DEC-A-7
RECORD-BREAKING NEWS—
INCLUDING THE FIRST TRIP OFF BASE
BY AIR TRAVEL TO A FAVORITE PLACE UNDER THE SUN—
NOT TYPICALLY THOUGHT OF AS A RETREAT FOR WINTER WARMTH
BERKSHIRE MEDICAL CENTER, PITTSFIELD, MASS
DEC. 6—9, 2001
#1 RECORD WINTER WARMTH
Record news number one: as I was running around the Capital yesterday, wearing the Marine Corps singlet and shorts, it crested at 77* F—a record for this date, as it was for many cities along the East Coast. It will repeat today, and is projected to be nearly as warm next week. I packed my running shoes and shorts, since I remembered the great run I had last April when I was in Pittsfield which kick started my running year and got me ready for Boston two weeks later. The runs around Lake Anota were wonderful, even though the snow flurries might have discouraged me in the blizzard that followed, just before I gave the International Night program with the subject Antarctica. Their springtime looked more like deep winter in April, and now their winter may look more like spring. I will see if the running is as satisfactory in this direction as it was earlier in the year.
#2 RECORD GROUND TIME
Record news number two: this marks the first time I have been off the ground in just over a month! This has been the longest time in several years I have not been jetting around this country and the rest of the world. By some degrees, this was by design, since I had to “catch up” with many project’s, including two books that will be published the first of January, and—not to make too much of a major publication project out of it, although it is now absorbing Herculean numbers of man-hours in all parts of its assembly, --the year-end letter, which will be called this year “: The Year of the Twins.” For reasons you will just have to read all about it to find out!
In other degrees, it is a by-product of what has now become fashionable to call “9/11” hangover. It seems National Airport is not yet up to half the traffic it had before 9/11 even during the busy travel seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. I have had three or four air trips scheduled for the next weeks, but already two of them have been canceled, some for reasons of jittery nervousness about travels anywhere. The hassle value of travel by air is even more apparent in this pass through Dulles airport, where the personal body searches are very invasive, even when no metal objects are carried and now the electronic machines set off signal. I was careful to put my key chain in the checked luggage so as not to lose my last tiny Swiss army scissors and nail file (1.5 cm long), but then was chastised by the foreign-born Middle Eastern contract security guard for still having a dime in my pocket. There are very large construction projects at Dulles, which had an already-in-place plan to build an underground railroad all the way from the parking lot to the terminal to the mid-field gates. But, now, it is further modified, and a special employee security screening area is put in place, as well as the National Guard in full BDU and firepower at each gate and check in area.
So, my usual fast takeoff is now going to have to be several hours longer, as my departure at 10:00 AM by Metro to West Falls Church, where I got the Washington Flyer, and then check in for a 1:10 PM flight to Albany New York. I have a rental car arranged there to drive to Pittsfield in my usual pattern of coming and going out of the BMC—one place for which I do not need a lot of further training in how to get there. I will arrive at the Crowne Plaza and go tonight to the Berkshire Country Club for the Visiting Professor Reception.
THE HUNTS OF AUTUMN
Gene Curletti is on call this weekend, so there will be no hunting in Mass or New York state, and I will miss the last weekend of the MD rifle deer hunting season, but, the weather that has slowed the deer hunts will be unchanged, and my records of this year’s opening weeks have been set in the first and second foxes of my hunting life which I have seen and fired at, both of which the .270 at long range turned into taxidermy.
THE RUNS OF AUTUMN
But the hunts, each within driving range, even if we had not canceled the drive up to Pine Creek Canyon to skip the hunt in PA this year since Don King was still under treatment for his bone marrow transplant, despite his insistence that we go up anyway without him, were not the only good reason to stay on the ground in the last month. I also had some long-range runs. As I arrived from the last trip from Denver, I had gone directly to Joe’s house where we had our after-midnight pasta, and the following morning early, we ran the high hot, hilly Baltimore Inaugural Marathon. The next week I did the Marine Corps Marathon, and then Joe and I repeated with the MITP---the best of our marathons together. So, this long-term ground time has allowed me not only to do the long runs and races, but also to discover the new “HWC”---GWU Health and Wellness Center.
Number three in the record department: I have just now seen the news on the airport TV and in the Washington Post headlines, as the Taliban’s top officials are trying to negotiate a surrender from the last spot at Kandahar where the Al-Qaeda allies in Afghanistan’s leadership are holed up. The name of Hamid Karzia is on al the front pages and his picture is now published and his English-speaking US-allied beliefs look to the future of what will be a new Afghanistan. To my surprise, this seems to involve me much more directly than I might have thought, sine Ravi Singh had just sent me a note about his good friend and Simla colleague who will be the next leader of Afghanistan, and I sent him back a letter (each in Dec-A-6) about being ready to go when it can be arranged. This next time, my trekking into Afghanistan might receive a very different reception than my incursion the last time in 1995 recorded in “From Kuwait to the Khyber Pass.”
#4 THE YEAR-END LETTER 2001
Record Number Four: the year-end letter which I have been working on in the details will be forthcoming—if I can cobble together the last of the loose pieces to be integrated—next week, and is now up to almost 200 double sided pages—after editing it down! But the pictures in the text I have run through the Xerox machine while I have nursed it through several glitches, and then assembled a color cover and back cover, which will be ready for your inspection on-line, if you have the capacity to receive large composite files; otherwise, wait for the Christmas mails and the delivery after the anthrax screens through which the letters will now have to be forwarded!
AND, NOW, OFF TO THE BERKSHIRES
So, for the first time in over a month, I am using the single device I have carried aboard this flight to Albany, New York, to do the resumption of the Visiting Professor process in the final stop of 2001 in symmetry with one of the first such excursions of this year, 2001, about which the full story is on its way to you.
MY VISIT TO THE BMC AT THE HAPPY
HOLIDAY
SEASON AMONG THIS GROUP OF “FAMILY”
DEC. 6—8, 2001
I was here in April as the winter was stubbornly holding on, and now I have been here in December when winter should have been approaching, but an unseasonable warm spell had come through here as well as at DC breaking all records for high temperatures on these dates—that is, until I got here with my shorts and tee-shirt! It was warm enough to run after I landed at ALB and rented a Dodge Intrepid as a Blue Chip member of Thrifty car rentals. But, I arrived at the Crowne Plaza check-in at 3:00 PM, and it was already getting too dark to run. I was expected at 6:00 PM for the faculty reception and dinner at the Berkshire Country Club in my honor, and Gene picked me up in his new pickup truck. Dolly is in Dingell Ireland, where his oldest son Buster has been managing a café for the last six months and saved up enough money to bum around the continent for the next six months. Since he will be the only one not home for Christmas, that is why Dolly is visiting there now. Gene is on call this weekend, having not been aware that this was the weekend I was coming, so he could not make the usual plans for us to go off and try some wing shooting, as well as this being the last day of the rifle deer season in New York, Massachusetts as well as Maryland. But he is going to rendezvous with me for the hog hunt on Cumberland Island, and he will be coming for the first time he has ever been there. The rest of the group, including the chief surgical residents, were all in good spirits as we had dinner at the Country Club. They have border collies on duty at the Country Club to herd the Canada geese off the fairways.
My Grand Rounds on Friday morning was on Surgical Sepsis, and then I led the Morbidity and Mortality Conference and resident case presentations. After lunch in the Administrators conference room, I discussed surgical endocrinology with the students and residents, who were grateful since they are all getting ready to take exams—a large chunk of which is always on this subject for specificity and intricate knowledge and judgments. I then got to the Crowne Plaza at about 2:30 in the afternoon, with the plan for the international evening coming up after 6:00 PM, the time of my last presentation. I knew what I had wanted to do, remembering my reluctant start in the blizzard on what proved to be a very good run in April that had got me ready for Boston two weeks later. I got on tee-shirt and shorts and went out from the hotel despite the weather channel saying that it would be 20* colder this afternoon, and 30* colder the next day with clouds that would give a 100% chance of snow in the evening of the Saturday when I would be otherwise stranded, if I had not taken a little of the nagging little chores with me—like filling in my 2002 daybook. And they are serious about winter and its onset here since the snow predicted is for seven inches on the ground. Specificity of weather forecasting has increased, as the precision has also been rather good, since they called the record-setting warm fall thus far.
Off I went, and I set out on the same course I had taken in April. I set out to run around Lake Onota, and did so—ten miles in 1:33. I was surprised to see the lake level is donw by over eight to ten feet—something they can control by letting the dam loose to flood the Housatonic River, which flows out of it. I made it back in time to get showered with about a half hour more than the ten minutes I had last year, and went to the hospital for the varied cuisine of all parts of the world represented by the ethnicities of the various residents. We all told where we are from, what languages our parents or we spoke, and how many generations we were American. We ate Guatemalan, Peruvian, Iranian, Polish, Italian Scandinavian dishes—and I being the only Dutchman simply ate all the others. I then gave a slide show on Africa. Two of the students, including especially a young enthusiastic woman named Meg are very interested in accompanying me to the India excursions this year; she is going to join here finance Neurology resident in Toronto, after she goes into interventional neurological radiology.
My Saturday would have been quite dull as I was doing little bookwork in the hotel, and putting away the presentations from the day before, including all the slides and parts of the Surgical Endocrinology textbook I had picked up from Kurt Johnson’s house before coming here. I was supposed to hear from a retired surgeon named Carey who said he would call me at the Crowne Plaza and we would go running. I never heard from him, and as I worried about it getting dark early as well as the plummeting temperature and threat of snow in later afternoon, I got back into the rental Intrepid, and drove to the Pittsfield State Forts. It was closed when I had tried to enter it before, but this time I got to the campground, and took off on a run up the tarred main loop road. I did not know in advance, but soon discovered, that the loop is straight up a mountain. I turned back after a half hour of real hill work, and got in the car and drove the rest of the loop. I found myself at a scenic vista point, called Berry Pond, the highest natural body of water in Massachusetts at 2,125 feet. I had been at the highest point in Massachusetts before, the top of Mount Greylock, which I can see from my window here now in the Crowne Plaza. By tomorrow, it should gather up the d\using of snow that would make it resemble, once again, the “Great White Whale” that had inspired Herman Melville as he would sit in the loft of his barn at Arrowhead nearby, where his wife had exiled him to go smoking, and he continued to use that spot as his writing den.
So, now, cleaned up after the second run—and the last one before real winter sets in, I am awaiting pick up to go to Dick Basile’s house for the staff Christmas Party to which I am invited tonight. I noted that I have a later flight tomorrow from Albany, but I called to check on available flight s and there is one at 11:00 A M and I will try to get back earlier by jumping on it, and getting back to defend Derwood, and continue to try to finish work on my year-end letter, and prepare for the weekend arrival of Michael and Judy and the twins, and my later departure to Chicago and Michigan.