CANCER BLOGS: Dedicated to T. S.

“The identifying of disease sites became gradually more specific as diagnostic tools, such as the stethoscope, were invented. With the aid of improved technology in the making of lens systems, it came to be appreciated that organs sicken because the microscopic cells within them sicken. Having identified the minute locus in which disease originates, doctors next turned their attention to finding the primary inciting agents that make normal physiology go awry. This is where things stood in the middle of the nineteenth century.”
-- Sherwin B. Nuland, “Doctors: The Biography of Medicine,” 1988

Fast forward to 2008.

In what follows, I will try to describe in layman’s terms three basic approaches to treating cancers.

The first is a tumoricidal approach. Because the cancers cells are fast growing, the idea is to kill all fast growing cells, which includes many, many cells that are highly beneficial to the body: like white blood cells produced in the bone marrow (this is why I suffered excruciating bone pain after being injected with Neulasta--the marrow is stimulated to produce white blood cells, thus putting tremendous pressure on the bones from the inside out--and why one becomes neutropenic, which means having a compromised immuno-defense system); and cells in the mucous of the anus and throat ([mucositis] this is why the lesions at the back of my tongue developed to the point of causing me talk like a Goth teenager who just had three tongue rings put in, although some said it improved my singing); and nerve cells having to do with fine motor skills (which is why I couldn’t hold a guitar pick, put money in a parking meter, turn over the ignition in my car with one hand, zip and button my pants, pay for gas at the pump with a credit card, and perform various other mundane activities).

I’m talking about chemotherapy. In my case, R-C.H.O.P.. What does this stand for? Rituximab, or Byebyehari, as Hindu psychics call it, is a monoclonal antibody (a biologic therapy that produces antibodies that attach directly to antigens on the cancer cells surface). Cytoxin (cyclophosphamide) is a DNA altering drug that changes the DNA, the building blocks of genes, to prevent cell growth. Hydroxyldaunorubicin (say that when you’re drunk) is an anti-tumor antibiotic that interacts with DNA and decreases cell survival. Oncovin (vincristine) damages cell structures that are required for a cell to divide. Prednisone is a type of steroid drug known as a glucocorticosteroid, a manmade version of a natural hormone produced by the adrenal glands. The main effects of prednisone and similar steroids seem to be due to their anti-inflammatory properties and their ability to alter immune system responses. For example, prednisone helps prevent white blood cells from traveling to areas of the body where they might add to swelling problems (such as around tumors). It also seems to help with the treatment of certain blood cancers (such as leukemias) by causing some cancerous white blood cells to commit suicide. Prednisone also causes one to bounce off walls, speed basket-weave, and eat like a horse. After reading this, why, you might ask, doesn’t this witches brew of toxins kill the patient, in my case, me? Because cancer cells are metabolically more active, they suck up the poisons more rapidly than normal fast growing cells. Those were layman’s terms, dude?

Here's a second approach. This treatment strategy seeks to augment the defense system of the host (see earlier post, "Oncological Darwinism"). How? By stimulating T-cell production. One such therapy utilizes Interleukin-2, the only drug approved in the US for the treatment of metastatic RCC (renal cell carcinoma). It is also approved in many other countries. But IL-2 isn't just a drug. IL-2 is a natural part of your immune system, a messenger protein called a cytokine, which activates parts of your immune system. IL-2 does not kill tumor cells directly like classical chemotherapy. Instead, IL-2 activates and stimulates the growth of immune cells, most importantly T-Cells, but also Natural Killer Cells (NK Cells), both of which are capable of destroying cancer cells directly.

There are several types of T-Cells but, without going into detail, certain T-Cells are capable of killing tumor cells if they recognize a specific antigen on the surface of the tumor cell. Antigens are normally proteins. Each T-Cell is specific for only one antigen but you have many different T-Cells. NK Cells have the ability to kill tumor cells without needing to recognize a specific antigen (I'm not sure how!). While this sounds good, NK cells are weaker cancer killers than T-Cells. The so-called LAK cells (lymphokine activated killer cells), which were used in some of the early immunotherapy experiments, are actually NK cells. The crude analogy I will use here is this: imagine cancer cells as runners trying to get to the finish line, what drugs like IL-2 try to do is position so many healthy runners (T-Cells) in the race that the cancer cells never get to the finish line, or at least take their not so sweet time in getting there. I might add that IL-2, like chemo and interferon treatments, has some, shall we say, uncomfortable side effects, but like chemo, they can be dealt with. I might also add that in December I will probably be asked to consider an interferon regimen to deal with my hepatitis C, which had been on the back burner while I was dealing with the non-hodgkins lymphoma. Gee, isn’t life fun!

The third approach has to do with slowing down the growth of tumors to the point that the cancer can be dealt with as a chronic rather than acute (a nice word for fatal) condition. Drugs like Sutent (Sunitinib), for instance, interfere with and modify cellular processes in term in terms of DNA/RNA replication. Sunitinib (Ojibwe for Man-With-Sore-Kidney) inhibits proteins in the body’s cells that promote the growth of tumor blood vessels. Sunitinib is used to treat advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC, a type of cancer that begins in the cells of the kidneys). Sunitinib works by blocking the action of the abnormal protein that signals cancer cells to multiply. This helps stop or slow the spread of cancer cells and may help shrink tumors.

Finally, a word about radiation. Many cancer research hospitals, like the University of Michigan Hospital, and the Institute Curie in Paris are now taking a new approach to radiation therapy called Tomo Therapy. More than 150 of these systems are now in operation around the world. The benefits of Tomo Therapy are these: in terms of treatment, by using CT imaging done on the day of the radiation rather than from the past week or month, it integrates a dynamic approach that emphasizes a case by case holistic assessment of the moment; this, in turn, allows a sharper focus, in terms of the precision with which the radiation is delivered to the tumor, and the angle of delivery, thus minimizing the exposure of healthy tissue; the combination of assessment of the moment, and accuracy of delivery, facilitates the possibility of altering the treatment plan at any given time. In short, Tomo Therapy offers a more fluid, less static, approach to radition therapy.

That’s All Folks – Randy

PS: Best wishes to T.S. and Candy K.

Madonna's Truth or Dare: Speaking Truth to Power

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the Judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war awaited him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be….War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”
-- Cormac McCarthy, “Blood Meridian” 1985

One of the enduring myths in American culture is the idea that the United States has always occupied the moral high ground in terms of global virtuousness. I was taught growing up that truth and justice were the American way. In fact, one of my heroes was Superman, who stood for truth, justice and the American way. How far we have fallen. We sanction torture, ignore the constitution’s guarantee of our civil rights, and pursue profit driven wars at the cost of our young men’s and women’s lives as well as the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents abroad.

So it was with some surprise that I read of The New York Times’ outrage and indignation at the video Madonna is showing on her latest tour. In an editorial on 8/27/08 entitled “So Far Over the Line” the Times noted that, “It shows a montage of genocide (a Nazi death camp, Asian and African killing fields) and faces of evil and oppression (Adolph Hitler, Ayotollah Khomeini, Robert Mugabe). Then it cuts to Mike Huckabee, who ran for the Republican nomination, and senator John McCain, who is about to become the official Republican nominee.” The Times goes on to say that “There is no room in decent discourse for comparing a candidate for president to Hitler.”

Why not? As most of my readers know, I’ve compared Bush to Hitler, and firmly believe he should be tried in The Hague for war crimes. Given that McCain believes we should continue the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, I find it neither far fetched nor appalling that Madonna is willing to liken him to a Khomeini or Mugabe. If McCain's policies come to fruition he will be an accomplice to war crimes that have already been committed. Further, continuing to ignore the horrors in Darfur will turn Bush's genocide by omission into McCain's crime of comission.

Let’s review a few other articles that appeared in that same edition where the Times felt it their duty to castigate Madonna in its main editorial:

U.S. Killed 90, Including 60 Children, in Afghan Village, U.N. Finds

KABUL, Afghanistan — A United Nations human rights team has found “convincing evidence” that 90 civilians — among them 60 children — were killed in airstrikes on a village in western Afghanistan on Friday, according to the United Nations mission in Kabul.
If the assertion proves to be correct, this would almost certainly be the deadliest case of civilian casualties caused by any United States military operation in Afghanistan since 2001. The United Nations statement adds pressure to the United States. The numbers closely match those given by a government commission sent from Kabul to investigate the bombing, which put the total dead at up to 95.

Mohammad Iqbal Safi, the head of the parliamentary defense committee and a member of the government commission, said the 60 children were 3 months old to 16 years old, all killed as they slept. “It was a heartbreaking scene,” he said. The death toll may rise higher, because heavy lifting equipment is needed to uncover all the remains, said one Western official who had seen the United Nations report.

And this:

U.S. Soldiers Executed Iraqis, Statements Say

By PAUL VON ZIELBAUER
Published: August 26, 2008

In March or April 2007, three noncommissioned United States Army officers, including a first sergeant, a platoon sergeant and a senior medic, killed four Iraqi prisoners with pistol shots to the head as the men stood handcuffed and blindfolded beside a Baghdad canal, two of the soldiers said in sworn statements. After the killings, the first sergeant — the senior noncommissioned officer of his Army company — told the other two to remove the men’s bloody blindfolds and plastic handcuffs, according to the statements made to Army investigators, which were obtained by The New York Times.

After removing the blindfolds and handcuffs, the three soldiers shoved the four bodies into the canal, rejoined other members of their unit waiting in nearby vehicles and drove back to their combat outpost in southwest Baghdad, the statements said.

In their statements, Sergeants Mayo and Leahy each described killing at least one of the Iraqi detainees on instructions from First Sgt. John E. Hatley, who the soldiers said killed two of the detainees with pistol shots to the back of their heads.

Last month, four other soldiers from Sergeant Hatley’s unit were charged with murder conspiracy for agreeing to go along with the plan to kill the four prisoners, in violation of military laws that forbid harming enemy combatants once they are disarmed and in custody.

In their sworn statements, Sergeants Mayo and Leahy described the events. The patrol chased some men into a building, arresting them. On the way to their combat outpost, Sergeant Hatley’s convoy was informed by Army superiors that the evidence to detain the Iraqis was insufficient, Sergeant Leahy said in his statement. The unit was told to release the men, according to the statement.

“First Sergeant Hatley then made the call to take the detainees to a canal and kill them,” Sergeant Leahy said.

“So the patrol went to the canal, and First Sergeant, Sgt. First Class Mayo and I took the detainees out of the back of the Bradley, lined them up and shot them,” Sergeant Leahy said, referring to a Bradley fighting vehicle. “We then pushed the bodies into the canal and left.”

Sergeant Leahy, in his statement, said, “I’m ashamed of what I’ve done,” later adding: “When I did it, I thought I was doing it for my family. Now I realize that I’m hurting my family more now than if I wouldn’t have done it.”

Add to this today’s Times front page report that the United States has secretly handed over alleged terrorists to the intelligence agencies of Saudi Arabia (a barbaric Kingdom where human rights are a joke), and Egypt (a dictatorship run by our thug ally, Hosni Mubarak, who would also qualify for Madonna’s montage), and you have to wonder about the pomposity of the Times’ vilification of the Bay City Queen. Quoting the Times: “Many of these detainees are initially held, without notification to the Red Cross, sometimes for weeks at a time, in secret at a camp in Iraq and another in Afghanistan run by American Special Operations Forces.”

What I have to say about Madonna is this: YOU GO GIRL!

BILL AND JOHN GET THEIR BLOKENS (See Harold and Kumar Guantanamo film)

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
-- Leo Tolstoy, “Anna Karenina” 1876

TUESDAY MORNING

Today I received news that last Friday’s CT Scan showed no cancer, yahoo! This means that after my next 3-month checkup, which will come at the 1 year mark out from chemotherapy, the scans will come at six, rather than three, month intervals.

TUESDAY AFTERNOON (The Moody Blues Suck!)

Narcissism run amok

Reasons I couldn’t vote for Bill Clinton the second time around. Yes, I found it unconscionable he refused to sign the land mine ban, bombed a pharmaceutical company in Sudan that dispensed life saving drugs to hundreds of thousands of Africans, and indiscriminately sent cruise missiles into Afghanistan, but there are more mundane reasons I couldn’t vote for this clown. Any twit who says he smoked a joint, but didn’t inhale, and is on record as saying his guilt stricken conscience couldn’t allow him to come when he had his dick in Monica Lewinski’s mouth, just ain’t up there in my pantheon of admirable characters. Bill is sulking about the fact he’s being pressured to talk about Obama’s and the democrats’ foreign policy agenda for the country’s future. What does he want to talk about? Clinton’s upset that Obama hasn’t made enough of his legacy. This dingleberry wants to give a convention speech bragging himself up, you know, the greatness that was Bill. Duh! Err…Bill, wouldn’t it probably be better to pay, or rope, someone else into blowing your horn for you.

Speaking of having your horn blown. I’ll bet you could get, say, John Edwards, another nitwit who’s taken high self esteem to a new level, to wax poetic on how great you are, Bill. Edwards is such a noble, caring man and husband, I mean, it must have really taken some courage not to cheat on your wife when she had cancer. I suppose he would’ve thought it remiss to be fucking his sycophantic vidieographer unless his wife was in remission. As Maureen Dowd put it, “His infidelity was oncologically correct.” When Edwards said, “You cannot beat me up more than I have already beaten up myself. I have been stripped bare,” my world fell down.

That’s so touching. Actually, after hearing that, I felt so sorry for Johnny I wanted to contribute to his haircut fund. Edwards said he wanted to be judged on who he really is, and not on the basis of being some “plastic Ken Doll that you put up in front of an audience.” I suppose $800 haircuts are not a sign of hyper-superficiality. Plastic people, oh baby, now you’re such a drag. Edwards “oncological correctness” should serve as a lesson to us all on spousal altruism. Cheating on one’s wife or husband is certainly something many have done, and I include myself in that group, but I don’t think most of us, in making that admission, would see our justification as an opportunity to trumpet our sincerity and nobility. How conceited can one get?

LAST SUNDAY NIGHT

“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of the world!”
-- William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 1605

Ode to Bitterness

Bitterness steals your spirit and sullies the soul. Of late, I feel like an Emily Dickinson poem in a Raymond Carver year, a Flannery O’Connor character in a Tennessee Williams play. Anger? Sadness? Bitterness? How is bitterness related to, and different from, anger? Bitterness permeates the space around you, your personal ambience. Bitterness gets projected as a low-grade callousness, a meanness towards yourself and those around you. Being violated causes bitterness. Bitterness smothers the capacity to love, to care about others. Bitterness makes care of the self, careless and sloppy. To be embittered is like and emotional cancer. If you're going to write about emotions, I guess you have to start with yourself. Where's that photo of happy father and daughter? Why is she, am I, so bitter? What's wrong with me? Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Does self-pity come from self-blame? If there's no future in dwelling on the past, does this mean I should exorcize all memories, even the good? Were they even that good?
Bitterness takes away your passion, inspiration, and soul. It saps your humor, your good nature, and your grace. It steals your zeal. Hamlet was bitter, and so am I. It’ll pass.

Love - r

PS: My new motto: "Count your blessings, not your guitars."

BACK TO WORK: Freshman Composition, ENG.125

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men--the balance wheel of the social machinery.
-- Horace Mann, 1848

English 125, Section 061 Randall Tessier
MWF 12:00-1:00 Office: 3122 AH
3437 MH Office Phone: 647-7690
Home Phone: 996-0746
The University of Michigan Office Hours: MW 1:00-3:30
Fall 2008 e-mail: rlt@umich.edu

The practical purpose of this class is to prepare you for the writing requirements expected of you at the university level. In this sense it is a service class where my role is to ensure your academic success. But since language, and its articulation in writing, is a way of attributing meaning to the world, ours is also a collaborative effort to better understand the dynamics of human experience, thus providing insight into ourselves, others, and societies different than our own. As our text’s title implies, all language, whether ordinary or complex, is a means of argument (a way of convincing an audience), and a vehicle of persuasion (a method of moving an audience from conviction to action). The rhetoric (a term that encompasses both argument and persuasion) we arrive at in composing our essays first requires that we carefully read and analyze those texts relevant to our argument. Foundational to critical reading and writing is the process of comparing what one writer says about the claims and observations of other writers. The term for this is critical thinking. While this phrase has a number of connotations, in sum it implies a willingness to engage with complex ideas, question easy assumptions about difficult subjects, formulate our own opinions, and apply these processes as a guide to belief and action. Since the art of argument requires subtlety and power, and simplicity and sophistication, having confidence in our conclusions and clarifying these ideas without resorting to empty phrases, trite clichés, or pseudo-academic jargon, is the first step on the road to becoming a better writer.

FICTION: The Intoxication of Sycophancy

“The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.”
-- Anais Nin

What Pluto's story suggests is that the need to undergo some ritual rite of passage or trial by fire is more than a social conceit in the male purview. Whether this disposition is cultural or biological is difficult to say. What seems apparent is that for those who have never been in harm's way there is an impulse to find something that provides a surrogate liminal event, some self perceived heroic act or acts that suggest they too have endured hardship and survived. From the evidence at hand, we might surmise that in Zeke Pluto's case, this ideational myth was constructed during his incarceration.

Chloe Satie appeared in the midst of great crisis for Pluto. At a time when his cynical idealism had evaporated to a faint wisp of hope, his trust in his mission had made it so that he could trust no one. As he became a public figure, the intoxication of sycophancy affected even the most objective members of his inner circle. For Pluto, their every opinion was never more than an attempted regurgitation of what he was thinking. His closest followers he kept at a distance, and his deepest emotional attachments were few: Zelda, the dead Savard, and perhaps someone we know nothing of. When Chloe arrived, Zeke was smitten in every way.

She had read Anxieties of Contentment as a manual for living, and saw its author as a new age messiah. The sense of absence that plagued Chloe's consciousness prior to her conversion revealed itself as a profound distraction. This dissonance expressed itself in two ways. First, there was her obsession with the future, with the vision of something different, an intuitive perspective from which she could see her life as having a continuity that was heretofore absent. Her desire was to pursue something she had never told anyone of, to dance; and firing these longings was her dream of dancing in New York and Paris. But her attempts to find a troupe were to no avail. It was as if her feet were too long, or one of her legs was shorter than the other. The dance companies passed her by without listening; they couldn't understand how she could equate dance and word. In misreading her movements they missed this connection. They laughed at her.

So she danced alone in her waterfront studio, late at night, at closing time, her silhouette fascinating and tantalizing the men leaving the disco below. Sometimes she would invite them up. Always they soothed her loneliness with understanding and sympathy. It was as if she could judge one's soul by observing purely physical characteristics. In the loft of the garret, in the moonlight under the skylight, they came together and created a temporary antidote for loneliness.

The second symptom of her distraction was those moments of happiness and security when she mistakenly believed that physical passion, the thrall, the lush kisses and close embrace, were love. In the moments that comprised these countless small epiphanies, when she surrendered to an ineffable swoon, as if having a fit, she hallucinated the visage of a savior, a man-child with the face of a boy, a face unknown to her until she saw Zeke Pluto.

Up the Blackfoot with Chief Kawbawgam's Great-Great Grandson

“Again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.”
-- William Wordsworth, 1798

Rounding the point on the approach to the Blackfoot, it’s hard to imagine the J. H. Gillet once operated the largest sandstone quarry north of Marquette on this bay. Since that was around 1910 and now is now, all we could see were the remnants of the once bustling old stone dock. But our purpose wasn’t a historical sight seeing expedition, it was, rather a preliminary scouting out of the river in anticipation of Billy Little Chief’s serious fishing excursion up the Blackfoot. While I’m no Marlowe, and we never did see a Kurtz, unless you count the Club Smokies we had to circumvent in our voyage upstream, I will here try to recount the details of our Salmonic sojourn. I use the word “Salmonic” here in the generic sense, since it was really trout we were after, which are after all, members of the Salmonoid family, biologically speaking. Since I was a rookie chomping at the bit to experience what I had only heretofore heard about, going up the Blackfoot, Billy was more than happy to have me as lead tag alderman at the front of a camouflaged leaky skiff that most civilized gentlemen would never set foot in. But since I hardly qualify as a man of that kind by any standard, Billy found me more than able to assume the bow of this intrepid little engine (I know, I’m mixing my metaphors here) that could.

And so it was we awoke at the crack of noon, purchased some not so lively nightcrawlers, grabbed an old coffee can for bailing, fastened up our Mepps #10 spinners and pushed off. One of the harder things to tackle (I’ll be using lots of fishing terms in a punning way from here on in, so get used to it) from the perspective of not only nature writing but descriptive narrative in general, is how to paint a picture of earth, sea, and sky in words. The weather was gorgeous as we turned The Musti north and headed around the sandstone cape of Thunder Bay, beyond which lies Granite Bay and the mouth of the Blackfoot.

Before I talk about the lure of the river, allow a short meditation on the majesty of Lake Superior. Again, the problem with paying due homage to the lake lies in its resistance to description. It is so awesome in its immensity that words fail, or perhaps better lose their meaning. Without getting too deep, which is impossible in describing the lake, the philosophical difference between the beautiful and the sublime bears mentioning. It was during the Enlightenment (18th century) that the philosopher Immanuel Kant made this distinction, But his discourse is so, almost, intellectually impenetrable that I’ll try to sum it up in brief. Beholding a scene that can’t be wholly perceived, that outstrips perception, puts us in the realm of the sublime. The beautiful, on the other hand, is something the imagination can take in, or encompass, in a way that the articulation of aesthetic judgment is possible. One might describe, or paint, the Yellow Dog Falls much easier than one might represent Niagara Falls. While photography has changed this paradigm somewhat, it still makes sense that some natural phenomenon defies description. In many ways, Lake Superior falls into this category. I mean I can say that it holds 10% of the world’s fresh-water, or that the Empire state building would not be visible if lowered into its greatest depth, but this doesn’t really tell you how awesome it is. And so as I look at it now, even as I write this, I can’t really convey how beautiful it is. The sands we pushed off from were wind-scalloped in such a way as to outstrip the symmetry of the artistic. The symmetry of nature can only be once removed from the real when it is humanely rendered. The seamlessness of water and sky as two blues that are at once delineated and inseparable present an oxymoronic imagery that can only be seen and not described.

Enough of that, the lake was beautiful as we headed for Granite Bay. Running along the eastern point as we headed in I could see the giant eagle’s nest that’s been at the river’s mouth as long as I can remember, and, low and behold, two eagles: a younger one still awaiting the white head feathers that give it its name, and an older one bearing the distinctive appearance that denotes the Bald Eagle. Whether they knew Bill was so reverent of the natural world as to be one of their brethren, or because they thought us as such a laughable pair of human specimens as to be harmless, they perched in stately silence, heedless of our arrival in the foot deep sand over which we pulled our old dinghy as we entered the mouth of the river. The pines, the dunes, the sunny high sky, and gentle breeze sweetly recommending itself to our senses; the eagles and beaver swimming under our boat, and friendly bug buzz of the north woods as we gained the necessary draft to slowly motor up river are more than words can convey. But try I must, and try I shall.

So now we were in the river, and it was time to fish. I should say here that in the past 3 years the Blackfoot has been designated as a natural preserve for the brook trout (coasters) that spend their time in the rivers and big lake. As such, where once one could take their limit in trout over 7 inches, now only one trout can be taken, and it must exceed 18 inches. Of course we had no intention of keeping any fish, and I, being less of a Luddite than Billy, had my trusty digital camera, which is really the only way that God’s creatures should be hunted; although Billy, who loves real fishing and real hunting, likes nothing better than stalking deer and occasionally taking a trophy buck or succulent bambi. Billy considers big lake angling as meat fishing, and hunting from a blind as a lazy kind of wanton, non-sporting decadence he’s compared to raping babies.

At times in what follows I will quote other writers, far more skilled than I, as a way of supporting my humble ramblings. So here is what Roderick Haig-Brown, an Englishman who came west in search of the perfect river, has to say about rivers: “A river is water in its loveliest form; rivers have life and sound and movement and infinity of variation, rivers are veins of the earth through which the blood returns to the heart….Lakes and the sea have great secret depths quite hidden from man and often almost barren of life. A river too may have its deep and secret places, may be so large that one can never know it properly; but most rivers that give sport are comparatively small, and one feels that it is within the range of the mind to know them intimately as to their changes through the season, as to the shifts and quirks of current, the sharp runs, the slow glides, the eddies and bars and crossing places, the very rocks of the bottom. And in knowing a river intimately is a very large part of the joy of fishing”(A River Never Sleeps, 1944).

I knew Billy knew this river intimately when we came to section of the stream where the water seemed to disappear. The tag alder formed such a dense canopy of vegetation as to give the illusion that we could go no further. This wasn’t a river runs through it as much as a river runs under it. Bill’s technique, which his sainted father, Kish-kit-a-wa-ge (Man with an Ear Cut Off), had long ago passed on to him, was to have me pull us along by the alder branches, while at the same time fighting them off so as not to leave us eyeless in Gaza. My sunglasses lasted about 30 seconds, and are still there to be found by the next intrepid interloper who braves the Blackfoot. Be warned though, it’ll soon have to be done on foot, since a giant pine tree lists over the river like the sword of Damocles right at the narrowest point of entry just above the mouth of the river. Since Billy had fished this noble stream for 60 years, he felt it his duty to wax poetic on the perils of fishing the bank, and while this was certainly informative, the majority of the time I spent untangling lines, lures, and rod from the infernal alders spoke volumes in confirming his ancient wisdom. Thrice I had to flip the bale and remove the spool as a way of beginning the long intervals of untying various Gordian knots. As more of an academic than practical fisherman, as is my wont, I will, once again, refer to the literature of angling. Confirming Billy’s best wisdom, Robert Traver writes (And don’t disagree with them lest you find yourself bleeding to death on the floor of the Lumberjack Tavern): “The tall lure catching tag alders on my side discourage any normal bank approach consistent with retaining one’s sanity. (Hacking down the tag alders would not only be a chore, but would at once spoil the natural beauty of the place and erect a billboard proclaiming: BIG TROUT RESIDE HERE!)”(Trout Madness, 1960). Once we reached a favorite hole, which was usually in the densest thicket available, Billy would have me tie us to a tag alder and commence with the impossible task of presenting line, lure, and worm into a black hole of submerged roots and logs.

At first, the small chubs and trout gladly assumed the task of devouring our worms, which got me wondering if even the best fishermen, like the Bystroms, Dagenais, and Trewhellas, didn’t sometimes return to shore skunked. While that didn’t happen, I did consult the literature on this once back to the camp. Here’s what Henry Van Dyke had to say about this over 200 years ago: “The attraction of angling for all the ages of man, from the cradle to the grave, lies in its uncertainty. ‘Tis an affair of luck….There is no combination of stars in the firmament by which you can forecast the piscatorial future. When you go a-fishing, you must take your chances; you offer yourself as a candidate for anything that may be going; you try your luck”(The Armchair Angler, 1986).

After a bit, and a modest repast of peanut butter sandwiches and beer, we caught some fish. Billy, ever the gracious host, and having those natural Kawbawgam Indian guide instincts in his blood, patiently steered us into positions where I would have the best chance of securing a fish. And so it was a 16-inch beauty flashed from under the bank and grabbed my offering, but I have my own theory about why I caught ‘em. After much painstaking research I found some literary backing for why I caught this, what represented for me, Moby Brookie. According to noted fishing expert, Ed Zern, “the reason a fish thinks the way he does is that his brain is very tiny in relation to his body. So the tinier the fisherman’s brain the easier it is for him to think like a fish, and catch trout right and left”(To Hell with Fishing, 1945).

After pushing a ways further up the Blackfoot, we came to a confluence of small tributaries that caused Billy to announce we were at the end of the line, and while there was no station manager to greet us, I played the ambiguous Marlowe and asked where in the heck this river went. Before answering the question directly, Billy described fishing these near invisible rivulets, and how the various holes where the fish lurked presented a veritable nightmare slog that only natural born fish hunters could, or would, tolerate. Since Billy didn’t have a name for these slivers of stream, here I will take poetic license and name them. Let’s pick three and call them The Scunthorpe, The Ginger-Nut, and The Nippers.

After fishing a bit from the boat while Billy performed his what I assume to be obligatory ritual of stalking a few holes in the brush we turned and headed back. What struck me most about our trip was the depth of Bill’s love of nature, and, for him, what symbolizes the very essence of nature’s beauty, the river. I thought of Bill later when I came across another quote by Roderick Haig-Brown: “A river is never quite silent, it can never, of its very nature, be quite still; it is never quite the same from one day to the next. It has its own life and its own beauty, and the creatures it nourishes are alive and beautiful also”(A River Never Sleeps, 1944).

It was on our return across the pristine bay that is Thunder Bay when Bill answered my question about where the river went. After the tributaries flow back together upstream, the river’s headwaters, on the Yellow Dog plains, are fed by various freshwater sources that provide the Blackfoot as well as the Yellow Dog with their origins. Bill further informed me that these same plains are where Kennebunkport Mining will extract platinum and palladium from the earth, which sent me to one last quote by Nick Lyons about rivers, and about guys like Billy B.: “When such rivers die, as so many have, so too dies an irretrievable part of the soul of each of the thousands of anglers who in their waters find deep, enduring life”(Bright Rivers, 1977).

Best - Randy

Photos uploaded and placed by the beautiful B, who hopes you enjoy them.

TOP OF THE WORLD, MA! I'LL BLOG MY WAY OUT OF THIS! Help, Me.

This is your crackhead reporter, Me, signing on. This just in:

BIG BAY. In a bizarre turn of events, after The Mining Journal’s “Superiorland Yesterdays”(8/1/08) reprinted a Marquette Police Department report concerning a series of breaking and enterings that occurred at Getz’s Department Store and Fisher Elementary School some 30 years ago, an arrest was made yesterday at the Lumberjack Tavern. Early this morning, Randall L. Tessier, 57, was taken into custody and charged with the crimes. According to Detective K. M. Ahola, Tessier was still wearing one of the Carhartt snowmobile suits reported stolen. “Let there be no doubt that Tessier is our man,” Ahola said. “Why else would there be Fisher School hot lunch tickets and rusty protractors in the Carhartt’s pockets?” After a relentless grilling by Sheriffs Paquette and Maino, and some light, Finnish waterboarding approved by the Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, Tessier broke under questioning and made a full confession.

What follows is a direct transcript of that confession:

It was a dark and stormy night. We had just finished swimming at the hot pond, when Stevie the Lion says to me, ‘Randy let’s go commit some crimes, steal a car, do a little joy riding, maybe.’ So I says, “Nah, let’s just roll Al’s ma’s car down the drive, start it in second, siph some gas, and cruise Trowbridge park. If we can find Pete Ferguson, we’ll get him to buy some jumbos and drink ‘em at the quarry.” Stevie would have none of it. He said we needed some cool work shirts if we wanted to get any girls, and Getz’s would be easier than Pennys to break in to.

Yeah, I admit it, we were thieves and troublemakers, more than just petty criminals. You guys probably forgot about those MIP raps in Judge Defant’s juvenile court. You also didn’t know that Stevie and I assisted in one of the more notorious Carp River College breakouts, even though you guys couldn’t pin it on us, that’s because Collins never told you. You know, John Norman is really a sweet guy, just a little awkward around women. Needs to work on his social skills. A guy I know knows him. Says he’s a swell guy and he can get me an autographed picture anytime. Anyway, I’m telling you now, hoping you’ll go easy on me at sentencing. So we drove around the island, harassed the peacocks, and thought up a plan.

The following day we snuck in the Delft, found some ticket stubs and left, thinking the movie theatre would be a good alibi as to where we were. Since we snuck in the Delft or Nordic every night, we figured we could explain the movie if you guys asked what we saw. We also knew the projectionist, who swore he would vouch for us if we got caught. Since he’s no longer with us, I guess you guys can’t ask him. Too bad, he was a good guy. It was a double feature. As I recall, they were showing a couple of those feel good movie of the year jobs: “Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer” and “Deranged.” Remember that dude in “Deranged,” Ezra Cobb? He was really cool. Bet he coulda got a lotta money for those human lamp shades at Art on the Rocks. Stevie had Milk Duds and I had extra buttered popcorn. After the movie starts, we leave and creep up the alley behind Getz’s. I climb up on a dumpster in back and slither through a window that’s slightly ajar. Once inside, I open the side door and let Stevie in. Boy were we in hog heaven, free shirts, jeans, and underwear. Stevie also took some women’s lingerie, he liked pastel bras with extra large cup sizes. You might think that’s a little weird, but heh, that’s the way he rolled. I guess all our criminal fun just sort of snowballed. All of a sudden I said it. Out of the blue. Stevie, let’s go break in the ice cream stand at the island and then knock over Fisher school. I think it was just that extra Y, or is it X, chromosome I got. I just had to do some law breakin. So we headed for Fisher School. The pencils, chalk, lunch tickets, they just went to my head. I just figured after all those years you’d never get me.

As it turns out, Tessier has a long criminal history. Besides having long alleged connections with events on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza, Charles Whitman’s Texas Tower School of Target Practice, Richard Speck’s tutoring service at the Chicago Nursing Dormitory, John Wayne Gacy’s Clown College, Jeffrey Dahmer’s barbeque stand, O.J. Simpson’s Ginsu Knife Symposium, Richard Nixon’s Tape Editing Service, the illegal bombing of Cambodia, Lieutenant William Calley’s “What, My Lai” Game Show, Pee Wee Herman’s Vaseline Porn Circus Movie Review, Senator Craig’s Bathroom stall Footsie jamboree, Bill Clinton’s non-sexual Blow Job Confederation, Rush Limbaugh’s Vico-Maid service, Richard Reid's shoe bombing and anthrax symposium, Osama bin Laden’s Falafel and Camel Oasis, Joseph Mengele’s Sea Shell City, Pol Pot’s Mystery Spot, Dick Cheney’s House of Wax, and Radovan Karadzic’s Serbo-Cruisers, there were unsubstantiated reports that his real father was the godfather of the notorious Purple Gang. Many also believe that besides being the 20th hijacker and accomplice of Killer Loonsfoot, it was Tessier who, on his way back from Big Bay to Sodom and Gommorarbor, stopped along the Pictured Rocks cliffs and pushed that poor woman to her death last summer. Suffice it to say, this guy’s a bad egg.

According to court psychiatrist Dr. Tato Pininen, Tessier blamed his criminal ways on his upbringing, claiming to have been raised by feral foster parents after his abusive father abandoned him at 12. Pininen’s records show Tessier as saying it wasn’t his fault he murdered and beheaded those 80 people, it was because he came from a broken home. The real tragedy in all this is that Tessier was allowed to plead insanity and released after serving only 3 months in Ypsi State Psychiatric Hospital. Had he been judged to be sane and of sound mind the Getz’s and Fisher school capers might have been avoided.

Oh well. That’s the way it goes. If any on this seems insulting to Mr. Tessier, I sincerely apologize. Sometimes the truth hurts, and sometimes the truth ain’t nuthin but a chicken dinner.

Best - Me

BIG BAY CHRONICLES: Local Color & Oxys in Covington

TRAVER, HEMINGWAY and the TELL TALE FOX

I found Robert Traver’s “Trout Magic,”(1974) among the old books on Bill Bystrom’s shelves. Being a signed first edition (w/both Robert Traver’s and John Voelker’s signatures), and given my literary respect for “Anatomy of a Murder,” and “Small Town D. A.,” I thought a light throne perusal might yield some useful intellectual data. Chapter 2 immediately caught my eye for 2 reasons. I had often heard the Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River”(1925) was really about the Fox, which runs through Seney, and because I had the occasion to stay at the Seney Motel and dip my toes in the Fox after a vehicle malfunction just short of there on M28.

With Traver, writing and angling are fairly inseparable: “many seem to think that we literary types who prefer splitting our infinitives to tying our flies are, piscatorially speaking, faintly treasonable….taking my own case, I only turned to writing books when it became all too comically evident that nature had never endowed me for tying flies but rather had left me so manually inept that, far from being able to tie a fly, I am barely able to unzip one”(20). Any of you, like myself, who might wonder why the adjective “big” is often applied to a river, need look no further than “Trout Magic”: “As any fisherman knows, it is sound fisherman’s idiom to call that portion of the river ‘big’ beyond where its principal branches come together. Such a stretch of river in my own bailiwick, for example, is the Escanaba River below the village of Gwinn which, all unimaginative cartographers to the contrary, most local fishermen continue to call the ‘big’ Escanaba”(20). He recalls a time when every U.P. river was such that one’s limit could be reached whether one fished the Billy Butcher or Little Garlic: “I can still remember—to my undying shame—bicycling out after school to a stream today that yields mostly beer cans, and getting home in time for supper sagging under the weight of my father’s big wicker creel full of trout”(20).

His point is that although the Two Hearted River, because of its literary renown, is now thought of much like the river Kwai”(21). Leery of wading through the scholarly essays surrounding Hemingway’s work and its geographical references, Traver writes: “I quickly learned that when scholars get hot under the collar mere fishermen had better not get caught in the crossfire of their footnotes”(21). Disputing the idea that Nick Adams had to have fished the Two Hearted because the title assumes it, he contends that these academic hounds are “Barking up the wrong river”(22).

Making the point that “nowhere in the story does Hemingway name the water Nick Adams fished; [and] that [the] sole authorial clue comes only from the title,” Traver notes that Hemingway’s description of where Nick departs the train is undoubtedly Seney: “Seney is not only in a different county from the Two Heart but many miles west of where any faintly savvy fisherman would leave his train were he hiking there”(24-25). He rightly points out that the closest railhead to the Two Heart is Newberry, and that, ”while no stream of consequence flows through or near Newberry (remember Nick watching the darting shadows of those lovely trout in a nearby river soon after leaving his train?), the imposing West Branch of the Fox River still flows through the Seney loop”(25).

Arguing that Hemingway himself, as an avid fisherman unwilling to reveal his private honey holes, is the source of the narrative ambiguity surrounding the whereabouts of Nick’s success, Traver suggests that since this story had its inception in Paris in the early 1920s, before the “twin lightning bolts of fame and fortune” drove Hemingway to deep-sea fishing, he was simply concealing his favorite fishing haunts. He concludes the chapter with this: “If brother-fisherman Hemingway ever fished the Two Hearted River the only thing he found memorable about it was its romantic-sounding name”(28). So there you have it, before Hemingway’s move from the relaxed anonymity of nature to the unrelenting torment of the public eye, he consciously sought to flummox his later critics by a narrative sleight of hand whereby a Fox lay concealed in his heart of Two Hearts.


THE AQUATIC TINHORN: A POETIC CRITIQUE

A man from South Honolulu,
Combed Squaw Beach in a tatersall tutu.
While he wasn’t a local,
On beer he got vocal,
Before donning a polka dot mumu.

It was said that he hailed from Wisconsin,
Claiming he was the kin of Chas Bronson,
He could often be seen
Swimming laps down the beach,
In a wetsuit protecting his Johnson.

Said a jealous old troll from East Venus,
“Cease your swimming betwixt and between us.
With your wetsuit and fins,
Who could tell where you’ve been?
There’s no truth in an unshrivelled penis.”

VI “SHIFTY” DAGENAIS

Morels tremble at the sound of her voice,
Blueberries and pastys her gentle game.
Beer and Chardonnay her beverage of choice,
Vi, “Shifty” Dagenais her name.

She still roams the plains
Where the Yellowdogs play.
Where the deer and porcupine
She would deign not to slay.

She left that task
To a man named Trewhella,
A natural born fish killer
And very nice fella.

Someday she’ll look back
And fondly relate,
The idylls of a wee lass
Who was once 98.


OXYS COME TO COVINGTON

Not long ago I made a case for the growing threat of a wide-scale prescription drug epidemic. In a post titled “Pink Pills for Pale People,” I wrote, “The recent ‘Florida Medical Examiners Commission’ 2007 report offers a snapshot of what’s going on across the culture. Damien Cave’s New York Times gloss on the report notes the commission (6/14/08) ‘found that the rate of deaths caused by prescription drugs was three times the rate of deaths caused by all illicit drugs combined.’ Lisa McElhaney, a sergeant in the pharmaceutical drug diversion unit of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office notes that prescription drug abuse has reached ‘epidemic’ proportions,’ adding, ‘It’s just explosive.’ According to Cave, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration reports that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. These aren’t skid row bums, these are our friends, relatives, and coworkers.”

Now comes yesterday’s front-page story by Marquette Mining Journal staff writer, Kim Hoyum, “Prescription Drug Probe Nets 57 Arrests,” (7/31/08). “According to Charles Gross, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan, the arrests span Menominee, Delta, Chippewa, Mackinac, Luce and Marquette counties.” Hoyum writes, “Robert Corso of Detroit, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent in charge of the case, said the effort began after a 2007 DEA assessment showed prescription drugs were becoming the biggest drug problem locally.” As Corso points out, and as the company that first made Oxycontin knew when it first manufactured Oxys, this synthetic opiate is highly addictive, and offers a high that only the purest heroin can touch. So it was no accident when places like Kentucky and Tennessee began to encounter an epidemic drug problem where the term “Hillbilly Heroin” was first coined. And recall that the pharmaceutical company that makes Oxys was sued and subsequently paid out a massive settlement for falsely claiming that Oxycontin was NON-ADDICTIVE!

As an aside, allow me to reiterate my position that substance abuse is a medical rather than criminal problem, which is the reason for the U.S. having the largest prison population in the world, at both the national and local level. Consider Marquette County Sheriff Michael Lovelace’s editorial in the same Journal edition, which reveals that “Since 1986 several studies have been done on the Marquette County Jail regarding capacity and overcrowding,” and that “every study has concluded that there is a ‘need for increased prisoner capacity in Marquette County and that alternatives to incarceration are considered saturated.’” Lovelace goes on to say that, “No inmate that is considered dangerous will be released from the Marquette County Jail due to overcrowding.” Considering that substance abuse is by and large a victimless crime--and yes, I know that families and loved ones suffer the peripheral consequences of addiction--clinical “alternatives to incarceration” rather than criminal prosecution, education rather than punishment, seems a better way to go. In fact, as most of you know, I ‘m for, at least, the decriminalization of all drugs, and at best, their total legalization. I’ll come back to this at a later date.

What I do agree with Special Agent Corso on is this: the old paradigm (the Gateway Theory) whereby potential addicts start with marijuana and proceed toward harder drugs no longer holds. If everyone who smokes pot moved to coke and smack we’d just about have to build a wall around the whole nation with Mexicans and Canadians as guards.

Where Corso gets it right is in pointing out that Oxy abuse represents a reversal in the dynamics of drug addiction: “’Oxycontin is really a pet peeve of mine in the drug world, in the sense of it sort of works backward,’ he said, explaining agents usually see illegal drug users turning to prescription drugs as an alternative, but Oxycontin users often do the opposite. ‘People are getting addicted to the stuff, and when their supplies dry up, they’re turning to heroin and sticking a needle in their vein,’ Corso said. ‘And the Upper Peninsula does not need a heroin problem, trust me.’”

I do trust you, Agent Corso, I would only add that our nation, from the Florida Keys to the Keweenaw Peninsula, needs to rethink its approach to the war on drugs. It’s no longer the Colombian gangster or Afghanistan warlord we need to fear, but the American pharmaceutical companies that reap the profits of our children’s addictions.