The Tomorrow River is a small Wisconsin stream that crosses US Highway 10 three or four times between Fremont and Waupaca. It eventually runs into a creek and becomes the Waupaca River. I crossed all those tributaries twice on a trip last weekend. It gave me the usual opportunity to free associate to my past life. Two memories came immediately to mind – both from about 1977. I was freshly out of the Peace Corps and trying to establish myself in a job as a research assistant cloning trees at an Institute in the area. That involved a lot of travel down Highway 51 to Highway 10 and I did not have a car.
One day I was travelling on a Greyhound bus heading to my
apartment. That was the first time I
caught the Tomorrow River sign, as I looked up from a letter I was writing to my friend Glenn. I had a good experience in the Peace
Corps entirely due to the Americans I met in my group. They were bright, excitable, and energetic. We had gatherings where we listened to music, ate pizza, and played basketball. We
had long discussions into the night about what was important, what art meant,
literature, music, math, science, and the meaning our work as high school
teachers in the Peace Corps. We read the hipster literature of our time –
Kerouac, Pirsig, Kesey, Brautigan, Wolfe, and others. There were animated discussions and
arguments. All of that probably influenced
the letter I was writing and then I saw the sign. The letter took on a
surrealistic quality that Glenn appreciated in a letter he sent back to
me. As I visualized that decades old
experience – it was a good feeling. I still feel a connection to my Peace Corps
friends even though it has been decades and we rarely see one another or
communicate. I know that when I do – we will
pick things up the way they have always been.
Between the second or third Tomorrow River sign there is an
uphill curve in the road that bends to the left when you are traveling east. It
is a long half mile bend. Later that same year just after Thanksgiving – I was getting a ride to my
apartment from my friend Walt. We went
to the same high school and college. He was two years younger than me. Walt’s
personality was completely the opposite of me. He was spontaneous, outgoing,
and engaging. He could joke about anything.
I was the lab assistant in his organic chemistry section and one day his
condenser hose broke loose and started spraying water just over the top of a
freshly cut pile of sodium metal. I was able to grab the hose and redirect it. Luckily there was no contact with the sodium,
but after that point he started referring to himself and his lab partner as Captain
Sodium. On that day he was dropping
me off and heading to his graduate program in endocrinology in Chicago. The weather was not cooperating. On that bend – the traffic that was usually
travelling at 65-70 mph was at a dead stop in an ice storm and backed up for
miles. We both got out for a better view
and realized it was impossible to stand on the road. Even maintaining your balance, you eventually slid from the highest to the lowest part
of the road and were forced to crawl back across the lane of oncoming traffic.
We got back in the car and spent a long time joking about his bright reddish
orange Dodge sports car and all of the trash talk he got from people in our
home town about that car. When he walked into a local bar he would hear: "Here comes the Fire Chief!" We eventually
completed the trip and I would see him from time to time over the next decades
as he completed his PhD, then medical school, then residency in
anesthesiology. He became one
of the top anesthesiologists in the country. And then several years ago, I got
the news that he had died suddenly after a brief illness. He was at the top of his game at the time – a
department head and national expert in neurosurgical anesthesia. I
felt badly about not seeing him and not congratulating him on all of
his success. I always feel badly when people don’t make it to retirement and a
lot worse if I know them.
Even before I went into the Peace Corps, I spent a lot of
time navigating these roads with my friend Al.
We did that mostly in a 20-year-old Volkswagen beetle with a defective
gasoline heater. When you tried to turn the heater on it might blow the hood
open. Al was a mathematical genius and had accumulated almost enough math
credits for a major when he was in high school - all self-taught by reading the texts. He decided to go to medical school
and that led him to spend an additional 2 years as an undergrad taking the
prerequisite courses. Somewhere along
the line driven by my insomnia and his sense of adventure, we ended up driving
long distances to other towns at night to see movies or bands that we knew
would never come farther north to our college town. When you drive on roads in Wisconsin,
Minnesota, and Michigan unusual things can happen. When the pitch-black night is
underlit by the snow cover – anything can happen. One night at about 2 AM we
were on a road running parallel to Hwy 51 north when suddenly – an old model
Chevrolet was airborne about 50 feet in front of us.
By airborne I mean it crashed over the top of a 5- or 6-foot snowbank at
a high rate of speed and crossed our highway in a perpendicular path. It landed on the other side of the road
clipping the top of that snowbank first.
Turning around it was obvious that this was a planned attempt to launch
the car from a parking lot outside of a bar to the other side of the road. A few seconds later would have resulted in
our Volkswagen being T-boned. That night we were able to turn up the radio and
keep going.
These are the kinds of associations I have when I am driving
these roads. The paragraphs seem flat
compared to the images in my head. I can envision my friends, our youth, images of what happened,
the associated emotions, and the thoughts I have stacked on these events over the
past 40-50 years. People I knew then often in a casual way. People who I wanted to know better. People
who – if I had interacted with them differently – would have drastically altered
the course of my life and the people who did alter the course of my life. People who I wish
would call me or send me an email. People
who I regularly think about and dream about.
But then I tell myself – “This is your own weird perspective on life –
most people don’t think like this.” Generally,
that is good to know but at the same time – people do reach out from the past.
They seem to realize that we are not the same people we used to be – but the common
experience means something. In many
cases, it means a lot. At my 50th high school reunion, I was sitting
outside of the main room when a classmate approached me and asked if she could
sit down. I have known her for over 50 years and yet, that conversation was the
longest I had ever spoken with her. It was longer than all of the conversations
I ever had with her combined. It was probably the best experience of the reunion.
I should probably clarify that I have no regrets and consider myself to be very fortunate. All of these thoughts about the past don't cause regret - but there is often that feeling that you get when you go back to your home town for the first time. You see things in a different light. You realize that you can't go back to the way things used to be. These thoughts have continuity with the present and the future.
At some point in the drive, I do a memory check. I use the autobiographical memory test format
and think of famous movie stars, visualize their image, and try to match
names. So far – so good.
I fantasize - primarily generative fantasies. I first encountered that term in the writings of the late Ethel Persons, MD. She was an American psychoanalyst I found when I started to research fantasies in the 1990s. She seemed to be one of the few psychiatrists writing about it. Generative fantasies are primarily problem solving fantasies that are more stimulating than coming up with lists in your head or your software. As I type that I am reminded of another road trip (east of Duluth on Hwy 2) when my wife asked me: "Do you ever have fantasies?' I told her I was fantasizing right at that time and she was very interested in the content. "I was thinking about what it would be like to win the men's 500M in the Olympics." She knew immediately that I was thinking about speedskating. I took up speedskating during residency and got quite good at it in my 40s. I was never an elite speedskater by any means, but I had the movements down, could endure the pain, and skated a lot of laps. Part of learning the movement had to do with fantasies and thinking about the skaters I was seeing in the Olympics and racing against and remembering any advice I had received. I always have plenty of these thought patterns that seem focused on a hypothetical future.
As a student of consciousness,
I always wonder about how all of these thoughts are generated and (as a
psychiatrist) what they might mean. Twenty years ago, I did a presentation on
what I called the bus theory of the human brain. In computers, a bus is any system that connects components and allows data transfer between those components. I decided that there was not enough
emphasis on white matter and studied those tracts, their fiber content, and
tried to calculate the bandwidth of those fiber tracts. At about the same time,
I was wrapping up a course that I taught for many years on dementia diagnosis
and cortical localization that was more of a behavioral neurology approach to
the problem. I tried to think of all of
the recent papers I had pulled on hippocampal connectivity and recent papers on
the neurochemistry of the hippocampus. I
thought about a paper I recently read on entropy and consciousness and whether
thermodynamics could be a granular explanation for conscious states. I am still a skeptic.
My wife wakes up. We
are driving home from her high school class reunion. There is a significant
celebrity in her class and he sent a video when he could not make the reunion.
The audio-visual equipment did not work, but we could see his projected image.
We start to talk about the events of the night and what some of them might
mean. We talk about the A-V problems and
the celebrity who clearly has become a projective test for everyone in her
class. We talk about how good it will be to get back home and what we will need
to do to reestablish the routine.
Thinking is a big part of life for me and life is very good…..
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
