’ll stick with him. Experience and wisdom are things you can’t just Google.

Engleman, who is likely safe in his guess that he’s the oldest practicing physician in America, enjoys dispensing slow, dry witticisms, eyes twinkling under storks’-nest brows. He recently renewed his driver’s license (“so I’m good now until 105”), but in a nod to his family’s wishes, he sometimes lets a driver take him the 30 kilometres to work at the Arthritis Research Medical Center at UCSF, of which he is founding director. Once there, “Eph” answers correspondence, consults with colleagues, and just generally bucks the odds surrounding aging and cognition.

The chances of an individual getting dementia double every year beyond age 65. Of those lucky enough to reach 100, only 15 to 25 per cent arrive with all their marbles. The brain of the average 90-year-old is about the same size as the brain of the average three-year-old: typically the shrinkage zolpidem order diazepam comes in the frontal cortex and the hippocampus, headquarters of planning and memory filing, respectively.

Very old folks like Engleman whose wetware is still high-functioning owe much to what brain scientists call “cognitive reserve”—renovations that keep the brain humming even as senescence sets in.

Cognitive reserve is the key to aging very well from the neck up.

There are a few ways to build it.

You eat a heart-healthy diet, because fatty plaques affect both the heart and the brain. Which Engleman does.

You exercise, preferably vigorously. Which Engleman doesn’t. (“I don’t even do the walking I used to do,” he says, because of increasing back trouble that’s led to his hunched-over gait.)

You keep the brain continually challenged with reading, writing, blogging, puzzling, bridge-playing, travelling, language-learning, storytelling. The more interventions you pile on the better: the benefits seem to compound. “The principle of synergy — you know, one plus one equals three — has been shown time and time again” to forestall dementia, says Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “Having more brain activities is good for the backup system,” Isaacson says. When the brain encounters novelty it’s forced to adapt. Neurogenesis, the hatching of new grey-matter cells, has no known age limit. So not only can you teach an old dog new tricks, it’s essential if you want that dog to stay sharp. (Engleman, among other non-work-related diversions, emcees at a local social club, at writes his own material.)

You go to school: education levels correlate with brain density. Then you keep going to school, even when you’re out of school. “Lifetime intellectual enrichment” seems to delay the onset of cognitive impairment, notes Prashanthi Vemuri, the lead researcher of a new study out of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn, published in the journal JAMA Neurology. By how much? Three to six years, on average.

So far, so good for Ephraim Engleman. But he may have a secret weapon on his side as well: music.

Engleman is a former violin prodigy. He put himself through school in the 1930s partly by playing in vaudeville orchestras. He still jams with a chamber quartet once a week in his San Mateo, CA, home, where he lives with his 99-yearold wife, Jean. “Playing music,” he says “is a real stimulus—and very, very good for the soul.”

The science bears out his statement—the first part, at least. Playing music seems to challenge brain in ways that offer significant protection from cognitive impairment and dementia, studies suggest. Richard Isaacson, of Cornell, rattles off five studies that have helped build the case: In one of them, six weeks of “music therapy” increased the level of neurotransmitters in the bloodstream of Alzheimer’s patients. “Right there is the biological basis for music, in some ways,” he says. In general, “the deeper your relationship with music, the better the effect.” Indeed, Isaacson was so persuaded by the data that he picked up his guitar again—and now plays bass in a band of neuron scientists. They’re called The Regenerates.

*

In the French village of Trosly-Breuil, just north of Paris, 86-year-old Jean Vanier lives a simple life. Each day, he walks from his house to the group home he established 50 years ago, where he eats, laughs and prays with his adopted family. This is the first L’Arche community. Founded on Vanier’s vision, the organization is built around the idea that if adults with mental disabilities were settled in private homes alongside non-disabled people, the result would be a boon to both sides.

The son of former Canadian governor general Georges Vanier, he had once seemed destined for a different kind of life. Having written his PhD dissertation on Aristotle, he briefly taught philosophy at the University of Toronto. But there was a spiritual curiosity in Vanier that academia couldn’t satisfy, and he followed his mentor, a Dominican priest named Father Thomas Philippe, to France, taking on a life of voluntary poverty and daily challenge. It irks Vanier when people call him, as many are inclined to, a living saint. The sacrifice he made is no sacrifice at all, he insists, since the disabled offer us a great gift: they teach us how to become human. More generally, having to accommodate the wishes and quirks and demands of others tests our patience and, in the bargain, strengthens it. Would he be the person he is now had he remained on that earlier trajectory? “God knows,” Vanier says. “All I know is I’m here now. I have grown. I still have things to grow into—to have fewer barriers, to be more open to people. The story’s not finished. I’m 86, but the story goes on.”

Unlike physical and cognitive aging, there is no identifiable point where people start to break down spiritually—and no reliable prescription if it happens. Studies have found that those who attend religious ceremonies live longer, although who can say for sure if the active ingredient is the spiritual part and not, say, the routine, or the power of social networks, or the fibre in the little wafers (okay, we can probably rule that one out).

We tend to think of spirituality in terms of meditation or perhaps prayer, a private inward journey. To Vanier, that is only half the story. A second current nudges us in the opposite direction, out of ourselves and into meaningful contact with others. In effect, at a phase of life when many people start closing themselves off, Vanier counsels opening up. Instead of spending our later years cementing our own comfort within tiny tribes, we should be reaching out. In what one could call an adaptation response of the soul, empathy begets empathy.

In his famous Grant Study, which began in 1938 and followed a group of male undergraduates from Harvard for the rest of their lives, psychiatrist George Vaillant found that the ones who thrived into old age were the ones who, among other things, figured out how to love and be loved. If there is a reliable prescription for aging well cordially—from the heart—it’s this: the company of people you care about, and who care about you.

*

It’s not quite fair to prop up B.J. McHugh, Ephraim Engleman and Jean Vanier in their respective shop windows as models of brilliant aging of the body, brain, and soul. The ways in which people age brilliantly aren’t mutually exclusive. Indeed, these three —as with spectacularly robust old men and women of all stripes — have a fair bit in common.

All have a strong sense of purpose that pops them out of bed every morning. And while all are extraordinarily conscientious, the drive is directed outward—all three were drawn to helping professions (McHugh is a retired nurse). When Howard Friedman, a psychologist at University of California, Riverside, was crunching the data for the famous Longevity Project—a study that was published in book form in 2011 and followed more than 1,000 American children to their dotage or their grave—he discovered a pattern. The hardest workers had the longest lives.

And so we return to the old formula: strive, adapt, live on. The kites that remain in the sky the longest are pinned there by resistance.

 

 

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Keeping Up With Your Joneses

Keeping Up With Your Joneses

Essays Featured Nonagenerians Psychology Science Sport What Makes Olga Run?

From PACIFIC STANDARD MAGAZINE, Jan/Feb 2014

TO A CERTAIN kind of sports fan – the sort with a Ph.D in physiology – Olga Kotelko is just about the most interesting athlete in the world. A track and field amateur from Vancouver, Canada, Kotelko has no peer when it comes to the javelin, the long jump, and the 100-meter dash (to name just a few of the 11 events she has competed in avidly for 18 years). And that’s only partly because peers in her age bracket tend overwhelmingly to avoid throwing and jumping events. Kotelko, you see, is 94 years old.

Scientists want to know what’s different about Olga Kotelko. Many people assume she simply won the genetic lottery – end of story. But in some ways that appears not to be true. Some athletes carry genetic variants that make them highly “trainable,” acutely responsive to aerobic exercise. Kotelko doesn’t have many of them. Some people have genes that let them lose weight easily on a workout regime. Kotelko doesn’t.

Olga’s DNA instead may help her out in a subtler way. There’s increasing evidence that the will to work out is partly genetically determined. It’s an advantage that could help NYGoodHealth explain the apparently Mars/Venus difference between people for whom exercise is pleasure – the Olga Kotelkos of the world – and the coach potatoes among us for whom it’s torture.

In a spacious cage in a cramped lab in the psychology department at the University of California, Riverside, there lives an albino lab mouse who has no name, so I will call him Dean. Dean is small and twitchy, with slender musculature. He may be the world’s fittest mouse.

Dean is the product of a long-running study of voluntary exercise. Twenty years ago, the evolutionary biologist Ted Garland, then at the University of Wisconsin, gave a small group of mice access to a running wheel. The mice who liked using it the most were bred with each other, so that the trait of running fast and far was amplified in each successive generation until, almost 70 generations later, Dean emerged. When Dean wakes up in the evening (mice are nocturnal) he typically goes straight to his wheel – before eating, even – and just runs full out, making the wheel squeal. He has run as much as 31 kilometers in a night.

Garland and his colleagues believe that, genetically and physiologically, Dean is different from other rodents. “Marathon mice” like Dean seem to find exercise uncommonly satisfying – likely because of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is central to the brain’s reward circuitry. Exercise stimulates dopamine production, which in turn causes a cascade of other molecular effects – a process known as “dopamine signaling.” Dean’s dopamine signaling is unusual: when he runs, some as-yet-unidentified molecule, downstream from the dopamine receptor, gets altered so that it now provides reinforcement that normal mice don’t get.

Those differences, the scientists believe, may help explain why some of us merely tolerate exercise and why others, like Olga and Dean, love and perhaps even need a whole lot of it. If your genes predispose you to loving your workouts, as Olga’s appear to do, and if your environment offers the opportunity to work out constantly, as Dean’s wheel does for him, a certain chain reaction can start. Physical effort feels fantastic, which prompts even more effort, which delivers even bigger dose effects in mood and energy.

How does any of this matter for the rest of us schlubs, who may not be similarly endowed? File this question under “Where there’s a cause, there’s a cure.” If scientists crack the genetic code for intrinsic motivation to exercise, then its biochemical signature can, in theory, be synthesized. Why not a pill that would make us want to work out?

“One always hates to recommend yet another medication for a substantial fraction of the population, says Garland, “but Jesus, look at how many people are already on antidepressants. Who’s to say it wouldn’t be a good thing?” An up-and-at-‘em drug might increase our desire for exercise or, conversely, create uncomfortable restlessness if we sit too long.

It’s pretty clear that Dean the mouse experiences something way beyond uncomfortable restlessness if he sits too long. He is a full-on exercise junkie. When researcher Justin Rhodes, an experimental psychologist at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who joined the study at generation 20, took away his wheel, depriving him of his fix, Dean was miserable. Rhodes scanned Dean’s brain and found high activation in the area associated with cravings for drugs such as cocaine. Both “drugs” – indeed, all drugs – goose similar reward circuitry. “But I think there’s got to be some differences,” says Rhodes. “Because it’s not as if an animal that’s addicted to running is necessarily going to be addicted to cocaine or gambling.”

And therein lies another weird direction for the research to go. What if addicts could take a pill that exploits those minute differences, redirecting their jones from a harmful one to a positive one – a kind of running-as-methadone plan?
Such a pill is conceivable in principle, says University of Michigan psychologist Kent Berridge, who studies how desire and pleasure operate in humans, but developing it presents an enormous challenge. Without knowing exactly how the brain assigns urges to specific objects of desire, how do we ignite a yen to exercise without also stimulating the yen to do things that will land your customers in rehab? Or blunt the urge for drugs while leaving healthy urges untouched? Scientists within the big pharmaceutical companies are no doubt working on it, nonetheless. “I’m waiting for them to contact me and offer me funding,” Garland says dryly.

It’s the kind of drug that Olga – normally one to Just Say No – might even endorse.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

From the archives: Fishing for Madeline

From the archives: Fishing for Madeline

Essays Featured Kids Published Stories Archive

 

From READER’S DIGEST, Dec. 2010 – Quinton Gordon photograph

Today was a big day, I’d reminded my daughter. Right after kindergarten we had a date. “Rick’s taking us fishing. He’ll teach us about fish.”

Madeline, who is five, looked unmoved.

“I already know everything about fish,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yup.”

“What do you know about fish?”

“They need to eat to stay strong, and they need to be wet to stay alive. They swim with their mouth open so they never get thirsty.”

It wasn’t a bad start.

“Rick” is Rick Hansen, the renowned wheelchair athlete who, outside of his charity work, happens to know everything — or close to everything — about one particular fish. Hansen is director of the Fraser River Sturgeon Conservation Society. And as he loomed into view through a misty rain, from the deck of his boat bobbing at the public wharf in Steveston, B.C., she recognized him as the “man in motion” guy in one of her kids’ books.

Madeline had never really been fishing. Oh, I’d taken her to the Father’s Day derby at nearby Rice Lake, where about a million little kids lily-dip their lines in hopes of snagging one of the timid little trout in there. But this was something else. White sturgeon are a species so big and old and storied that catching one is almost as much of a life-changing experience as tagging it and putting it back—even for adults. The sturgeon that swim in the Fraser today are evolutionarily unchanged from the ones that swam before the ice age before the last ice age. No joke: we were going fishing for dinosaurs.

His folded wheelchair tucked between the seats, face flush with the pleasure of being out of the office, Hansen throttled up and we nosed out of port. The wind, here in the estuary, carried the tang of sea salt. The working river was doing double-time – seiners schlepping their heavy nets, tugs towing barges of sawdust, a crane lowering a tankerload of cars from Asia onto the dock. None of this interested Madeline much. Look, there were two TVs on board! When it became sadly clear that neither was going to pick up Babar, she tuned in to Rick’s explanation. One screen mapped where we were. The other was a fishfinder. “In the old days you used to be able to say, well the fish just weren’t around,” Rick said. “Now you have to admit, we just weren’t smart enough to catch them.”

Madeline sat on my lap. I could feel the warmth of her right through the yellow rubber rain pants. It was kind of blissful. To busy parents of little kids, life too often seems like a string of teachable moments squandered. By the time we realize what we should have said to help decode their wonder and give it a name, the door has slammed shut. But a day spent fishing for sturgeon is one long master-class in pretty much everything that’s important to know. The teaching goes both ways. Adults make fishing complicated, but a kid’s appreciation of it—as of most things—is big-picture simple. Today we would learn not how different a prehistoric fish is from a five-year-old girl, but how similar.

“What do you think sturgeon like to eat?” I’d queried on the drive south through Vancouver. “Worms,” Madeline said, definitively. Turned out she was right: many a novice fisherman casually dangling an earthwormed hook into the Fraser has had a near heart attack when a sturgeon the size of a dancer’s leg takes that bait. But there are things a sturgeon likes even more. Fred Helmer, a veteran BC fishing guide who was along with us, had prepared four rods—including one for Madeline and one for me. And now as we dropped anchor in Rick’s secret favorite spot near the Alex Fraser Bridge, he cast the hooks in and they sank without bubbles. On the menu today was choice pink-salmon parts and —the special of the day — a syrupy clump of skein roe that Fred called “magic bait.” These are protein-rich eggs harvested from a mama pink salmon just preparing to spawn: superpremium catnip.

Fred held his hands a foot or so apart. “How big is the fish you’re going to catch?” Madeline shook her head. He went wider. “This big?” Madeline knew exactly how big. In her kid logic, a successful fishing outing is one in which you land a fish that would fit your clothes. Madeline’s sturgeon, by that reasoning, was going to be 109 centimetres long– three foot seven. Mine would be 175 centimetres—five foot nine.

What’s cool about sturgeon fishing, though, is that it’s not about size. Every fish has equal merit. Nobody would be taking a sturgeon home for dinner tonight. Earlier this century they were fished almost to extinction—twice—and while their numbers recover, the white sturgeon of the Lower Fraser are protected. But this is more than a catch-and-release enterprise: it’s catch-and-tag-and-release. Sturgeon fisherman are tracking the population: where they’re going, how they’re growing, how many of them are out there — and data on the juveniles is just as valuable as data on the old soldiers. To fish for sturgeon is to be an adjunct scientist. Everyone who catches a sturgeon becomes part of the conservation effort, and in this sense a five-year-old’s contribution is as valuable as any biologist’s.

 

An hour of fishing under the bridge yielded but one tiny sculpin, which Madeline took great joy in setting free. But now the tide had turned. The rising sea was pushing boats upriver, giving the Fraser the appearance that it was running backwards. We were entering a dreamscape where the normal laws of physics were suspended.

The scent of that gorgeous bait was carrying on the current. For the fish, the wind had just picked up outside a bakery.

Madeline’s rod-tip twitched, subtly. Rick took the rod gently, reefed up hard on it, once, then handed it to me. A fish was on.

 

It felt big. Or at least mad. I struggled to keep too much line from peeling off the reel. “So, Rick has a couple of rules,” Fred said. “You cannot let go of the rod no matter what. If you do go over the side, hang on to the rod and we will come and get you.”

For some long minutes the tug-of-war continued. Then out of the brackish depths of the Fraser it came, Madeline’s sturgeon, tigerish stripes on its back visible first, then the sharklike head and the flicking tail defining the two ends, establishing its size. I had been trying to stay strong for Madeline—the great stoic hunter little girls expect their dads to be—but my arms were blasted. I was shaking and frankly not too far from tears.

“What’s the most humane thing to do with this fella?” I croaked as we brought him alongside.

“Just keep him in the water, relaxed,” Rick said. “We have to set up.”

The fish was still. “Is he dead?” Madeline asked.

“No, Sweetie. He’s had better days. But he’ll be fine.”

Fred guided Madeline’s sturgeon into a hammock-like sling in the water, which Rick then winched up into the boat. Madeline put on gloves. She came up to her fish. It seemed less like a fish than some kind of farm animal with body armour. Something in a medieval petting zoo. We watched the gills opening and closing, flashes of crimson beneath. Was it suffering?

“Sturgeon aren’t like some other fish, where after five minutes out of the water they’re done,” Rick said. “They are incredibly hardy.”

“Back in the day when you could catch and keep sturgeon, my dad would store them on the lawn, for three or four days, with the sprinkler on them – and then go sell them in Chinatown,” Fred said.

“Here’s the mouth—see how leathery it is? Look how it comes out – like a vacuum hose. And these things on its nose are chemical sensors for detecting prey.”

Rick turned in his chair. “They have the ability to locate food that’s way more sophisticated than ours, using vibrations,” he said. Madeline, who sometimes has trouble locating the snacks in her backpack, stroked her sturgeon, its sandpapery skin, incredibly gently.

 

I picked her up and held her, lengthwise, over top of her sturgeon. It was her size. A measurement confirmed it – within a centimeter. It was probably a few years older. Fred produced an instrument, like the little retail-store gun that scans the barcode tags, and passed it over the fish. BEEP! A microchip under the fish’s skin sent a signal, and a number popped up in the scanner viewscreen.

The fish had been caught once before – on November 22, 2006. Since that day, we would learn, the fish had grown nine centimeters in length but only one in girth – taller but not much fatter. Like Madeline herself. I had a flashback to St. Paul’s hospital, our daughter emerging grey-pink and slimy and a doctor moving her under a warm light and producing a tape measure. Madeline stuck out beyond the last mark, off the charts. “Our child cannot be measured by science!”)

“You can check on your fish once a year,” Rick told Madeline. Thousands of BC schoolkids, from grade two to grade seven, are monitoring the sturgeon stocks by following the stories of individual fish like this one.

As Madeline’s fish rested in the sling, a second sturgeon was brought aboard. This time the scan was beepless. So: a new capture. This fish had never been above water. Fred loaded a little glass tag the size of a grain of rice into what looked like a hypodermic needle.

“I’ll try not to get this needle in my hand—that has happened before,” Fred said. “Now, Madeline, we put the tag right under the surface of his skin, so when the fish grows the tag can move around in his body.”

We tipped both fish toward the river and they slipped in, headfirst. I thought, romantically, that Madeline’s fish might look back at her before swimming away, but it didn’t. Madeline asked to be picked up. She was dead weight. I had the notion that she was drained of energy in sympathy with her exhausted fish.  (Or, less likely, in sympathy with her exhausted dad.) Probably it was just a perfect storm of a couple of late nights, fresh air and a glucose crash from the nut bars.

But clearly, this was all almost too much for her to process. She didn’t have the language for it.

I wondered what new fears we had introduced on this trip. The idea of a whole teeming subsurface world: monsters under the bed. Her fish had been brought up gasping into the air. It looked bad, but it really wasn’t, we insisted. Did she buy it? (You could see her searching for the right analogy and later she found it. “How would you like to be holded under water?”) A million mind-blowing factoids swirled: Dinosaurs are real. Dads are weaker than they let on. And the people we read about in books might one day step out of those books and take us fishing.

She had been a motormouth on the car ride over. From the back seat issued strong opinions on how Beethoven lived in China, how things were better in the days when dads like me weren’t underfoot and moms played with kids and gave them treats. (Also: could she have a horse?) But now she was silent. I looked down at her in my arms. She was asleep.

 

You can guess how the rest of the story goes. Kid logic prevailed. The sun broke through. Soon after my own fishing rod twitched with a bite. After a monumental struggle that ensured I’d be sleeping with a heating pad for days, I brought this last fish in. Madeline was awake now, saucer-eyed, trying to get close without getting in the way. Fred’s hand got raked by the pointy scutes and was trailing blood as he scanned it.

This fish was monstrous. It measured 93 centimetres around, its belly probably full of pink salmon. It was between sixty and eighty years old – the age of grandpas and grandmas. Now it was going back. With great luck it will still be here a generation from now, and maybe Madeline will catch it again with her own five-year-old son or daughter on a fine fall day like this one.

But there was one thing that didn’t square. Madeline’s fish was Madeline-sized. Mine was supposed to be my dad-sized: that was what she’d ordered. We measured it. From its nose to the tip of its tail it was around 215 centimetres. Madeline leaned close.

“That’s you?” she said.

I shook my head. “It’s taller.”

Then it clicked.

“That’s you on my shoulders.”Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

From the archives: To Snip or Not to Snip

From the archives: To Snip or Not to Snip

Essays Featured Kids

The complicated questions a vasectomy can pose

FROM TODAY’S PARENT, October 2009

Not long after our second daughter was born, my wife, Jen, began leaving vasectomy pamphlets around. This is the way parents sometimes introduce important conversations to teenagers, whose notorious sensitivity prevents things from being discussed more openly. And I can’t claim it was a bad approach, because the end of a man’s reproductive life (and so abruptly!) is a flinchingly uncomfortable moment; it feels like being fired from the only job you were ever really qualified to do. And then there is the thing itself, the idea of a knife at work down there. All that barnyard poetry comes flooding back: the farmer snipping off the tip of the scrotum like he’s scissoring the tip of a cigar. Jay-sus.

But Jen was right. It had to be done. I’m 45 years old. We’re happily married. It’s the responsible thing.

“I’ll start saving up for it right now,” I told her.

“Um, it’s covered by your health insurance, my friend.”

Here in Vancouver, when you think of vasectomy operations one name pops to mind. Neil Pollock is not so much a doctor as a brand. His ads for “virtually painless,” “no needle, no scalpel” amount to a bloodless severing of a man’s more visceral qualms. Seven minutes and you’re done. Up to 25 men move through his clinic a day. Pollock has cut more ribbon than the mayor. There’s even a “premium” option for guys who fancy themselves too busy for the follow-up visits. (You pay a little surcharge for unlimited post-op phone access.) It all seems perfectly packaged for the modern, hyperdecisive guy: get your snip, get back to work, and don’t think about any of this ever again, buster.

Except that when you go to the website, you discover that Pollock also performs circumspection. What if you change your mind? It turns out that “up to seven percent” of men, “within a few years of having the surgery done,” wish they’d never been cut. At which point they’re stuck. Reverse-vasectomies cost about $5,000 and work maybe half the time. But Pollock isn’t talking himself out of business, just suggesting an elegant option, an escape hatch that makes the commitment seem less permanent: Freeze your sperm. A couple of local facilities, unaffiliated with the clinic, will keep it for you in cold storage. While many vasectomy docs don’t even mention the possibility of freezing sperm, Pollock strongly promotes it as a kind of cheap insurance policy. (It’s not that cheap — $500 for five years in the bank. But then, it’s not practical to cut costs by doing it at home, in your own freezer. The cells die, and anyway, you know the spooge is going to end up in someone’s scotch.)

“I’d do it,” Pollock told me during our telephone consultation, when I asked him about freezing sperm. “At your age, you never know.”

At my age — which is also Pollock’s age — terrible, unforeseen things can happen and do, yet a man is still young enough to rewrite a workable script for the second half of his life. I don’t feel particularly young; I frankly can’t see myself ever again touching my toes. But apparently it doesn’t matter if the flesh is weak as long as the swimmers are willing. And there’s no social stigma against embarrassingly old guys siring kids. On the contrary.

“Do not forget,” Pollock’s website points out, “Aristotle Onassis had his last child at 85 years old. David Letterman at 58.”

And so, quite suddenly, what had seemed such a straightforward decision wasn’t.

“It really would be a shame to lose this sperm,” I said to Jen, offhandedly. “Because it’s no ordinary sperm. As soon as we pulled the goalie we conceived — every time. Do you know what the odds of that are? We’re incredibly fertile. You have Fabergé eggs. And my guys are like a billion little Ian Thorpes. Not saving this stuff, it’d be like being blessed with 60/20 vision and giving away your eyes.”

This is called rationalization.

Jen’s expression said, Please get a second opinion.

And here is where a man gets gold-standard advice from his friends, because I guarantee you any guy older than 40 has thought about vasectomies — a lot. What emerged in these discussions was a strong case against saving sperm, at least for couples like us.

One wise friend pointed out the canny salesmanship of that whole insurance-policy metaphor: You may not ever use that sperm, but you want to know that you could. That touches something very deep in the male psyche. There is a German word that captures what a lot of guys feel in midlife: torschlusspanik. Fear of the gates closing. Fear of options evaporating. The option to store sperm exploits those fears quite perfectly.

The middle-aged guy tends to feel that he hasn’t really amounted to what he wanted to amount to — but he could still find his groove, and when he does he’ll want to share the mojo. His sperm, too, will become golden. “They’re playing around with the mythology of what it means to be a man,” my pal said. “And what a time to do it. Because, literally, they’ve got you by the balls.”

Another wise friend came in from another angle with advice that’s hard to refute. “Look, if you’re in a position to use that frozen sperm, it’s because something very bad has happened — in which case, having another baby is probably the last thing that should be on your mind. And anyway, do you really want to be changing diapers at 50? I sure as hell don’t.”

Jen and I were inching so gingerly into this discussion, it was clear, because we both sensed how fraught it was, what power it had to change the ecosystem of a marriage. Freezing sperm surely has something of the same impact that a pre-nuptial agreement does. It’s as if part of you has already disengaged and is surfing the dial for an alternative future, with a different house and a different dog and a different name you call out in bed. Yes, it’s naïve to think it couldn’t happen. But wouldn’t that time and energy be better spent with your partner, right now, digging in?

The next night we peeked in on Madeline. She’d fallen asleep with a yellow helium balloon from a four-year-old friend’s party wrapped around her wrist, suspended two feet above her head like a small, still moon.

We stood there in the doorway just looking at here. “This is far and away the best thing that has happened to us,” I said. “I can see why people just want to keep going.”

“But…”

“But. Yes.”

“We got two great ones.”

“We got lucky.”

“Yes.”

“We should walk away from the table.”

The next morning I called Pollock Clinics and booked the appointment. Would we be freezing sperm? No, I didn’t think so. No.

The receptionist slotted me in for two weeks hence. “Oh, and don’t forget to shave.”

This was an unwelcome little tic amid the bigger issues: You gotta shave the huevos.

All in all we were peace with the decision. Ready to go.

And then something happened.

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Jen asked one morning. She’d been having second thoughts. About the frozen sperm? About all of it.

“What if our ship came in tomorrow? What if we won the lottery?”

She was feeling particularly in love with her three-month old girl. They are unbelievably charismatic, babies, you know?

Something was up. It turned out that, at that birthday party, the kids had been exposed to whooping cough. (The boy’s chagrined parents phoned Jen to warn us.) That’s no big deal for vaccinated toddlers, but if a tiny baby contracts it, the mortality rate is one in 200. Lila’s exposure was limited; the odds against serious problems seemed small. But fear doesn’t know from the odds. Fear was now driving.

“What if….” The idea was too terrible to finish.

“We’d try again.”

“How?”

“I’ll freeze sperm.”

“But … that seems silly when we could get it fresh.”

The clock ticked. Stars were born and died.

“This isn’t going to happen, is it?” I said.

Jen shook her head no.

I called the clinic. You can avoid the cancellation fee if you call 48 hours in advance. We didn’t quite make it.

“Two hundred dollars,” the receptionist said.

I fished out my Visa card.

“I guess this happens a lot, eh, cold feet?”

“No, actually” she said. “Maybe once a month.” The put us among the one-fifth of one percent of couples who flake.

As least I didn’t shave the huevos.
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The Library of Flesh and Blood

The Library of Flesh and Blood

Essays Featured Psychology

From THE RESPONSIBILITY PROJECT, by Liberty Mutual

The sign just inside the doors of Surrey City Centre Library was small enough, or strange enough, that most of the patrons who’d been waiting outside filed right past it without even noticing.

Human Library—Open Today

Surrey City Library, in a bedroom community of Vancouver, British Columbia, is a just-opened Modernist gem, and it has all of the things you’d expect in a library — books and magazines and scores of multimedia options —plus one rare new thing: a small collection of “human books” that you can “sign out” for 30 minutes at a time.*

Human books are, simply, people. They are volunteers who have made themselves available to the public, as stories. They were chosen because they have something unique to say and a compelling way of saying it, and because they reflect the cultural diversity of the community. Theirs are stories that – because they don’t involve vampires or boy wizards or ladies’ detective agencies— might otherwise be lost, in the blockbuster-or-nothing climate of today’s publishing world.

The books sat at tables, waiting for readers. About half of them were mustered in a big room. Beside each was a glass of water, a timer, and a little box of breath mints. (Aesthetes might argue that printed books “breathe” – and indeed the subtle smell of paper and glue is a crucial part of the reading experience that’ll be lost when we all go fully digital. But actual bad breath would surely be a bringdown for any reader.) One book stood out. It wore a vest bearing a sign in thick black block letters: I AM A BOOK.

The vested man was named Abdifatah. He had an easy smile and red-rimmed eyes —the badge of new-fatherhood. Abdifatah was a Somali refugee who had fled that country’s civil war in the mid-1990s and resettled in Canada. His story was ostensibly about “the immigrant experience” – but that title, I discovered after checking him out, barely scratched the surface.

You don’t read a human book the way you read a regular book. The exchange is, in principle, more like a dialogue. “Ask any question that occurs to you,” Ravi Basi, the project’s co-coordinator, put it, by way of instruction. But once Abdifatah got rolling, I didn’t dare interrupt him. Around ten minutes in, the poetic heart of his tale breathtakingly emerged.

When Abdifatah was 11 years old, growing up amid growing chaos in Mogadishu, he and his older brother were kidnapped and held for months by rebel soldiers. The boys were forced into servitude, given chores like making meals and laundering bloodstained clothes. It was corrosive stuff for a little kid, and Abdifatah’s brother was determined to protect him from the worst of it. He would soften the nightmarish edges of day-to-day life by confabulating stories that sanitized the truth.

“He’d make it like a fairy tale,” Abdifatah said. “He would say, ‘Abdi, they’re hunting animals – that’s how the blood got on these clothes!’”  (In actual fact Abdifatah’s brother had stripped those bloody clothes off of dead soldiers himself.) The older boy kept the younger boy’s spirits up, day after day. It became clear that this human book wasn’t really about a young African man’s transition to Western culture, as advertised. It was about brotherly love.

It is the responsibility of a community to protect its stories. So an anthropologist buy brand name ambien might argue. It is the responsibility as human beings to step into each others’ shoes on a regular basis. So a philosopher might argue. Actually, that’s one of the reasons we read books. But it’s not the only one.

We read to confirm our biases. We read to bore deeper into an area of interest. Sometimes – though not often, it must be said – we read to “challenge ourselves,” says Basi, with a book that relates experiences or beliefs that oppose our own.

That, indeed, was the founding principle of the first-ever human library experiment, launched a dozen years ago in Denmark after a tragic event. A young man had been stabbed in a nightclub, and five of his friends were grasping for answers. Violence, they concluded, is a product of ignorance and misunderstanding; it melts in light. So if potential adversaries could sit down with each other—the book and its hostile reader, so to speak — anger and mistrust could be defused. The project was born. One of its first “books’ was a policeman, and one of his first readers was an illegal graffiti artist.

Since then, a handful of other human-library experiments have sprung up here and there – notably in Australia—each nodding to the original concept, but broadening it to scratch other, less political, itches of curious readers.

After the timer on Abdifatah’s desk buzzed, signaling my time with him was up, I thanked him and moved, a little stunned, out into the main stacks. By this time more readers had found their way to the human library. One was a man who had just come to drop off a book, then co-incidentally discovered a kindred spirit in a human book named Sara Grant, the mother of an autistic boy. He promptly signed her out, and the two settled in to a quietly intense discussion. (The man’s grandson is autistic; he had done a lot of book-reading, but had spoken to precious few people in similar circumstances.)

I started giddily signing out other human books.

One was about  “laughing yoga,” by a teacher of that emerging discipline. Another concerned an East-Asian woman named Anita who had remained defiantly single, despite her parents’ best efforts to marry her off. A third was about the world of competitive crossword-puzzling, told by an international champion. All of my books were chatty and unguarded –qualities of temperament that the organizers selected for. At least one book – Anita– was unaware of how great a premise she was, and unsure if she’d make a compelling read. “I was kind of worried no one would check me out,” she admitted. More than once I thought: this is the real thing, a tale told around the primitive fire—no editing, distribution or downloading required.

Moving from table to table felt dizzyingly promiscuous, like literary speed-dating. But my mind kept returning to Abdifatah and his brother.

I confess I can’t tell you the brother’s name. I forgot to ask, and now it’s too late. There’s no going back to Abdifatah to check.

Unless I renew him.

* Note that Surrey library’s human books, unlike its print books, aren’t continuously available. (That would be a lot to ask of volunteers.) Rather, they will be made available periodically. Staff have yet to decide how frequently to run human library days.

Postscript: Abdifatah has checked in. His brother’s name is Mohamed.

— Bruce GriersonFacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Congrats, you’re a Dad. Time to dial back the risk-taking?

Congrats, you’re a Dad. Time to dial back the risk-taking?

Essays Featured Kids Psychology Sport

From THE RESPONSIBILITY PROJECT by LIBERTY MUTUAL, June 29, 2011

Not long ago, a French-Canadian skydiver named Pascal Coudé, who hopes to break a world record by freefalling for 6 to 7 minutes from an altitude of 30,000 feet, was telling me about his preparation. He plans to make the jump in a baggy costume known as a “wingsuit” – a specially designed jumpsuit with webbing that catches wind and creates massive air resistance. Sounds fun, but in fact it’s incredibly dangerous. If you tire and lose your stable position, you can start tumbling uncontrollably.

When the time seemed right I asked Coudé: “Do you have kids?” He replied that he does – a 19-year-old son.

“Do you think about him as the plane nears the drop zone?”

No, Coudé said. “I’m thinking only of the jump: nothing else.” There could be no distractions up there, in the brief prelude to glory.

Everything about “adventurers” tends to be writ large – which is what makes them such appealing profile subjects. Over the years I’ve covered a guy trying to skydive from the troposphere; a woman diving unprecedentedly deep in the ocean on a single breath; a Norwegian explorer walking across remote northern Canada, without support or even a phone. These are seriously brave people, and very often there’s poignancy to their motivations.

For years I never thought to ask such people, the takers of ungodly risk, if they have children. But now I always ask. It strikes me as an essential question. Seven years ago, when my wife called her dad to tell him his first grandchild – our daughter – had just been born, his first word was: “Congratulations!” He left a beat, and then said: “Your life is no longer your own.” Welcome, in other words, to the world of real, adult responsibility. His statement raised questions about the costs of adventuring. Did morally defensible risk now begin and end with serving past-the-date spaghetti sauce once in a while?

British mountaineering writer Robert Macfarlane makes the distinction between “acceptable risk” and “gratuitous risk.” The moment you become a parent the dividing line shifts, he suggests, and those life-threatening ascents that once earned you praise for courage now fall into the zone of indefensible. On this subject utilitarian philosophers are likewise pretty clear on the rules. To put it in Spock-ish terms: the needs of the many trump the needs of the one.

And so when my daughter Madeline was born I decided, with some encouragement from my wife, that my own Darwin-baiting escapades were over. No more aimless multi-day rambles in the British Columbia wilderness; no more solo kayaking across the Strait of Georgia or scrambles across snow bridges on Rainier. It was an easy choice for someone like me, who really was just goofing around under the flag of extended adolescence. Risk was a hobby, not a calling, and I happily let it go.

But what about professional adventurers like Coudé? For them it’s not about growing up: they’re grown. It isn’t really even about choice. Risk is so much part of what they do, and what they do is so much part of who they are, and who they are is so closely linked to a script that they feel was written for them, that thinking about stopping doesn’t compute. Force them to change and they would simply … cease to be.

“How could I have stopped her?” responded James Ballard when reporters asked what business his wife, Alison Hargreaves, had in summiting K2 – a far more treacherous peak than Everest – when she had young children waiting patiently for her to return. Hargreaves, considered by many the world’s best woman climber, was blown off the mountain in a violent storm in 1995. Hers became a morality tale for the issue of acceptable risk. Harsh judgment tarnished her legacy – harsher, arguably, than it would have been for a man. (Putting a mountain ahead of one’s kids struck many as antithetical to the natural mothering instinct.)

But Hargreaves had her defenders. After the climb that left him a widower, Ballard received letters from women who praised her for not capitulating to domestic life and setting down her ambitions. Her life, even shortened, was a victory for women, they said; becoming a parent doesn’t foreclose on our questing human nature, or at least it shouldn’t. We’re here to see what we can do. Hargreaves had inspired them to follow their own trajectories, these mothers said, no matter what anybody else thought or said.

Of course, Hargreaves’s children never got a vote in the matter. Their mom went to work and one day she didn’t return, plain as that. But her daughter, Kate, and son, Tom, 20 and 22 respectively, are now in a position to weigh in. Both say they are proud of their mother. Tom in particular has become a seriously skilled mountaineer. He’s currently in training to summit the peak that killed his mom, and he may become the first to scale it in winter. He understands her compulsion to push the limits of the sport because, he says, it’s in him too.

Maybe the Spock doctrine about “the needs of the many” and the “needs of the one” is insufficient. It gives equal weight to every life without measure of the quality of that life – how enhanced or impoverished it becomes when you add or subtract risk. The question What do we owe to others? is incomplete without its corollary: What do we owe to ourselves?

Sometime this summer, probably over Arizona, Pascal Coudé will leap from a plane in his wingsuit. And I’m positive that, as he falls — a flying squirrel fighting to hold position in the sky —he won’t be thinking about moral calculus, or utilitarian philosophy. Neither will his son.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Dam it All

Dam it All

Essays Featured
From EIGHTEEN BRIDGES, September 2010
Castor sisyphus canadensis.

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Why Do I Get So Lost?

Why Do I Get So Lost?

Essays Featured Psychology Science

From EXPLORE MAGAZINE, March 2010

Let me tell you a few things about my relationship with the points of the compass, and then we’ll jump to the meat of this thing.

At shopping malls, my eldest daughter has to frequently tell me where we parked. She is five.

Once, while visiting Paris, I went out for a jog and got disoriented. Eventually I spotted a police officer, and I pulled from my shoe the address where we were staying. “Ah,” he said. “You want to go back to Paris.”

On a quest many years ago to climb the highest mountain on Vancouver Island, a pal and I got so lost that there was no turning back, because it just wasn’t clear which way back was. It wasn’t clear where forward was, either, except that we’d seen a plane fly in over the ridge ahead, so we went that way. (Did I mention that my pal was bleeding from a head wound?) It was a long shot but—don’t you see?—it was the only shot, because that slot in the horizon was our lone landmark.

I am like Captain Peter “Wrong Way” Peachfuzz on the old Rocky and Bullwinkle TV show, who was so navigationally inept that the crew kept him on a fake bridge, with dummy instruments, so that buy generic phentermine imprint e5000 he’d think he was in charge while the ship was in fact being steered elsewhere. My instincts are reliably wrong—which is as good as their being reliably right. You can take a “gut” reading and—Hello, Cleveland!—go do the opposite.

I tell you this not as a pathetic cry for help, or a claim to a perverse kind of pride, but to try to understand: Why does people’s sense of direction vary so wildly?

My own case by no means defines the low ground. There is a woman in my hometown of Vancouver—I can’t tell you who because she’s only described, not named, in the journal Neuropsychologia—who suffers from a pathology called “developmental topographical disorientation.” She’s in her 40s, and in most ways fully functioning—she can watch TV and read the newspaper and even get to and from work so long as she doesn’t deviate one iota from her regular route. But she can also get lost on the way home from the bus stop. She can’t make and store accurate mental images of her environment.

This kind of impairment is vanishingly rare, but it does make you wonder. Are those of us with more moderate symptoms different in kind or just degree? Is there a genetic component to this?

Full post:

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Kids Gone Wild

Kids Gone Wild

Essays Featured Kids Psychology

There’s a new movement out there to get children into nature

from EXPLORE MAGAZINE, August 2009

A huge—and I mean huge—black bear walked right past the car as I was loading my infant daughter into the back seat. It was in no particular hurry. It had emerged from the forest and was cutting through our driveway en route to the dumpster near the elementary school, where it would poke around and then hang a left back into the wild. We both watched it recede. At 300 feet it still looked pretty big. Lila was curious but not frightened: it occurred to me that buy xanax 0.25 mg living among bears—not to mention coyotes and the odd cougar—is normal for her now. And that’s a good thing, I think.

“You know why I like it here?” my wife explained to someone not long after we’d moved to this little townhouse complex, high on the flank of Vancouver’s North Shore mountains. “Because the only predators you have to worry about have four legs. And I’ll take those over the two-legged kind any day.”

Read the whole story here:

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Father Abraham

Father Abraham

Essays Featured Profiles

From VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, July 1, 2008

At the tiny hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant around the corner from his Point Grey house, Abraham Rogatnick needs no introduction. He is a regular, with his table, his chair. On a sunny afternoon not long ago the owner looked up as he came through the door. She smiled sweetly with a tiny bow of the head, disappeared into the back, and quietly returned with the Yellow Pages for him to sit on.

Rogatnick is an elfin man. Wearing a neatly knotted black tie and white shirt under a red sweater, he could be Billy Crystal’s dad. His face rings a bell, the way character actors’ faces do, though you can’t be sure where you’ve seen them. In Rogatnick’s case, it could have been the crime drama Just Cause, in which he played a nutty old judge on a couple of episodes. Since he broke into acting around 1998, at age 74—propelled by a love for the language of Shakespeare, and with a little more time on his hands at last—he has been steered by his agent away from the stage and into movie and TV roles, more Lear than Romeo.

“I’ve played old men,” he said. “Usually dying old men.”

It occurred to him, as he worked on his chicken soup, that he’d eaten here for four consecutive days, with a different companion each time. Though he retired from the architecture department at UBC in 1985, academics and artists and former students seek him out. Something about him invites questions.

His face registered his pleasure with the soup. “It’s so good today,” he said. “It’s better than it has been for a long time. It must be a new batch.” It was the soup of the day, the soup of the place. If you tried to take it home it wouldn’t be the same soup. He lingered over it. “I eat very slowly,” he said. “I just can’t swallow as fast as everyone else.”

There are people who visibly wield power. And then there are the people who quietly prop them up. Sometimes the backroom partners emerge with a bit of a profile of their own—Raymond Carver’s editor, Helen Keller’s teacher, George W. Bush’s pastor—but more often they don’t. Influence that isn’t particularly interested in fame can easily stay hidden. It’s a different kind of power, exerted by sitting on design panels or crafting inspirational lectures that ignite promising students or eating dinner with men who buy ink by the barrel—but it’s vital to the forward movement of the culture.

Abraham Rogatnick (“Abe” is reserved for his oldest friends) is an architect, a historian, a professor, a public intellectual. Newspaper reporters sometimes reach for goofy catchall phrases like “octogenarian livewire” to describe him because no single label captures him.

Behold Abraham Jedidiah Rogatnick. Who trained at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design under the directorship of Walter Gropius—the Bauhaus founder and one of the pioneers of modern architecture. Who popped into town in the fall of 1955 for a quick visit and was welcomed by the arts community the way a drowner welcomes a floating barrel, and just never left. Who pretty much explained modern-art to Vancouver—after opening the doors to one of the first contemporary art galleries in Canada. (This was six weeks after arriving.) Who helped create what became the Arts Club Theatre, and was parachuted in to restore stability to the Vancouver Art Gallery after its Watergate in 1974. Who invented a “studies abroad” program for architecture students, so they could live in some of the world’s great cities. (When you leave home, as the poet said, you see your own home.) Who chose a water-squeezed tourist mecca for the first platoon of outgoing UBC architecture students—and became one of the world’s foremost authorities on Venice. (That there are plenty of lessons Vancouver can learn from Venice has been one of his chief preoccupations.) Who walked its streets with Buckminster Fuller and Louis Kahn, as their interpreter. Who may have covered more of Vancouver on foot than anyone else alive. Who hiked the Chilkoot Trail with Pierre Berton. Who met Bill Reid when Reid had only recently learned he had some Haida blood in him (and so was phasing out of a career as a CBC broadcaster to explore his roots in art). Who would stand at the intersection of a sample of some of Vancouver’s most important architects and painters of the last century: the landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander, architects Arthur Erickson and Ned Pratt and Ron Thom and Barry Downs and Fred Hollingsworth, painters Bert Binning and Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith. Who was present at the birth of West Coast modernism—the closest we have come to an indigenous art movement—and managed to keep his eye on the ball as a new bunch of artists emerged to put Vancouver on the map again. (He remains good friends with Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Ian Wallace, Attila Richard Lukacs.) Who is one of a very few men in this city who can get away with wearing a cape. Who tipped the last Vancouver mayoral election. And who claims to be puzzled that people think he’s worth writing about.

Full post:

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An Atheist in the Pulpit

An Atheist in the Pulpit

Essays Featured Psychology

Public identity and private faith are never more at odds than when a preacher loses his faith

from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, January 2008

James McAllister, a 56-year-old Lutheran minister in the midwest, was working on his sunday sermon one Thursday afternoon last summer. It wasn’t going well. The reverend wasn’t suffering from writer’s block—in fact, he was crafting quite an elegant parable about “the importance of making our whole lives a prayer.” No, the problem was bigger than that. The sermon skated around a private truth that McAllister could no longer deny.

McAllister has learned that you can tell inspirational stories, grounded in social justice and tolerance and peace, without having to bring God into the picture—and this sermon was a masterful case in point. A woman in his congregation had recently dropped everything to care for her cancer-stricken daughter, and that selfless commitment was sacred in its way. “You can see how I cook the books a little bit to make it easier to look in the mirror,” he says of his sermons. “But there are times when I get that sort of empty feeling in my stomach, like I’m a fraud.”

Read the rest of the story here:

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The Age of U-Turns

The Age of U-Turns

Essays Featured Psychology U-Turn Book

from TIME MAGAZINE (US edition)

April 5, 2007

It’s easy to get the sense these days that you’ve stumbled into a party where the punch is spiked with some powerful drug that dramatically alters identity. The faces are familiar, but the words coming out of them aren’t. Something has happened to a lot of people you used to think you knew. They’ve changed into something like their own opposite.

There’s Bill Gates, who these days is spending less time earning money than giving it away–and pulling other billionaires into the deep end of global philanthropy with him. There’s historian Francis Fukuyama, leading a whole gang of disaffected fellow travelers away from neoconservatism. And in the back, humming Give Peace a Chance, the new Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega, former head of the Marxist Sandinistas. The comandante has come around on open anyone order tramadol online economies and free trade and is courting foreign investment as the way out for his nation’s poor.

From modest recants–Oprah Winfrey on James Frey, NBA commissioner David Stern on leather balls, Rupert Murdoch on global warming–to full-on ideological 180s, reappraisal is in the air. The view long held by social psychologists that people very rarely change their beliefs seems itself in need of revision.

To flip-flop is human. Oh, sure, it can still sometimes be a political liability, evidence of a flaky disposition or rank opportunism. But there are circumstances in which not to reverse course seems almost pathological. He’s a model of consistency, Stephen Colbert said last year of George W. Bush: “He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday–no matter what happened on Tuesday.”

Read the whole article here:

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“Chasquis! Take This Message!”

“Chasquis! Take This Message!”

Essays Featured Human Power

 

For The Stress Fractures, a team of highly amateur runners assembled for a single day’s heroic shenanigans, trouble came — for the first time — 40 kilometres outside of Jasper, Alberta.

It was 1:30 pm and crowding 27 degrees C. One hundred and sixty two competitors, strung out along the shoulder of Highway 93, were baking like macaroons. And the thing about the Jasper-to-Banff relay is, you can never really prepare for heat, because the moment you do you’ll get snowed on. Such are the cruel variables of the Rockies in June.

The Stress Fractures had front-end loaded their squad, with strong runners in the first three of the 17 legs, and were actually in a respectable position—around 35th place — when the third guy, Alan Cassels, came threshing into the exchange area and handed off the baton. Runner 4, not wanting to embarrass himself, was giving it all he had, spraying pea gravel across the long shadows of the mountains of the Athabasca River Valley, his gait so ungainly people actually remarked on it as they cruised past in support vehicles.

Or so I heard later. Runner 4, you see, was me.

It was some Jesus hot. The last kilometer of my leg climbed to a ridge, and as I approached it our next runner, Patrick Maguire of Victoria, swam into view. I waved the baton in Patrick’s direction, he reached for it, and… all went granular.

It turned out that the two litres of cranberry juice I had guzzled up the road looked just a little too much like blood when I puked them back up into the bunchgrass. Next thing I knew there were sirens, paramedics, a needle in my arm. (Two weeks later, back at home in Vancouver, there would arrive in the mailbox a bill for $150 for the ambulance: those Albertans are cost-recovery fiends.)

Wildflowers were in bloom beside the highway. It was quite a lovely place to lie, drinking through a vein and contemplating what made this annual event so great; what made it, as one American running publication gushed, the best organized and most beautiful relay race in the world, anywhere, anytime, ever.” The premise was simple. Each team had 24 hours to move a glow-in-the-dark baton 288 kilometres. (Exceed the time limit and your only reward was in heaven, because you were disqualified.) There were teams from Switzerland, Peru, the Netherlands, the Cayman Islands, all over the US — and every year a squad of thoroughbreds from Japan that was rumoured to have a couple of Olympians and a partially bionic guy on it, a team that perennially surged into the lead from the get-go and wasn’t seen again until they emerged from Melissa’s the next morning with pancake crumbs on their shirts.

Adventure races are no novelty any more, but this one broke ground when it started in 1980, and it retained a certain aura. Bottom line: it got city people away from their desks and into the subalpine, and contrived for them an unmatchable wilderness experience. For one day, parts of a highway that moves a million cars a year were empty but for support vehicles. It was like flipping back the calendar to 1929, before there was a highway here. By dusk, the competitors were so widely separated that each had the sensation of being completely alone. Slip the baton behind your back and there was not a human-made sight or sound to betray the illusion that you had been air-dropped in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter — the sort of circumstance that’s likely to produce a vision, or a change in life purpose. Or at the very least, if it happened to involve a midnight encounter with a grizzly sow and her cubs near the Bow Summit, a change of underpants.

Alas, those wildlife encounters, and complaints over the disruption of traffic, and concerns over the environmental impact—the Parks Board began to demand that organizers pay for a study of the race’s environmental impact—proved to be an even bigger bear.

In 2000, the race was re-invented, with a slightly different format. It’s now broken in two, with the two halves run simultaneously in the daylight, so it’s over by dusk. Without the night legs, it lacks a little of the mythic, gotta-get-this-message-to-Marathon feel. But it’s safe to say that everyone who ever ran it has a different appreciation of that stretch of road—and probably, of nature itself.

Before the J2B, I’d driven the Icefields Parkway probably a half-dozen times, cruising beneath the hatchet faces of Mt. Wilson and Mt. Chephren, progress slowed by mountain sheep and families from Utah taking snapshots of meltwater rilling down the grey-green cliffs of the Weeping Wall, or of the glaciers with the bare bits below them, like trouser hems—evidence of how much the ice has receded. Even through tempered glass it’s all perfectly marvelous, a strip of highway that Stompin’ Tom should have immortalized the way Woody Guthrie did Route 66. (When you stop for gas at Saskatchewan River Crossing, you realize that the filling station and visitor’s centre there are the only man-made structures along the entire route.)

There’s a strong case to be made that that usual way to see the Parkway – by car – is the best way. The entire linked chain of five river valleys spools past in about the time it takes to watch Brokeback Mountain (which was filmed nearby), and you can Tivo-pause at any time to pull over for a hey-Martha view of the Kerkeslin Goat Lick or Bridal-Veil Falls. You’re barely aware of the car gearing down as it climbs up out of the subalpine forest and noses over wind-hammered passes that rival the altitude of the high points on the Tour de France.

But for me, completing the route – or at least a little slice of it — on foot personalized the Icefields Parkway in a way that’s a bit hard to explain. I can’t drive it now without experiencing the road as a necklace of 15-km-long segments, each of which I conflate with the friend who gritted his or her teeth and knocked that leg off, bringing the team in under the limit, beating the clock in the way that felt like a metaphor. It’s like what’s supposed to happen in the nanosecond before you die: a parade, before your eyes, of the faces of the people who mattered to you the most while you lived.

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An Examined (and Exhibited) Life

An Examined (and Exhibited) Life

Essays Featured

jeff.harris.dec.12.2001On January 1, 1999, Jeff Harris held his Olympus Stylus camera out in front of him and snapped his own picture in Times Square. His face poked out of a parka hood. He wore a tourist’s expression of goofball self-consciousness. It was cliché placed carefully on top of a billion others, noticed by no one and absolutely meaningless by most definitions.

But Jeff had loftier goals for the picture. It was the first day of the last year of the 20th century, and he aimed to capture this moment in time — maybe for grandkids forty or fifty years down the road. (He’d often wondered about the daily rhubarb of life in the time of his grandmother, born a exactly a century earlier, and wished she had found a way to preserve it.) So then and there he decided to snap a picture every day for a year. Nothing special, just a document of life in the lengthening shadow of Y2K.

On December 31 had his project in the can. The millennium turned, the world went on, the little private experiment was over, and Jeff actually had to restrain himself from throwing his camera in the air in glee and yelling: “I did it!” Then a friend suggested he extend the experiment. What thewhy? Well, he asked himself: why not? The task wasn’t all that burdensome. It gave shape to the days. In fact, it changed the days, in the sense that it forced him to take a different route home from work or otherwise find a unique angle on things. Contriving to record each day forced him to live each day so that there’d be something worth recording.

So he kept shooting. And shooting.

Long story short: he never stopped. He is still at it. He has not missed a day. He is 36 years old. This thing is already the thing – surely more than his job as photo editor at Maclean’s magazine – that he will be remembered for. In June of 2000 he built a website to explain the project and archive the photos, and the website remains and every day it grows a little, like a stalagmite. This year he marked the project’s 10th anniversary with a major show at the Allen Lambert Gallery in Toronto, near the Hockey Hall of Fame. Three thousand six hundred fifty three photographs on a wall two hundred feet long. It is a time-lapse record of one man’s life – although it doesn’t quite feel that way because Jeff is not full-faced in many of them; his rule is that there be some evidence of his presence in each frame; sometimes it’s only his shadow. A shul. Most of the shots are taken by other people. (And, in a quirk of the project that Jeff hatched two years in – and changed its complexion somewhat—quite a lot of them are taken by famous people, from Conrad Black to Isabella Rossolini. And the only way you’d know that is if you spot the tiny, unassuming photo credit.)

This is not a “journal” anymore. It’s an art project. It’s an essay, in the literal sense of the word: an experiment in oneself. On the website there’s a guest book where visitors can click on a date to see a photo of Jeff stoking a campfire or cutting up an avocado or returning to his upper-deck seat at the Skydome. And then that visitor is invited to recall what they were doing and thinking that day and to summarize it in a few words – a Twitter sensibility that prefigured Twitter by years. The whole package is so simply compelling that the site was nominated for a “Webby” – the Oscars of the Internet – three years in a row.

But what is it really? The granular deconstruction of an ordinary life. An artful and ingenious exercise in self-indulgence. And maybe that’s all it ever would have been if this hadn’t happened:

On November 14, Jeff Harris was diagnosed with cancer.

Doctors found the tumor growing around his sciatic nerve, up through his pelvis and attaching to his tailbone. That would explain the pain. The surgery was complicated: his sciatic nerve severed, a pizza slice taken out of his pelvis, half his tailbone removed and the other half fractured. Jeff can’t walk. He should be able to again in six months or so, but right now he’s just thinking about being alive.

A cloud moved across the project and, of course, he kept shooting. Here now was Jeff being slid into an MRI machine (picture credit: “unknown”). The photos are not so different on the surface, but everything has changed. Gone are the cultivated eccentricities. In the frames where you can see his face, there is terror. His normal m.o. — activate the self-timer and move into the shot before the shutter clicks – is out, because he can’t walk. So a fair number of the recent pictures have been taken by his mom, who has moved in to his Toronto apartment with him. “That’s why moms are put on this earth,” he says. “I need her to dress me and wash me.” Her sensibility is, sweetly, very different, more family snapshot than documentary project. She tries to clean her son up, hide the tubes.

 

Some things we do are private. To draw attention to them would commodify them, rob them of their soul. For seventeen years Jeff has quietly volunteered as a counselor at a camp near Toronto for kids with cancer. The weekend he was diagnosed with cancer he was scheduled to work. He phoned ahead and said he was going to be late. He arrived at 11pm and sat down in the crowded dining hall. He told nobody. The photo from that day is him playing backgammon with one of the kids.

In this company he was always an outsider; it’s a club to which the wages of belonging are steep. But Jeff always felt, somehow, that belonging was only a matter of time. “Now I’m like, Okay, here I go,” he says. “I was waiting for this moment and now it’s me.”

He’s scheduled to return to the camp the last two weeks of August. “With luck I’ll be walking by then.” But there’ll be no keeping his secret hidden. “If it were leukemia or something I’d be able to conceal it,” he says. “But there’s no hiding these scars. There’s mistaking that something’s gone wrong with me.”

 

Ed. note: Jeff recovered from his cancer. He ceased the project on Dec. 31, 2011. For an archive of his 4,748 consecutive photos, see   www.jeffharris.org

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The Book of Bob

The Book of Bob

Essays Featured

It’s been said my grandfather helped build modern-day Korea. He left a subtler legacy for me

From THE WALRUS, June 2004

There was a man in the land of Han whose name was Bob; and that man was imperfect, and often wrong, though he feared God, and avoided evil. And there were born unto him six daughters and one son, who each had their own home. And Bob, each day, morning and evening, aware of the evils in the world, offered sacrifice of intercessory prayer, according to the number of them all, for he said, it may be that my children be inclined to conform to the ways of the world, when they might, by Divine Grace, be transformed by the renewing of the mind so as to prove the benefit of conforming rather to the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Thus did Bob continually. (See Job 1:1-5)

So begins a diary that my grandfather started writing in 1898, shortly after he was sent to Korea as a medical missionary by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, and which he consolidated on onionskin and carbon paper twenty years after his return to Canada in 1936. The work provides a rare glimpse of the seaside village of Sungjin, which is now deeply ensconced in Kim Jung-il’s North and among the least accessible places on Earth. It’s a snapshot of rural medicine reduced to its basic elements: improvisation and skill and luck. It shows a committed man trying to do good in impossible circumstances.

The reference to Job, even the Korean word han (which translates very roughly as a kind of deep national sadness, infused with outrage at injustices done), suggests we are in for a tale of Christian self-sacrifice, with or without a tidy redemptive wrap-up. My grandfather’s reward was, I suppose, posthumous. There are today more than ten million Protestant Christians in South Korea, at least a quarter of the population. Christianity rivals Buddhism as the religion of choice. The Presbyterian mission to Korea — an effort involving, in its second wave, the Canadian, American, and Australian wings of the church — has been called a “miracle of mission history.” If it were a corporation, it would no doubt be looked at by Harvard Business School graduates as a study in how to build a franchise.

Presbyterian evangelists displayed, from very early on, a cunning sense of which notes to sound with the Korean people. They managed to make Christianity seem less like a threatening replacement of traditional Korean beliefs than a natural extension of the brand. They appealed to nationalistic pride, evoked family values, and, most important, promised a paradise — an economic one — to be realized within a single lifetime.

It’s not too big a stretch to say that my grandfather helped build modern-day Korea. The Protestant ethic helped to power the country’s transformation into an emerging titan of consumer capitalism. What was initiated back at the turn of the century would grow into a uniquely Korean expression of Protestantism. The pastor of the world’s largest church — the half-million-strong Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul — summed it up in a phrase: the “theology of prosperity.”

And so those early pioneers have in some circles been canonized. They are the grist of propaganda, of religious scholarship, even of the kind of “personal-development” books that fly off the business shelves. But not, usually, of literature.

This becomes my problem, now. It is considered professionally advantageous for a writer to come from a long line of abusers or psychotics or slaves to some pernicious addiction. When the sun sets on such people (as the novelist Geoffrey Wolff said of his own deadbeat dad), “one clambers up a slippery mountain, carrying the balls of another in a bloody sack, and whether to eat them or worship them or bury them decently is never cleanly decided.” It’s not quite clear what ought to be done with Robert Grierson, M.D. He remains, at least in the family mythology, almost beyond reproach: to eat him would be indecent; to bury him, premature; to worship him, banal. Worse, I have no memory of the man. He died in 1964, when I was two, and the living links to him are closing down fast.

But one way to think of him is as part of a continuum that began with his father and ends, at least for now, with me, as a kind of conversation, with each man responding to his father by creating a life that, to varying extents, agrees with his or rebuts it. This is, I think, how our identities are formed — by a push and a pull.

My grandfather was ninety-five years old when I was born. “Now I can die in peace, thank God!” he told my mother. “The family name will carry on!” It wasn’t just the name he was talking about — it was the spiritual obligation. If he could check back today, forty-one years later, for a progress report, it would not be immediately clear to him whether his prophecy had been borne out. The evangelical impulse did not show up in my father or in me in any obvious way. It seems to have been transformed en route, to have shed a little of its energy — and ultimately to have found expression in things that have nothing to do with institutionalized religion. My grandfather would be miffed. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Because God-fearing Bob seems himself to have struggled to define what it meant to be a Christian.

Anyone looking for a place to spend twenty-five years in exile could do a lot worse than Sungjin. A town of a few thousand, according to my grandfather’s accounts, it lies hammocked between ocean and rock: what was then called the Sea of Japan (now the East Sea) touches its feet, and the Diamond Mountains at its flank shorten the afternoon sunshine.

The Sungjin hospital, where my grandfather carried out one half of his mission in Korea, resembled a sort of peace-time M*A*S*H unit. “Outside the brain cavity,” my grandfather wrote, “there was practically no operation that we did not do from the eyebrows down.”

They resected ribs, removed kidneys, excised carbuncles, even did plastic surgery. For one syphilitic woman whose top lip had sloughed off, leaving “nothing under the nose but grinning teeth,” my grandfather fashioned a new lip from neck tissue and sent her home to her village, quite beautiful now, he thought. He did cataract operations by candlelight, removed ovarian cysts the size of wheelbarrow tires.

There were always more patients than he, stretched thin by his other commitments, could handle. The evangelical work often got in the way of the doctoring.

The position of the Presbyterian Church until that time was that medical missionaries like my grandfather were chiefly valued not for their medical skills but for the access they had to the unconverted. (“You’ll come for the appendectomy, you’ll stay for the epiphany!” their sell-line might have been.) They were Trojan horses, really — a way to build trust and get inside the gates, thence to deploy the Christian gospel. Here’s how the Korean Mission Field newsletter described the strategy: “The doctor could go where the preacher’s way was closed, the relieved sufferer would listen to the message of his physician where he would have only scoffed at the strange doctrine of another.”

But a counter-current was forming, a philosophical shift from a strictly evangelical mode, which held that Christian conversion could solve society’s ills, to a more inclusive social-gospel approach. If you were a doctor in Korea in that transition period, were you promoting conversions or providing social service?

This was to be my grandfather’s first great test.

Bob Grierson was a tiny man, five foot three and never more than 110 pounds. He was legendarily robust, a genetic inheritance. He did tricky calisthenics and strength-work most mornings until well into his nineties. These routines he transplanted to Korea. There are photos from Sungjin of villagers dotted across the exercise yard — anticipating scenes that would become familiar seventy-five years later, with Hyundai employees out exercising en masse on the company’s emerald lawns — comically knotted up in groups of two or three. They hold each other off the ground in crazy isometric friezes. It’s painful even to look at.

Life, to him, seemed to be organized in resistance to Thomas Aquinas’s definition of acedia: “the capital sin of boredom or sloth or ennui at living.” He would often read while walking, a habit that could send him veering off the path. Koreans who heard him speak their language did a double take, because he spoke it without an accent. Before leaving for the mission field, he became a small footnote in Canadian sports history. James Naismith famously invented basketball; but my grandfather (so the family story goes) brought the game to Canada after seeing Naismith’s peach buckets and stepladders at a ymca in Massachusetts.

He was, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous paradigm, a fox, not a hedgehog. He knew a lot of little things. In Sungjin, he put together an orchestra that at various points included a trumpet, cornet, sax, violin, clarinet, trombone, violoncello, bass drum, and kettledrum. They took their act to the north country, playing for church openings, conventions, revival meetings. Travelling through Siberia at the beginning of his last furlough (sabbatical), they belted out hymns in four-part harmony, like some sort of Presbyterian Partridge Family. (“I have the feeling that in no other of my varied services to the cause of the Lord and saviour did I serve him more usefully than as the Minister of Music,” he would say.)

Whether from some powerful sense of civic engagement, or just because he wanted to show off his chops, my grandfather entered the Canadian national-anthem competition. His entry was nosed out by Ewing Buchan’s “O Canada” in 1909, but I can remember my dad singing my grandfather’s entry around the house, in this way keeping it alive.

His version, which was called “My Canada,” had a few nice moves, and, hearteningly, it kicked against the Calvinist idea of predestination.

Here men are men with good red blood,
Here maids are fair and true.
Here sturdy worth not pride of birth
Determines who is who.

But it probably hit the God note a bit hard for what was supposed to be a secular anthem. It wouldn’t have sounded right at hockey games:

Tho from abroad came vice and fraud,
They cannot flourish long
In Canada, my Canada,
All that is modern and right up to date,
Yet the old Ten Commandments remain on the slate.

My grandfather was decisive. His first date with my grandmother, his second wife, was a game of chess aboard a train en route to Seoul in 1922. They’d met minutes before. Within a couple of months, they were married. And my father was conceived, if not on their wedding night, then awfully close to it. I’m sure my grandfather was bowled over by my grandmother’s wit — there’s every reason to believe she thumped him at chess; she was a formidable player — but there were practical considerations for this pairing, too. His first wife, Lena, had just died, tragically, in childbirth (losing the baby as well). Back home in Sungjin there awaited a motherless household of four daughters between the ages of eight and twenty-one. He needed a new wife, and fast.

But, perhaps most of all, my grandfather was a storyteller. His Korean journals are broken into “episodes,” parables, really, with names like “The Blind Saloon Keeper,” “The Bread-and-Butter Man,” “The Hour of Decision,” and “The Valley of Humiliation,” in which Reverend Bob gets some mild comeuppance. A good Protestant, he tried to stick to the facts, but you can tell the temptation to embellish is almost irresistible, and he torques up the drama where he can. He says things like, “Now we turn the page and see a real hand-to-hand scrap, in which your humble servant was personally engaged.”

Here is Bob dipping his drinking mug into a roadside hot spring and taking a big quaff — boasting of the healthful effects it would surely produce — only to discover, a couple of hundred metres upstream, some villagers washing a dead pig in the source water.

Here he is performing for some villagers who got wind that he had been a champion gymnast in college, and set up an iron horizontal bar for him to show his stuff.

“I managed to do one or two of my most spectacular up-starts, layouts, circles and shoots, but I did not feel well afterwards,” he admits.

His feats as a surgeon have no doubt been exaggerated over the years. But there are reliable first-hand reports. My father, as a kid, had a mole on each cheek. He remembers that, one day, my grandfather sat him down in a chair in the dining room and, by the light coming through a window, carved them out with his scalpel, leaving no trace of a scar. Years before, my father had lain patiently while my grandfather clipped out his tonsils without any anaesthetic. He looked on my grandfather with trust, and pride, and awe.

There is no firm agreement on just why Christianity grew so quickly, so prodigiously in Korea. Certainly there were political reasons. Modern Korean history is one long litany of continual threat or oppression or occupation: by China, Russia, Japan. Starting in about 1905, under Emperor Meiji, Japan began tightening the screws on Korea. Reneging on its promise to grant Korean independence, it began a feverish political smear campaign, belittling Koreans as a primitive people incapable of self-government. In 1910, Japan annexed Korea outright.

Korea, in response, turned inward. As a matter of pride, and self-survival, it began bolstering its own culture in contra-distinction to the Japanese. Athletic contests were organized (Korean prowess in distance-running dates back to those years) and schools sprang up. Korean intellectuals recognized that alliances with Christian missionaries — internationals — were essential to counter Japanese propaganda. The missionaries and the Koreans needed each other.

But the magnetic persuasion of the early missionaries was also a factor. (“When I first came to church I did not believe in Jesus Christ, I believed in Koo Moksa,” reported one Korean Presbyterian church elder. Koo Moksa was my grandfather: literally, “Minister Grierson.”)

Because Robert Grierson was the first Canadian medical missionary to Korea, one might be tempted to compare him with Norman Bethune. But when I read his journals, I thought of Che Guevara and his motorcycle diaries.

A missionary on a motorbike is a benign revolutionary, for sure. My grandfather bought his in 1919 while on furlough in the Hollywood Hills. It had a sidecar, and when my grand-father saw it at a dealer he imagined it back in Sungjin, ferrying patients the hard mile between the mission station and the hospital. His three daughters and wife piled into the sidecar and they motored out of the lot, my grandfather touching his cap, Henry Miller-like.

It turns out that my grandfather was indeed something of a radical. And that radicalism — as is so often the case — was born of close contact with people who were suffering unnecessarily. He believed the physical needs of the rural Koreans for medical treatment superseded even their spiritual needs. In 1912, he announced he was going to do only medical work. In 1931, he left the mission field for good. Three years later, another physician-missionary crystallized his views in a mission-field newsletter: “Any society or church that uses its medical work chiefly for its own propagation is far from being Christian in the true sense and deserves only to fail in its ultimate aim.”

The longer my grandfather spent in Korea, the deeper grew his empathy for the han of the Korean people. The atrocities committed against Koreans by Japanese soldiers during my grandfather’s time in the country would later be rivalled by those of the Nazis. During the independence movement of 1919, anyone suspected of aiding the resistance was jailed or executed. Dozens, even hundreds, of people at a time were incinerated in locked barns. Japanese soldiers made “comfort women” — sex slaves — of Korean women who had been torn from their families.

As the underground Korean independence movement crested, my grandfather got politically involved in the most reasonable way he could: he allowed activists to hold meetings in his home. There were Sundays when almost no one was in church because most of the congregation had been tossed in jail by the Japanese. On those days, “to encourage the hearts of our brethren in prison,” my grandfather went out to the bell tower, where a big bell hung. “I rang it long and loud so that the person across the river might know that we were signalling our sympathy and greetings.”

Of course these people were in a fix that my grandfather had, to some degree, engineered. By declaring themselves Christians, or even consorting with Christians, they had effectively run afoul of the state. Presbyterian Christianity was, after all, about putting the rule of men and the rule of God before the rule of any emperor.

Did he feel guilt about any of this? There’s no evidence that he did. The blame, in his mind, lay not with the Christian church but with the Japanese themselves. “No wonder that Divine Providence reproved Japan for cruelty and injustice,” he wrote. “Manei [hurrah] for Korea!”

I often wonder how my grandfather held in his mind the paradox that he was both a man of faith and a man of science. Some would say the two rest on irreconcilable sets of assumptions. On the metaphorical desk of a scientist there are three in-baskets: “matter,” “antimatter,” and “doesn’t matter.” There is no room for a spirit realm.

But my grandfather seems to have taken no great pains to sort out what was the work of science (man), and what was the work of faith (God). For him, the two were intertwined.

He began and ended all medical work with a prayer. He was of the opinion that both prayer (what Buddhists might call “right thought”) and selflessness (“right action”) were manifestly rewarded. Only once in his life, from the time he was a boy earning $2.50 a week in Halifax, did he fail to tithe. His position was never that he couldn’t afford to tithe; it was that he couldn’t afford not to. He had a theory about how spiritual accounting works: the more you give, the more God gives back.

Once, he bought some useless, non-arable land from a cash-strapped friend as a favour. A few years later, the railroad came in from the south and for the rights to tunnel under a hill in the corner of his field, my grandfather was paid ten times what he’d paid for the whole chunk. “You see,” he would write, “the Lord is Himself a good businessman. He helps the tither so that the tithe may keep increasing.”

Another time, a fellow missionary wrote him a “you-can’t-get-good-help” letter, bemoaning the difficulty of recruiting missionaries. “Where are the Frasers and the Livingstones in our colleges, that we cannot get men to come out to help us?” the man wrote. He was referring to those two famous missionaries to Africa, Donald Fraser and David Livingstone. But my grandfather was startled. He had just managed, while on furlough and unbeknownst to the letter-writer, to recruit two men, by the names of Fraser and Livingstone.

He was pretty clear on what to make of such “coincidences.” They were proof of the existence of God — not in the scientific sense, of course; rather they were what theologians call “pragmatic proof.” The logic goes like this: strictly speaking, it’s impossible to make a theoretical argument establishing that Christianity is the universal religion, or that Christ is the Son of God. (Such propositions are “unfalsifiable,” and therefore unsound science.) But Christianity’s mysterious validity — like that of the Theory of Relativity, certain Chinese herbs, and Charlie Chaplin — lies in its having withstood the test of time. “In missionary work,” the theologian Paul Tillich writes, “the potential universality of Christianity becomes evident day by day… actualized with every new success of the missionary endeavor…. It shows that Jesus… has the power to conquer the world.”

My grandfather would have agreed. He describes his communications with God as a palpable thing, as perceptibly real as a radio broadcast.

The idea of the material efficacy of prayer is a problematic one. It reduces God, as someone once said, to a “cosmic bellhop,” and not a very efficient one at that. But for my grandfather it was a simple fact. Often, he would ask the Lord to place a particular notion in the mind of someone who could help him out.

For example, while on furlough back in Ontario in 1923, he stayed for two weeks in Muskoka with Fred Moffat (the stove magnate), an acquaintance who was sympathetic to the missionary cause. One night, he wrote, “I asked the Lord to put into his mind the idea of giving me a motor car to use in my hospital work. At breakfast the next morning he said, ‘Bob, my wife has a question for you.’ She said, ‘Would you have any use for a motor car out there?’”

Cash in hand, my grandfather went to Detroit, and bought a black ragtop Model T. He baptized it “Coralynn” with a little radiator coolant, packed the kids into it and prepared for a triumphant return to Sungjin.

But en route to Korea, he realized there were was an unfordable river between Seoul and Sungjin, and no road over the mountains. How to get the car across? He asked the Lord to put it in the mind of the guy in charge of roads that it was about time the country had a bridge there, and also a road beyond. Then he continued on. He drove the Model T through Japan, charming his way out of paying duty, securing the driver’s licence he had been told was impossible to get, navigating bridges he was assured were too narrow for anything but horse carts, and arriving, finally, with the fully loaded car at the bank of the unfordable river in the Non Sung Valley to find… a bridge. And a road on the other side snaking up the mountain. The bridge still smelled of newly sawn lumber. The Japanese military had just put it there to get armaments across.

He was not so much surprised as reassured. He had been, he admitted, “so committed to driving the car home to Sungjin that my intelligence would not function. It was not what one would call faith; nor, I think, was it pure stubbornness. It just seemed to be a kind of fatalism.”

And as he drove across the span he thought of the reliable calculus of faith. “Simple,” he concluded. “Like the natural law in the spirit world.”

If you follow the bloodline on my father’s side you can see the evangelical Christian impulse slowly becoming diluted.

My great-grandfather, John Grierson (no relation to the National Film Board founder), was an evangelistic Presbyterian of such enthusiasm, he used to trudge into the deep forests of the Miramichi in New Brunswick to preach to the loggers (not an easy crowd). He made my grandfather look like a moderate. Once, in Korea, my grandfather and his father found themselves at a peacemaking dinner with some Russian soldiers the mission had run afoul of. The Russians raised their vodka glasses in toast of rapprochement, but my great-grandfather, a violent teetotaler, refused to drink. My grandfather had to convince his father to at least raise the damn glass and pretend to drink. “Peace is Christian,” my grandfather chided. “Insult is not.”

My father, in turn, was more moderate than his father. My grandmother and grandfather leaned on him to be a missionary or a medical doctor (preferably both); Dad wrestled with the idea, but ultimately rejected the pulpit for the pew.

His idea of Christian evangelism was less like a direct-mail solicitation than like a poem tacked discreetly on your own front door. You don’t go out and try to wrangle souls. You simply try to set a good example.

And so the narrative comes ‘round to me.

I am a guy living in the most secular part of the most secular city in one of the most secular countries on Earth — the buckle of Christianity’s “cold belt.” My neighbourhood in Vancouver is a place peopled by the “religious nones,” as social scientists call them — the folks who when asked by census-takers to identify their religion say “none.” They are what the journalist Jonathan Rauch calls “apatheists,” people who feel at ease with religion even if they are irreligious.

While my grandfather was in Korea, in fact, right around the time my father was born, the Presbyterian Church of Canada joined with the Methodists and Congregationalists to form the United Church of Canada — and that became my family’s denomination by default. I still go to church sometimes. It’s a tranquil and fitting place to spend an hour thinking about the right things — like being in the forest, but with fewer distractions. (A high moment for me is always the semi-regular animal-consecration service at St. Andrew’s Wesley church in Vancouver. People bring their dogs and cats and snakes and hamsters to be blessed. Hamsters have souls!)

Fundamentalists sometimes call the United Church the “great compromise,” a body trying so hard to be inclusive that it’s like some sort of pantywaist uncle, ineffectual and embarrassing everyone at the party with its efforts to stay current. But, to my mind, its inclusiveness is its boon. The United Church is a mélange of beliefs and influences and, if you dig around in it, you will find the ideas of Martin Luther King, Walter Rauschenbush and his social gospel message, even Mary Daly and her feminist theology.

Of course, once inclusiveness expands beyond a certain point, it becomes simple humanism. And once you start questioning the historical accuracy of the Scriptures — a logical eventual step — you’re into Robert Funk territory. Funk is a biblical scholar and former Harvard professor who’s also a rationalist. In his view, when you boil off what are very likely not Christ’s actual words and deeds, the Jesus that emerges is one well suited to a generation of skeptics: not the Son of God but a wise and irreverent sage and social activist who may be our rock, but is certainly not our redeemer.

My own religion, such as it is, consists in trying to find a way to believe in God without feeling as if I’m kidding myself. A way to go to church (for the singing, and the stained-glass windows, and the sense of connection with my father) without feeling like a fraud. I have faced somewhat the same dilemma my grandfather did dining with those Russian soldiers, when the vodka was placed before him and he was scissored by competing demands: to maintain an internal consistency and integrity, and yet not to offend. I think Bertrand Russell was probably right when he said that religion is mostly about fear. But pro sports are mostly about tribalism, and knowing that doesn’t make the Mariners less worth watching on a Sunday afternoon. And so I go to church. And yet — how conflicted is this? — I don’t take communion. One Christmas Eve, caught up in the moment, I did. I felt guilty, and vowed not to next time.

“So let me get this straight,” my mother said, as we filed out of the church that following year, when I abstained.

“You’re only a Christian when you feel like it?”

The faith I have settled into is strange, improvised, opportunistic. My shelves contain as many books on Buddhism as on Christianity. I send up little prayers of gratitude like dispatches from some radio-telescope in Peru, their value not in the long-shot hope that they will ever be heard, but in the discipline of creating them in the first place. I am in danger of becoming a New-Age flake. In this I am as much a product of my era as my father and grandfather were of theirs.

This, then, is the progression: An evangelist begets a doc-tor who begets a psychologist who begets a writer. Every link in the chain makes sense not only in the push-pull of the creation of identity, but in its social context. At each stage, the sphere of attention, of perceived influence, of duty, shrinks: the whole world, a village, a family, an individual. With each stage comes subjectivity and ambiguity and detachment. At each stage the resistance to a received orthodoxy increases, until there is one man standing deliberately outside any coherent belief system at all, resigned to looking for some other means of transcendence.

The river tumbles down the mountain. It slips underground, boils up, goes under again. Our deepest impulses ride our genes down the generations, but they can change form. What if writing itself is the faith I have settled on? In many ways writing and missionary evangelism are more alike than most writers would care to admit. You try to use the language more to describe than to evaluate, but you judge in the end, you do. You do constant, epic, Protestant battle with yourself at every turn, trying to decide whether to reveal wonder or to stick to verifiable facts. You penetrate your subject’s defences (if you are a journalist), win their trust, and then you do what you have to do. You sometimes misrepresent yourself as more sympathetic — or at least less unsympathetic — than you are.

Preaching is supposed to be the enemy of art. (“If you want to send a message,” goes the classic advice to would-be authors, “call Federal Express.”) But even in simply showing things “as they are,” the writer is a parablist of sorts; stories are about options and actions and consequences, and they always say, “This is how a life can be.” If you are a “writer’s writer,” a stylist above all, your belief in The Word is absolute.

The desire to invent a story or honour a god are, perhaps, the same desire. For many writers (even secular ones), mystery is preferable to no mystery — even if that mystery is consciously manufactured. I think that’s one of the reasons my grandfather’s rational mind could accommodate spirituality so readily without crashing. It’s a richer story. To accept material science as the final word is to reconcile yourself to a demystified world. No magic, just coincidences.

One day in Sungjin, my grandfather received a patient who had been “a hopeless invalid” and a burden on the family for twelve years. “On examination, we could find no trouble of any kind,” he wrote. By his own estimation, 30 percent of all medical cases were psychosomatic. So my grand-father put the man on the operating table and took out his appendix. He then attached a heavy forceps to the lower end of the appendix and stretched it until it looked “like a worm almost a foot long.”

“When he awakened from the ether,” my grandfather wrote, “I took the ‘worm’ to his bedside and said, “Look at this, Chun Sepi, what we found with its mouth fastened to your bowel, drawing strength from your system. Is it any wonder you have been sick for twelve years? Now you are going to be all right, strong and well.”

The man returned home and never had another sick day. On top of that, in the recovery room he had taken up the Lord’s cause with a renewed fervour, and managed to convert all ten men in the ward.

It’s a great story. But it also reveals a by-hook-or-by-crook subtext to missionary work. My grandfather was just trying to make this fellow well, but he was not above a little sleight of hand. I thought, reading this episode, How unPresbyterian of you, my man. How like a writer.

Looking at photos of my grandfather in the Sungjin mission field, surrounded by his open-faced students, I often wonder what serendipity brought this man to this place. Modern-day Korea, living in the gravity-well of a powerful neighbour, tends to produce people very much, in temperament, like Canadians: proud and insecure at the same time. The huge schism between the present-day cultures of the south and the north is rich metaphorical fodder. One half is democratic, one totalitarian. In one, Christianity is practised openly in churches; in the other it is practised clandestinely, small groups gathering in somebody’s basement in this or that community, at considerable risk. The two Koreas are each other’s Jungian shadows.

In a sense, I think my grandfather probably “saved” his town more completely through his writings than he ever did by cherry-picking souls.

We have it pinned to the page now, Sungjin, but what has actually become of the place? The little settlement, tucked so picturesquely near the foot of the mountain Mang Yang Jung (“Mountain Longing for the Sea”); the people who once thronged the white pebble beach you could reach by swimming through a cave; the mission hospital where, on sunny days, tuberculosis patients were lined up outside in their beds, in the fresh air, waiting; my grandparents’ home, with its wide eaves and ivy-clad walls; the bonsai apple tree where the neighbour’s canary alighted, and stepped from the branch back into the cage as my grandfather held the door open for it, a lesser miracle? I may never know.

I recently learned that, while in the mission field, my grandfather had been invited to be an editor of a (secular) newspaper in Seoul. “He very much wanted that,” my aunt Doris told me. “He was willing to abandon a hospital, an evangelistic ministry. The other missionaries had to agree to it, and he canvassed them to support him, and they couldn’t.”

Thwarted, he channelled his newspaperman’s energies into his diaries. Who are they for? He tells us. They are for “you my dear children, my dear grand-children, my dear great grand-children and perhaps my great great grandchildren, for whom these episodes were written after the manner of the patient Job.”

There are a number of ways to achieve immortality. Kill the president or become him, and you may be remembered for hundreds of years. Invent a religion and you may be remembered for thousands of years. My grandfather was vying for men’s immortal souls, and he achieved a certain history-book immortality in the bargain. But he understood, I think, that there is another way, humbler and altogether adequate. To write words your children will carry into a future you will never live to see. To plant those words forever in their minds, like a prayer.Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

Norm and Vince

Norm and Vince

Essays Featured

for EXPLORE magazine, June 2002

patrick hendry / unsplash

The first thing I noticed about Norm Winter, the mountain guide I’d hired to help a group of us reach the summit of Mt. Baker in the U.S. Cascades, was his strange calm. Norm was a B.C. boy, lanky as a cowboy, with a little billy-goat tuft of hair—a soul-patch, a flavour-saver—beneath his lower lip that drew your eye there, away from his bemused smile. He walked as if he were making an instructional video on how to walk so you are never off balance. In his commitment to restrained and deliberate speech and movement, he was almost Confucian.

The first thing I noticed about his dog Vince, a four-year-old mongrel with some Spitz, some husky and lord knows what else in him, was his…strange calm. (No, the first thing was his crazy curled tail; the second thing was his strange calm.) Initially it seemed odd that Norm had brought Vince along. What was he going to do with the dog while we climbed? The question was soon answered. By the time we’d geared up and mustered at the Heliotrope Ridge trailhead, Vince was already ahead of us, way up the path. No car camping for Vince. He was coming with us. And he aimed, it appeared, to beat us to the top.

This was not ordinary. But then, as I would soon learn, Vince was no ordinary dog.

Vince came into Norm’s life one summer’s day in 1995. Norm was walking along Commercial Drive in Vancouver, out with another dog that belonged to an out-of-town friend, and he was literally thinking Man, I have no room in my life for a dog right now, when a woman walked past, with Vince. The dogs stopped to sniff each other. So their people chatted, too. It turned out that Vince’s owner was living on the street and couldn’t keep him. “She was actually at that moment on the way to the pound with him,” Norm recalls. Norm looked at Vince. Vince looked at Norm. Norm thought that, as dogs go, this one was really pretty beautiful. “I told her, ‘Look, I’ll take your dog for a couple of weeks until you find a home for him,’’ Norm remembers. “And I never gave him back.”

Vince had a quirky personality—a bit standoffish, not all over you like so many pups. He could be aggressive with other dogs but he was timid with people. “He had big emotions, but he didn’t dole them out to just anyone. He chose individuals and did things for them.”

As a domestic dog, Vince was raw clay. Before Norm started taking him into the mountains, there’d have to be basic training.

Someone had obviously thrown Vince from a truck when he was a pup because he wouldn’t go near one. This posed a problem for Norm. They weren’t going to the mountains—or anywhere— until Vince could be trained to get in into Norm’s own pickup. “I worked on it for seven years—very, very systematically,” he says. A walk together around the truck. Open the tailgate and walk around it again. One paw on the bumper. “There were at least 20 steps in the process.” Eventually Vince learned to trust that this man with the soul-patch was a different species from the asshole who had tried to dispatch him. He committed to Norm, and the two became a buddy movie.

Vince was plainly an outside dog. In a Squamish downpour, he’d go sleep on the lawn for seven hours. He was also a natural climber. That much became clear once Norm started bringing Vince on his treks—in the Coast Mountains, in the Rockies, in the Cascades.

“We’d get to approaches where it’d be fifth-class climbing.” That’s the point where you have to start using your hands. “So what he’d do was back way up and take a run at it, and hit the wall as fast as he could and just start pumping his feet. One time he just got his paws over the lip and was hanging there, with a long drop beneath him.” Norm reached Vince just as the dog was gassing out, and pulled him the rest of the way up.

If the climbing got too technical, Vince would find another way, a less obvious way. While Norm was guiding on Polar Circus—a long ice climb in Banff National Park—Vince made it halfway up before he ran into ice walls. And then he was gone. Norm kept climbing. “All of a sudden Vince popped his head up and was looking down at us.”

In the really hairy spots, Norm would rig a harness out of a prusik and a piece of webbing and heave Vince up. Vince didn’t like that one bit—but he’d let Norm attach it if he figured it was the only way their day together was going to continue.

“I thought I’d lost him once in [Utah’s] Zion National Park,” Norm says. “We’d spent a day climbing and were camped at the end of the canyon, up in the dry ranchlands. Vince disappeared there chasing rabbits. It was a bad place. He was just gone.” Norm finally gave up waiting and started back down the canyon. “And then I could hear him howling. He’d backed out onto a outcrop and was cornered there, 30 feet up.” Norm brought out the harness. Vince did not object. “He actually took a wide stance to make it easier for me.”

Vince summitted Mt. Athabasca. He summitted tk.

Now, it’s not unknown for dogs to climb serious mountains. In 1979, famed Iditarod racers Joe Redington and Susan Butcher got together their best dogs and mushed them to the top of Denali. (The dogs made it no problem. The only issue was that sled dogs are trained to keep going, and so these four grew confused when, at the peak, they ran out of real estate.) But it’s rare. In those cases where a dog does become a regular companion of a mountaineer, the bond between dog and owner can be legendary.

The great, eccentric Victorian-era American climber and mountain-historian William Coolidge summitted some 66 big peaks in the Alps—including the Jungfrau and Mont Blanc—with his tiny brown beagle-mix, Tschingal. (Tschingal, when she died, was awarded honorary membership in the British Alpine Club.) Coolidge wrote about how that dog would trot across precarious snow bridges, “and on at least one occasion helped to find the way home when the guide had lost it.”

When we climbed Mt. Baker, we gingerly picked our way up the Coleman Glacier, with crevasses on both sides. Though we were roped up, I still felt vulnerable. It seemed like no place for a dog. But maybe it was the perfect place for a dog. As it turns out, a dog can sniff its way through an icefield. “Its super-sensitive nose can scent the old air that comes up through the crevasses from the depths of the glacier,” Coolidge wrote. In some ways dogs are more naturally suited to this pursuit than people are—so long as they have the courage to climb.

It would be revisionist history to say that Norm and Vince recognized each other from the beginning as kindred spirits. They didn’t. But they were.

Norm was every bit as complicated as Vince—as I would grow to discover over the course of three climbs in the Cascades.

Norm could discourse on the history of mountain gear, from the hobnail boot to the 12-point crampon. In the next breath he’d be parroting whole scenes of dialogue from The Eiger Sanction. He described his hometown of Flin Flon, Manitoba, as “the only town in North America named after a literary character.” (Flitabbatey Flonatin, the adventurous grocer from Muccock’s The Sunless City.) Then for long stretches he’d fall silent.

When the weather turned on us as we were climbing Mt. Rainier, Norm made the call to abort, and his face clouded with regret. “I’ll be back here,” he said. “I want this one, too. We will climb this mountain.” He rolled up his sleeve to expose his forearm, and he began hitting that forearm with two fingers of the other hand, trying to raise a vein. He had the mountaineering jones bad.

It struck me that Norm was himself a little bit feral. His father was a hard German man, a veteran of the German cavalry in World War II who had escaped from at least one POW camp and admitted, in later life, that he slept, still, sometimes, with a gun. Norm himself learned to be self-reliant early. He could shoot a rifle and drive stick by age six.

The city made Norm tense. Only after we were out of the car and partway up the trail did he noticeably relax.

I once called him on what I thought was his land-line around dinnertime. I could hear the faint roar of a butane stove in the background and the image that came to mind—of a guy camping out in his own apartment, maybe sleeping in a tent in the living room, because wild is the only mode he knows—seemed perfectly apt. In fact, I had reached Norm on his cellphone, in the mountains of Alberta’s Kananaskis Country, cooking dinner for another group of clients.

Together, Norm and Vince were like an old couple that can count the moments, over their long deep marriage, where things looked grim. “We were very attached,” Norm says. “But it wasn’t all roses.”

They would get into arguments. Norm had his agenda; Vince had his. “And he’d be defiant. I’d be on a time schedule, with another climb to do. I’d say: ‘Vince, we have to go. I have to go.’ ” Vince would hunker down, just out of reach. So Norm would leave.

Two or three days later, he’d return to that spot—to find Vince waiting for him.

One summer Norm, then based in Golden, B.C., went to work in Europe—guiding in the Swiss Alps out of Zermatt. The folks at Chatter Creek Heli-Skiing said they’d take Vince for the summer. “They figured he’d keep the pine martens out of the lodge.” But Vince sensed that his master wasn’t coming back any time soon. So he set out to find him. Two weeks later he showed up in Golden—having navigated 100 kilometres of some of the densest bush in the world. “He knew I’d eventually show up.” If Norm left home for a few days or weeks, Vince would often set off on his own peregrinations, then return to Norm’s doorstep at almost the exact moment Norm arrived back in town. It couldn’t have been coincidence. Could it?

“The thing Vince wanted most was to be with me,” Norm says. “To have that sense of place in the pack. He was happiest when we were in the wilderness. His Nirvana was us running together, out there, and coming across a field filled with deer. And me not restraining him.”

My initial climb with Norm happened more than a decade ago. In the last few years, I’d lost his signal. A couple of months ago I called him up again. He’s a mountain guide still, running a successful operation called Revelstoke Alpine Adventures. He’s married with a little son named Leif: life reordered. All is good. But what had become of Vince?

The call was spookily timed. He beloved mutt, whom he had given a governor’s pardon to all those years ago, and then built a life with, had just died.

“He got old,” Norm says. “He got sick. “He had cancer and he was not feeling so well.” A tumour had shown up on Vince’s flank, and Norm had it removed; then the cancer spread inside. So one day Norm put Vince in the back seat of the truck. They set out on the long car ride to the vet’s. On the way they had a conversation. This time it was one-sided. Norm talked, watching the road. “I let him know how much I had learned from him, and how much I respected him,” Norm said. “Really, he taught me a lot about patience. I realized after I got angry at him that it was never about him. It was about me.

“I thanked him.”

Norm drove in to the parking lot of the vet’s. Then he turned around. Vince had once again found another way, the less obvious way. He had died back there, the voice of his human playing him off the air.

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The Lightning Field

The Lightning Field

Essays

SATURDAY NIGHT magazine, December, 1997

“Have you heard of the Lightning Field?” my friend Frank asked as we sat waiting for menus in a café in Victoria. I said I hadn’t. He cocked his head, as if downloading the recollection from some deep data bank. “It’s out in the middle of the New Mexican desert. Quite a place. Hard to describe.” A few seconds of silence passed. “It’s a couple of hours from Albuquerque. I can’t tell you where.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know. It’s not on the map, and it’s not really near anything. You can’t drive there yourself. You drive to a small town, and you leave your car there. A caretaker pickes you up and you travel through the dust for awhile. You stop at one point at a gate into a ranch, and then you go further until finally you see an old cabin. The caretaker drops you off there, and that’s where you stay.” As Frank spoke, I heard his voice catch a couple of times. I wondered if he had a cold coming on.

“They leave food for you in the cabin, and there are beds. Out on the front deck there are some chairs.”

“What do you do there?” I asked.

“You look. You listen. You wait.”

“Wait?”

“For the lightning.”

“Frank closed his eyes like a narcoleptic. He didn’t look unhappy. Something had happened to him out there, wherever there was. I wouldn’t begin to understand quite what until, eight months later, I received a phone call telling me that Frank had died.

*

“Out here we don’t talk in acres much,” says Karen Weathers, navigating the GM Suburban over the cattle guard and through the gate to the biggest spread of private land I have ever been on. In New Mexico they talk in sections. There are 640 acres to a section, and Dia owns twenty-three sections – which amounts to the whole New Mexican desert as far as I can see.

Dia is the Dia Art Foundation of New York, a body dedicated to, among other things, funding and maintaining land art — man-made monuments in remote parts of rural America. We are in Kittram County, thirty-five or so miles east o Quemado, where I exchanged my rental car for blind trust in Ms. Weathers. She’s not what I expected—a young Frances McDormand where I had in mind Peter Lorre. She is the caretaker of the Lightning Field. In four years she has riven 1500-odd people from around the world out here for an experience that often leaves them permanently changed, though rarely in ways they can explain.

I had arrived at the Albuquerque airport with no plan but to find this place. All I knew was what Frank had told me that bright day at lunch. The locals I met had never heard of it, and it was by chance that I finally found someone who knew someone and wrote down a phone number on a packet of sugar. The Lightning Field is open to visitors six months of the year, from the beginning of May to the end of October. No more than six people are permitted to view it at a time, and only advance written requests are considered. After explaining that I’d come from Canada just to see the field, I was squeezed in—though the spontaneous-pilgrimage story was clearly one they’d heard before, and had the booking sheet been full I would have been on the next plane back to Vancouver.

I am not alone here. Peter Healey, a photographer from Massachusetts, and Tom Arthur, a sculptor and university professor from Sydney, Australia—old friends from art school in Boston—have come to cap a reunion trip across the Southwest. For Arthur, the Lightning Field is the cobbler’s unmended shoe. Until now he has been too busy lecturing on it to actually come and see it. Healey has his camera with him, out of sight in his overnight bag. Photos are discouraged, if not expressly forbidden. “This is a privately owned work of art,” a Dia employee, Kathleen Shields, told me. “We want to limit how widely the image of the piece is distributed out in the world.” Two years ago, Dia threatened action against the producers of Lightning Field, an American cable movie in with an environmental artist played by Nancy McKeon gets crosswise with a satanic cult at an art installation very like this one. (The producers backed off, renamed their picture The Lightning Incident, and redesigned the ads.)

Weathers lets us out in front of a cabin that looks just as Frank described it – a 1920 homesteaer’s lodge of rough-hewn pine, warty and solitary on a low scrub flat of pinon bushes and Torry yucca. She will leave us here overnight. “Watch out for rattlesnakes,” she says. The snakes have been around more frequently since Dia got rid of its cats, and now, when guests leave the doors open, the snakes sometimes come into the cabin and find a corner to sleep in. When this occurs, Weathers comes round with a shotgun and blasts the snake where it lies. She promises to return the next ay at 11 am, and then she gets into the truck and drives off.

Inside the cabin are an airtight stove and a couple of heavy oak mission chairs. Old wood with new fixtures, old iron beds with crisp, clean sheets. Rustic living without the hardships. Inexplicably, here in the geographic centre of nowhere, there is running water and electricity. Yet there are no power lines. A buried cable brings the power in, which contributes to the illusion that the cabin is magically self-sustaining.

We put down our gear and get our first full-on look to the west. There, in the desert, 7,200 feet above sea level, is the Lightning Field: 400 polished stainless-steel poles sharpened to points, like giant silver knitting needles arranged in a grid a mile by a kilometer. This is the chef’d’oeuvre of sculptor Walter de Maria, who approached this project with a jeweller’s eye and a geometer’s rigour. Sixteen (four squared) poles by twenty-five (five squared) making 400 (twenty squared). The measurements are so precise that an imaginary sheet of glass placed on top of the poles would be perfectly, evenly supported. Distances between the poles—220 feet—are accurate to within one-twenty-fifty of an inch. From any direction, the rows appear to stretch to infinity.

De Maria spend five years searching for this spot. He scoured California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Texas before settling, in 1977, on this isolated plain—isolation being, in his view, the essence of land art. Unlike Robert Smithson, who chose Great Salt Lake for his famous Spiral Jetty partly because it was supposed to be an energy vortex, De Maria was looking for a more pedestrian combination of virtues: it had to be a flat, lonely spread in an area of high lightning activity. There are roughly sixty days a year when lightning can be seen from the Lightning Field. In the summer, changes of seeing some are good. In the summer, lightning comes in with what the Navajo call “male rain”—that hard rain that falls in big drops—as distinct from the gentler female rain that falls between November and March.

I had a taste of a New Mexico lightning storm two days earlier when, as I was travelling north from the Chihuahuan desert, a storm brewed up in the east. Sheet lightning bounced around up there, looking for a way out, and every fifteen seconds or so the cloud put down a big fork. National Public Radio was playing a jazz suite to which the lightning seemed somehow choreographed. The British composer George Benjamin, I remembered reading, had been inspired by a New Mexico thunderstorm to write “Ringed by the Flat Horizon”—all soft bell chords and tremors in the lower registers. NPR kept interrupting its programming to upgrade the storm warnings: severe lighning-storm warning, tornado warning, and then: “Radar has picked up a tornado heading directly for Caprock, New Mexico. Residents of Caprock are advised to take cover.” The announced dropped his broadcast diction. “Go down into the basement and cover yourself with cushions.” Caprock was about forty miles to the east. This storm, now moving at about the speed I was driving, would sweep east, pick up steam, and kill fourteen people in Texas.

When lightning strikes a pole at the Lightning Field it generally melts the steel at the tip, blunting it, and the pole has to be replaced. But this happens so infrequently—maybe once or twice a season—that it’s hardly worth thinking about. People who come to the Lightning Field aren’t storm-chasers. A lot of them are art students, paying homage to what’s acknowledged as one of the most important earthworks in America. (A few pilgrims do both Donald Judd’s place at Marfa, Texas, and the Lightning Field, in a kind of double-shrine swing.) Earthworks are those conceptual pieces, monumental in sale but minimal in form, that went up mostly in the seventies, when people such as Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, Smithson and De Maria took it as their mission to rescue art from preciosity and re-pot it well away from the city. New land art still gets done—James Turrell is still working on his big crater near Flagstaff, Arizona—but for the most part the movement has been paved over by the next phase of public art: big urban projects people can actually see without renting a Land Rover and taking time off work.

Every visitor, Karen Weathers told us, has a unique response to the poles. Some climb them. (“Very disrespectful,” said Kathleen Shields.) One man, inexplicably, mummified himself from head to toe in aluminum foil and went running among the poles, hoping to attract a charge. (It was a clear day.) Some self-impose a vow of silence. De Maria recommends the work be viewed alone, or with a small number of people over at least a twenty-four hour period. Visitors, he believes, must wander about and see the poles from all perspectives. Watch them pick up light in the morning and let it go at night. The Lightning Field resists comparison to anything else. But I came to think of it as an image of Jesus in a plate of billboard spaghetti, drawing travelers off the blue highways, giving them a brief, shared common experience, some life-leavening mystery.

Certainly, coming here is the closest a lot of middle-class white folk such as Tom, Peter and I will ever come to a spirit quest. The aim, quite literally, is enlightenment. The whole exercise recalls the line from the class Buddhist text The Bodhicaryavatara: “As when a flash of lightning cleaves the night, and … virtuous thoughts rise, brief and transient, in the world.” We cannot muster virtuous thoughts, so we decide to tell stories instead.

Peter, who from some angles looks just like Bill Clinton, sits on a porch chair and peers into the distance. It’s ust. The air is thin and dry, crisping the edges of everything. He begins with a tale of his music teacher back home in Massachusetts. The teacher’s mother, who apparently has some psychic gifts, has been plagued by Southwest indigenous imagery so vivid she is compelled to get into her car and drive to New Mexico. She arrives in the middle of a freak snowstorm. She can barely see the road. Suddenly an animal darts in front of her car. It’s a white coyote – a sight so novel she is moved to mention it when she arrives in the next village. The villagers’ reaction is startling. Turns out the local shaman has just died. When a shaman dies,his soul is said to take the form of a white coyote. “The first person to see the white coyote,” the villager explains, “becomes the next shaman.” Peter’s friend’s mother did not stick around for the formal initiation. She now lives in Calgary and has a postgraduate degree in chaos theory.

*

The stars are out in force over the desert. The low light has lent my cabinmates a sinister air. Can I trust them? Possibly they wonder if they can trust me. If this were a Tony Hillerman novel, one of us would now turn into a shape-shifting Navajo witch and take out the other two with a shiv made from a human femur. Dia would be party to it. Earlier, Arthur noticed there was enough bacon in the cabin’s fridge to clog the arteries of half a dozen really big men. “That’s what they do,” he concluded. “After you’re dead they come in and take your passports and sell them, and then they prepare for the next earthwork. See those three mounds out there.”

There’s nothing to do but wait. In this, we are not alone. Waiting is New Mexico’s unofficial pastime. The whole state sits face-to-the-night in a kind of suspension. Near Jemez Springs, in the cold mountains northeast of Santa Fe, five young Ohioans pass a joint counterclockwise around the fire, steam from a mineral spring frosting their beards. They are waiting for the economy to turn, the snow to melt, their coffee to run out; waiting to get back into the water. At Bandelier National Monument in Frijoles Canyon, a kiva built by the Anasazi lies unexcavated—waiting for the hands of future archaeologists who, it’s assumed, will have more sophisticated methods of digging, preserving, dating. Tim McVeigh passed through this town, perhaps stopping briefly for gas or a smoke, after hatching a bomb plot in Kingman, Arizona, and driving easy along Route 66 to carry it out. Now everybody waits for the next McVeigh to come around, tor the violence inherent in a fringe of the American right to bite in.

My friend Frank was waiting too. Looking at this landscape, maybe sitting right in this chair, he was staring down his own mortality. Frank had AIDS. He hadn’t told anybody. I imagine him peering out at the poles, in twilight, as they stood out against the distance Sawtooth Mountains like the gradations on a thermometer. He was here with a friend. What did they talk about? Favorite movie exit lines. The gratuitious precision of Mr. Walter De Maria. Anything, everything, but the Big Thing. Maybe they took a little peyote and saw the nearest silver pole as the lance of the Caballero de la Triste Figure: Don Quixote.

I have no idea whether lighting stuck on the night Frank was here. I have a romantic notion that one bolt fell like the finger of God. But of course that couldn’t actually have happened. Lightning does not fall. I was surprised to learn, in the same way I was surprised to learn that the North Star is not fixed, that lightning isn’t a single charge. There are two strokes. One leaves the sky for the ground, and another leaves the ground for the sky. And somewhere in the middle, they meet.

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