From the archives: Fishing for Madeline

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.”

From the archives: To Snip or Not to Snip

by Bruce Grierson 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.

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

by Bruce Grierson 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.

What does the future hold for the Twins Who Share a Brain?

by Bruce Grierson Featured Kids Psychology Science

from VANCOUVER MAGAZINE, Sept. 1, 2011

The moment they were born, on October 25, 2006, in Vancouver, this much was known about Krista and Tatiana Hogan. The girls were conjoined—what used to be called “Siamese”—twins. Their skulls were fused such that their tiny bodies together made the shape of an open hinge, the girls facing the same direction but essentially away from each other. Each had her own organs and limbs, but they shared plenty of blood vessels in the netlike sheath beneath their scalp. And they shared something else, too, something believed to be unprecedented among living twins: a “bridge” of tissue connected their otherwise-separate brains amidships, at a crucial relay station called the thalamus.

Eight hours after the twins’ birth, a remarkable thing happened, and it immediately transformed the story of two little girls from Vernon, B.C., into something almost mythic. Tatiana got a shot and Krista flinched. Clearly, the girls were not just attached but connected. Sensory information passed between them.

“This is not telepathy. This is not ‘sixth sense,” says Douglas Cochrane, a veteran pediatric neurosurgeon at BC Children’s Hospital who has been the twins’ wingman—their doctor, advocate, and, in a sense, protector—since they were in utero. “The girls send chemical messengers in the bloodstream between each other. They send electrical impulses and information between each other along this bridge”—on the CT-scan image he’s pointing to, it looks like a long kidney bean—“and I’m sure along the coverings that they share.”

The bridge has been likened to a FireWire connection between their brains, and its bandwidth appears broad. Months after their birth, tests confirmed that images falling on the retina of Tatiana were processed in the visual cortex of Krista. What one girl looks at, the other girl sees.

This development, bordering on miraculous, had a flipside: separating them would be a bear. The risks were extraordinary. At best it would likely mean, at the end of many complicated operations teasing apart bone, skin, and vessels, some vision and speech impairment for both girls. Plus: “Given the way the brains are packed together—they’re physically separate but they sort of interdigitate like the teeth of a zipper—it was clear to me that we’d end up with weakness on one side for one twin and on the opposite side for the other,” Cochrane explains. “What else would happen no one knows.”

A semi-crazy-sounding philosophical question presented itself: Is it better to be healthy and fused to someone at the head, or to be impaired and partially paralyzed but on your own? To answer means having to assign a value to independence. Do we perhaps overvalue it? And undervalue—because no singleton can appreciate it—the presence of someone who gets you because they are in you, of you?

Cochrane viewed his job, in those early days, as articulating what splitting the girls up would mean (in terms of gains and losses), and then stepping back and letting mother Felicia Simms—then just 21—and the rest of the family make the call. The family chose not to separate. The twins would move into the future as one.

Brain surgeons have a reputation for an appalling bedside manner—almost as if they’re unwilling to devote even a bit of RAM to niceties that could go instead to saving lives. But David Douglas Cochrane has somehow found space inside himself for both. He is a big man with softly recessed eyes and a cultivated patience. On the consumer website RateMDs.com, where patients can describe their experiences with physicians, a father weighed in. Cochrane had successfully excised a bone cyst from his son’s skull. “Dr. Cochrane is the most professional, talented, kind, humble man I have ever met,” he wrote. Other comments strike a similarly devotional tone. (Alerted to the praise, Cochrane laughingly dismissed it because the sample size isn’t statistically significant.)

Cochrane became a doctor for some of the usual reasons: he wanted to help people, a family friend whom he idolized practised family medicine in hometown Cambridge, Ontario, and he (Douglas) had the brains and the stamina to get through med school. His ambitions drew him into the wider world. At the University of Toronto, he won the Faculty of Medicine’s Cody gold medal, then struck out for Angola and worked under the medical missionary Robert Foster at the tail end of a brutal civil war. Foster’s resourcefulness under fire (literally) provided a new benchmark. Cochrane decided there to specialize in neurosurgery. Neurosurgeons are medicine’s bomb squad—brain disorders are among the most threatening to patients, and treatments carry the most risk. Family medicine it isn’t, but for Cochrane that combination of complexity and high stakes was exactly the appeal. “I found I enjoyed trying to solve tough problems,” he says. Pediatric neurosurgery is the no-limit table: the highest stakes of all. If your itch is to help, life offers few more useful places to scratch. He has been at Childrens’, where he specializes in fetuses with congenital neurological malformations, for 25 years.

But nothing in his background, he says, prepared him for a case like the Hogan twins. Cochrane is watching and listening like everyone else to see what the girls reveal about who they are.

The twins, chestnut-haired and blue-eyed, are nearly five years old. Developmentally they’re closer to four, Cochrane says, but that may just be the Ginger Rogers syndrome: they do what other kids do, but backwards and in heels, so to speak. “They have had to learn motor movements differently,” Cochrane says. “They had to work on how to sit and stand and cruise and walk.” (Even bum-scooting required heroic teamwork.)

Their language has come slowly. Cochrane admits he doesn’t quite know why but reckons the answer might be social rather than physiological. The twins are the not-so-still centre of an extended family of 14 people, all mustered under the roof of a 10-room rented house, all more or less devoted to the insatiable needs of the world’s rarest craniopagus twins. “You could say that there’s a household there that’s so full of adults and kids communicating that they’re kind of communicating for them,” Cochrane says. “It’s like the third child: he’s not going to talk until he’s three because the other two are doing all the talking for him.”

Exactly what the girls’ internal landscape is like we can’t yet know. The best tool for getting a real-time snapshot of what’s happening in the brain is an fMRI scan, which measures changes in blood flow (which correlate to changes in neural activity). For those pictures the girls will need to go into the scanner without anesthetic, which means getting their cooperation. It’ll likely be at least a year before Cochrane lets that happen. For now everybody is guessing.

Some things are established. It seems clear that Tatiana will “see” the sickle moon that Krista is looking at (and vice-versa). Very likely, in some fashion, she will hear the Bruno Mars song piping into Krista’s ear bud, and taste the Tin Roof ice cream Krista just licked, and feel the give of the soft-shelled where to buy ambien cr online crab Krista just picked up. (One exception: she may not smell the chrysanthemum Krista has leaned down to sniff; olfaction appears to be the one sense that routes around the thalamus.) The fear Krista experiences in her nightmare will agitate sleeping Tatiana, too. And when Krista jars awake, so will Tatiana. (The thalamus governs wakefulness.) So they will save money on alarm clocks.

It’s not clear how their brains will sort out the interference from the two-way traffic on the bridge. If they are both reading a book, will each see both sets of words? (Some neurologists wonder if the twins will have an increased chance of synesthesia—a blending of senses disproportionately common in visual artists.) The communication between them will likely prove to be a uniquely intimate call-and-response. But can we say what they are sharing are actual thoughts?

The thalamus relays not only sensory information but also some memory information to a part of the midbrain called the cingulate cortex, which is involved in, among other things, processing emotion. So the exchange is bound to have at least a dimension of what we think of as “thoughts.”

Felicia Simms is convinced her girls are playing a sort of private game of tennis, mentally. Kelowna filmmaker Alison Love, who spent a year with the twins while helping create the documentary Twins Who Share a Brain, believes it, too. “In the beginning we weren’t sure ourselves,” she says. “Is it just Mom hoping that the kids are really more special than they are?” But then both she and filmmaking partner David McIlvride began to see the same thing: a tight, coded link between the girls’ behaviour without a sound passing between them.

Cochrane, for his part, is somewhat a kindred spirit to Atul Gawande, a Boston-based endocrine surgeon and popular writer. Both men crusade for patient safety, ensured by systems of checklists and protocols for doctors to work more efficiently and limit catastrophic errors. Gawande wrote a book called Better, which promotes these issues; Cochrane co-directs the Canadian Patient Safety Institute and was recently appointed to chair the inquiry into thousands of medical scans performed and interpreted by a couple of B.C. doctors unlicensed to do so.

But Cochrane is like Gawande in another way, too. Gawande has an oft-quoted line that could easily be Cochrane’s mantra: “The social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific.” Cochrane is a listener above all else. Patients know better than doctors do whether their treatment has been “successful,” but that’s not the way the equation works now. Correcting that thinking, Cochrane says, “becomes more important to me the older I get.”

A powerful social lens may prove one of Cochrane’s best assets as far as the girls are concerned. (For theirs is going to be as much a social story as a medical one, a story of standing out and fitting in.) Cochrane is a curator of the twins’ uniqueness who emphasizes their ordinariness. “My sort of mental model of these kids is that they’re two kids who come to visit me,” he says. “I’m involved in the care of many kids with deformities and malformations, kids who don’t look normal and their arms and legs don’t work normally.” In this sense, the twins are like any other of his patients. “I see them as children.” If this case were special, the other ones wouldn’t be.

Cochrane doesn’t burn much daylight thinking about the philosophical and poetic implications of the girls who share a brain. Even the twists and turns of the neuroscience don’t preoccupy him. “I am interested,” he says, “and when the time is right we’ll try and put some sense to this. But I’m not prepared to put the girls out as medical curiosities. I mean, where historically did these people end up? In circuses.”

This is Cochrane as protector—trying to create normalcy around a family circumstance that would quicken the pulse of a reality-show producer. That 14-member extended family—including mom Felicia and father Brendan, five kids (the twins have an older brother and a sister, plus a baby sister called Shaggy), grandmother Louise, and various aunts and uncles and cousins—are stretched impossibly thin. The monthly budget doesn’t cover the frequent car trips to Vancouver for medical tests, which are only partly subsidized by the provincial health ministry. Some of the adults, at least three of whom have health issues of their own, report that they sometimes go hungry so that the twins can eat. To manage the twins’ exposure and drum up income (through things like speaking gigs for Felicia), the family has retained Los Angeles agent Chuck Harris. The self-described “Wizard of Odd,” Harris counts among his other clients “Lizard Boy,” “Wolf Boy,” and a guy who balances a car on his head. (Not to mention 49-year-old Lori and George Schappell of Reading, Pennsylvania, the world’s oldest set of craniopagus twins.)

The frenzy of academic interest in the twins is its own kind of P.T. Barnum scrum, in Cochrane’s view. “It’s ‘Who’s published about it? Show me the article!’” he says. And here the face of this perfectly controlled man clouds with frustration. (Cochrane has published no papers on the girls himself.) “The kids need to develop in order for us to understand some of the things that they’re asking. And the case study of these two twins will in fact be important when we can do it.”

The Hogan twins—the fact of them—is a little like the fact of life on Earth: a series of odds-defying events compounded to a level of staggering improbability. They weren’t supposed to make it this far. Early fears were that Tatiana’s heart, which was doing almost the work of two hearts, might fail. But now that the twins have grown, and grown stronger, that fear has faded and they are thriving beyond all expectation. Cochrane heaps credit on the family. “The support I remain in awe of,” he says. “That family has remained absolutely committed and absolutely strong. Without them the girls probably would have ended up in foster care.”

Out in public the girls still generate strong reactions. That’s not likely to change. “People’s immediate response is, ‘The twins should be separated—let’s make them like us,’ ” Cochrane says. Whatever the motives for that reflex—to spare the girls an impossibly complicated life or just to spare ourselves the uncomfortable feelings they might arouse in us—it’s not likely to happen now. “The only two other twins I know of who had this form of joining, though not the bridge, were two Iranian sisters,” Cochrane says. “They chose to do it in adulthood. And they did not survive.”

So, barring some game-changing microsurgical advance 30 years down the road, these two British Columbian sisters, bred in the bone, will move through life together, communicating in ways they’ll probably never be able fully to articulate. No one else will understand. But one man will understand better than most.

www.vanmag.com/News_and_Features/The_Worlds_Rarest_Twins?page=0%2C0

Fresh Tracks

by Bruce Grierson Featured Kids Published Stories Archive

The “Spirit Trail,” Harrison Lake, BC.

from BRITISH COLUMBIA magazine, December, 2010

The tubing park at Hemlock Valley Resort doesn’t look like much: just five lanes carved into the side of the hill, separated by hay bales, with a rope tow to schlep the demonstrably lazy to the top. But it provides a perfect teachable moment.

“Girls, in about a minute you’re going to feel like you’re going for gold in Whistler. Because this is very much like the luge.” Madeline lay poised on her inner tube. Lila lay on top of me on the other tube, inert in her snowsuit. (She is two.)

“What’s the luge?” Madeline says. (She is five.)

“An Olympic event.”

“Who invented it?”

“Who invented the luge?”

“Right.”

“…Penguins.”

Last night’s snowfall had creamed the entire valley almost to lodge level. In today’s sunlight it looks as if a painting crew had triple-coated everything in white, leaving the baseboard untouched. You can see the triple-express chair ferrying skiers and snowboarders to the summit – from which, an hour ago, a parasailer had launched, a yellow dot against the blue sky. We shrugged our tubes up to the edge of the slope and over.

It isn’t super-steep. But some space-age polymer on the underside of the tubes makes them unspeakably slippery, and fast. We thundered town, pinched the haybale sidewalls and spun like curling rocks until straw scattered on the runoff slowed us to a silent stop. There was a certain amount of heavy breathing; I realized it was coming from me. Were the kids alive? If so, it occurred to me they might never forgive me. But it soon became clear they’d never forgive me if we didn’t do this 15 more times.

Snow is not the first thing, or even the second or third thing, that comes to mind when someone mentions Harrison Hot Springs, BC, and its surrounds. The village, just two hours’ drive east of Vancouver, is known as a summer getaway — a place of sandcastles (on the beach) and fiddlers (at the arts festival) and boutique cheeses (from the area farms). Even winter here’s just a cooler shade of green. That’s why Hemlock Valley is so freakish. It’s like something out of CS Lewis. Bear north outside of town and push up into the mountains – through the firs as if through the furs in the magic wardrobe—and out you pop into … the French Alps. In Hemlock Valley so much winter snow routinely falls that even amid one of the warmest winters on record in southern BC, it was ski business as usual up here—minus the lift lines.

If it all seemed a little bit magic—slipping in and out of winter in less time than a cab-ride takes to the airport—well, so be it. There is something a bit otherworldly about this former logging town cum-tourist-mecca—and there always has been.

To American gold-rush prospectors, steaming north toward the rumoured motherlode in Yale, Harrison Lake was a golden key. Here was a freshwater highway, 42 miles long and boomerang-shaped, that breeched forbidding mountain ranges like a magic portal to the BC interior, where untold riches lay. And maybe all that concentrated human intention, that thrill of sudden good fortune, is still in the air around here.

Willie Charlie has no qualms about using the “s” word. It is, he says, a spiritual place. Charlie, the soft-spoken chief of the local Chehalis band, is a custodian of many of his people’s legends, recounted an origin myth. A man out fishing had a bountiful day. But instead of sharing his catch, he got selfish. He boiled up a huge batch of fish-head soup that he aimed to quaff down himself in one big greedy slurp. Sadly for him, the great creator was watching, and turned him to stone. He stands forever on a mountain ridge west of Harrison Hot Springs. And that boiling cauldron of soup? That’s the hot springs.

To all the Natives in the area the springs carried – and still do – a healing power. But no longer can you just jump into the pools that once gathered beneath a fissure in the mountainside. The healing waters have long since been harnessed. They pop out now in two places: the pedestrian public hot springs and the lavish, spa-like pools of Harrison Hot Springs Resort.

The morning we arrived, the hotel itself seemed to be just stirring from sleep. Guests padded groggily through the lobby in plush robes en route to the outdoor pools – thence to slide into the water until the warm vapours met the cool air and their hair turned white.

The rest of the family beat me into the water. I was finishing breakfast upstairs with a guy who knows as much as anyone as the other thing that has put Harrison Hot Springs on the map.

Bill Miller is a big man with a shaggy mane of cinammon-brown hair. Almost every day, rain or shine, he climbs aboard his Polaris ATV — “Bigfoot Research” on the side — and guns it up the logging roads, high into the mountains looking for … signs. When he’s not on the buggy he’s out dutifully checking out every reported sighting, or he’s on the Net contributing to the sasquatch conversation in forensic detail. Sasquatch sightings have been reported all over the Pacific Northwest. But around Harrison Lake the data points cluster. If Bigfoot lives, he lives here. Did Miller really believe they’re out there? I asked.

“Unless the one I saw died as it walked out of sight, and it was the last one,” he said.

Miller’s eyes drifted into the middle distance, beyond the poised forkful of breakfast sausage and out through the big windows into the east shore of the lake, as he reconstructed the memory. Co-ordinates: 2003, 4200 feet up Sentinal Mountain, near Stoki creek. Miller was scanning a nearby slope when, in a clearing, something moved. He got off the buggy and peered through 600 mm of camera lens. He picked the thing up again there, in the shaky telephoto spotlight, and squeezed off two shots. The first one was blurred. The second one caught Bigfoot. The very same species of hominid, maybe, that Miller had glimpsed through the fog while night-fishing in Minnesota almost thirty years ago, and that set his Bigfoot obsession in train. Except that the picture is not quite good enough to show anyone. Another inconclusive photo is going to create more scoffers than believers. And so he will not rest until he has the definitive vindicating evidence – a crisp photo, a sharp video sequence. He has already spent, in his estimation, $150,000 of his own money in the hunt. (If he accepted money, his motives would be suspect and his credibility shot, he reasons.)

The fruits of his labours to date: some footprints in the middle of nowhere. A rough catalogue of fugitive glimpses. No bones, no nests. “People say to me, you’ve been at this almost every day for a decade and you haven’t found it. Well, look around. This is a vast place. You could hide a dinosaur up here and no one would know.”

But just by being here, doing his thing, Miller is kindling a buzz around Bigfoot not seen around here since they cancelled Sasquatch Days. He’s trying to scratch up funding to get a good-quality replica of the creature built and put on display here in Harrison, a diarama kind of thing, sasquatch in his natural habitat. He thinks there might be a market for Sasquatch tours, taking tourists into the mountains to the locations of famous reported sightings. You’d bring a lunch and eat it right there on the Sasquatch trail.

It’s easy to think of the whole Harrison Hot Springs area as a filigreed map of trails like that, some visible, some not, dating back thousands of years – First Nations, explorers, fur traders, prospectors and maybe hairy hominids too, all laying down tracks. It would take something like a satellite map not of space but of time to reveal them (get on this, Google people). But even today, local residents are still finding ways to create new trails, with surprising payoffs for those who discover them.

Earlier, we’d pulled off the main road and stopped at an unmarked trailhead. This was the “spirit trail,” so named by some geocachers who had hidden a small prize at the end of it (a box maybe containing batteries for the gps that had got you there). The woods in there felt primeval. Traffic sounds soon fell away, swallowed up by the sword ferns. Moss-covered deadfall gave it an elephant’s-graveyard feel. It seemed untrodden by anyone, ever. And then you saw it: halfway down the path, high up on a big hemlock, the face of an old man.

The mask was the handiwork of Ernie Eaves, a potter and semi-retired drama teacher from an area highschool. This was a path he knew of, had walked for years with his dog. But one day he saw the forest differently. The trees seemed somehow…animated. A group of four of them looked like four men playing poker—and so that’s what they became, replete with visors and eye patches. Near the end of the trail is a kind of circle of trees. That’s where Ernie put “the goddesses” – twice-lifesize faces of women across cultures.

Ernie didn’t build this trail to be discovered, or to be written by people like me. He built it, he says, “to make myself laugh.”

I caught up with the rest of the family at the indoor pool at the hotel. There was a strange energy to the scene. Madeline was sharking around in search of warm spots. Where was the kid who was a little bit afraid of water? She was dunking her head, swimming half the width of the pool. Lila was launching herself off the side with crazed abandon, and babbling nonstop in some foreign toddler tongue. Clearly, in the last 24 hours, the kids had made a developmental leap. There’s probably a scientific explanation –like, that’s how kids’ brains grow, in observable fits and starts. But I couldn’t help think that something in the water had shot them through with vitality, like Hume Cronyn in Cocoon.

Probably, whatever mysticism people find in Harrison Hot Springs is mysticism they have brought here themselves. “The great thing about Harrison is that it doesn’t pretend to be more than it is – a beautiful spot at the end of a long lake,” Ernie Eaves told me. The medicine water issues not from rock but from the espresso machine at Muddy Waters – a coffee spot we visited on the way out of town. Sunshine speared through the big glass windows. We fueled up on sandwiches for the trip home and gazed at the photos on the wall. Portraits of guys with names like Cootie Williams and Waldren “Frog” Joseph. Jazz legends who never in their lifetimes saw this much light.

Kids Gone Wild

by Bruce Grierson 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:

explore-mag.com/article/people/kids-gone-wild/

Getting to ‘Yes’

by Bruce Grierson Featured Kids

7 Habits of Highly Persuasive Toddlers

From TODAY’S PARENT, Sept 2007

Young soldiers, listen up. Your parents are busy. They really don’t have much time. Which means you have only seconds, not minutes, to grab their attention and get your message heard.

The good news is, that’s all you’re going to need, because you’re parents are fairly easy game. They’re low-functioning. They’re exhausted and weak and dizzy. They’re pleased, after an outing, just to have successfully found their car. Their eyes aren’t good enough to read the serial number on their iPod, no matter how close they hold it to their face. They’re losing words at about the same rate you’re gaining them. They are no match for you.

But they’re still human beings. And so they deserve to be treated with dignity. Be straight up. Proceed boldly and methodically. Here are seven tips to help you bend the current administration to your will:

1. Keep it simple. Eschew adjectives. Ditto for articles and conjunctions. Hemingway wrote a short story in six words (“Baby Carriage for Sale: Never Used”), and IBM boiled the company’s brand identity down to one (“Think”). A single concrete noun will often do. Example: “Fudge!”

2. Serve compliment sandwiches. A request slid between two “I love Mommys” is hard to ignore. Only the most stonehearted parent will even hesitate before caving.

3. Show, don’t tell. Timely gestures are more powerful than words. A dad de-pantsed from the foot of the bed at 5:30 a.m. is a dad who clearly understands that it’s time for the family to meet the day.

4. Stay on message. There are lots of things you may want right now, but pick one and stick to it. Think of your parents as short-order cooks, hired from the dregs of some government make-work program. You really don’t want to send more than one order at a time into that kitchen.

5. Isolate the sponge. Mom and Dad struggle mightily to maintain a united front. But it’s pretty obvious that one of them is soft. That’s the one you need to get to, alone, before he can confer with head office.

6. Show chutzpah. Spunk is a trait parents respect—it just makes good evolutionary sense. Parents may claim they want docile children, but deep down they know docile won’t fight for them years from now, when they’re lying in a vapour tent and a doctor is trying to unplug them to free up the bed.

7. Who’s the customer here? Remember that question and remember the answer: you are. Without your continuing patronage, this joint shuts down. The implicit threat that you might take your business elsewhere—say, to the Auerbachs’ next door, with the plum tree and plenty of room at the dinner table now that their own kids have left for college—should make your parents very attentive to your needs.

— Bruce Grierson and Jennifer Williams live in a maintenance shed behind the Vancouver house occupied by their two-year-old daughter, Madeline.

Spellbound

by Bruce Grierson Featured Kids Psychology

From THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, Sept. 1, 2002

Every September, the office of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Cincinnati issues a crisp new edition of ”Paideia,” a comic-size booklet that lists thousands of obscure words that will appear in spelling bees across the country over the coming year — words that any competitive speller in America should know cold. Most families wait for their ”Paideia” to arrive at school; but serious devotees know when the advance audio version of ”Paideia” will go up on the Scripps Howard Web site. On that day each year, the Goldsteins of West Hempstead, N.Y. — Amy, Ari, J.J. and Amanda, along with their parents, Jonathan and Mona — assemble like the Von Trapps in a thunderstorm. The whole family squeezes into Amy’s bedroom and fires up the computer, and the familiar, baronial voice of the National Spelling Bee pronouncer, Alex J. Cameron, carefully enunciates each new addition to the list — aition, buy cialis online in pakistan campanile, kittel, giaour. Each Goldstein sits with pen and paper in hand, as still and focused as a game-show contestant, and spells the words, one by one. It takes hours.

It is the equivalent, for this family, of the first scrimmage of the year. It signals the beginning of bee season, a long nationwide winnowing process that starts with the 10 million kids who enter class bees in December, passes through countless district and regional bees in the spring and concludes at the National Spelling Bee in late May, leaving a lone speller standing on a stage, holding a jug-handled trophy in clammy hands. Of all the rituals the Goldsteins observe — and as Orthodox Jews, they observe many — this is one of the most important and perhaps the most personal. It is a reminder of what binds them, and defines them, as a family.

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Bruce Grierson

Social science writer