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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.

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Voles, Stories, and Owls

Voles, field mice, are among my favorite animals.

Field Mouse Skull from owl pellet. C9 Photography

My dad (Ted) used to read Beatrix Potter to my sister and me. Actually, he retold the stories in his own way and only occasionally referred to the illustrations. Somehow, Beatrix Potter’s English Lake District was transported to the fields and gardens of the Waschke Homestead. And the field mice, Dad never called them voles, were prominent characters. Dad did not have anything to say about house mice; they were pests in the barn, and he was happy to see the cats catch and eat them.

In Dad’s stories, field mice had names, characters, families, and adventures. He told gentle stories. Brave little field mice narrowly escaping marauding owls, rescued by their mouse parents. Field mice falling into holes and struggling to escape. Field mice outwitting a clever red fox crouching in hiding next to a succulent cache of tender roots. Field mice going out in the snow and catching a chill that had to be treated with hot foot baths and chamomile tea. Field mice meeting wise old chickens. Where my father ever got the idea that a chicken might be wise, I don’t know.

Voles are a separate species from house and wood mice with different diets and habits. The variety that lives on the Waschke Homestead is much larger than house mice—sometimes five inches long, plump, with longer hair, shorter tails, and never venture far from open fields. The hay and grain fields, offering cover for their labyrinthine trails and nests, teemed with them. Corn and potato fields were too open for field mice and the cows in the pastures trampled and destroyed field mouse kingdoms. But the hay and grain fields left the field mice undisturbed for months at a time and they flourished there.

The owls, foxes, barn cats, and coyotes all knew where the field mice lived. After sunset and in the early morning before sunrise, the owls fly over, and other predators nose around in the field mouse trails and dine well on field mice fattened on grass and other plants that grew in the fields.

Field mice skulls appear in owl pellets in the barn. The owls swallow the mice bones and all, then cough up the indigestible parts as pellets when they roost in the barn. The pellets litter the floor of the hay barn and the silo now. The contents of the pellets are fascinating. Jake and Monica captured the harsh beauty of a field mouse skull from an owl pellet in the photo above.

Field mice are terrifyingly prolific. A fertile female produces four or five offspring a month, who mature in a few weeks. Without the predators the field mouse population would soon run out of food. Relying on the natural curbs on their proliferation, Dad never worried about field mice affecting his crops and I don’t believe they ever did.

Hay cutting and grain harvesting was a terror for field mice. When we cut hay with a sickle cutter bar mower, in areas where the field mouse population was high, the cutting bar laid their nests and trails open to the sky and the sickle would drip with deep red field mouse blood. The disk mowers that are generally used now disperse the blood in an invisible blur.

The field mouse slaughter was also a dangerous time for cats. They liked to hunt close to the mowing, waiting to catch mice fleeing from the cutter. A cat’s instincts are not tuned to mowers cutting hay and sometimes they dive into the path of the mower instead of away. Every year or so, we’d lose a good cat to the mower.

As the field was cut, mice would run to the tall grass remaining in the center of the field, a patch that got smaller with each round of the mower. During the last few passes, the patch of tall grass in the center would rustle with fleeing field mice.

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Social Infrastructure

This week, I went to the Mid-Winter Meeting of the American Library Association in Seattle. I went to a talk about “social infrastructure” by Eric Klinenberg. He is a sociologist from the University of Chicago, where I went to college and graduate school. He teaches at New York University.

Klinenberg believes that a strong social infrastructure makes people happier, lengthens life spans, and increases the chances that people will live through a natural disaster.

Up here in the Pacific Northwest, we don’t hear of neighbors dying in hurricanes, wild fires, or tornadoes. The last big earthquake only caused one death in the entire Puget Sound area. The Big One is predicted to be much more severe, but it’s hard to get worked up about it in comparison to the deadly heat and cold waves that kill the elderly in the big cities of the Midwest and Northeast like Chicago and New York every few years. We have our forest fires, but the threat of fire on the rain soaked west side of the Cascade is not the terror of dry eastern Washington, Oregon, and California.

But I was still interested by Klinenberg’s talk. His social infrastructure is the set of institutions that bring neighbors together and foster a sense of caring for the other members of the community.

In my own community of Ferndale, an example of social infrastructure of the past was three-hand pinochle in the back room of the old Cedars Tavern on the corner of Main and Second (Now Outlaws Saloon). Farmers, construction workers, and other folks played cards and gossiped on rainy afternoons. I don’t know if back-room card games are still around, but while they went on, they brought together the community, cutting across social and cultural boundaries in ways that some closer-knit organizations, like churches, or civic organizations like Rotary or Kiwanis, do not. Of course, churches and civic organizations have an important place in social infrastructure, but they are not the same as broader based institutions.

The Ferndale Public Library is also an example. Folks of all ages and economic position mix together in a new and airy building. Kids attend story-times. There’s a LEGO club. Teens have Whatcomics and a readers theater. Adults have their book clubs, computer sessions, English practice sessions, and stress management classes. All ages read and check out books and magazines, borrow music and videos, and use free wi-fi and internet terminals. A librarian will help you find instructions for rebuilding the smoke lift on a 1954 Farmall B. Most importantly, folks see and interact with each other. Go into the library. Getting a smile and nod from a complete stranger there is the easiest thing in the world.

Another example is the Ferndale public school system. Kids are educated in schools, but schools do more than educate. When I entered the first grade, the first refinery, then Mobil, was completed at Cherry Point. I went to school with kids who had just arrived from Olean, an oil refining center in western New York State. Their parents were transferred to Ferndale to run the new plant. I remember going to PTA potlucks and other school events during which my parents met these new and different neighbors. Later, with the opening of another refinery and an aluminum plant, the population of Ferndale expanded and diversified. The schools, especially the high school, where the entire district turns out regularly for football and basket ball games, was an important force in welding the community together.

Social infrastructure brings people together who would not ordinarily mix in their work and home life. The school brings together parents and children, causes them to get to know one another at ball games, school concerts, plays and other events. Ferndale has always needed this, we still need it now. The Whatcom County Health Department reported this month that two Whatcom County communities with healthy social infrastructures (Bellingham and Lynden) stand out with lower rates of death from heart issues and cancer.

The social fabric of Ferndale has changed in the last 60 years. Back room card rooms have been replaced by a gleaming casino. The high school of a few hundred students that I graduated from is now the largest in the county. The high school building, which was dated in 1967, is still in use. In a few days, Ferndale will vote on a school bond to rebuild the high school and performing arts center. If the bond succeeds, Ferndale will carry on a tradition of a healthy social infrastructure that has kept the community going for over a century.

Disclaimer: I’m chairman of the board of trustees of the Whatcom County Library System and I use the Ferndale Public Library at least once a week. I haven’t been enrolled in high school for over fifty years.