SR99 Tunnel Ride

This post is mostly about Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM), a congenital heart disease that I was born with. HCM is actually fairly common—at least 1 in 500 people have it, which is more than many well-known diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), or Muscular Dystrophy. When you hear of a young athlete suddenly dying on the playing field, the cause is almost always HCM.

A cardiomyopathy is disease of the heart muscle, distinct from coronary disease, which is disease of the blood vessels that supply the heart, typically caused by buildup of cholesterol that clogs the vessels. When a coronary artery is blocked, the result is often a cardiomyopathy caused by dying blood-starved heart muscle, a typical heart attack. HCM often causes symptoms that resemble a mild heart attack.

HCM is different. In HCM, heart muscle fibers grow thick and stiff. In my case, my heart grew in such a way that blood flow through my left ventricle was impeded. Eventually, I went to the Mayo Clinic where Dr. Werner Schaff stopped my heart for half an hour while he reshaped the interior of my ventricle by removing heart tissue. After the surgery, he told me the tissue he removed was the size of my thumb. That was in 2008.

When I returned to Whatcom County from Rochester Minnesota, I was weak, but I felt better. All my life, I felt palpitations, sessions after heavy physical labor, or for no apparent reason, my heart pounded in my chest to the point that I could think of nothing else. I assumed everyone experienced the same thing. I have not felt those pounding palpitations since the surgery.

In retrospect, I had a close call in the fourth or fifth grade. Custer, Central, and North Bellingham Elementary competed in a softball league. I was on the about the fifth string of the North Bellingham team playing Central, the elementary for the town of Ferndale. When there was no possibility of putting anyone else up to bat, I was at the plate. The Central pitcher threw a slow one, smack down the middle, no doubt because the chance that I would hit it was near zero. I saw it coming and swung. Miracle of miracles, I drove it into the outfield.

I started running. I made it to first and rounded toward second, the only time in my entire life that I have made that turn. About midway to second, my feet seemed to disappear from under me and I was engulfed in a reddish-brown fog. The next thing I knew, a crowd of kids were looking down at me and the umpire called me out. They pulled me up and I stumbled back to the bench, blaming myself for being so clumsy. So much for my baseball career.

Knowing what I know now about HCM, I believe I was lucky. Other young athletes have never left that brown fog. The most common first symptom of HCM is sudden cardiac death.

I made it until my early fifties. I’ve always liked bicycles. At that point in my life, I was riding a bike to work every day. We had bought a second home in Redmond, about six miles from the office. Most of my ride was on the Sammamish River Trail segment of the Burke-Gillman Trail, the bike super highway of the Seattle area. The trail is almost level, but I had a climb from the trail to the office on 128th in Kirkland.

I had a regular checkup with my doctor in Redmond. I mentioned that my chest ached on the uphill from the river trail. He frowned, asked me a few questions I’ve forgotten, ran an EKG, and shoved me across the hall in a wheel chair to a cardiologist. The cardiologist ordered an echocardiogram and pushed me into his echo lab. The technician performed an echocardiogram, the first of many. At one point, she called in the cardiologist to look at the screen. After a while, she gave me a cloth to wipe off the jelly she had smeared on my chest and told me to get dressed. She escorted me into the cardiologist’s office. A routine checkup had turned interesting.

The cardiologist told me that my echo-cardiogram was abnormal. He had not seen my condition often, but he thought it was idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis (IHSS), the old name for HCM.

I went through a series of medications, none of which seemed to do any good. The last straw was a tread mill echo-cardiogram that the cardiologist in charge refused to complete. I had a referral to the Mayo Clinic.

That was ten years ago last November. My heart has improved steadily after Dr. Schaff’s knife work.

Last Sunday, my friend, Bill Merrow, and I rode the historic Cascade Bicycle SR99 Tunnel Ride. I was, frankly, scared, thinking about sudden cardiac death and my aborted softball career, but I also felt like I could do it. Riding through the tunnel before it was opened to car traffic was a once in a lifetime event.

So, I tried. And succeeded. Bill was forbearing, tolerating my slow speed, being passed by 10-year-olds on rocket bikes and families pulling trailer-loads of infants. I stopped once, on the final ascent of the return trip through the tunnel to let my heart slow down and a few muscles relax, but I made it.

Folks with HCM, once they have made it through young adulthood, typically live as long as anyone else. That’s my plan.

Leaving the Homestead

You may know that I live on a road named for my family and in a house that was built by my grandfather and that both I and my father grew up in. Every so often, I meet someone who is like me: stubborn, lacking in creativity, or otherwise inclined to remain sessile in a country where no one lives in the same place for long. All has changed. This spring, I left that motley clutch.

My wife Rebecca and I decided early this year that it was time for us to leave the Waschke homestead. The property has been in my family for well over a century, passed on from my grandfather, to my father, and finally to me. We have a deed tucked in a safe that has Ulysses S. Grant’s signature at the bottom, although I understand those deed signatures were all copies.

The decision was difficult and part of me still disagrees vehemently. Sadly, I am no farmer. I was raised on the farm, but my interests have ranged from mathematics, to classical Chinese history, developing and writing about computer systems, libraries, and writing mystery novels. Although I stayed on Waschke Road and the homestead my entire life, I never wanted to farm. Too much experience has dulled my appreciation for the work on the farm that many find renewing and fulfilling. In recent years, a congenital heart condition and diabetes have made maintaining the farm more difficult and my wife Rebecca had her third back surgery last summer. My city wife is the gardener on our team, but what she enjoyed and I dreaded as stoop labor, is now impossible for her. Our children are not interested in the farm. The inescapable conclusion was that we would live longer and happier if we relinquished the homestead.

We decided to sell the old place. Our first step was to buy a house in town, Ferndale where I went to high school. I move, but not far. Although we remodeled the old farmhouse ten years ago, we both much prefer this smaller and more easily maintained new house. I am happy to spend my days researching and writing instead of fretting over the aches and fatigue that almost put me to bed after a few hours on the tractor or maintaining the farm. We still live from packing boxes—the effort of moving from a house and grounds in which three generations lived without ever moving out was tremendous. We are sorting three generations of accumulation. We found a pair of trunks, which we think traveled to America from Germany when my great grandparents emigrated. One of the trunks contained the chrome plated name plaques from the coffins of my two aunts who died shortly after birth on the homestead before my father was born. The trunks now sit in our new foyer. We’ve cleaned them up and are thinking about whether to let the years show or to restore them.

The homestead is now on the market, waiting for the right buyer. I don’t expect the place to sell quickly. It is not for everyone. Only a certain person in the right circumstances will appreciate it. You can see pictures here.

From Prussia to Minnesota

My great grandfather, Gottlieb Waschke, was an orphan. His parents died when he was twelve, leaving him and his younger brother to fend for themselves. As orphans, Gottlieb and his brother John trained as a builders and craftsmen in the public vocational school system established by Otto Von Bismarck in 19th century in Prussia. He built sugar mills, which boomed in northern Europe after the American civil war interrupted the supply of sugar from the Gulf of Mexico. My great grandfather emigrated from Germany, I believe entering the U.S. through New Orleans. He went up the Mississippi and used his training and experience to become a railroad car builder in Detroit and later Stevens Point, Wisconsin, near Green Bay. Later, he brought his younger brother from Germany, who was also a craftsman. The younger brother was soon recruited to Whatcom County to help with the late 19th century Bellingham Bay real estate boom.

Arrival in Whatcom County

My great grandfather Gottlieb saved enough in the car yards to buy farm land near Wells, Minnesota. He apparently did well, but the frigid winters and broiling summers of the upper Midwest were not to his taste. His brother wrote about the mild climate and opportunities in Whatcom County. My great grandfather decided Washington would be a more hospitable to a family farming operation and made the move to Washington state.

Gottlieb leased a railroad stock car, loaded it with machinery and livestock and sent it to Bellingham with his two oldest sons riding along, tending the cattle, horses, and a few chickens. The railroad allowed only one rider to tend the livestock. My grandfather, only thirteen or fourteen, hid in the cattle bedding when the railroad officials came around. Gottlieb, his wife, daughters, and younger sons rode on a passenger train. On arrival, my great-grandfather bought a quarter section of land on the northeast corner of Aldrich and Smith roads in south east corner of Ferndale township.

The Matzkes, my grandmother’s family, were from Pomerania, near Prussia. They were also mill builders and had ties to my great-grandfather’s family. They also emigrated from Germany to Whatcom County, arriving a few years after my great-grandfather and settled on the west side of Aldrich Road close to my great-grandfather. Romance soon blossomed between my grandfather and grandmother. They married and planned to start their own family.

Buying the homestead

With the help of their parents, my grandparents, Gustave and Agnes Waschke, purchased forty logged acres in 1906. This plot became the Waschke homestead. Gus was born in Minnesota, but working on his father’s farm, he soon learned enough about Whatcom county to decide exactly the kind of land he wanted. The loggers who harvested the Nooksack plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries took only prime timber— mostly Douglas Fir and Red Cedar—leaving behind brush and trees they considered trash like Big Leaf Maple, Alder, and Birch, and, perhaps surprisingly, a few firs and cedars too big to cut by hand. Gus’s father’s farm was part peat bog, plagued with bog iron, and uneven, which made cultivation difficult.

Gus looked for a parcel that was flat with rich, neither waterlogged nor, dry soil. Not too many cedars—that signaled wet ground that could not be planted until late in a wet year like his father’s bog ground. And not too few cedars either—that meant dry ground that would not yield a good crop in a dry year. He also looked for big fir stumps, tough to clear with a team of horses, but a sign of fertility that would yield abundant crops. He found the mellow loam he wanted on the high ground on the verge Silver and Deer Creek watersheds and north of the skid road that paralleled the Smith Road. In those days, oxen still trudged the skid road pulling strings of logs cut on the Deer and Silver Creeks to the Nooksack river at Ferndale.

Gus and Agnes built a one room cedar shack in the northeast corner of the property, close to Agnes’ parents’ house on the Aldrich Road, where they lived for their first ten years together. Early in their marriage, a dry August northeast wind blew a brush and forest fire through the area. Gus and Agnes defended their home, beating out the flames with wet burlap sacks and shovels. Agnes recalled that they fought the flames until dark. Then they went to bed. She shook her head when she told this story, wondering that they survived, but they were young and life was an adventure.

I plan to write more about the homestead and its history in later blogs.

Treasure the Morning

What’s special about mornings? I have an answer. It’s not mornings, it’s what you do the day before.

Experience developing software

When I was developing software, I discovered that when I was stumped, the best thing I could do was to think through and write down the problem as exactly as I could rather than try to concoct a solution. I could throw away the notes, I seldom looked at them again, but after they were on paper, go home, take a nap, get a fresh cup of coffee, whatever, just change the subject for a while. Don’t think about it for a while. A solution would usually come to me.

On the other hand, wracking my brain for code never seemed to work well. I might be able to hammer out something sufficient, but it was never my best work.

Conscious versus unconscious mind

From this, I’ve concluded that my conscious mind is less capable than my unconscious. The best use of my conscious mind is to clarify problems, not create solutions. If a solution does not come freely and effortlessly, I try to clarify the challenge rather than construct a response. When I think I have the problem as completely understood as I can, I stop and wait until something pops up.

Mornings

This is why many people treasure the morning. The unconscious mind has a fresh cauldron of newly minted solutions to deliver to consciousness after a night of work. The new day’s task is to implement these solutions and gather a fresh batch of clear problems for your unconscious mind. I am surprised when I see how much better I feel and how much more I get done when I stop fretting over solutions and strive to understand problems.

Writing

In writing, I don’t try to plan what I will write. Instead, I make notes on what I am trying to say, the kind of story I am trying to tell, what my characters feel. I notice that John Steinbeck did a lot of this in his journals and Raymond Chandler did the same in his letters. At least I am in good company with this approach.

Oddly, I often lose track of this plan and frequently have to stop myself from going for a solution instead of clarity. Insisting on a solution rather than a clear problem is a trick that my stubborn self-defeating resistance plays on me all the time.

Callie Oettinger posted a “What It Takes” blog on Steven Pressfield’s site that inspired me to think this over and I posted a version of the above as a comment there.