Bill's Blog

I enjoyed reading Jodi Picoult’s “Wish You Were Here”. The novel is set during the pandemic and the main character, Diana O’Toole, a young employee of Sotheby’s Auction house in their art department gets COVID. I don’t want to spoil the story, so if you have not read it yet, stop here. 

The first half of the book is kind of set in Isabela, one of the Galápagos Islands. I say “kind of” because she imagined traveling to the island just as COVID swept the Americas and was trapped there. She received help from the locals and had adventures on the island for weeks. However, she was actually back in New York and on a ventilator for 5 days, fighting for her life. The book explores the power of the mind to “lucid dream” during comas, surgeries, near-death experiences, etc. Diana was planning to do the trip with her boyfriend, a resident doctor in Manhattan. She completely blacked out and dreamed she went on the trip without him while having a severe case of COVID. The experiences she had were imagined from the places she read about during the trip planning. During the dreams, she fell in love with a local, decided to drop her boyfriend and leave working as an art auctioneer and start an art therapy practice. 

“The truth is, we don’t really know what happens when we medically sedate someone, and how your mind syncs your reality with your unconscious.”

Wish You Were Here, Jodi Picoult – 2021

The mind is powerful and misunderstood and I believe people have these intense, lucid dreams during times of great stress and unconsciousness. I was thinking if I ever experienced anything similar. I remember once when I was a child, I remember having an “out-of-body” experience where I left my body and watched myself play on our family’s back porch from above. I also had a period during university of intense dreams that I was flying at an incredibly fast speed over my hometown of Iron River. The dream recurred several times one summer. I’ve never had surgery and have never been put under anesthesia, and am glad I avoided it so far, but it would be a life experience and I wonder how my mind would react.

It also made me think about memory. I have a bad memory and have really forgotten a lot of details of my life. I think that is one reason I blog so much, to help me remember. My brother Jim has an amazing memory and he remembers things like what our school lunch times were like in middle school. He brings back descriptions of our childhood that most people have long forgotten. Dreams, memories, “terminal lucidity” are just some of the aspects of the human brain that are fascinating. I think medicine in the upcoming centuries will understand more about the brain and give better explanations of these. Picoult’s book triggered my thoughts about the power of the mind. Pic

Diana in the book asks her mother, a world famous photographer, “Did you always want to travel?” “When I was a girl,” my mother says, “we went nowhere. My father was a cattle farmer and he used to say you can’t take a vacation from the cows.” (I felt the same way growing up. The furthest I travelled until my senior year of high school was Minneapolis, a 5-hour drive from my hometown and following our high school football team to the state playoffs in 1977 to watch them in the Pontiac Silverdome. When I graduated from high school and college, I wanted to see the world!

I like the idea of “tsunami stones”. Japanese believe that it takes three generations to forget. People who experience trauma, pass it along to their children and grandchildren, but after that, the memory fades. The stones are made to warm future generations. Diana as an art therapist has her patients erect “COVID stones”. Some of the mantras on the stones are “Find Your Joy” and “No job is worth killing yourself for”. It’s understanding that an extra hour at your desk is an hour you don’t spend throwing a ball with your kid.

Some other items of interest.

• “You can’t plan your life, Finn,” I say quietly. “Because then you have a plan and not a life.”
• terminal lucidity – terminally ill patients suddenly remember and think clearly after years of dementia and their brains are destroyed
• Unlike animals, we can now sing and speak and scream… but unlike animals, we also can choke to death if our food goes down the wrong pipe.
• Djinn or Jinn – invisible mythological creatures from pre-Islamic Arabia

Diana specializes in art and in the novel, she is dealing with a painting by French artist Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. He had skeletal dysplasia that left him only 5 feet tall with undersized legs. He was commissioned to paint a series of posters for the Moulin Rouge caberet in 1899 Paris. My wife Nadia loved the Baz Lehrman movie about the caberet. Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings are worth millions. You can see one of the posters of the Moulin Rouge series below. He painted himself as a seated patron in the center left.

My cholesterol level dropped almost 100 mg/dL thanks to the drug atorvastatin! I’ve been taking 10mg daily since March of this year. Wow! My cholesterol levels in my blood have been averaging 221 since I started recording them in 2005. I finally took the plunge this spring when I had a reading of 243.6, and combined with my age, puts me at an 8% higher risk of heart attack. This put me on the threshold of taking a statin so I decided to stick with it this spring to see how it goes. I saw big losses also in my levels of triglycerides (-176) and LDL (-76). My HDL (good cholesterol) is still not much over the recommended threshold of 40 mg/dL. I’ll try to eat more foods that help that and exercise more.

I can see why atorvastatin is the most commonly prescribed drug in the USA with over 141 million prescriptions annually. Heart disease is the number one killer of humans, and lowering my cholesterol lowers my risk of a stroke or heart attack. Atorvastatin is shown to reduce heart attacks in multiple research studies. Thanks to Bruce Roth who invented the drug way back in 1985. The drug sold over $125 billion under the trade name Lipitor between 1996 and 2012 for Pfizer. The medication is relatively inexpensive and all health plans cover the cost for adults between 40 and 75 in the USA.

I continue to closely monitor my health and set an appointment for a colonoscopy next summer. That will be a great blog post! 🙂 This year I will try to follow Michael Pollan’s mantra, “Eat food (no heavily processed food), not too much (I need to eat less, I still eat portions like I am a teenager) and eat more plants (not only good for you, but good for the planet). I will also try to exercise more. Yesterday morning I went for a run at the track at the beautiful Nelson Field.

For the first time since my father died in 2012, we had the entire family above gathered in one place. My two brothers and their families joined my family for dinner last night at Alice’s Supper Club in Iron River. After dinner, we hung out in our garden in our home in Caspian. As you can see from the photo, my brother Jimmer and I are adopted so we have a range of looks and personalities in our family. We had a delightful evening with lots of laughs. Hopefully, it won’t be so long between occasions that we gather together.

We contributed to the $337 million dollars the Barbie movie took in on its opening weekend on Sunday. The closest theatre is an hour drive from Caspian in the town of Quinnesec. Ocean and I wore pink for the occasion. The Barbie doll was first brought to the toy market in 1959 and Mattel has made a lot of money during the more than 50 years of the doll. We had a good discussion of feminism and the struggles of boys and girls to develop themselves and their careers in our world.

I took the boys on a hike on Saturday to the Cooks Run Trail in northwest Iron County. There was not really much to see on the three 1-mile loops besides trees and swamps. We cut the hike short after 2 miles and returned to the car to get away from the mosquitos. We ended up have a refreshing swim in Hagerman Lake, one of my favorite Iron County lakes. I love spending time with Owen, Oliver, Beau, and Tony as young men. We had a lot of laughs! I am looking forward to watching them mature into adults and am curious about what they will do for a living and who they will marry. I am just happy they still like to hang out with me and allow me to tag along.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is covered with protected national forests and lakeshores. I grew up on the edge of the Ottawa and Chequamanon-Nicolet national forests. The Ottawa National Forest is where I call home. I love the over 1.5 million acres of lakes, rivers, and streams, the 200 inches of yearly snow, and the solitude (the largest “cities” on the fringes of the forest are Ironwood with a population of 9,000 and Iron River with a population of 5,000) and the designated wilderness areas within the forest, including the nearby Sylvania Wilderness. The Ottawa National Forest covers a big chunk of the western Upper Peninsula. There are three large national forest areas in the UP and one national lakeshore. This provides me kilometers of hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing trails and roads.

The national forest system has 157 total forests. The most extensive forests are located out west, with Alaska having the most national forest land and Idaho having the highest percentage of its land under national forest protection (38%). The Upper Peninsula if it was a state, actually has a higher percentage than Idaho with 58% of its land designated as national forest. 42 of the 50 states have designated national forests or grasslands.

One of my favorite activities, while I am in Iron County, is cycling. There are a lot of roads (paved and gravel), former railways turned into trails, and lots of logging two-track trails to bike. There are very few cars and up here, cars give me a wide berth, unlike in Uzbekistan. Today I cycled a combination of trails and roads for about 50 kilometers. I only encountered a few cars, with the exception of light traffic on M73. I road to Bass Lake to look at the Eagle’s Nest and then by Stanley Lake to home. A red fox ran out about 10 meters in front of me.

Yesterday we rented kayaks through Sylvania Outfitters. They supported our 6-mile trip on the Ontonagon River from Burned Dam Falls to the ghost town of Interior. We were on the middle branch of the river which eventually empties into Lake Superior. It was a cold, overcast day but we all were swept away by the beauty of the flowing river.

Iron County has ideal cycling conditions! I’ve been trying to get out as much as possible on my brother’s bicycle while I am here. Riding through the countryside of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is one of my favorite things to do. The population density of my home Iron County (4 people per kilometer, which is the same as Canada and a little more densely populated than Australia. There are not a lot of cars or people (11,631) in a big space (3,140 km2). Iron County is closest in area to the Turkish side of Cyprus, which has a population of 358,000. There are also good roads for road cyclists and a variety of gravel roads, logging trails, former railways turned to trails, ATV trails, etc. to give cyclists many opportunities to ride in the forests. There are no high mountains, but many rolling hills which are strenuous, but not impossible to scale over a course of a ride.

Iron County is one of two “land-locked” counties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Land-locked meaning not having a Great Lakes Coastline. It borders Wisconsin and is in the Central time zone as is the four counties that border Wisconsin. This is confusing when we have appointments in Marquette, the largest city in the UP (20,.629), which is in neighboring Marquette County, but is in the Eastern time zone. The entire Upper Peninsula is great for cycling with a low population density (300,000 people in the size of Switzerland).

Some people not from here complain that there are too many trees. Driving or cycling between towns means a monotonous band of green (in July) with breaks only for bodies of water, some homes, and towns. It does limit the views and if one goes into the thick forests, there numerous mosquitoes. The weather in July is ideal, not too hot during the day and cool evenings, but for much of the year, there is snow and cold weather. There is also a lack of cycling culture here. In the university towns of Marquette and Houghton, you see more cyclists but in overall, very few people ride bicycles here.

Logging is a positive and negative for cyclists. The positive is there are many logging trails that mountain and gravel bikes can explore. The negative of course, are areas that look blighted (above). Overall, it is a cycling paradise and one of the reasons I like to return home.

Summer storms are common in the Upper Great Lakes Region. Storms occur in unstable atmospheric conditions with warm surface air rising, cooling, and then releasing precipitation. Often this precipitation is held up in the upper atmosphere to generate quite large hail stones. The rising air is replaced by “downburst winds” which in some cases cause destruction like tornadoes. They touch down at isolated points along the route of a storm and skip over other areas. These are not swirling winds like a tornado, but they blow in one direction. You can see the evidence of this in trees that fall down all in one direction. Ecologically, these downbursts create light gaps in the forest and the downed trees eventually become fuel for fires which many plants rely upon to germinate. (Note – The Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide to The Northwoods of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Southern Ontario is an excellent resource to explain weather and climate in this region.)

Last night just before sunset, a summer storm came to my village of Caspian. I was south of town, teaching Oliver and Ocean how to drive and we were on the border land between Michigan and Wisconsin when the storm came. We approached Caspian shortly after and experienced the aftermath of downed trees. No one was injured, and the Caspian-Gaastra fire department was on the scene directing traffic and clearing debris. It was quite an exciting event in a normally quiet little town.

Since this is the only time we will be in the USA until next year, we usually take care of doctor’s appointments, purchase things we cannot find in Uzbekistan, and other errands/tasks that must be done while we are here. We’ve been driving to Marquette quite a bit recently for visits to a dermatologist and optometrist. Marquette is a 90-minute drive from Caspian and is the unofficial capital of the Upper Peninsula. It is such a lovely town being on Lake Superior, surrounded by forests, and having some of the amenities of urban centers. As you can see above, we stopped at the Trenary Cafe for a coffee and some of the famous Trenary Toast. Trenary is a small town on the eastern side of the Upper Peninsula and the bakery’s famous toast is actually a twice-baked, Finnish korppu. Many Finnish immigrants came to the Upper Peninsula and brought their customs and traditions that still survive today. Jorma Syrannen in 1928 brought the Finnish coffee cake to the UP. Despite my adopted mother being Finn, we never ate Trenary Toast or korppu, although, my relatives drank a lot of coffee always accompanied by sweet cakes and cookies. Cinamon rolls and coffee were usually served at all family daytime gatherings.

We bought eyeglasses for me. I have progressive lenses which are not made in Uzbekistan. I got a thorough check of my eyes and all is healthy. I increased the magnification of the reading section of my lenses, however, and the optometrist suspects I’ll be needing another magnification in a few years. The eyes stabilize around 60 years old, so at least I have that to look forward to. Owen bought some reading glasses as well.

We also visited the dermatologist and Ocean and Nadia had some moles removed. Nadia’s mother died of skin cancer at a young age, so we are sensitive to sun spots, freckles, and moles. Ocean was brave and I ended up having a nice day with Nadia and Ocean.

We are still playing lots of tennis this summer. The courts are always free and we can use free-of-charge because they are open to the public. We had an epic 2 and 1/2 hour doubles match against Owen. Nadia and I lost 1-6, 7-5, 4-6 to Owen. His youth, the speed, strength and agility were too much for us.

I am not a golfer but with my son working at a golf course this summer and him starting to get into the sport a bit, I decided to read a book about golf. The Saudi government program of “sports washing” is fascinating to me and Phil Mickelson was one of the first professional golfers to switch to the LIV Tour. I also heard he is entertaining and controversial so I thought the book would be a good read for the summer.

I thought the book was good read. It went through his career from growing up in San Diego in a golf-obsessed family to attending Arizona State University and then hitting the PGA tour. As the title says, Mickelson is quite the character! He makes controversial comments all the time, takes risks on the golf course and his life that many think are crazy or imprudent. He differs from many golfers, who always play the percentages and play “boring” golf. I can see why he was popular and got a lot of endorsement deals. He has a lot of charisma and can “work a room”. I didn’t know he was the main rival to Tiger Woods during Wood’s heyday. Mickelson had a way with people that made people who met him in person like him immediately. He was also vain, selfish, fake, and rude at times, which are all human qualities. I think this was his appeal as well. Fans saw themselves in him, with his propensity to overeat, gamble, have an undisciplined approach to his fitness and game, and say crazy things. This was in stark contrast to the robotic approach to golf of Tiger Woods.

The author, Alan Shipnuck has a new book coming out about the whole PGA/Saudi fight and eventual agreement. That may be a good book to read as well.

The book did not make me a golf fan or want to play more. However, it did give me an appreciation of a Hall of Fame golfer’s career and life. Below are some new words I learned.

• “Nassau” – This is a type of bet among players. They bet the first 9, then the second 9, and then the full 18. It is three bets for a round of golf.
• “duende” – In Latin America, it is a type of goblin, but I learned it also means passion …Ballesteros recognized the kid’s duende.
• “consigliere” – This is an advisor to a boss, someone who resolves disputes, challenges the boss, and at times, can be the elder statesman of the group. The term originated with the Sicilian mafia.

The Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore preserves 42 miles (67 kilometers) of Lake Superior coastline between Munising and Grand Marais. The wind and waves eroding the sandstone cliffs are truly awesome and beautiful and I can see why National Park Service designated it as the first national lakeshore area. It is like Bryce Canyon or the Grand Canyon meets Lake Superior! We took the boat tour with my uncle and I highly recommend seeing the cliffs and rock formations from the lakeview. I would take it via kayak next time, but to get a full overview of the park, a boat tour is the best introduction, especially if you have limited time and a mixed party. We also saw many birds, including two Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) and plenty of seagulls and cormorants.

The geology is fascinating with spring water coming out of the cliffside to create a palette of colors. There is also plenty of evidence of major chunks of the cliffs suddenly collapsing. These take place over many years. The trees on the edge live a precarious existence, and I thought it was a good metaphor for humans. Enjoy life while you can because you never know when the bottom will fall out.

We were last in the area with the kids when they were little probably about 15 years ago. We stayed in some cabins in the nearby town of Christmas, and we had a summer celebration of Christmas. This time we stayed in Munising at the Econo Lodge. After the tour, we stopped at Captain Ron’s Fish Truck and had a delicious Lake Superior whitefish and chips lunch! The truck is on the side of M28 just on the outskirts of the town on the Marquette side. Munising is a picturesque town of 2,500 people, the same size as Iron River. The school is right on Lake Superior. What a place to teach!

We stopped at Star Bucks and I shopped for eyeglasses in Marquette on the way home. My home village of Caspian is quite isolated and services like good restaurants and medical care are limited. We finished the evening with a Riverside Pizza from Iron River. There was a big thunderstorm with hail while we were eating. The sunset was spectacular. The fresh air and skies of the UP are relaxing. It was a great day!

My family ran the 42nd annual Crystal Falls Bass Festival “Run Your Bass Off” this morning. Owen and I ran the 10-kilometer race, Ocean the 5-kilometer race, and Nadia, Oliver, and Uncle Jack completed the 2-mile non-competitive walk. Owen had the best time of all of us, finishing under 54 minutes for the 10.6-kilometer course. I ran exactly 1-hour and didn’t feel good the entire race. I think I need to incorporate more aerobic training, especially running. I had trouble catching my breath and my leg were very sore immediately after the race, telling me I need to train more. I can’t rock up to a race and crank out a decent time anymore. 😦 The important thing was we all did it together and had a great time! The weather was perfect and I ran into my cousin Debbie. It was a good morning.

We then drove to Marquette in the afternoon and stopped at Owen’s house. We took a nap before going for an early dinner at Teriyaki Bowl restaurant. The food was excellent and the waiter was from Thailand so it was authentic Asian cuisine. I recommend it and we will definitely come here again. It is nice to be able to get good Asian dishes in the Upper Peninsula. Only in Marquette!

We watched the fifth and final installment of the Indiana Jones series, “The Dial of Destiny“. We all enjoyed the movie and it brought up a lot of the best scenes from the earlier Indiana Jones movies. The de-aging effects are amazing and I think CGI/AI can make a movie even with dead people. It was interesting to see Clark Gable come back to star in a modern movie. It delivered what people want from the series, Nazis, chase scenes, archeology, etc. I thought it was a little too long, but overall an OK movie and it was good to share the experience with the kids.

After the movie, we drove an hour during the sunset along M28 to Munising and checked into our hotel. My uncle’s observation about the Upper Peninsula is that it has a lot of trees and not much urban development. The trees make driving hypnotic and a bit boring. I remember the first time I visited the American West in Nevada. I was amazed at the open vistas and being able to see miles and miles in the distance. Growing up in the UP, my views were mostly of trees. The eastern half of the UP is much flatter than the western half. The drive along Lake Superior is beautiful, only ruined by the number of cottages along the lake. There are several protected areas for the public to enjoy however and I hope to stop at one of them to admire the lake.

The Fourth of July celebration of America’s independence always gets me thinking of the history of the USA. In honor of the historical day, I took the boys to the Treaty Tree and Mile Post Zero. This site commemorates Captain Thomas Cram placing the first survey marker establishing the Wisconsin-Michigan border in 1841. That is one of the things I like about the USA is the federal system of government. Much of governance is left to the states and every state has its quirks and local customs.When states were being carved out of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, there was a dispute between the states of Ohio and Michigan regarding its borders. Most of the problem was poor surveying. If this happened today, GPS would accurately define borders. Because of mistakes made by surveyors and early map makers, both sides claimed the Toledo Strip, the narrow green area in the picture below. The strip of land had the port city of Toledo, the Maumee River and farmlands to the west. The state militias intimidated each other across the river but never started fighting over the strip of land. (see Toledo War).

The dispute was resolved because then President Andrew Jackson needed Ohio’s electoral votes. He made a compromise, giving Ohio the Toledo Strip (500 square miles) and giving Michigan the western side of the Upper Peninsula (16,000 square miles) and statehood. At the time they were not happy, but as a Michigander, I think it was a good deal. I graduated from Adrian College which is located in the far southeast corner of Michigan, very near to the Toledo Strip. The city of Toledo is not a picturesque city and the huge amount of land (the UP is the size of Switzerland) makes Michigan the largest state in area east of the Mississippi. I see where Wisconsin would complain they lost the UP but they were not powerful enough as a territory to weigh in on the decision.

Today the Michigan border counties (Gogebic, Iron, Dickinson, Menominee) share the Central time zone with Wisconsin and many cultural similarities. We are a mix of Wisconsin and Michigan influences are the Western UP is probably more similar to northern Wisconsin than Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The city of Green Bay, Wisconsin is the unofficial “capital” of the UP. The most important city in the UP is Marquette.

Getting back to Captain Cram, the US government thought that they could use rivers to separate the Upper Peninsula from Wisconsin. This mostly works with the Menominee and Brule Rivers emptying into Lake Michigan. However, there is a gap from where the Brule River starts at Brule Lake to where the Montreal River empties into Lake Superior. Cram’s job was to draw a straight line between the two spots. The Treaty Tree marks the start of this line at the headwaters of the Brule River. Surveyors often carved into trees to mark special spots and that is exactly what Cram did. The Tamarack tree he chose is dead and preserved at a museum in Marquette. As you can read below, the idea of land ownership and precisely defining state borders was lost on the Ojibwa (Chippewa) indigenous people of the time. I don’t think future surveyors left gifts for them at the site. Cram sent his report to Congress and the border was redefined. Instead of rivers separating the two states, a section would be a land border.

William A. Burt came back in 1847 to make it official and a monument is in place marking “Mile Zero”, which is the start of the land border between the Brule River, going to Lac View Desert and continuing to the Montreal River and eventually Lake Superior. In 1928 a Joint Border Commission put in the plaque below. The site is maintained today near a state campground. We had to clear some vines that were covering the marker.

We finished the day by watching the City of Iron River fireworks show. The fireworks were literally over our heads because we were about 50 meters from where the Iron River Fire Department was shooting from. It was a great way to end the day and to celebrate 247 years of the United States of America.