Walking with Waldo

It isn’t the rail-trail, but it’s still a nice place to walk…

You will not stop them from dying.  At best, you will stop them from dying today.

-Aude Mernilliod

I saw an orthopedic surgeon and got a steroid injection in my right outer hip.  The next day, I felt significantly better.  Then things went downhill and the pain returned en force.  In addition, I now have some decreased sensation over my lower shin.  That suggests a neurological problem.  I now think I might have a pinched nerve somewhere.  The most likely place is in the spine, where the nerve root leaves the vertebrae.  From the distribution of the pain and numbness, I’d say the L4 nerve root.  So, I contact a spine specialist to get the required tests (probably an MRI) and see what’s up.  I also received a prescription for oral steroids.  They helped quite a bit which suggests that whatever is pinching a nerve has some inflammatory component.

I mention all this to open a window into how our medical system works.  I’m in a position where, being a doctor, I understand how things are done and why they are done that way.  But I am also a patient, so I live with the frustrations and challenges of having to deal with the system.  If a life or limb is not threatened, the usual process takes time.  You start out with conservative treatment, in this case that means rest, ice and nonsteroidal pain meds and wait.  If that doesn’t work, and it hasn’t for me, you try something minimally invasive like a steroid shot in the place where you believe the inflammation is, like the bursa, and you wait.

All this waiting can be very frustrating, especially when pain is involved, but there are reasons for the delay.  One reason is that we don’t have an infinite amount of resources to spend on medical care and we have to be judicious in how we use what we have.  If you have a true emergency, fine.  You’ll get what you need ASAP.  If you don’t, you may have to suffer for some time while the list of possible causes of your discomfort is explored.  You know, the etymology of the noun, patient, is the Latin, patiens, the present participle of pati, to suffer, and has nothing to do with a tolerance of waiting.  As uncomfortable as I feel, this ain’t gonna kill me while I go through the process.  I’ll be a patient patient and suffer the waiting while I suffer the pain.

The differential diagnosis of my pain is long.  Many things can cause it.  Given my symptoms and what makes them worse or better, many possibilities can be moved down the list, ordered from most likely to least.  A simple pelvic x-ray taken when I got my steroid shot, for example, ruled out osteoarthritis – an all too likely cause of hip pain, given my age.   Since I have the numbness, that reorders the list a bit more.  It also changes the level of urgency, although it doesn’t make it emergent, because compressed nerves can be permanently damaged in a short period of time.  Given the extent of my neurological compromise, though, I still have plenty of time before that happens.  The next step is a lumbar spine x-ray to examine the bony holes that the nerves pass through.  If that proves not to be illuminating, then either I get an MRI, which is really good at showing swollen tissue, or we try some physical therapy to see if the symptoms can be made better without spending the many thousands of dollars that an MRI costs.  If the neurological symptoms worsen, or the pain exacerbates to where I can no longer perform my ADLs (activities of daily life), then things get escalated another notch.  This is as it should be.  After all, it would be totally inappropriate to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to rule out toe cancer when all you have is a hangnail.

Meanwhile, I suffer. But I can bear it and there are many people out there who need the available medical resources more than I do.  I won’t be neglected, I just have to be patient.  I don’t have to be in the front of the boarding line, the plane isn’t leaving without me.  Suffering is just nature’s way of letting us know that we’re alive.  I’m not worried.

Not worried about me, that is.  I do worry about Waldo.  He doesn’t understand what’s going on and simply feels an instinctive need to get out there and romp.  So far, I can provide him with a minimally acceptable level of exercise – mostly walking around the apartment grounds, but sometimes going to a park.   He runs a bit, sniffs a lot and, of course, carries a ubiquitous stick.  He’s happy, tail wagging, eating well and engaged with life.  I know, from prior experience, that he will get through this just fine – as long as I can continue with what I’m doing now.  If it comes to pass that I no longer can, well…   I do worry about that.

But, Waldo, he’s patient.

… and there’s plenty of places to sniff and look for rabbits.

walking around the apartment isn’t quite as idyllic…

Pain is temporary.  Quitting lasts forever.

-Lance Armstrong

This past week has been an ordeal.  It’s not unusual for me to feel some pain when I walk – back pain and muscle pain mostly.  Usually, I can ignore it, “walk through it,” as they say, and carry on.  After a couple of hours of rest in my beloved recliner, the pain is gone and I’m ready to continue the next day.  Sometimes, I’ll have an extra sharp pain, somewhere or other – doesn’t ever seem to be in the same place, and I’ll take a day off for a little extra rest so I won’t make it worse.  That works pretty well and it has always taken care of the problem.  I’m not particularly surprised when I get a pain here or there – I am 73, after all.  But for the past week, something else has been happening.

A week ago, I noticed a mild, barely noticeable dull ache on the right outer side of my hip.  Not in the joint, but on the top end of the femur at a place called the greater trochanter.  I figured it was just the usual muscle pain, an overuse kind of thing, and it would go away.  For a couple of days, Waldo and I did our usual trek and the pain didn’t get worse while I was walking.  But it didn’t go away.  On the third night, when I lay on my right side, the pain got significantly worse and the ache kept me awake much of the night, even when I rolled over.  Next morning, I decided, much to Waldo’s disappointment, to avoid the rail-trail to see if it got any better.  It didn’t.  Day by day, it got worse, to the point where it’s difficult to walk even a half-mile without periodically stopping.  Ugh.  Now I don’t even attempt going to bed – I get what sleep I can in the recliner, the one place I can get some, though not very much, relief.

I diagnosed myself with greater trochanteric pain syndrome, a fairly common occurrence, and tried to get an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon.  A surgeon can inject steroids into the trochanteric bursa which will decrease the inflammation that causes the pain.  Complete relief usually follows soon after.  However, the best I could do is get an appointment in another week – the surgeons are pretty busy.  Until then, I have to just suffer through as best I can.  Nonsteroidal pain medication doesn’t help any and ice gives only some temporary relief.  Sigh.

Over the years, I have had enough pain that when I get some, it feels like I’m meeting an old acquaintance.  An irritating, bothersome acquaintance, for sure.  But one I’m familiar with and, like a troublesome family member who overstays their welcome, I know that it will sooner or later depart and become just another memory.  Perseverating about it, trying to push it away and getting agitated about it will only make it worse.  The key is patience.  Lots of patience.  Accept it, make friends with it as best you can, and wait it out.

Pain and pleasure are different ends of a spectrum – you can’t have one without the other.  It’s all just a part of the human experience.  A bar magnet always has a north pole and a south pole.  You can never have one without the other.  They come only in pairs.  You chop a bar magnet in half and you end up with two bar magnets, each with a north and a south pole.  In the same way, no life can have only pleasure without pain.  Everyone will have pleasure sometimes, but they can never avoid pain and even the roughest life has some pleasure in it.  They’re different ends of the same stick.  Wishing life to be something it isn’t is just a waste of time.  You just cope.  Sigh.

Waldo is coping quite well too.  We only walk a half-mile around the apartment complex, several times a day, and he isn’t able to work out all his border collie energy in the distance I can now walk.  He tugs at the leash a little more than normal because I’m walking significantly slower.  But he still romps around and goes after sticks and chases rabbits, although he’s a bit more frenetic about it than usual.  He’s patient with me and seems to know that this will not last forever.  After all, he had to wait a good six weeks before we could return to our full rail-trial trek when I sprained my ankle a while back, so he’s been here before too.  But I do worry about what I’m going to do if something happens and I can’t even take him out to do his business.  I’ve not yet come up with a good solution for that.

We both take a deep breath and just sigh.

…and yet, even here, she shows off her beauty.

The band, “Tuxedo Junction,” at Branford Green.

Where words fail, music speaks.

-Hans Christian Andersen

A friend of ours. Marlene, invited Waldo and me to go down to Connecticut to enjoy an outdoor concert.  We readily agreed and drove the two hours from home to the Branford town green.  The band, about twenty instruments, including saxophones, trumpets, cornets, trombones, an electric guitar, a keyboard, a bass and drums, were setting up as we arrived.  I walked Waldo around the green, so he could do his business before the music started, and then we settled down on some portable chairs that Marlene brought.  The show began and Waldo lay down quietly in front of me — except for a few times when he dug at, and tried to eat, some weeds in the grass.

The band played old, well known music, including Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” and “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess.  They also had a very good tenor singing along in some of the tunes and, all in all, it was a very pleasant experience.  I really enjoy concerts en plein air and, although he didn’t seem to like it as much as Marlene and I did, Waldo tolerated it well.  It makes me wonder, why do I enjoy music?  Why does anyone like music?  Why does it exist?

That’s a question that fascinated me for a long time. As far as I know, the enjoyment of music, in some form, is universal among all human cultures.  That suggests to me that there must have been, at some point in our evolution, a survival advantage that music provided for the species.  In the past, I just couldn’t imagine what it could be.  How could music help primitive man, or his ancestors, survive?  Maybe it served as a mechanism that brought people together and that helped them survive because it reinforced their tendency to congregate and socialize?  Living in larger groups clearly made it easier for humans to get along in the world, but that begs the question, why does music cause people to come together?  For years, I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer.

Then I came across a book that piqued my interest called, “Animals in Translation,” by Temple Grandin, a famous autistic woman.  In the book, she talks about animal behavior and its whys and wherefores.  At one point, she mentions a theory, thrown about by some researchers, that made sense to me.  There are some animals, like the prairie dog, that communicate using a singing type of voice.  Their songs can be very detailed.  For example, they can communicate not only that a predator is approaching the community, but also what kind of predator, where it’s coming from, in what direction, how fast and, if they have confronted the beast before, the particular animal that’s threatening the community.  They haven’t evolved the ability to use language the way we do, but they communicate, just the same, using “music,” and that helps them survive in this dangerous world.

Now, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, which is just a fancy way to say that during an individual’s growth in utero, human beings go through the same steps of development that our ancestors went through in evolution.  Human fetuses go through a fish-like stage, an amphibian-like stage and so on.  Which makes good sense because as our ancestors mutated and evolved, new genes would be added onto old genes, much of the time, without throwing away the old genes.  So, maybe, just maybe, our human ancestors, at some point, evolved the ability, like prairie dogs, to use music to communicate and only afterward evolved language centers in their brains that allowed them to speak amongst themselves the way we do now.  If so, then we inherited the music centers in our brains and can still communicate using music.  Those centers then evolved further to give us our love of making and listening to music.

Clearly, music does communicate something to us, at least most of us.  And what it communicates cannot, in large part, be adequately expressed in the words, syntax and grammar that our language centers use.  Music, I think, communicates something more subliminal, emotional even, than what our language communicates.  Something that enhances, deepens and broadens our ability to share the human experience with one another.  Maybe that, at this point in our evolution, doesn’t enhance our ability to survive, but, man, it certainly beautifies it.

I know that Waldo has a language center in his brain because he responds appropriately to the words and expressions I’ve taught him.  It’s well known, too, that animals respond well to some kinds of music – music soothes the savage beast.  But Waldo must have a “music center” in his brain because I can communicate with him by using different whistle tunes and he responds appropriately to them.  However, if his behavior is any guide, it would be a real stretch to suggest that he enjoys the music I do.  If he enjoys any at all, it doesn’t seem to be “In the Mood” or “Summertime.”  But, just the same, he lays quietly next to me and allows me to enjoy the band.

Waldo must have also inherited a “tolerance to human idiosyncrasies” center in his brain.

Playing “In the Mood.”

Nature is truly prolific in its variety.

If you wish to know the divine, feel the wind on your face and the warm sun on your hand.

-Buddha

Waldo and I are still getting up at 6 AM to do our daily walk.  The sun rises before we get to the trail, but the air is still quite cool – generally in the mid to upper sixties.  Waldo goes off doing his Waldo stuff and I’m left to my own devices.  In keeping with recent interests, I find a few more species of moss, including common liverwort, toothed plagiomnium moss, Schreber’s big red stem moss and twisted moss.

I’ve also been on the look-out for ferns.  Ferns are the next evolutionary step up from mosses.  Like moss, ferns like to grow in wet shady areas, but not in the same places.  I can see ferns growing a ways away from the trail, in places that I would have to climb over fences, or bushwhack through undergrowth, to get to.  So, ferns are a little more difficult for me to speciate.  Just the same, I find interrupted fern, eastern marsh fern, sensitive fern, cinnamon fern and eastern hay-scented fern.  There may well be more kinds out there, I just can’t get to them.

And then there are grasses.  There are so many different kinds of grasses.  Most, like the mosses, are growing close to the trail.  There’s India lovegrass, Bermuda grass, bristeleaf sedge, hairy crabgrass, St. Augustine’s grass, eastern gamagrass, perennial ryegrass, broadleaf cattail, redtop, orchard grass, reed canary grass, common reed, common rush, Japanese stiltgrass, common foxtail, nimblewill and whitegrass.  And I’m pretty sure that list is not exhaustive.

I give you these lists to show how many different kinds of living things there are out there in the wild areas of the world.  I’m no botanist and have no desire to be.  I don’t put a lot of work in identifying the plants I see.  I have an app, called “Picture This” that I use.  As I walk along, if I happen to see a plant that seems interesting and different, I pull out my cellphone, take a picture, and within seconds, I see its identification and some additional information.  I take the time to do this because it forces me to pay attention to what’s happening in the present moment and commune with nature on a more intimate level.  I feel like I learn the names of the plants I find.  Instead of seeing just trees, I see red oaks, white oaks or black oaks.  It’s a little like learning the names of people, but not quite that intimate.  I don’t see “Bob,” the white pine, but I do see the white pine and not just a tree.  And it’s interesting to be on the lookout for things I haven’t noticed before.  That causes me to be more engaged with the nature around me, and therefore, more involved in the walk that Waldo and I are on.

This communing with nature also produces effects on me as a human being.  I can’t do it without feeling like I’m a part of it all, not really separable from it, like I’m in the company of an extended family that is much vaster than my infinitesimally small self.  It’s a peaceful, reassuring and supportive feeling when I start seeing myself as being a part of something so vibrant with life.  It’s as if paying attention to nature awakens an understanding of my own natural self and how I fit into the universe, not that different from what engulfs me.  It makes me feel more natural.

I notice a plant I haven’t paid attention to before.  It’s a little taller than I am and stands straight up, as if guided by a plumb bob.  I’ve never seen a plant do that before.  In their search for sunlight, the growth usually deviates at least a little from the vertical.  Yet there it is, thrusting up on a spindly stalk with some kind of bulbous buds at the top.  I can’t get a good picture with my phone, it’s so tall, so I gently bend it over to get the top closer to me.  I bend it a little too far and the stalk breaks, the entire plant falling over in my hands.  I immediately feel remorse and sadness for the poor plant.  All it was doing was following is nature to grow and thrive and I had to kill it.  I did get the picture, though.  It is a Canada lettuce.  A weed.  My communing with nature has gotten me to feel regret, a human response, for killing a weed.  It has made me even more human, which is also an expression of nature.

Waldo has a stick and is jabbing my legs with it.  He wants to play.  He plays keep-away for a bit, then gets close enough that, with some effort, I can grab the stick.  We play tug-of-war for a while, then I let him have it and he runs off up ahead.  There’s no doubt in my mind that playing with Waldo makes me more of a dog because I emulate dogness to play with him.  I couldn’t do that if there wasn’t a piece of dog already in me.

In a similar way, communing with nature seems to make me more intimately aware that I am nothing more than a piece of nature.

Just look at how many different kinds of weeds there are!

Where the grass grows…

Dark green is my favorite color.  It’s the color of nature, the color of money and the color of moss!

-Leonardo DiCaprio

It’s a little bit cooler when Waldo and I start out today, so we leave a little after sunrise, around 6 AM.  It’s still going to be too hot to walk comfortably after 10 AM, but we have plenty of time to do our morning constitutional and still beat the heat.  The sun is up and the light that penetrates the long forest shadows has lost its golden hue, but the glaring burn of late morning is yet to come.  There’s a slight breeze that adds to the sensation of cool and rattles the leaves of the quaking aspens.  It’s nice, but it does lack the early predawn magic of a walk in the woods before sun-up.  On the other hand, Waldo and I did get to sleep in a little longer.

All this nuance seems to be lost on Waldo.  His tail is up and wagging as he explores the bushes next to the trail – stick in mouth, of course.  He loves being out here, romping in the wild.  The heat doesn’t really deter him from attempting to cavort, either – it’s just that it isn’t long before he becomes overheated.  Today, that’s not a problem and he’s off entertaining himself, leaving me to my own devices for amusement.  I decide that I’m going to engage with nature by paying attention to whatever mosses I can find.  I’ve seen them alongside the trail before, but I pretty much ignore them.  Today, I’m going to fix that.  It’ll help me be more aware of the wonderful world around me.

Mosses are a group of plants that were one of the first to evolve to be able to live on land.  To do that, they had to developed new ways to breathe, preserve moisture and reproduce.  Those developments are what distinguish them, and all plants, from algae.  As a plant, though, they are diminutive and rudimentary.  They don’t have real roots, leaves or vascular tissue.  This means they like to live in shadowy, wet, cool places that other plants are less eager to inhabit.  On the rail-trail, this means places that have lots of thick shade.  The trail used to be a railroad bed and has drainage on either side that provides plenty of water, but most places have more sun than mosses like and are heavily populated by other phylae of plants, like grass, weeds and bushes.

Though there are several places where mosses can be found, there are only a couple that have a lot of it.  One stretch runs through thick forest shaded by large maples, oaks, sumacs and other trees.  There isn’t much grass in these shadowy places and moss can be seen to grown right up to the tarmac.  I identify four different species: twisted moss, common hairmoss, delicate fern moss and silvergreen bryum moss.  They are all close to the ground and no more than an eighth of an inch or so thick.  I brought a jeweler’s loupe with me (botanists like them because they’re small and readily accessible, hung from a lanyard around your neck) to get a close look and I have to get down on my knees to use it.  When I do, Waldo comes up next to me, drops his sticks and looks at me as if to say, “Did you find something really stinky?”

I’m reminded of a time I went to southeast Alaska with a group of people to survey a uranium claim on Prince of Wales Island off of Ketchikan.  We were five young men in our early twenties.  Three weeks we spent there, staying on a piece of the island that had no other living souls, living in a tent, sleeping on the ground and eating what we brought with us.  The place is a rain forest, filled with Sitka spruce, and it rained every damn day except one.  That one day was the only day we took off and we did nothing but enjoy the sun.  One thing I remember well is that the trees looked like they were covered with a green furry hide.  Of course, it wasn’t really fur; the trees have a thick layer of moss, over an inch deep, that surrounds the trunk.  Whoever came up with the idea that moss only grows on the north facing side of a tree has never been to southeast Alaska because, if that were true, all directions would be north up there.  I know for a fact that it isn’t the South Pole, so that idea must be false.

The moss I see next to the rail-trail is comparatively stunted and meager.  But it’s there and it seems happy enough.  Grass doesn’t grow nearby and it seems to have found and secured its own niche in the local ecology.  I straighten up and look around me.  There is so much variety to the life in these woods.  Dozens of different kinds of trees, myriad species of bushes and multitudes of varieties of weeds and flowering plants.  And lots of moss, too.  What a horrible disservice is done to Mother Nature when man comes into an area and “civilizes” it.

We finish our walk and return home until tomorrow.  Waldo got his sticks and I saw my mosses.

Who knows what tomorrow has to offer.

…where the moss grows.

It’s still quite dark as we start out.

The best part of the day is coming home to a wagging tail.

-Unknown

It’s hot out today, with lows in the low 70s, so Waldo and I are up before dawn.  We have a scant three hours to finish our walk before it gets unbearably hot for Waldo.  It’s still quite dark as we start out and it’s hard for me to see Waldo.  Fortunately, nature provided him with a white-tipped tail and that, I can see as it weaves back and forth with his sashaying gait.  I can tell when he stops, but I don’t know why.  Sometimes it’s to lift a leg and pee, sometimes to pick up a stick, sometimes to smell who has gone before and sometimes it’s for something I have to know about.  I have a small bright flashlight in my pocket and I shine it on him when his taillight stops to see if he’s pooping.  I’m vigilant for that because I have to pick it up when he’s done.  Keeping the flashlight in my mouth, so I have my hands free, I shine it on the pile he leaves behind.  I pick it up in the doggy poop bag I always carry with me.  I tie the bag in a knot, the light goes back in my pocket, and we’re back on the trail.  That’s how dark it is.

Whoever said that it’s darkest before the dawn clearly wasn’t equating sunrise with dawn.  Twilight creeps up on us slowly, as we make our way down the path.  It’s a good hour before the sun comes up and I can begin to see more and more of that piece of Mother Nature that we’re walking through.  Soon, I can make out Waldo’s sable birthday suit and the leaves of the trees and bushes that surround us.  It isn’t long and it becomes light enough that I can’t tell if the sun has risen behind the foliage.  I glance at my watch.  Nope, won’t happen for another half-hour or so.  One way to tell that the sun isn’t up yet is to note that there are no shadows.  The light is diffuse without any obvious source and makes everything look a little flat, without the shadows to provide a sense of depth.

We’re halfway done with our walk before the sun creeps above the horizon and shadows appear, outlined by the golden glow of sunbeams as they slice between trunks of oak, maple and sumac.  The orb of the sun is still hidden behind the leaves, but its penetrating fingers of light give the landscape a magical, incipient promise of the day to come.  It also warns of the hot temperatures that will follow – the day is already getting warmer.

There was a mostly submerged volcano that erupted near Tonga, in the southwest Pacific Ocean, on January 15, 2022.  Named Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, it created a cloud of water vapor about ten times the size of Singapore.  This water shot up into the stratosphere (between 8 and 33 miles above sea level), in an amount so large that it increased the amount of water vapor already there by a good 10%.  This increased upper atmospheric water vapor traps heat near the surface of the Earth like carbon dioxide does and may add to our problem of global warming.  It can take five to ten years before the upper atmospheric water vapor can dissipate, so this effect could last awhile.  That’s all we need.

What I know for sure is that it’s getting pretty hot before we finish our walk.  And it’s only six-thirty AM!  Waldo is dropping his sticks so he can let his tongue (man, he has a long tongue!) dangle, dripping, in an effort to pant effectively.  He’s going from shady patch to shady patch to avoid the sunlight and his gait is slowing down.  I’m soaking my shirt with sweat and it’s hard to hold onto the leash handle because my hands are so wet.  We’re both looking forward to the AC at home as we finish our trek.  And the forecast is for even hotter days for the next month or so.  Sigh.

I put Waldo in the front passenger seat, sit behind the steering wheel and roll down the windows.  Waldo gets a treat, just ‘cause, which he accepts with joy.  He seems as grateful to be sitting as I feel.  I’m slimed in the treating process and pat him on the head, wiping the worst of it away so I don’t smear goo everywhere.  “Another day and another six miles,” I say to him.  He audibly sighs.

God, it’s good to be back in the groove.

Early morning twilight over Fort Meadow Reservoir.

Goodbye, Haute Nendaz , Switzerland. Until next time…

I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.

-Bill Bryson

I awoke early this morning, after a hard night.  My temperature remained elevated and I developed a sore throat that intermittently woke me from sleep.  This morning, though, the soar throat, although not gone, is significantly better and the fever is gone.  The sore throat convinces me I should take a Covid test.  I argue with myself, “How could I have Covid and still walk 7 – 7.5 miles?”  But people can have Covid and be asymptomatic and I have a sore throat, so I tested for it (I brought 4 tests with me from home).  The test was positive.

My family were not surprised and no one I was exposed to felt threatened or in danger.  It is, after all a risk we all take when we travel these days.  Now, I have to decide what I’m going to do about it.  I could stay another week without much problem.  After all, I do have health and travel insurance that would cover the extra cost.  I really want to get home and see Waldo, though.  I decide to look once again at the CDC guidelines.

The CDC says that for the first five days since the onset of symptoms, one should isolate.  After that, as long as the symptoms are better and the fever is gone, one can come out of isolation, but they should wear a mask.  The CDC arrived at these recommendations through various studies and considerations.  It is known that Covid is most infectious just before the onset of symptoms.  After 5 days, one can still shed virus, and therefore, still be infectious, but by wearing a mask, the risk of infecting someone else is quite small.  The CDC weighed the effect on the economy and the interruption of personal lives, as well as the impact of spreading the infection, and decided that this scheme was the best solution in an imperfect world.  I figure this is day 5 of having symptoms (counting the days when I had a low-grade temp and sinus irritation), symptoms are improving and, so far, I am afebrile.  So I meet the criteria.  The fever seems to come on in the evening, so I decide that I will go ahead, mask up, and keep my plane reservations to return home tomorrow, unless I develop a fever tonight.  As long as I’m afebrile and my symptoms continue to improve in the morning, I’m good to go.

I spend the day mostly sleeping, only getting up, now and then, to grab a small bite to eat.  I have no problem sleeping that much, but I’m not really feeling sick, except for a slight sore throat.  Night comes and I’m still afebrile.

I get up before dawn the next morning and pack – no fever and my sore throat is almost gone.  I say goodbye to my family and get on the bus to get to the train.  After many hours on trains and planes, I finally arrive in Boston.  Throughout the trip, I remained afebrile with only minor symptoms (even the extreme tiredness was gone).  I pick up my car and drive to pick up Waldo.

It’s 11 o’clock when I get to the house where he’s staying and the people are asleep – they left the back door open for me.  Waldo is very happy to see me, wiggling his butt and whining with excitement.  I pack up his stuff and soon we’re back home, ready to resume our lives and our walks.

No one I know and can track has come down with Covid, so I’m comfortable that I did the right thing.

I have come to some conclusions from this trip that others might appreciate.  If you want to experience the joys of international travel in the midst of 2022 Covid, you can.  But be prepared.  Some countries still require Covid testing before entry.  Covid is out there and the R0 for BA.5 is 18.6 (R0 is a measure of how contagious a disease is) and it is easy to catch (it’s a little more contagious than measles).  For most people, it’s not a big deal if you get it.  But it is still killing lots of people and if you are in a high-risk group that could get really sick, you might want to reconsider travel.  You can still get very sick even if you’re not in such a group, but it’s not very likely.  Weigh your risks and benefits carefully and make a well-informed decision before you go.  If you go, it would be wise to get both travel and health insurance, just in case you have to prolong your visit.  Lastly, the travel system is stressed right now, due to a shortage of pilots and other things, and delays and cancelations are frequent.  It’s even worse during the height of vacation season, so try to avoid traveling then.  Pack and plan as though you will miss your connecting flight and be without your checked luggage.  Assume that will happen and then be surprised if it doesn’t.

After having said all that, if you feel that the benefits outweigh the risks for you, then, by all means, go.  The world is a big and wonderous place, filled with many fine people (and dogs) and amazing things to experience – fine food and wine, people happy to share a small piece of their lives, and extraordinary cultures rife with long and deep histories.  Just make sure that you are fully vaccinated, boosted and you follow the recommended guidelines.

But for now, please, excuse me.  A black furry critter is agitating me to take him out for a walk.

It’s good to be home.

Come on! Let’s go!

Back streets of Sion.

The mountains are calling, and I must go.

-John Muir

Sion is one of those cities whose roots go back into antiquity.  In Roman times, it was called Sedunum.  There are two hillocks in Sion crowned by the remains of the 13^th century Château de Tourbillon and the Château de Valère (the latter containing a museum and a 13^th century church).  In the town, there is also the Cathedral of Notre-Dame-du-Glarier, the Church of Saint-Thêodule (1516), the Maison Supersaxo (1505), the town hall (1660) and the remains of the Château de la Majorie (now housing an art gallery).  It is an important market place for fruit, vegetables and wine and lies on the road and rail routes to Milan, Italy, via the Simplon Pass.  It is predominantly French-speaking and has a population of 29,000.

We take the bus to Sion today, not to enjoy the sights, nor to ponder our place in its history, but to go shopping.  Tomorrow is my sister-in-law’s (Michele) birthday and I want to find her a gift.  I’m also looking for chocolate to bring home (when I asked my friends and family what they wanted me to bring back from Switzerland, the unanimous answer was chocolate) and maybe something uniquely Swiss for me.  The temperature is 88℉ and I work up a sweat walking through the streets.

After a few miles and stores, I find a girolle.  It is a round wooden plate with a hole in the middle through which you secure a spike.  Small wheels of cheese (traditionally Tete de Moines, or monk’s head cheese, but there are others) are impaled over the spike.   One end of a blade, with the cutting edge sitting down on the cheese, is placed over the spike so it can be spun round and round.  As the blade is turned, thin portions of cheese curl up into rosettes that are just the right thickness and consistency to melt in your mouth.  Delicious and very Swiss.  I buy Michele a bottle of Novembre, her favorite local white wine, a lot of chocolate for me to take back to the US and we head home.  At dinner, I feel uncharacteristically very tired and, again, slightly feverish.  Damn cold.  I will sleep well.

I awoke feeling fine and rested, no fever or other symptoms.  Today is Michele’s birthday.  It is a tradition that the family goes, on her birthday, to Crans-Montana, a touristy ski resort town high in the Alps, down the tracks and on the opposite of the valley from Haute Nendaz.  There’s a restaurant there that has a blueberry tarte that Michele loves.  It also has a lot of small shops that cater to the rich and famous and is a nice place to window shop.

The first hotel, Hotel du Parc, was opened in Crans-Montana in 1893.  Golfing started in 1906 on a majestic plateau that exists amongst the steep slopes.  Golfing is still popular here today.  The first downhill ski race took place in 1911 and the place has been a ski mecca since.   I can only guess how brutal skiing in these mountains must have been before there were any ski lifts.  One of its most well-known celebrities, Roger Moore, owned a chalet and lived at the resort for many years until his death in 2017.  The town has a population of 10,218.

After we have lunch and eat our tartes (I had a wild-berry tarte full of currants that was delicious), we walk around the town and ogle what’s behind the store windows.  There’s a store dedicated to selling every kind of Swatch you can imagine, chocolatiers, sports shops for all kinds of outdoor activities, cheese shops, clothing stores and just about anything else you can imagine a resort town might have.  By the time we make for the bus stop, I’m feeling really tired, achy and a bit feverish again.

Back in Haute Nendaz, we go out to eat and enjoy a fondue dinner and good wine.  Fondue is a very traditional Swiss meal originally designed as a way to eat hardened cheese and stale bread during the winter months.  The earliest known recipe is from 1699, and today, it’s prepared using mostly Gruyère and Emmental cheeses.

The food and wine are very good, but the exhaustion and fever are starting to get the best of me and I’m glad when it’s time to go home.  The temperature in the valley was in the high 80s today, but tonight, up here in the mountains, it’s 60℉ and I’m feeling a little chilled, wearing no jacket.  I’m soon in bed, picturing all the places I’ve been the past few days, imagining doing it all with Waldo on the end of the leash.

He would love it.

Celebrating Michele’s birthday with a nice glass of vin blanc.

The promenade next to Lake Geneva.

My hair is grey, but not with years.

-“The Prisoner of Chillion,” by Lord Byron

Today, we went down the train racks toward Geneva a little further to a town named Montreux.  Montreux is a city of about 26,000 citizens that lies on the northeastern shore of Lake Geneva.  There is evidence the area was occupied since the late bronze age and an important wine-growing region since the 12^th century.  It has been a popular tourist spot since the 19^th century with grand hotels attracting the rich and famous from all over Europe and the Americas.  It has seen the likes of David Bowie, Noel Coward, Zelda Fitzgerald, Freddy Mercury, Vladimir Nabokov, Igor Stravinsky, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovski, and Shania Twain, just to name a few.  Queen Victoria was a fan of Montreux, visited here several times, and Freddy Mercury has a larger than life bronze statue on the promenade erected in his honor.  We’re here just to explore around and see what the place has to show us.

We get off the train and walk through winding streets, surrounded by buildings from the “Belle époque,” the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  They often have roofs and windows of a unique design that have an ornate flair that gives the city, in my mind, an old and cherished feeling of pride-of-history and culture.  It’s like I’m walking through reflections of the past, footprints left of what’s gone by.  I seem to be surrounded by lingering shadows of things, things that once marked a daily life, now gone and largely forgotten.  There’s a sense of continuity that runs from what happened centuries ago to my walking the streets in the present day.

We walk down to the lakeside where there is a promenade running right next to the shore of Lake Geneva.  It is well manicured, sporting flower beds, beautiful trees and shrubbery, and seems to be a popular place to go for a stroll.  Soon, our path takes us to where the yearly jazz festival is being prepared – we will miss it by a week.  In addition to auditoriums, there are food stalls of every imaginable flavor and ethnicity – Indian, Brazilian, American, English and, of course, French, German, Italian and Swiss.  Soon we are entering downtown and we stop to have a tasty lunch at a French restaurant.

After eating, we retrace our steps and walk on to Chateau de Chillion, some seven miles or so away.  Its origins and distant history are buried in the darkness of the middle-ages.  A castle was built there in the twelfth century that survives to today and is a popular tourist spot.  Among other things, it served as a prison and in 1880, Lord Byron wrote the poem, “The Prisoner of Chillion,” about an unnamed man who was imprisoned there.  In the bowels of the place, once used to house prisoners, there is a plaque honoring Byron.  The castle was also the domicile of various dukes and other royalty and there are a number of interesting old artifacts left behind.

On the way to the chateau, I lag a little behind my brother, his son and grandson.  I’m feeling unusually tired and I keep getting distracted by the dogs leading their charges down the path.  I say hello to them, but they ignore me and continue on with their doggie business.  After a bit, I notice a young woman, in her thirties, I would guess, setting her cellphone on a rock so she can get a selfie.  “Est-ce que je peux vous aider? (Can I help you?),” I ask.  She says yes and hands me her phone.  After a few pictures, we talk a little about where we’re from, and so on.  It turns out she’s from Sao Paolo, Brazil.  I speak a little Portuguese, she speaks a little English, but I explain I need to practice my French, so we walk on and chat in that language.  She is going to the castle as well and we have a very pleasant conversation as we visit there.  I don’t understand everything that’s said, but enough to get by, and I’m pleased she can understand my probably horrible accent.  All too soon, we bid each other enchanté and part ways.  My family and I have to catch the train.

Soon, we’re back in Haute Nendaz, have a nice dinner, and go to bed.  I’m starting to feel like I have a low-grade temperature, a lingering irritation in my sinuses, and very tired.  I figure I’m coming down with a cold as the symptoms are so minimal.

As I fall asleep, I think of Waldo and how much he would have liked the walk down the promenade next to the lake.  He’s fine, but I really wish I could have brought him here with me.

But at least I don’t have to explain to him about my trying to cheat with the other dogs I met today.

In the dungeon of Chateau de Chillion. I must have been here before — there’s a plaque that says so!

The trail, next to a bisse, meandering through the forest.

In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.

-John Muir

This morning, I awake, dress and meet Bill and Ted in La Brioche, a boulangerie (bakery) across the street from my studio.  It’s small and cozy and has a welcoming and gentil (kindly) atmosphere.  The French (and this part of Switzerland) believe in l’art de vivre, or the art of living.  They choose to skillfully craft their experiences, including those of eating and drinking.  It is no wonder that the origin of the word gourmand is French.  The result is very tasty food and excellent beverages, including, of course, the local wine.  I don’t usually drink wine at home, but here, I relish it.  At La Brioche, I have a cappuccino and a tarte au framboise (a raspberry tarte).  Man, it’s a good thing I’m only spending a week here.  If I spent much more, I’d go home weighing a ton.

Afterwards, we walk to the tourist office where we are scheduled to take a bus to Veysonnaz, a small village not far away.  At the tourist office, we meet up with Luda, a retired colleague of my brother’s.  She was born in the Ukraine, but now lives in Houston.  Both Luda and my brother are retired geophysicists who used to work in oil exploration and bought property in Haute Nendaz when that was possible (Americans can no longer buy property here, although they can keep it if they bought it before it became illegal).  She is energetic, very friendly and will make a good companion for this morning’s trek – a local hike through the mountains.

It’s a short ride to Veysonnaz and the bus leaves us close to the beginning of a well-manicured trail that follows les bisses.  Switzerland used to have a lot of two things, high mountains and glaciers.  They still have the former, but global warming has cut deeply into their supply of the latter.  There is still enough water, though, flowing down from the heights, to provide hydroelectric power and the life-giving fluid necessary to grow crops and animals.  They’ve built reservoirs up high and one of the ways they bring the water down to where it’s needed is through long troughs, about three or four feet wide and three or four feet deep, made up of stone, cement, and other materials.  These troughs they call bisses and they run nearly horizontally, traversing the steep slopes of the Alps laterally.  Along the way, sluice gates can be opened to allow the water to flow down to where it is needed.  Because the bisses are nearly horizontal, the water flows vigorously, though not overly rapidly.

Trails exist alongside the bisses to maintain them and a volunteer community has arisen to keep them in good order for those, like us, who enjoy walking on them.  We are walking opposite to the flow of water, so we must be going uphill, but the grade is so gentle, it’s hardly noticeable.  Even for us old(er) folks.  The bisses and the trails wind around the steep slopes through dense forest and, in places, flatter open pastureland.  Just like New England, many of the trees are white pine.  Unlike home, there are very large trees, probably over a hundred years old, and remind me of the Black Forest in Germany and Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  The temperature is in the eighties, but it is much cooler in the shade of all these trees.  Add to that the friendly people we pass (most of whom speak English) and the beautiful vistas out over the Rhone Valley and you get a very pleasant hike.  If only Waldo could be with us.  And look at all those sticks!

Along the way we talk about all manner of things, including the Ukraine war, of course.  But we don’t spend too much time on that topic, Luda still has family there and I think she finds it difficult to think about it.  She’s been on this hike before and points out landmarks along the way, like the small village of Verrey, just a few yards uphill from our path, and tells us that it has only been the past ten years or so that they’ve had electricity.  I could do that.  I have done that for short periods of time.

Our hike takes us to Planchouet, another alpine village, about seven and a half miles from Veysonnaz.  There, we have a nice late lunch.  I have a croûte de fromage avec jambon et oignons (cheese on toast with ham and onions) and a local beer.  Délicieux!

After lunch, we catch another bus and go back to Haute Nendaz.  The trail continues on and ends up right outside my front door, but it is a couple of miles further and I’m feeling a little tired and my back is starting to hurt.  My mucus membranes are a little raw too, but I decide that’s because I must be coming down with a cold.  At any rate, we get back home and, after eating a wonderful dinner of grilled rabbit, prepared by Ted, I go off to bed, feeling like I’ve earned the right to sleep this night.

I get texts that tell me that Waldo is doing okay, but, damn, if only Waldo were here,  sharing this day!

Watch where you’re going, Ted! You’re on a cliff face!