December 2020

 

Books read:

  •         Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence
  •         Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris
  •         When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

 

Trails walked:

  •         Goldmine trail in the San Tan Mountains (December 3rd)
  •         Inspiration Viewpoint in the McDowell Mountains (December 4th)
  •         Black Mesa Loop in the Superstition Wilderness (December 7th)

 

Song of the month: 

·         The Mother by Brandi Carlile    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npSDM26xlzs

 

 Scientist Spotlight:  

John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino



  


Well, it's official now.  We've moved from the desert to the mountains.  The above photos were taken in December.  The Saguaro sunset photo was taken from the Inspiration Viewpoint trail in the McDowell Mountains in Scottsdale, Arizona and the mountain photo was taken from our new backyard in Longmont, Colorado.  Moving to a new town in the time of Covid is certainly a challenge, but luckily we have a nearly one-year-old grandson 30 minutes away to uptick those serotonin levels.

I can still remember the text message from my son in early January of 2020 talking about a virus in China that is going to change the world and kill millions.  Of course I figured he was embellishing and even though there was some news about it, nobody believed it would turn into the life altering event it currently is (well, except for my son).  

We are all painfully aware of the negative aspects this virus has laid upon our world.  However there actually are a few positive things we can take from this Covid year:

  • No workplace holiday parties! Who really liked going to them anyway?
  • No more allowing our precious children to sit on the laps of unemployed old men dressed like Santa Claus. I can’t believe we did this to our kids. Even that kid in A Christmas Story knew….
  • Sonic Drive-In advertisements that they’ve been socially distancing since 1953. Brilliant.
  • All the small restaurant businesses that have adjusted to the new norm of take-out and delivery. Many of them were able to adjust more quickly than the big chains because it was do or die for them.
  • Teachers and health care workers finally getting the recognition they deserve (although still sorely underpaid)
  • More people are discovering the great outdoors as they search for something fun to do. Well OK, as an outdoor enthusiast myself this is a double edged sword. It's great to see people discovering the natural beauty of our world, but it sure does make all the trailheads busier than ever....

There was a small period of time this month after we sold our Arizona home and before we moved to Colorado where I was able to find some time for a few more Arizona hikes (my January blog should finally have some Colorado hikes). And I was able to read a classic novel by DH Lawrence and two terrific non-fiction books about bicycling the Silk Road and dealing with terminal cancer. 

May your 2021 be less and less socially distanced than your 2020.


Song of the month – The Mother by Brandi Carlile:  For Christmas, our kids gave us concert tickets to see Brandi Carlile at Red Rocks near Denver in September of 2021 (hopefully live concerts will be back to normal by then).  I’ve been a Brandi Carlile fan since her 2007 song The Story.  She achieved some success with that song, and a few Grammy nominations here and there, but it wasn’t until her 2018 masterpiece album, By the Way I Forgive You, that she reached superstar status.  She won 3 Grammys for that album and was the most nominated woman at the 2019 Grammys.  There are several great songs on that album, but for me The Mother is the best.  It is perhaps the greatest and most perfectly descriptive song ever written about having a child.  Here is just one of the many great verses:

The first things that she took from me were selfishness and sleep
She broke a thousand heirlooms I was never meant to keep
She filled my life with color, cancelled plans and trashed my car
But none of that is ever who we are


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npSDM26xlzs

 


Scientist Spotlight - John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino:  These three men shared the 2019 Nobel Chemistry prize for their work on the discovery and commercialization of Lithium-Ion batteries in the 70s and early 80s.  These light, compact batteries power much of the world today, including our smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles.  Whittingham developed the first functional Lithium battery, Goodenough doubled its power (I guess he didn’t think the exiting power was…”good enough” ha ha ha).  Yoshino made the batteries safer and therefore usable commercially by switching from pure lithium to lithium ions.  Why lithium?  It’s the lightest solid element, third on the periodic table after Hydrogen and Helium.   You can read more details about their work here:  https://theconversation.com/highly-charged-story-chemistry-nobel-goes-to-inventors-of-lithium-ion-batteries-125051

 

Goldmine Trail in the San Tan Mountains:  We were back in Arizona for a few days waiting for our furniture to be delivered to our Colorado home, so I took advantage and went on some winter desert hikes.  The San Tan Mountains are in the extreme southeast part of the valley near the community of Queen Creek.  I’ve hiked in the southern portion of the park before, but this was my first time using the Goldmine Trailhead in the north.  It’s a decent workout with a one mile 500-foot climb at the start.  Nice views of the Superstitions and the southeast valley.  After reaching the top, it’s another mile and a half downhill to the eastern trailhead where you can turn around and hike back for a 5 mile trip or have a car shuttle for a 2.5 mile walk.   

There are two gravesites about a quarter mile from the northern Goldmine trailhead.  They are the graves of Mansel Carter and Marion Kennedy who mined for gold in these mountains in the 1940s and 50s.  Carter was known as the “Man of the Mountain" and many locals remember him for his interaction with the desert animals.  Interestingly enough, while I was visiting the graves on this trip I struck up a conversation with a guy who was visiting the site because when he was 5-years-old he met the “Man of the Mountain" and remembered him with ground squirrels and quail and lizards climbing all over him like they were his pets.  Carter and Kennedy were good friends and lived together for a time.  As Kennedy went blind later in life, Carter stretched ropes all around their property and the mines so that Kennedy could always find his way back home.  Kennedy died in 1960, Carter in 1987.  Neither struck it rich evidently but Carter’s family still holds some of the 55 mining claims he established. 

A bench with nice views to the northwest

Views to the south from the saddle

Large wash that would be fun to follow some day

Sign for the gravesite

Mansel Carter memorial stone

Marion Kennedy memorial stone

Gravesite


 

Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence: In 1999, Modern Library ranked this book at #9 on the 100 best English language novels of the 20th century.  It was also once listed in the American Library Association’s list of most banned books.  Most people probably know Lawrence from his notorious novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover which was banned for obscenity when it was released in the late 1920s (only to be allowed in the UK in 1960 after a famous trial).  Sons and Lovers was published in 1913 when Lawrence was 27 and was likely banned for its explicit (for its time) depiction of Oedipal love and sexual innuendo.  I enjoyed the book as it took me to another place and time.  Its depiction of the life of coal mining families in rural England reminded me a bit of Emile Zola’s Germinal.  You could feel the cold of the homes and the grit of the coal dust.  But unlike Germinal, this wasn’t a story of coal mining and socio-economic disparity.  This was a story of a mother’s love for her sons and how that love impacted the sons’ feelings for their father and their ability to have their own romantic relationships (especially if they weren’t approved by good ol’ mom).   To the mom’s credit, even in a bad marriage and in impoverished conditions, she was able to raise her sons with the ability to lift themselves out of the coal mining world and into the middle class.  But her lack of passion for her husband seemed to redirect itself to her sons which impacted their lives in sometimes negative ways.  The story was mostly focused on her son Paul Morel who courted one woman, Miriam, who seemed well suited to him but Paul’s mother didn’t approve of her farmer family background nor Miriam’s desire to have Paul all to herself.  So, he dumps Miriam for a married woman, Clare.  That relationship seemed strong at first but became predicably complicated.  Lots of family and relationship drama occurs in this epic tale that begins with the mother’s courtship of her eventual husband until her eventual sad death, which Paul could not overcome.  It’s said that this novel was somewhat autobiographical as Lawrence’s father was a coal miner in rural England and the family life sounded like his. 

Some of my favorite lines from the book:

She never suffered alone anymore:  the children suffered with her.

There was only this one lamppost.  Behind was the great scoop of darkness, as if all the night were there.

She seemed to be stranded there among the refuse that life has thrown away, doing her jennying (sewing).

 

Inspiration Viewpoint in the McDowell Mountain Preserve:  I’ve hiked to Inspiration Viewpoint many times hoping for inspiration.  It’s a pretty spot in the McDowells where a large, curved bench was built with a peaceful view of the interior of the preserve.  It’s around 3 miles and 1,000 feet up from the Gateway Trailhead and is a nice workout.  The first mile and a half is part of the popular (and crowded) Gateway Loop trail, but once you pass the loop’s junction there are far fewer people and you feel like you’re really escaping the city. 

 





Nice saying inscribed on this rock near Inspiration Point

View west from the bench 


View northeast from the bench

View of the city near sunset

Saguaro sunset

Sun turning the hills golden


Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris:  I thoroughly enjoyed getting lost in this true adventure story.  It follows two Canadian women (Kate Harris and Melanie Yule) who decided to bicycle the Silk Road across ten different countries, ten thousand kilometers, and ten months from January to October 2011.  The book was published in 2018.  Friends since they were in elementary school in Ontario, they fell out of touch during their high school years only to reconnect afterwards for some incredible adventures, the culmination of which was this Silk Road exploration.  They first attempted riding the Silk Road in 2006 but only completed the portion through Tibet (or as it’s officially known since China invaded it, the Tibet Autonomous Region or TAR).  Five years later, with Oxford and MIT stints behind her, Kate decides to finish the journey.  But this book is about so much more than just this challenging (physically, mentally, and bureaucratically) journey.  Harris has studied literature and science history all her young life and the book is filled with great quotes, fascinating historical and scientific contexts, and lots of social commentary, especially relating to borders.  Most of us know little about countries like Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Georgia and the story takes you there where you can feel the cold and the heat and the wind and see the generosity of the people who have very little in the way of possessions but will give you all the food they have in incredible feats of hospitality.  There is a short video summary of their adventure at this link if you don’t want to invest time in the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAf3FTOPSEk&feature=youtu.be

Here are some of my favorite quotes and lines from the book:

The history of science and exploration is full of wealthy foreigners winning fame and glory for “discovering” the sorts of things locals already knew.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.  Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I was born centuries too late for the life I was meant to live.

China invaded Tibet in 1950 and eventually forced the Dalai Lama to sign over Tibet’s sovereignty.  Eight years later, when the Chinese violently suppressed an uprising in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama fled for his life into India and tens of thousands of Tibetans followed him.  Many hundreds of thousands more have fled since, for the country they once knew was “liberated” by the Chinese in 1959, meaning the former government of Tibet was declared illegal and the once independent nation was forcibly downgraded to the not-so-autonomous region of Xizang, which in Mandarin means, rather tellingly, “west treasure vault.”  Ever since, the plateau’s vast reserves of copper, lithium, gold, and silver have funded China’s economic growth, and Tibet’s borders-turned-regional-boundaries have hosted checkpoints that restrict mobility – not of foreigners, as we experienced firsthand, but of locals.

So there I was, rich in unemployable university degrees, poor in cash, with few possessions to my name besides a tent, a bicycle, and some books.

Before we left, the family in Rize scribbled another family’s name and phone number on a piece of paper, and in this manner Mel and I were passed like batons between generous friends all across Turkey.

…the Kars Plateau, a region variously known as eastern Anatolia or western Armenia, depending on who you asked at the turn of the twentieth century.

We need this world, and this world doesn’t need us.  Why do we persist in behaving as if the converse were true?

We’re only here by fluke, and only for a little while, so why not run with life as far and wide as you can?

“In the middle of the forest,” wrote the poet Tomas Transtromer, “there’s an unexpected clearing that can only be found by those who have gotten lost”

Marco Polo never knew this trade route by its modern name.  “Silk Road” was coined by a German geographer in 1877 to describe the flow of goods and ideas between East and West.

Arabic saying I’d read somewhere:  the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel.

…the Uzbek language has no word for “fun.”

The mother of four who ran the restaurant invited Mel and me to spend the night and even offered to wash our hair.  By hand. With a bucket.  Hair that hadn’t seen anything but dust and sweat and the inside of a helmet for more than a week.  Of all the hospitable gestures we were met with along the Silk Road, and there were multitudes, this woman whistling softly to herself as mud streamed off our scalps ranks among the most generous and loving.  It felt so good to be taken care of, to let our guard down completely and be mothered like that.  Mel and I were shocked to learn she was younger than us by a few years.

Signs along the road showed cartoon human legs being blown off, warning of the minefields left over from Tajikistan’s civil war in the wake of Soviet independence.  We stayed on the road to avoid land mines, hesitant to even pee off its shoulder, and camped in the yards of families for the same reason.

Tajikistan and Afghanistan river border: Families found themselves stranded on opposite banks, able to wash clothes in the same water but forbidden from boating across.

…and the road signs featuring the Tibetan language in tiny script below much larger Chinese characters, reinforcing subordination right down to font size.

And there I was, joyriding through this oppressive landscape, a tourist in a regime Tibetans literally set themselves on fire to protest and escape.

I lay in my sleeping bag, aching all over, and fervently hoped humans never made it to Mars.  We didn’t deserve a new world; we’d just wreck it all over again.

The Chinese symbol for “gradually” is based on pictograph forms that showed water cutting through stone.


Black Mesa loop in the Superstition Wilderness:  This is a nice 9.5-mile loop in the western Superstitions that has great views of Weaver’s Needle.  It’s the first I’ve been in this area since the August 2020 fire that burned nearly 10,000 acres here.  Although not as devastating as the 2019 Woodbury fire that burned two thirds of this beautiful wilderness, the August fire did burn one of my favorite areas, Garden Valley.  Garden Valley is around 2 miles into this loop trail and it’s a popular camping destination for scout groups.  It used to be a lush area containing grass, mesquite, palo verde, and several varieties of cactus with great views of Four Peaks and Weaver’s Needle.  But now it’s a burned-out desolate landscape.  Very sad to see.   I only met 2 other hikers on this loop today plus a group of horseback riders.  At the big trail junction half-way through the loop where several trails merge, I was the only one there which has never happened before on previous trips.  There have always been campers or hikers or riders hanging out at this ‘grand junction’ of the Superstitions.  I suppose the August fire has reduced the traffic.  So much of this, my favorite wilderness area, has burned in the last two years that it will never be the same in my lifetime.  The views are still stupendous, and the hiking is still challenging, but the lush desert is mostly gone.  There are a few unaffected areas offering a reminder of what once was, but the Superstitions that I grew to love is forever changed. 

 

Burned up Superstitions

The fire raged through the arroyo on the right

In the spring this will be full of water in most years

Chain fruit cholla with trail leading to Weaver's Needle

View west towards the Goldfields

Weaver's Needle looming ahead

Junction of Black Mesa and Dutchman trails



Burned saguaro

Burn areas along the Black Mesa trail

View towards the Flatiron and Siphon Draw, some areas weren't impacted by the burn

Saguaro lovers on this trip

Saguaro Lovers early in 2020, before the August fire


When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi:  This tragic book about life and death was a New York Times best seller and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer prize for Biography/Autobiography.  Kalanithi wrote the book to document his struggle with terminal lung cancer while he completed his residency as a neurosurgeon. The book has a wonderful forward by Abraham Verghese who happened to write one of the best books I’ve read in the past couple of years, Cutting for Stone.  It also contained a tear-jerking epilogue by the author’s widow, Lucy Goddard Kalanithi.  The story begins with Kalanithi explaining the desert town he moved to when he was 10.  As he described the town, I thought it sounded familiar and then he revealed that it was Kingman, Arizona where my daughter started her ER nursing career.  The author’s father was a doctor at the hospital there and my daughter had met him but had no idea about the story of his son.  His father moved the family there from New York City.  Talk about a culture change!

In addition to his medical training, the author had literature and biology degrees from Stanford and a philosophy of science degree from Cambridge.  All that education conspired to create a compelling philosophical tale of life and death as he described his residency as a neurosurgeon and the heartbreaking stories of the people he treated and their families that were so impacted, both positively and negatively.  He then spends the rest of book documenting his equally heartbreaking struggle with the terminal lung cancer that was diagnosed while he was a resident.  Anytime a young person dies, it’s tragic, especially when that young person has so much to offer the world and could actually have saved many lives and livelihoods. 

Here are some of my favorite lines from this emotional and thought provoking  book:

I studied literature and philosophy to understand what makes life meaningful, studied neuroscience and worked in an fMRI lab to understand how the brain could give rise to an organism capable of finding meaning in the world...

Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job, not how you find a calling.

..every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact.  In addition, to the patient and family, the brain surgery is usually the most dramatic event they have ever faced and, as such, has the impact of any major life event.  At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die, but what kind of life is worth living.

How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable?

I made mistakes.  Rushing a patient to the OR to save only enough brain that his heart beats but he can never speak, he eats through a tube, and he is condemned to an existence he would never want...I came to see this as a more egregious failure than the patient dying. 

Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death.

I could see the vastness of the chasm between the life she'd had last week and the one she was about to enter.

One evening in my third year, I ran into Jeff, my friend in general surgery, a similarly intense and demanding profession.  We each noted the other's despondency.  "You go first," he said.  And I described the death of a child, shot in the head for wearing the wrong color shoes, but he had been so close to making it...Amid a recent spate of fatal, inoperable brain tumors, my hopes had been pinned on this kid pulling through, and he hadn't.  Jeff paused, and I awaited his story.  Instead, he laughed, punched me in the arm, and said, "well, I guess I learned one thing:  If I'm ever feeling down about my work, I can always talk to a neurosurgeon to cheer myself up."

How little do doctors understand the hells through which we put patients.

Severe illness wasn't life-altering, it was life-shattering.

Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit.

It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.

Human knowledge is never contained in one person.  It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still it is never complete.

The author's wife, explaining his last moments: The attending physician stepped in with strengthening words:  "Paul, after you die, your family will fall apart, but they'll pull it back together because of the example of bravery you set."  Jeevan's eyes were trained on Paul and Suman said, "Go in peace, my brother."  With my heart breaking, I climbed into the last bed we would share.

Paul confronted death - examined it, wrestled with it, accepted it - as a physician and a patient.  He wanted to help people understand death and face their mortality. 


Thanks for reading, and happy reading and rambling!