Category: Uncategorized

Hiking the Chilkoot Trail in Alaska and Yukon

December 24, 2022

I looked in horror to see Kathy sink in the snow, walking twenty feet in front of me. She was down to her waist before she stopped sinking. I lurched forward and flattened myself on the snow-covered field reaching towards her with my outstretched walking pole. With effort by both of us, she crawled out of the snow with a disbelieving smile on her face.

 Deeply etched in my mind, this memory came back to me when reading someone on Quora – a question-and-answer website – that his most memorable adventure, after traveling in eighty countries, was skating on the Rideau Canal in Ottawa: the 3-mile-long canal frozen during the winter months. I have skated on the canal many times without getting excited over it.

In contrast, hiking the Chilkoot Trail stood out in my memory for its physical challenges, natural beauty, and dangers.

As soon as we decided on our hike, our daughter, Megan, and her husband Jerome from Baton Rouge, LA, and son David and his girlfriend Erica, Chapel Hill, NC, decided to join us. Our camping group increased in size when my friend Lloyd also joined us with his son Neil and Neil’s new bride, Alison. Neil offered the trip to Alison as a honeymoon and presented it like a walk in the park. Well, that was not to be, Alison was not in shape for heavy-duty hiking and did not have proper hiking boots.

We hiked the thirty-three miles long (fifty-three kilometers) Chilkoot Trail from Skagway, Alaska, to Bennett Lake in the Yukon in 2001. (The trail is famous for the Klondike gold rush when over a hundred thousand prospectors panned for gold between 1896 and 1899.) It took us five days of hiking and four days of wilderness camping to complete the trail, enjoying unparalleled scenery, from the coastal rain forest to alpine lakes to above the tree line.

At the trailhead, the park rangers gave us a lecture about grizzly bears and how to distinguish between predators and other bears, a fascinating subject to ponder on embarking on the trail; were the park rangers trying to scare us or merely educate us?

Although the rangers advised us not to use hiking poles because of the fragile ground conditions of the north, we brought along one pole each; a useful additional support on uneven terrain.

From the trailhead, we started on a gentle hill with a path not very well marked or visible, but full of roots and rocks. I found the ascent difficult with a heavy backpack on our back carrying our food for five days and camping gear.

Although most of us started to hike early in the mornings after a quick oatmeal breakfast, Lloyd slept in, and Jerome got off early with nary a breakfast and was always the first to arrive at our destination at night; he reserved the best sites at the camp for our group of nine.

We brought along large chunks of cheese for lunch that did not require refrigeration and had trail mix and chocolate bars for snacks. Our “happy” hour was when we arrived at the designated campsite and set up our tents. The freeze-dried food tasted delicious at dinner time after a hard day of hiking.

Since we had to fill up our large water bottles every day, I made a deal with Neil. He did not have a water filter and borrowed mine. In return, after filling up his and Alison’s water bottles, he filled up mine and Kathy’s.

Being in bear country, the rangers advised us to wash our dishes and utensils carefully after dinner. For the night, we packed up all the food and hung it in our backpacks from a rope strung high between two trees, away from our tents, to make sure that bears could not get to it.

On the third day of hiking, we arrived at the famous “stairs.” I thought there would be stairs cut into the rocky ascent. It was not. I read that during the winters, the stampeders cut fifteen hundred stairs in the ice to make it easier to climb up the slopes. We arrived at the “stairs” in September when there was no ice and the “stairs” were huge rocks, some over ten feet high, that we had to climb. We climbed for hours in a fog so we could not see where the top was. We just kept on climbing. When we arrived at the top, we were euphorious about accomplishing what we thought was a real feat.

Descending from the highest point in our trek on a glacier, Kathy suddenly sunk to her waist in the snow-covered mountain side. It seemed surreal to see her sinking, so I hurried over and lay down on the snow to get traction to reach and pull her out. She was soaked, and we hurried up to warm up. Walking over rocky terrain was a unique challenge; there was melting water among the rocks, and we jumped from rock to rock to avoid the water.

On the fourth day of hiking, we heard loud talking and singing behind us. David, Megan, and Erica were trying to make a lot of noise when they got between a mother bear and her two babies. The mother bear false-charged them. Megan and Erica backed away and David flailed his arms to make him look bigger until the bear moved away. Kathy and I hiked with bear bells clanging, and the rest of our party wore them as well after meeting the bears.

We returned to Skagway in the last car of the White Pass and Yukon Railway, free for the smelly hikers, to avoid mixing with the tourists from the luxury cruise liners docked at Skagway. On arrival we went to a pub to have a cold beer. 

The Nuclear Stress Test of the Heart

December 18, 2022

I drove over to the east end of Ottawa to the Cardiovascular Center in a strip mall. It was a bad move on my part to hit the road in rush hour, especially with all the construction going on. It was difficult sometimes to find the lanes toward my destination with all the traffic cones, although this was my second trip there. The first time they injected some dye into the blood flow to track the circulation. This time, they would track the circulation after stressing my heart out.

The Cardiovascular Center is in one of the most inauspicious strip malls. And within the mall, the center is between an optician and a pharmacy. The other small stores in the mall range from dog obedience school and physiotherapy to a Middle Eastern restaurant with Arabic writing on the storefront.

Driving to the Cardiovascular Center made me relax; I usually get nervous going to medical buildings. This place in the middle of a nondescript shopping mall is certainly not like going to a hospital and seeing uniformed nurses and doctors rushing around the hallways with official tags around their necks.

I checked in with the receptionist sitting behind a plastic window and sat down in the waiting room on a seat away from the sun that was shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows, making the room feel like a hot greenhouse.

The people in the room were all older, like me, some required canes for walking. One couple was talking loudly, otherwise, the room was quiet and I read my cell phone to pass the time.

It did not take long for a nurse to call me into a room furnished with a hospital bed, monitoring equipment, and a treadmill. Aha, I thought I will use the latter for the stress test.

Then the nurse asked me to take off my clothes from the waist up and lie down on the hospital bed. She put a blood pressure monitor on my arm while talking to me, then put electrodes on my chest. The last connection was an IV needle.

Finding a good vein to insert an IV is always a challenge for nurses. Although I drank a lot of water that morning to help show veins, and she said that she saw the veins, she could not find one large enough for the needle around my elbow. After poking me twice by my elbow, she put a smaller IV needle into the top of my hand.

In the meantime, we had a great chat about Ottawa that relaxed me and brought down my blood pressure, which is always high when I visit a medical facility, even if it is in a strip mall.

She started my IV drip with saline solution to help the veins; she explained it is used to deliver medications. After the saline solution, some nuclear material dripped into my veins to stimulate the heart. All this time she kept asking whether I felt nauseous, had a headache, was dizzy, or was just lousy. I did not have any of those symptoms but was getting anxious, as I started imagining that perhaps I should have those symptoms if the test were working. But she repeated the same questions in a few minutes, and I assured her again that I was fine and told her if she did not badger me, I could fall asleep on the comfortable bed. The lack of any sickness on my part was a good sign, she said, and that made me feel good.

The nurse also explained that if I felt sick because of the nuclear material, she would give me an “antidote” via the IV. Since I was not feeling bad, I am not sure if she gave me any antidote.

The bottom of my arm, which had the IV in it, was getting painful with pressure building up in it, and told her so. She explained that it is the rush of the liquids coming from the IV needle and because the veins are small in the lower arm, the flow of the liquid puts pressure on the walls of the veins.

The only other impact beyond the pressure in my arm was my pulse rate exploding from its normally low rate in the fifties. Perhaps it was the anxiety of doing the test. While the IV drip was going on, the nurse was in front of a monitor watching my performance.

After a while, she said that it is time to inject some dye into my veins for the “gamma” camera to track the movement of blood in my veins, especially around my heart. I said that was fine with me; she could have put any liquid, even alcohol, into my IV.

When we finished with all the cocktails entering my veins, she told me to go outside into a small waiting room and eat the snacks that they had directed me to bring. But I asked her, “When are we going to do the stressing”? and pointed to the treadmill. She replied that the stressing was already done and explained that the nuclear material injected into me made the heart race and mimic the action of the heart when one is exercising. Ah! So that was it. I did not feel like I exercised at all – I did not sweat – and felt gypped not having the chance to jog on the treadmill for a little exercise, but glad the first phase of the testing was over.

So, I went into a small waiting room and snacked. I was hungry by this time; as I had been told to fast for four hours before the test.

After a half hour in the waiting room, they took me into another room with a dentist-type chair. On the left side of the chair, there was the gamma camera, a huge L-shaped machine that covered my chest, and the left side. She moved the camera over my chest and told me to sit on the left side of the chair so that the other side of the L was next to my left side, where the heart is. The camera buzzed for four minutes and then after a break, we did it over again, for four minutes. Then I was done.

I felt quite relaxed coming out of the Cardiovascular Center. It was not only because the staff were pleasant but also because of the venue. We were in a strip mall, and I thought this visit was more like going for coffee at Starbucks than getting a medical exam. Maybe we should have all medical clinics in shopping centers instead of medical buildings. Now I just must wait for the results, which may come in a few weeks.

From Railroads to Coal Mines to National Park

December 9, 2022

We hiked along the Southside Trail in the New River Gorge National Park near Fayetteville, West Virginia, over Thanksgiving weekend. The trail is wide, and the grade is easy; it follows an abandoned railroad line used by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad company in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Those with longer legs and strides went ahead. I strolled after them, enjoying the quiet. There were no people on the trail except one fellow walking a couple of dogs.

It was in November; all the leaves had fallen, making the path soft under the foot and letting the sun’s rays come through the trees. The temperature warmed up from near freezing to t-shirt time and I put my jacket and sweatshirt into my backpack.

the Southside Trail

Coal mining in this areagoes back to the 1800s. Coal replaced wood to boil brine to make salt needed for the transport of meat with no refrigeration. Small coal mines had sprung up to respond to the need. The demand for coal further expanded when using coal oil for indoor lamps became popular in the mid-1800s; distilled coal is coal oil, made just like moonshine. The increasing demand for coal triggered the construction of railroads.

I passed by well-preserved coke ovens, left over from the time “King coal” was mined and made into coke in the early 20th century. Taking a rest on my walk, I sat down and looked up the story of coal in this part of West Virginia on my cell phone.

I learned the mining industry was a tough one; miners were mostly immigrants and African-Americans, working for low pay under unsafe conditions. To accommodate the workers, the mining companies built housing for them from scratch, overnight; the housing was segregated with whites on one side and blacks on the other side of the coal chute. The companies also provided a store, since there were no other commercial establishments in the vicinity. And the stores sold items for usurious prices to the miners who had no options but to buy at the company store.

Despite their hard condition, the miners’ spirit could not be contained: they played baseball, and the folklore of the ballad of “John Henry” or the alternate “Take the Hammer” song was born. I checked out the ballads sung by most blues and country singers and the one I like the most is by Tennessee Ernie Ford. You can listen to it on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kr6FIXBaZ8

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), formed in 1890, came to unionize the workers, to help improve pay and safety, and fought, often violently, for 43 years. Mary “Mother” Jones of national fame, was one of the principal leaders in the West Virginia labor movement until 1921 and led many marches, culminating in armed fights between the miners and the mine owners. The armed miners could not stand up against the National Guard and the Armed Forces called out by the Governor of West Virginia in one case and President Harding in another case. The mine wars culminated when President Roosevelt let the UMWA organize in 1933.

The trail I followed is next to the “New River,” an ironic name for one of the oldest rivers in North America. There are spectacular views of the river along the trail, which has smooth water parts for canoeing and white water for rafting and kayaking. The New River is in a deep gorge, hundreds of feet down from the rim; the sides of the gorge provide some of the best rock climbing in the Eastern United States.

After a couple of hours of walking, I turned back while the rest of the family went on this seven-mile trail. I engaged in a friendly conversation about the history of the coke ovens with the three people from Virginia I encountered on my return trip to the trailhead.

Our home was a Vacation Rental by Owner (VRBO), a half-hour drive from the trailhead, in Fayetteville with a current population of 2800 people. Fayetteville, incorporated in 1872, used to be a mining town, but to me, it was transitioning to become a tourist town in the center of the New River Gorge National Park.

 The house was close to a thousand square feet in size, fully renovated, and well-appointed, but I felt technically challenged trying to change the thermometer. Equally challenging was following instructions to make coffee on a machine that combined a carafe coffee maker with a Keurig coffee maker.

Sam, the host, came over to help us figure out how to operate the “nest”thermometer. He demonstrated how your finger moving along the perimeter of a circular control knob changes the temperature. 

His wife runs three VRBOs, and he takes care of technical problems when he is home from Alabama, where he now works. Although he was trained as a mining engineer, it was not clear if he was doing mining-related work in Alabama. Perhaps he left town, because there may be no mining jobs left in Fayetteville. The abandoned mines we saw in the area testified to that.

In the afternoon, we walked around the hilly streets of Fayetteville, incorporated in 1872, with small houses like the one we rented. Many of them looked vacant; I wondered if the people owning the vacant units left town for job opportunities elsewhere and converted them to VRBOs.

The downtown area had well-maintained, old commercial buildings. One was a bank. I always recognize the typical small-town banks, stone buildings with Greek columns framing the entrance, and large windows on the sides. This bank was at a street corner, as most of these small-town banks are, with the entrance door located diagonally where the two streets met. 

We came to stay in Fayetteville, a convenient location for visiting the New River Gorge National Park. The area was originally established as a National River in 1978, by President Carter and updated into a National Park in 2020 by President Trump. They show a short film on the history of the National Park at the Visitor Center. On leaving the Visitor Center, a South Korean family asked me to take a picture of them, which I was happy to do.

Observing the mostly out-of-state license plates in the parking lot of the visitor center and meeting someone from South Korea made me think the area is successfully transitioning from the declining mining industry to tourism. According to a National Parks report, the New River Gorge National Park attracted 1.8 million visitors in 2021 who spent over $80 million in the region.

(The coal industry grew from mining two million tons of coal in 1880 and employing 3700 people to mining 168,000 tons of coal in 1948 and employing 125,000 people, at its peak. Today, West Virginia coal mines produce 90,000 tons of coal and employ 49,000 people.)

The Advent Worship in Clemmons, North Carolina

December 4, 2022

St. Judas Thaddeus Church in Sopron, Hungary

I have never been a church-going person except in my youth when my father, who went to a Jesuit school, made us go to church on holy days like Xmas and Easter.

My memory of going to the old baroque church in Sopron, Hungary – St. Judas Thaddeus, built by the Dominicans in 1715 – is not pleasant (see picture on left). The huge nave of the church was a forbidding, gloomy space for a small kid. It was cold inside with a stone floor.

Nobody received us at the entrance lobby; nobody led us inside. I stood for the service at the back of the church, listening to the sermon; that gave me a quick getaway if I got too cold or bored by the service.

The sermon and the entire mass were in Latin, which I could not understand. (The Catholic Church required that Mass be carried out in Latin until the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965, which permitted the use of the vernacular.)

And the priest dressed in ecclesiastical clothing for delivering the sermon, giving him – and it was always a “him” – a formal appearance, talking down to us from the pulpit ten feet above us.

And, of course, we had the confessionals in little cubicles on the side of the nave of the church, where it was dark and I had to kneel in front of a wire screen behind which was the priest listening to your sins which were related to disobeying your parents and swearing using religious imagery.

 The salvation for my “mortal” sins, prescribed by the priest, was always saying a prayer fifty times or more, depending on the gravity and length of the list of my sins. I always thought the confessional was a good bargain to repent your “mortal” sins; it never took longer than a half hour to get back on the good side of the Lord.

Once I repented my sins, I lined up for communion wafers, the “sacramental bread”, that tasted good. Then we were free to leave the church.

Clemmons First Baptist Church, Clemmons, North Carolina

I encountered a huge contrast to my experience with my baroque church when we visited our family at the end of November in Winston-Salem NC, and joined them for Sunday service at Clemmons First Baptist Church (see picture on left), on the last Sunday of the month, the beginning of Advent.

We entered the modern building with a red-brick façade, where smiling people welcomed us into the well-lighted and comfortable lobby and ushered us into the nave of the church to padded pews.

I felt like I was in a large living room entering the lobby and once we sat down, lively conversation filled the church until the service started. The Pastor welcomed the attending children, and the organist played hymns with the text shown on two gigantic video screens over the stage so that we did not have to pick up the hymn books to follow the songs.

All the people were informally dressed. The Pastor showed up in slacks and a sweater and gave a sermon from notes, speaking freely most of the time.

The Pastor addressed the meaning of Advent by asking us to look at our state in life to make sure we are ready for the second coming of Jesus. He illustrated his point by talking about himself getting old, although he said he is 44 years old; to me, he is a young man. But he said he feels his age when getting up “from a toilet seat”, eliciting laughter from the audience. He added that now one can install higher toilet seats to help with that. This type of informal sermonizing made me feel quite comfortable.

Then the Pastor, in a more serious vein, talked about embracing silence, meditation, and the healing power of nature. I felt quite at home by now: we just came from the New River National Park in West Virginia, where we spent a few days hiking and enjoying nature in silence.

He said there is no need to push yourself to get ready for the second coming by reading the scriptures. Instead, he said, wait until the desire to do so comes from within yourself. I liked his low-key approach to religion; embrace religion when you are ready for it. I was ready to join the church!

At the end of the worship, we followed the Pastor, who walked into the lobby to welcome the audience. I told him how much I enjoyed his sermon, shaking hands with him.

I noticed a board in the lobby with pictures of a dozen deacons (members of the church); I learned that all the families frequenting this church have a deacon who follows their well-being and provides help when needed. For example, should someone get sick and not be able to cook, the deacon would organize members of the church to bring over food. My brother-in-law is a deacon here. I thought the deacons performed an important and valuable role.

If we had had churches like the Clemmons First Baptist Church when I was growing up, I may have been a lifelong churchgoer.

My Questions for the Canadian Immigration Minister

November 5, 2022

The Minister announced yesterday that Canada will welcome 500,000 immigrants annually. He said the country needs to move up immigration targets because of the low fertility rate and a million vacant jobs in Canada. But, Mr. Minister, have you fully considered the costs of a sudden surge in immigration, and the impacts on healthcare and housing in Canada?

Canada used to welcome a quarter million immigrants annually, ramping up to 300,000 recently. The number jumped to over 400,000 in 2001 and is likely to approach 500,000 this year.

Immigration policy in Canada has evolved. Initially, immigrants were invited in the 18th century to colonize the west, coming mostly from the British Isles. Central Europeans came early in the 20th century. People coming to work in Canada created the “economic class” of immigrants, and their families followed them (called the “family reunification” class of people). The “refugee” class of people was created under Prime Minister Diefenbaker, who welcomed 37,500 Hungarian refugees escaping their country after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Sixty percent of immigrants today fall into the “economic” class. India is the source of 32% of today’s immigrants, followed by China at 8%.

Besides economic development, demographics have become a new policy issue for Canada because of our low fertility rate of 1.5%, the replacement rate is 2.1%. So, the question comes to mind: have we tried to influence fertility rates? Many countries have tried it with limited success (Russia, and France, for example). Changing behavior is difficult, so let’s bring more people into the country to boost our population.

But the devil is in the details. Of the two major sources of immigrants to Canada today, India’s fertility rate was 2.1% in 2021 and China’s 1.7%. If immigrants from these two countries continue to follow their culture, they may not help with Canadian fertility rates. But would this flow of immigrants help with the economy?

A target group for the Minister is the science, technology, engineering, and math people (STEM). Yes, we have a million vacant jobs, but most are in the service industries, the hospitality and retail industries, and not in STEM. So this group of immigrants may not help fill the vacant jobs we have in Canada, especially when technology people are being laid off these days (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter).

A related question I have for the Minister is: what do we do with the one million unemployed people in Canada and another half million people who stopped looking for work? We have one and one-half million people who could be employed. Retraining may make them employable. It may not be in the Immigration Minister’s mandate to solve labor shortages via retraining, but it begs the question: should we look at the unemployed and the stay-at-home people for filling vacant positions in Canada before filling these jobs with immigrants?

And the Minister has not talked about the cost of immigration, except for the benefits to the GDP and the income taxes immigrants will pay. But clearly, immigrants need services like healthcare and housing, provided by lower levels of government. We, the taxpayers, pay all government taxes – federal, provincial and local – so perhaps it is time to reflect on the costs of immigration.

At a time when healthcare is already breaking at the seams with doctors’ shortages and nurses retiring, an increase in immigration will put an additional load on the system. (Six million people in Canada do not have a family doctor. Some emergency rooms have closed due to a lack of nursing staff). You say that, of course, we should target doctors and nurses in the immigration program. Makes sense. But do you realize that both professions require certification by relevant authorities and the reality in Canada is that foreign doctors and nurses must qualify before they can practice?

For example, I had a technician perform an ”ultrasound” procedure on me and I found out that she was a medical doctor from Belarus and took all the Canadian exams to become a doctor but failed to get residency in a hospital required for certification and was forced to take a technician’s job.

Yes, Mr. Minister, we have a supply problem: we need more doctors and nurses and immigration will not provide a quick fix because of certification barriers.

And immigrants need housing. On average, 200,000 housing units are built in Canada annually. The half million immigrants coming to Canada each year could use a few hundred thousand units and drive-up housing prices, especially given the present housing shortage (for example, the Premier of Ontario recently announced a sweeping housing plan to ease the shortage of housing).

Preserving and increasing the value of current homeowners’ units may be good for the homeowners, but difficult for young Canadians who would like to get into the housing market. Has the Minister thought through how the half million immigrants coming into the country each year impact housing markets?

And my questions to the Minister would not be complete without asking about “absorption rates” for immigrants in Canada. Absorption refers to the ease with which immigrants assimilate or integrate into Canadian society: get a job, acquire housing, have their children in school, and become a part of their local community.

Ethnic groups like to settle near each other for comfort. When a large group of immigrants settles in an area – that often happens – ghettos may result and integration into Canadian society may take the back seat. Has the Minister studied how many immigrants can Canada absorb annually?

There are costly impacts on education and social services at the local level when immigrants arrive. Teaching the official languages of Canada to immigrants is a significant cost for school boards. For example, Quebec has 23% of Canada’s population and could take up to 117,000 of the 500,000 immigrants, but the Premier said their capacity to teach the French language is limited to 50,000 people annually. Has the Minister discussed how many immigrants each province would take?

I am for immigration; I was an immigrant myself and found my journey to assimilate into Canadian society has been challenging but tremendously satisfying (it never stops). But I ask the Minister whether he has thought about the impact immigrants will have on our healthcare system, our housing situation today, and our experience with integrating immigrants successfully into our society when suddenly we’ll receive a half million newcomers each year.