Tough People

I always knew folks up here were tough. You have the long cold winter to contend with, and in the spring massive swarms of various bugs, and even in the summer some pretty ferocious winds and storms have to be met. However, nothing prepared me for the life stories I am privileged to hear these past two weeks. First, there is the lady who lives on the same dairy farm she was literally born on. She came into the world about 78 years ago on an early cold morning and her father delivered her. She came out cyanotic (blue) with the cord wrapped around her neck three times. Dad, who had delivered other children and many cows, reduced the cord, delivered her and tried to revive her. Despite his best efforts, she remained blue and breathing intermittently. Thus, he cut the cord and left her with mother, as he hitched up the wagon to the team and drove into town to get the local doctor---who fortunately was only about 7 miles away that week. The doctor rotated towns back then, and news of his arrival spread and folks would come in to see him during his itinerant week. The doctor came back with him, and working thru the night, kept the wee baby alive enough to meet me 78 years later. She said until this day she occasionally has trouble breathing and when she does, her feet turn blue. She relates that she is sure this is due to her mother’s prolonged labor, and her own near death. I really can’t dispute that—in any case, she is truly the product of a miracle birth. Obviously, God intended her to survive, and go on to run the dairy farm and produce numerous offspring of her own. All of which she too delivered in the same farmhouse. As if this wasn’t enough, I met a man in his 80’s, or maybe 90’s (he’s not sure) today, who was the 6th child of 12. His mother in fact had over 20 pregnancies, while she raised the family, milked the cows and took care of her husband, a logger. They lived in what my patient calls a “one room shack”. He says all the boys served in some capacity in WWII. He says he can’t understand how his mother waited for news from the war and did all this while the husband was away for months at a time, and still lived to be 80 something herself. She perhaps defines the phrase “barefoot and pregnant”. She was pregnant most of the time he can remember living at home in the shack. He said when a stillborn came, they would bury the infant out back, with the others. There was no fanfare, coroner’s inquiry, etc. They dried their tears, cleaned up, buried, and went on to tend to the cows, the garden the other children in their subsistence existence. Note that this is not 1776---this is life in the Upper Peninsula a mere 60 or 70 years ago. There were few paved roads---mostly logging trails. The land was filled with rich soil, but plagued with rocks in the soil. It would take years to till the land, dig up the rocks, and get the grass to grow for the dairy cows. Back breaking, incessant work before Tylenol or Motrin were common household items. Before in fact, the doctor was only 7 miles away. They are Fins and Swedes and Germans and Poles who still speak both languages. People who even today enter the doctor’s room with near reverence, to think that maybe I am the one who would stay up with that blue baby, getting her to turn pink by morning. Someone so rare that 7 miles away by horse and buggy is actually “pretty close, purt near next door.” Wow, I say, what an amazing people, what an amazing Peninsula, what an amazing County. These horse and buggy dairy farmers were or produced our greatest generation. Now, I am less surprised that they could hit that beach in Normandy, and dig into and spit up sand and bullets and keep on going all the way to Berlin. Is it any surprise? That is America, they are America, they are God’s Gift. Sad to think that there will never be another people like this. But what a joy to get to meet them still!!! Go out today and find one and give them a hug!!!

Inevitably you will eat a bug someday. Living on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the Northern Wood, is a privilege. Indeed, I am sitting here looking at the Lake in a southerly blow, watching white-caps form or a turquoise sea. It is cloudless, except for the swarms of this black gnat that form above the tree lines. You can see these swarms from miles away. It is amazing. If it’s not windy in the morning you can hear them buzzing overhead. The mass of gnats makes that humming sound you hear from one of those big mercury lamps that humm in the night. The columns of bugs rise in a tornado like pattern above the trees as much as 300 feet long and 50 feet wide. You have to be careful when they are hatching and you are outside because they will find their way into your ears, nose, mouth and yes, I’ve swallowed or inhaled them. Now if you’re a trout this is a pretty good thing. It’s the feast time of year for fish following the long winter fast. In fact, I just finished catching 5 very feisty rainbow trout today. They were 10 to 15 inches. The largest fish I had on today was the first one I hooked, but he obtained his freedom by spitting the hook before I could get him near the bank. He had a rather large girth to him, I think he must have been 3 pounds. Pretty nice for a cold pond Michigan rainbow. I used a variety of bugs, trout candy, but alas the wooly bugger outperformed them all. This is typical of course. So anyway, it occurred to me that dealing with these relatively harmless, non-biting swarms of gnats is just one price I must pay to be surrounded by one of the most beautiful places on earth. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride in life. Sometimes you have to swallow food somebody prepared that tastes awful, because you are polite. And sometimes, we must even eat a bug. Even bugs are good, they fatten the fish in advance of when the long, cold nights come to the land. They are good in that they give me something to write about. They are good because somebody gets paid to study them. Yeah, for me, up here in the Nook in the North, I’ve come to even like the bugs too.

Do you remember the Maytag Repairman commercials? The middle-aged gentleman sitting in the Maytag Office with his Maytag uniform on and sleeping most of the time? The phone would ring and it would wake him up and startle him. Most of the time it was a wrong number or a salesman. The premise was Maytag’s are so reliable that you never needed to call the repairman. I have to say that my experience with Maytag’s really is close to that. In any case, I was sitting in my office today about 3 p.m. after seeing 9 patients for the day. I had already paid my bills, took a short refresher in reading EKG’s, surfed e-bay looking for a pellet stove, talked to about 9 hospital employees about the weather. I had my feet up on my desk and was drifting off when my nurse came in to tell me a patient was ready. She startled me and I was a bit embarrassed as my feet fell off the desk. I rather quickly apologized and said I feel like I am the Maytag Repairman today. My very capable and most pleasant nurse looked at me rather puzzled and said: “well I’m not sure what that means but ok, if you say so.” It occurred to me that she had never heard of the Maytag Repairman commercials. I asked her when was she born and she told me 1976. Ahh, I said, yes, those commercials were mostly before then. In addition, I reflected, that’s when I graduated from High School. Of course, it shook me up a bit, realizing my age, but I went on to earn my keep. On my way home I reflected on the fact that I took care of two hospital patients and saw a few complicated ones in the office with extensive medical histories and really did earn my keep after all. Rather than let my age awareness bother me, I was thankful for it as I watched the streams and cedar trees go by. I was thankful that I have lived long enough to tell my nurse about the Maytag Repairman commercials. I am sad, yet also thankful that I have already out-lived many special friends. Why God has allowed me this I don’t know, but I thank him for it. I am thankful that I am back home in the country of my youth. I am thankful for the smile and the laugh that comes over me as I get home by 4 or 4:30 and still have so much time left in the day to enjoy the lake, and the swans, and the gulls, and the eagles and the hawks that go overhead. To think that I would still be buried in a mountain of charts and traffic and go go go if fate hadn’t yanked me from the darkness. I can appreciate Eddy Albert more in Green Acres when in the opening song he reflected thus, about thanking God for the country life, the chores, etc. I am thankful that I don’t have a wife like Zza Zza Gabor who thinks more of stores than God’s beautiful country. There is a fog over Lake Michigan, but there is no fog in my head.