Fall Color

My wife and I just returned from a 3-day trip to visit friends and take in the fall color.  The trip took us north to US Hwy 2 from Duluth, MN to Wakefield, MI and then south to Winchester, WI.  My home town is on that route and I have driven HWY 2 both ways to Minnesota and Michigan hundreds of times.  When you are an old man like me with a personality like mine – that means a lot of associations along the way.

The overriding theme of those associations seemed to be feeling grateful, being lucky and particle spirituality.  I have posted about my blue-collar origins in the past.  Much of that comes down to railroads, mines, relatives I never met, and the thousands of people I have interacted with.  The railroaders include a grandfather and a great-grandfather and three more recent railroad employees my father, brother, and uncle.  My earliest introduction to Hwy 2 was driving with my family to Ironwood, MI 30 miles away to pick up my father. He would drive a freight train down to the Fox River Valley, sleep on a locker room bench overnight, and then return to Ironwood rather than our home town.  I never found out why he was never delivered to his starting point.  I was always focused on the image of that hard wooden bench he was sleeping on - especially as he got older and started to look more fatigued.

Railroad jobs were highly valued.  The pay was good if you could work, but there was a seniority system that seemed to string a lot of people along.  It seemed like a prolonged residency program – all of the work and inconvenience and none of the rewards.  There was plenty of work in the local switch yards that my father could rarely get because of that system.  Instead, he worked 40 hours in 4 days and slept on a bench 2 nights per week.  Six decades later that still raises a lot of questions for me and there is nobody around for the answers. 

Apart from the work-related trips, we would drive over to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (UP) to buy margarine.  Until 1967, Wisconsin had a law that banned adding yellow food coloring to margarine.  Without it the sticks of margarine were an unaesthetically unappealing white in color.  We drove over to Michigan to get the yellow stuff.  Wisconsin became the last state to repeal that law in 1967.           

Hwy 2 starts as an exit off US35N in Duluth. The freeway drops quickly down a long hill to that exit.  From that hill you can see the Richard I Bong Memorial Bridge.  It is an impressive piece of engineering and it seems to be aging well.  We lived there my first three years out of residency training as part of a National Health Service Scholarship arrangement.  I really liked that city even though the lake kept it cold.  When I lived in Duluth, I was a member of the Duluth Speedskating team.  Before we had ice we would do dry land training out to the middle of the Bong Bridge.  Rhythmic side to side motions from an extreme flexed position at the waist.  It was done at night in darkness, in the gales of November, uphill to the middle of the bridge – the highest point -  and back down again.  There were about a dozen of us following a coach who was my age at the time.  By the end of the month, we were on a 400m oval of ice that we flooded ourselves.  

In the summer, I would cycle to my office across the Bong.  That involved 5 miles on the Skyline Drive in Duluth until I could drop down a steep avenue to the bridge.  There were days when I imagined myself in a movie – cycling over Lake Superior to and from work.  It was that unreal.

There were always plenty of sports related travel both ways on Hwy 2.  Football, baseball, basketball, track, canoeing, and kayaking.  We drove over two rivers that I had canoed and kayaked multiple times, including one where I was almost killed twice in one day.  The Montreal River was not very visible from the road, and I was guessing it was fairly tame this time of the year.  In the spring it moves 1800+ cubic feet per second down a steep gradient though a narrow canyon with steep rock walls.  In some stretches the gradient looks like you are going down a staircase.  If you go down in that water, there is no way out. The day I tried it with the friend I was driving to see and 4 novices in 3 aluminum canoes I was trapped against the bottom by a canoe full of water and then an aluminum canoe wrapped around a boulder holding me down. I was lucky to get loose – twice.  

I think about the games played not so much about the scores or seasons. I was quarter miler in high school and think about a qualifying heat I ran in Ironwood. I was trying to run a sub 50 second quarter mile and failed. I really knew nothing about running or training.  When I finally started learning about the biomechanics of running and realized I could train indefinitely – I beat that time at age 45 on the high school track in my home town. 

I thought about football practice and weight lifting back in those days. How much more or less am I lifting now as an old man? In high school we used homemade weights fashioned out of concrete set in coffee cans at the ends of an iron bar.  I think they were estimated to weigh 60-80 pounds.  Our weight-lifting area was behind the spectator bleachers on the football field.  I still get a mental image of all of my teammates and the expressions on their faces going through practice.  I remember who went on to college and where they ended up.  I remembered who is no longer with us and the last time I talked to them.   I remember how hot it could get and how bad all of the equipment smelled.  At times I think about what I would have changed over 50 years ago on those fields.

And then it is on to other friends.  I drive past a court house and think of my friend who took care of it for decades. He never owned a car and would either walk or cycle to this building to makes sure it was running right – even on the bleakest winter night.  As we were driving up Birch Hill - headed east outside of Odanah I had thoughts about coming down that hill in the opposite direction in a 1963 Plymouth Valiant.  My friend Bob – had his father’s car and decided to see how far it could coast from the top.   It was a standard transmission.  He reasoned it would coast a long way.  It’s the kind of thing that teenage boys did before there was an Internet and Smartphones.  I tell my wife the story about a guy from my hometown who was coming down this hill one night on his new Norton Interceptor when he decided to put the kickstand down and crashed.  But the hill is most famous as a line of demarcation between the mild to moderate snowfalls of Wisconsin and the epic ones of the UP.

All the while music is playing in the background.  Rock music by the decade from a streaming service.  No more cassettes or CDs. Just tell the phone what you want.  We had to carry separate briefcases just for the media. I used to be able to sing along to the falsetto parts but no more.  I can strain to hit "Goin' Up the Country" on a good day but no more Steve Perry or old time Robert Plant. I start talking about vocal ranges of rock singers.  I know Grace Slick is a contralto.  I think Jim Morrison was an alto – but might be wrong.  Lately I have been playing his tracks over and over again. I have seen many videos of his band mates praising his lyrical ability. His song Soul Kitchen started playing spontaneously at home as we were leaving.  The music cuts out several times as we go off the grid reminding me that we are streaming and not listening to downloads.

I think about my relatives along the way – the ones with the greatest impact on my life. My life story is one of many tragedies and I start to think about life being tragic.  I have the recurrent thought – “You did not really plan anything – you were just lucky.”  As usual I can’t disprove it.  At no point in my early life along this highway did I say to myself: “You need a plan to (go to college, get a job, join the Peace Corps, avoid the draft. etc).”  My early life was a series of desperate last-minute decisions.  I had to do something.  In some cases, the decisions were failure based. In some cases, I was just moving along to the next failure.  I think about those failures and what I was like at the time. I think about how everything seemed to fall in place after those desperate decisions.  My life seemed out of control until I was in my thirties. 

And whenever I think about that random walk through life, I always end up thinking about my undergraduate professors.  They were people who believed in me and they were not shy about saying it.   They were people who had clear life plans and philosophies and knew how to live life.  They were people very comfortable about living life outside of a blue-collar world. It is still a mystery to me how I thrived at a small, now defunct college by identifying with those professors and realizing I had a genuine knack for academics.  We did summer projects along Hwy 2.  The focus was water chemistry leading us to remote rivers and creeks – in some cases driving down logging roads.  Sampling water and then running all of the analyses ourselves back in the chem lab. In biology classes we would sample the insects and plankton living in streams and rivers and do all of the taxonomy.  It opened up a whole new level of thinking in the place where I grew up.

At some point in the trip my mind wanders to composite particles and elementary particles.  A few years ago, I discovered that protons and neutrons lasted a trillion trillion years (10⁵⁰ to 10⁵² years).  Almost all of the protons were formed when the universe formed.  The protons in my body are 13.8 billion years old and they have plenty of life left in them.  If I am cremated 96% to 98% of my body is oxidized or vaporized as carbon dioxide, water, and nitrogen gas.  My protons are back out into the universe to live again - for billions of years.  If I am buried it takes slightly longer but the same process prevails in the end. That seems like a spiritual process to me, but I am trying to get opinions from experts.  From my own reading it seems consistent with what Spinoza called a single unified and infinite substance identical with God.  He saw individual humans as temporary perturbations in the infinite substance.  I am part way through 2 books on particle physics and the origins of the atoms in the human body from the cosmos.  During a recent phone call with one of my undergrad classmates, he thought my reading and connections to protons over 50 years after our last chemistry class together was quite humorous. 

As we drive through Ironwood, Hurley, and Bessemer – the last time I was here Hwy 2 was just 2 lanes wide.  Now it is 4 lanes wide with a lot of traffic.  Just to the north is Copper Peak – a ski flying hill.  It has been out of business for 20 years but it is being rebuilt with a large grant.  My wife and I watched a ski flying competition there back in the 1980s.  There were three guys from my hometown standing behind us that day. One of them was the funniest guy I ever knew. He was killed in a car accident a few years later.  One of the other guys was the nicest guy I ever knew.  He died in an industrial accident about 10 years later.  The third guy is still alive. He was responsible for my first dental crown when he elbowed me in the mouth playing basketball and broke tooth number 24 in half.  I get an image of all of us standing there, talking, and joking.

When we get to Wakefield, I think of the first time I was there as a kid to visit my aunt and uncle.  My uncle worked in a copper mine setting explosive charges.  As we drove around Sunday Lake to find their house, I remembered a spillway on the opposite side of the lake but did not look for it this time.  We still had 22 miles to go down S. County Hwy 519.   The fall color along that route was spectacular and I don’t know why.  The weather there is probably subject to what is happening on both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.  At some point big lakes bring the baseline temperatures down, especially in low lying inland areas.       

When we finally arrive at our destination – we are greeted by a couple I have known since 1970.  We stayed in touch through the lean times, the industrious times of medical careers, and now in retirement.  We caught up on families, common interests, activities, and the medical infirmities of aging or as my friend put it “an organ symphony”.  Among the four of us we have 4 knee replacements, 1 shoulder replacement, 1 hip replacement, 3 ablations for arrhythmias, a pacemaker placement, and various other necessary surgeries.   Nobody is upset about it.  The general attitude is do what is necessary to keep going.  There is some reminiscing but not a lot.  I want them to do as well as they want us to do.  The two days we spend there flies by and we are back on Hwy 2 headed home – hoping to see them a lot sooner next time.  On the road again I think of how important this relationship has been.

In the past few years, I have touched on semantics on this blog and the increasingly well-worn phrase: “The map is not the territory.”  My territory as I have outlined it involves extended connections to people at almost every fork in a 274-mile stretch of road.  There are so many of these connections they can be overwhelming, especially considering the emotional aspects.  With a few exceptions it is impossible to estimate the impact of all of these people on my life.  I am always happy to see them and I miss them when I don’t.  Some people reading this might be surprised.  I am considered to be a loner and asocial on the surface but I don’t think many people really are.  Especially if they have an active memory and can recall the details of what happened to them on Hwy 2 or anywhere else. 

They are just quieter…

 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

 

Supplementary 1:

I tried to capture some of my personal experience - the way I think most of the time as I went along this trip.  It has a lot of room for improvement - but at the same time it covers a lot of ground.  I debated constructing a diagram of all the people I would think about along this route and probably will at some point laying it over the route on the map.  I also wanted to provide details of how semantic memory automatically created meaning from these relationships but will defer that to another time. I could not include everything and that may seem paradoxical for a guy with few apparent relationships.  

References:

1:  Wenliang Li ,The proton’s next secret. Science 393,663-664(2026). DOI:10.1126/science.aek0574

2:  Spinoza, Benedictus de. "Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata." In Opera Posthuma. [Amsterdam: Jan Rieuwertsz], 1677.  (Grapevine Kindle edition and translation – Benedictus de Spinoza.  Ethics. 2023.