I wonder how many baby boomers remember those TV cigarette commercials featuring an actor holding a smoke, sporting a black eye and saying “I’d rather fight than switch.” I guess they ran those ads from the 1960s to 1981.
I think of those commercials when I read the news. There are a couple of Iowa news items about a University of Northern Iowa (UNI) professor requiring his students to wear masks or suffer the consequences to their lab grades. He’s suffering the consequences because he’s going up against policies of the state Regents and UNI, which prohibit mask mandates. He’s doing it to protect others from COVID-19 infection. It sounds like he’d rather fight than switch.
The Governor of Iowa has signed into law a ban on applying mask mandates. However, Iowa City Mayor Bruce Teague has just extended “until further notice” a city-wide mask mandate that started August 18 and was set to expire today. Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller has been studying the situation for weeks and has apparently made no decision, despite the Governor’s office saying the mandate is “illegal” and “unenforceable.” I guess Mayor Teague would rather fight than switch.
There has been an executive order by President Biden to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for the many hospitals which have over a certain number of employees and are paid by Medicare and Medicaid. Headlines indicate there are many who would rather quit their jobs than get the jabs, which would not make patient care any easier. I guess they would rather fight than switch.
A man in Germany recently walked into a convenience store to buy beer and when the clerk asked him to put on a mask, the man left angry, came back wearing a mask and shot the clerk dead. I guess he’ll do the rest of his fighting in prison.
There a few songs about fighting and switching. I don’t remember Ruby Johnson’s version of “I’d Rather Fight Than Switch.” There was another version done by a group called The Tomboys, a group of female vocalists I’ve never heard of who were also performing in the 1960s. It looks like country star George Jones did a reversal of it with “I’d Rather Switch Than Fight.”
I wonder how things would be if people would start saying “I’d Rather Talk Than Fight.”
I watch the History Channel TV show “The Proof is Out There” hosted by Tony Harris. Early this year (I think January), an episode featured a snapshot showing a woman who’s mirror reflection didn’t match her facial expression. It was striking. The question was whether this proved we live in a simulated reality (think of the film “The Matrix”). At that time, I think Tony and his panel of analysts (including a digital imaging expert) called the photo unexplained but stopped short of declaring it proof we’re all living in a simulation.
A couple nights ago, on an episode of the new season, Tony had to admit he and his colleagues got it wrong—because the snapshot can be created using the smartphone camera panorama mode. Somebody submitted a couple of photographs duplicating the effect of the one submitted in January along with an explanation of how to make them.
Sena and I checked this out. When I googled the term “panorama mirror trick,” I got several hits with step-by-step instructions and several YouTube presentations. Depending on what search terms you use, I could find internet references going back several years.
We played with the camera. It took a little practice, but we got the hang of it quickly. These are rough instructions:
Mirror trick:
Open the camera app and swipe to panorama mode.
Subject stands adjacent to the mirror, at an angle partly facing it and partly turned toward the camera operator.
Camera operator taps the shutter button while panning from one direction toward the subject and moving past, keeping the arrow centered on the straight horizontal line.
When camera operator has panned just past subject and before reaching the mirror, stop moving the camera and have the subject change position. This should take only a moment or so. If the camera is still moving, you’ll get a lot of motion artifact.
After subject has assumed the new posture, start panning again toward the mirror and a bit beyond, then tap the shutter button to end the shot.
You should get an image with the subject in one posture and the subject’s mirror reflection in a completely different posture.
Doppelganger trick:
I call this the doppelganger trick because the maneuver creates an image with two different images of the same subject in two different spots, creating a twinning or doppelganger effect.
Set up is the same as for the mirror trick but have the subject stand in one spot to the left of the camera operator and strike a pose.
Camera operator starts panning to the right, then stops briefly.
Subject zips behind the camera operator on the left side and takes up a new position on the opposite side.
Camera operator restarts the pan right and completes the shot after moving past the subject.
Doppelganger
It may take a few tries, but when you get it right, the result looks startling. It’s fun.
Now here’s a question for Tony Harris. Do Doppelgangers exist?
It must have been after 8:00 PM last night that the FDA posted the COVID-19 Booster EUA authorization. The ACIP took that ball and ran with it all day long. Today was the second day of the ACIP meeting and the committee covered a lot of ground and ran over the schedule by more than an hour by the time voting on recommendations ended.
In a nutshell:
The committee voted unanimously to give boosters for people 65 and over as well as nursing home residents. Most of them voted to give boosters to those 50-64 with medical conditions that raise the risk for severe COVID-19 infection. A smaller majority voted to give boosters to those 18-49 with based on individual benefit and risk given underlying medical conditions. The committee voted down a proposal to give boosters to those 18-64 who would be at elevated risk of infection because of occupational or other setting, including health care workers, prison guards, and people who live or work in homeless shelters.
Nobody was happy about not giving an option to “mix and match” vaccines. If you got Pfizer in the initial series, you got Pfizer. But if you got Moderna or J&J—you couldn’t get Pfizer. More data is coming about heterologous vaccine dosing, but it’s not immediately available. On the other hand, the 6-month mark for getting the booster is anything but a hard line. You could wait months longer and still retain adequate vaccine effectiveness.
I thought it was interesting that, according to a survey in unpublished data, about a third of unvaccinated respondents said that offering a booster would make them even less willing to get vaccinated at all. See slides 52 and 53 in the presentation “Evidence to Recommendation Framework: Pfizer -BioNTech COVID-19 Booster Dose” by Dr. Sara Oliver. Despite that, several members of the committee stressed the critical importance of continuing to attempt vaccinating them.
There’s going to be a lot of flux in the next several weeks as more data is obtained. These recommendations are subject to updates and there will likely be several more meetings ahead, according to attendees.
I know that in Iowa, a lot of people are counting on the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) to give the word on when to roll out the boosters. The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics and Story County officials have said that. I have not seen boosters even mentioned on the IDPH website, though. I inquired about what their plans are for the booster rollout this morning on their website contact form. I expect it may be a while before I get a reply, if I get one at all. They’re incredibly busy.
I heard one expert say that in his community, they were offering the vaccine to people in a way that emphasized the individual’s benefit only. I think that’s certainly one way to “sell” it. Altruism has a place here, though. I get regular email messages from Hektoen International, hekint.org.
They almost always contain some essay or quote that’s thought-provoking and inspiring. Here’s one I got this morning that included a public domain photograph of Bertrand Russell as well as his thoughts on the receding ego:
Bertrand Russell on life from Hektoen International hekint.org
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
“How to Grow Old,” from Portraits from Memory and Other Essays by Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell by Fotograaf Onbekend / Anefo. 1957. Nationaal Archief. Public Domain. Via Wikimedia.
This was the first day of the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on COVID-19 vaccine boosters. I was struck by how organized it was. I was also struck by the statement by one presenter that they’re still waiting for a final decision from the FDA on the issue. I thought they made that last Friday. The decision has not yet been posted, though and I think it has to be published on the FDA website before it’s gospel.
In fact, ACIP is wondering if tomorrow’s meeting should be postponed if the FDA decision has not been made by then. Tomorrow is when ACIP plans to vote on what they decide about the who and how of the booster shots. Would they really leave it up in the air like that?
The only thing I see about boosters on the FDA website after the September 17th meeting is a podcast on September 20th that FDA Commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock did on a show called “In the Bubble with Andy Slavitt.” I thought it was a good general introduction to the booster issue. The interview also included questions about Pfizer’s latest study of their COVID-19 vaccine in children, ages 5-11 years of age. I thought there were too many commercials. There was supposed to be another broadcast about boosters on the show today, but I was too busy watching the ACIP meeting. I’m pretty sure I’m getting most of what I need from that, but I might check out the Andy Slavitt show “Toolkit: Answering Your Booster Questions.”
I know one thing; I heard the best lecture about the basic immunology of the boosters this morning. See the slides from the presentation “Adaptive immunity and SARS-CoV-2” by Dr. Dr. Natalie Thornburg, PhD. I still have cold sweats every time I think of the first basic immunology lecture we got in medical school. That was ages ago. The poor lecturer at some point during her talk happened to look up at us and she abruptly stopped talking. She looked dismayed by what must have been the totally lost look on our faces. She was demoralized and there was this—pause. She looked like all the air was sucked out of her. I thought for a moment she was too demoralized to go on.
I don’t remember how I got through the immunology exam. I do know I still have flunking nightmares of being a student at some level of college or medical school. In the dream, I’m usually trying to find a lecture hall, riffling through a key set of notes and books, all of which are incredibly jumbled up. I’m always hopelessly late and I have this sense of despair about ever graduating.
But today’s presentations were brilliant, fascinating, and helped clarify at least some issues in the complexity, not the least of which is deciding what the main goal of the boosters should be. Should it be preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death, or preventing infection altogether?
I learned that not only are nursing home residents at high risk for getting COVID-19 but that it’s actually the level of community transmission that drives infection rates in residents (see presentation “Modeling the potential impact of booster doses in nursing home residents” by Dr. R. Slayton). Which brings up the issue of transmissibility of the virus, which is very high. Would the boosters cut the transmissibility? It’s unclear.
The boosters seem to be very safe and effective for pregnant people, yet only about 30% of them get vaccinated—cut that percentage in half for African American women. See the lectures with the word “pregnancy” in the title.
Dr. Sara Oliver’s “Work Group Summary” was enlightening and disturbing. The safety and immunogenicity date are reassuring but limited. But getting more data takes more time. What are the next steps for the ACIP? They are awaiting regulatory action from the FDA. I get a sense that we need a lot more beyond Dr. Janet Woodcock’s word on that. As she said in the “In the Bubble” interview with Andy Slavitt— “We need to get this right.” I think that means they need to take whatever time it takes to do that.
Will ACIP meet tomorrow? Will they vote? Don’t ask me; I still have flunking nightmares.
I saw a nice summary by Stat News of last Friday’s FDA Advisory Committee meeting on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine booster. They indicate the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) are meeting this coming Wednesday and Thursday to fine-tune the FDA recommendations, which was a messy affair. I have been checking the ACIP web site frequently but so far, I’ve not seen any agenda or slide sets for September 22 and 23. Is that a signal that watching their meeting will be even more like watching sausages being made?
Just as an aside on the quote attributed to Otto Von Bismarck I mentioned in my post on Friday—it’s probably apocryphal.
Laws are like sausages; better not to see them being made.”
Otto Von Bismarck or maybe John Godfrey Saxe
I glanced around the web and ran across several articles which cast doubt on whether the big sausage duel ever took place. It’s kind of a shame because it had the medical science angle. Supposedly the scientist Rudolf Virchow who was studying the parasite responsible for causing trichinosis had responded to Bismarck’s challenge to a duel by proposing they each eat one of two sausages as weapons. Bismarck and Virchow would choose a sausage to eat, one of which was loaded with trichinella or one that was not. They couldn’t tell by looking at the sausages which was which. I first learned about this duel on the Travel Channel show (episode entitled “Sausage Duel”), which I think set the context as nasty factories churning out Trichinella laden sausages because of horrifyingly unsanitary practices. The show cast Virchow and Bismarck as opponents over that issue specifically. Bismarck conceded and that led to the factories cleaning up their act. Scientists triumph over politicians!
That probably never happened, according to more than one writer. So maybe I should choose another quote. One by a lawyer statesman might be a partial fit:
If Columbus had an advisory committee, he would probably still be at the dock.
Arthur Joseph Goldberg
Another that I like just because I’m a Dave Barry fan:
“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and will never achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meeting.’”—Dave Barry.
If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and will never achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meeting”.
Dave Barry
Some sources on the web say Barry’s quote was in one of his many books I used to own: Dave Barry Turns 50. It’s in a list: “25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years.” I didn’t check with Barry’s web site to verify the quote. You can find some of them on line. Many of those items are on the order of booger jokes, of which I happen to be a fan. This quote also happens to be highlighted on the website called mycommittee, which ironically advertises committee management software which promises to make them more productive. The home page shows a sample software document entitled “Decisions regarding response to Covid-19.”
Hmm. Maybe the advisory committees could use this.
ADDENDUM: Whoa! ACIP just posted this Wednesday’s draft agenda. More materials will surely follow.
Sena and I watched the FDA Advisory Committee live streamed meeting yesterday on whether or not Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine booster should be given full licensure. You know, there’s a much-discussed question about who actually made the following quote:
“Laws are like sausages; better not to see them being made.”—often attributed to Otto Von Bismarck although it’s been attributed to others.
You can view the arguments about who said it at this link. The point is I think it should also apply to FDA meeting decisions. Our overall impression is that it was a messy process. We watched the entire daylong proceeding. The bottom line was that the committee revised the original question and reframed the approval from full licensure to Emergency Use Authorization (EUA):
The FDA approved the EUA for the booster based on the “totality” of the available evidence instead of just the originally specified Clinical Trial C4591001 (because of the small number of subjects including only a dozen in the older age group; the data from Israel was also fair game) and restricted the population to those age 65 and older (instead of the original 16 years and older). They further specified further that the booster should target those at increased risk for severe disease—which is to be understood to include health care professionals and others at risk for high occupational exposure.
One of the voting members disclosed candidly that his wife had already received a booster shot at a pharmacy well in advance of the meeting (technically off-label) and that he planned to do the same—after they unanimously approved the booster after the question was reframed. Sena and I both thought this was an extraordinary statement coming from an FDA advisory committee member.
The original question was voted down with only 2 of 18 members voting in favor. Dr. Stanley Perlman of The University of Iowa voted no on the original question and voted yes on the revised question. For many days now, the news has been reporting that a large number of people have been getting a booster shot despite the lack of FDA approval.
Dr. Arnold “Arnie” Conto M.D., the Acting Chair of the committee, after being asked to read the original question, slipped by indicating the age as “16 months” instead of “16 years.” He was instrumental in holding the committee members to staying on time for each phase of the meeting.
Dr. Conto: “Do the safety and effectiveness data from clinical trial C4591001 support approval of a Comirnaty booster dose administered at least 6 months after completion of the primary series for use in individuals 16 months of age and older?”
“I see someone has his hand raised. Do you have a question?”
Dr. X: Lips clearly moving but no sound.
Moderator: “Please unmute your mike” (Everyone was guilty of this oversight repeatedly throughout the day. One participant actually started speaking audibly and then leaned over and switched off his mike, possibly not to break the trend).
Dr. X: “Oh my, sorry about that. Arnie, we’re not sure on that part about “16 months and older.”
Dr. Monto: Oh yeah, I meant “at least 16 days and younger.”
Dr. X: Lips moving but no sound.
Moderator: “Unmute, please!”
Dr. X: “Oops, sorry! OK, Arnie. Does anyone know whether we’re supposed to vote on the time machine today, or will that be for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices?”
Christopher Lloyd: “I got that covered! Dang, I mislaid the keys to the DeLorean.”
We listened to those making short presentations at the open public hearing. They were each given about 3 minutes to make their statements. Some were in favor of the vaccine booster, others were not. Safety concerns were prominent, especially for giving vaccine boosters to children.
In fact, the committee seemed very ready to change the focus of the booster to place less specific emphasis on children. We imagine that’s part of the reason why the age range was adjusted away from specifying those 16 years and older (although they’ve probably been getting the primary series, even before the August approval of the Pfizer vaccine). One of the committee members asked, after the change of the age from “16 years” to “65 years” (but also specifying those at “high risk for severe disease”) whether that still meant a 16-year-old could get the booster. The answer was “yes.”
That made sense since children can have medical illnesses that increase their risk of serious complications from COVID-19 infection. But some committee members wondered about the 65 years of age cutoff, probably because they were not 65 years old. This and other speculations about how to specify the vulnerable population led to scrambling to get the meeting over because this was a question which the ACIP could clarify—and because it was getting very close to the end of the day.
We still don’t know when the ACIP is going to meet about the booster. They’ve added something for September 22 and 23, but I don’t find an agenda for it yet. Maybe they’ll have sausages for lunch.
Sena and I got our annual flu shots last week, and I also got a pneumonia vaccine. We’ve been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 since earlier in the year. Now we’re waiting for the word on whether we’ll need COVID-19 vaccine boosters. We’ll probably know more about that by the end of the week after the FDA Advisory Committee meeting on the matter.
We’re part of the vaccinated, which is increasingly distinguished from the unvaccinated in various ways. The controversy about the unvaccinated almost amounts to them being discriminated against, according to some news headlines. The COVID-19 pandemic is now being called a pandemic of the unvaccinated, although some are able to resist the trend by seeing through it and realize we’re all in this together.
It reminds me of an old Cold War era episode of The Twilight Zone, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” which originally aired in 1960. The gist is that aliens seeking to conquer earthlings create paranoia and violent conflict amongst neighbors on a quiet cul-de-sac simply by manipulating the electrical power to cars and other devices. At first, the electrical malfunctions are only puzzling until a boy named Tommy tells everyone that the trouble is being perpetrated by aliens who are indistinguishable from humans, a notion he got from a comic book.
And after that, everyone on the street begins accusing each other of being malevolent aliens disguised as humans, often on the basis of interpreting benign behaviors like insomnia or tinkering with a ham radio as evidence for dangerous plots. One character even shoots his neighbor dead, believing he’s a dangerous alien.
There was a 2003 remake of this in which the government, instead of aliens, is doing the manipulating. No doubt both of these will be re-broadcast as part of Twilight Zone marathons next month as part of the usual October Halloween TV program lineup.
Sena thought of another Twilight Zone show, “The Shelter,” first broadcast in 1961, which also might fit the current pandemic context. A doctor builds a bomb shelter to protect just him and his family in case of a disaster. The unthinkable happens with UFOs being sighted and the friends and neighbors who threw a party for him all want to beg, bargain, or threaten their way into the doctor’s bomb shelter because they didn’t build their own. He refuses to allow them in. The neighbors turn on each other, showing the worst selfishness, hatred, and racism. They finally break into the doctor’s shelter with a battering ram (which, of course, negates the safety it might have provided)—only to find out in that moment that the UFOs were just satellites. They had become monsters and could not see how it happened.
Depending on what news media outlet you prefer to read, the vaccinated or the unvaccinated will be cast as bad guys or good guys. As the rhetoric heats up based on divisions between political parties, religious groups, scientists, races, and nations, the antipathy has fostered escalating tensions over whether vaccine and mask mandates should or should not prevail. The unvaccinated have their own battering ram—fake vaccination passports, which negate the safety assurance. The unvaccinated can’t get in to see their doctors in person, poison themselves with unproven medicines, or accuse the government of trying to poison them with vaccines. The wealthy vaccinated buy their booster shots at the expense of those who can’t afford them and before the medical experts can approve their safety and necessity. People are resorting to violence.
I always had a little trouble with the title of the Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” The monsters are not just due—we have arrived. Why is it so hard for me to recall an episode showing exactly how to recover our humanity?
Sena and I went for a walk on the Terry Trueblood Trail yesterday. We saw a huge apple tree on the trail. We’ve never noticed it before. The boughs were bent and broken from the load of apples. There were a lot of buzzing insects, maybe some annual cicadas among them.
We saw a lone American White Pelican on the lake, the first one we’ve ever seen. There were no other birds on the water. In fact, we didn’t notice other birds other than the pelican. All but one of the tree swallow nest boxes had been removed. Nothing peeked out from it.
The pelican just bobbed about on the lake. They migrate in autumn to Central and South Americas. They’re often seen in large groups, but this one was alone. They get pretty big, about 5 feet tall, and can have a 9-foot wingspan.
Pelicans are often connected to symbolic meanings including nurturing, humility, charity, healing, wisdom, and sacrifice.
When I think about all the mandates and bans against mandates for the COVID-19 vaccines and masks, I wonder about my own motive for getting the vaccine and wearing a mask.
In one sense, I’m doing it for myself. I’m a retired consultation-liaison psychiatrist and I got called to the intensive care units a lot. Almost always, the patient was delirious. And almost always, the patient was delirious in the setting of being on the ventilator or in the process of being liberated from the ventilator.
The critical care physician and the nurses were always looking for one specific thing from me. I was supposed to stop the patient from being agitated, to calm the wildly thrashing, terrified person fighting the restraints and struggling with hallucinations and fragmented paranoid delusions that every caregiver in the unit was trying to kill him. Often there were many medical problems, including multiple organ failure often from lack of oxygen, resulting in brain injury as well. Nowadays, COVID-19 is a frequent cause of delirium for the same reasons.
Years ago, the only tool I had was an antipsychotic called haloperidol, because it could be given intravenously. It would calm some patients, but it could and did cause side effects including akathisia (extreme restlessness), dystonia (severe muscle spasms), and neuroleptic malignant syndrome NMS, a rare, complex, life-threatening neurologic emergency attributable to antipsychotics. Over the past several years, the ICU pharmacies acquired newer drugs like dexmedetomidine, which is not a psychiatric drug. That didn’t stop the ICU from calling me.
I’ve seen all of that. I got the vaccine and wear the mask mostly because I don’t want to be in that boat. But I think those measures help protect others, too. I think many people have that motive. Those who think they’re getting it just for themselves can go on thinking that.
We’re taking a risk when we get the vaccine. It’s not completely harmless. There are very rare side effects which can be life-threatening and they have killed people. There is some level of altruism involved. Those who get the vaccine are playing a role, however small, in reducing the chance the virus will mutate into something that will kill even more people.
Wearing masks is a nuisance and doesn’t really feel heroic. But this act combined with other measures (the usual suspects: hand-washing, social distancing, avoiding large crowds) spreads love instead of infection.
We don’t have to agree. We don’t have to love each other. I just hope we can respect each other.
Occasionally I’ll reminisce, an activity which recently got triggered when I realized why I tend to like watching TV shows like Highway Thru Hell and Heavy Rescue 401, which are heading into the 10th and 6th seasons, respectively. Despite that, last year I didn’t see any episodes in which the COVID-19 pandemic was even mentioned. Nobody wears masks. They’re hard-working people in Canada who basically drag semi-trucks out of various ditches. It’s hard work, they’re down-to-earth and they’re not acting.
I marvel at what they do. It’s brutal, real, and no-nonsense. While I watch them, I tend to forget about the pandemic, and the social and economic upheaval everywhere on the planet. For a little while, I almost stop thinking about bored I am and without a purpose or meaning sometimes in retirement. I just find myself being glad I don’t have their job.
Sometimes I think about how I got my start as a working stiff, starting out as a teenager doing practical work like the heavy tow truck drivers. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to sell you the idea that land surveying is really hard work. I was outside most of the time, although in the winter when highway, street, and other construction was down, I would do some drafting. I worked for WHKS & Co. If you click the link to their website, scroll all the way down on the About Us section. There’s a black and white picture with four frowning men sitting at a heavy desk in front of a bookcase with many large books in it. They are from left to right, Richard “Dick” Kastler, Francis Holland, Ralph Wallace, and Frank Schmitz. I didn’t know Richard but his brother, Carol Kastler, was my boss along with the other three. Carol Kastler was the head of the land surveying department.
This is not going to be a history of surveying, which I’m not qualified to do; just my impressions of it as a young man. I can flesh it out a little with a video about how to throw a chain, and an extremely detailed reminiscence written by a real old-timer about surveying that was a lot like the way I remember it. Try to read all of Knud E. Hermansen’s first essay about measuring with a steel tape, “Reminisce Of An Old Surveyor, Part I: Measuring a Distance by Taping.” You can skip Part II, which even I couldn’t relate to because the stuff was way before my time.
Hermansen’s description of measuring distance using a steel tape and plumb bob is spot on, though. The other thing I would do in the winter down time was tie up red heads—which is not what you’re thinking. You tied red flagging around nails which were used to mark distances measured.
We often did work out in the field through the winter, though. When we set survey corners using what were called survey pins. Sometimes we had to break through the frozen ground first by pounding a frost pin with a sledge hammer. I remember WHKS & Co. made their own cornerstones using a wood frame box and cement. They were several feet long and they were heavy and surveyors carried them slung to their backs through the timber.
We spent a lot of cold days on straightening out a lot of the curves in Highway 13 between Strawberry Point and Elkader in eastern Iowa. We had expense accounts and were often away from our homes a week at a time for most of the winter. We ate a lot of restaurant food. Carol Kastler was partial to pea salad.
Guys told colorful stories out in the field, some of them pretty sobering. We were out setting stakes for widening a drainage ditch and talking with an old timer running a piece of heavy equipment called a dragline excavator. It has a long boom and a bucket pulled by a cable. The old timer told a harrowing study about his son, a dragline operator himself, who suffered a terrible accident. Somehow the boom broke off and fell on him. It didn’t outright kill him and workers frantically called his father (the old timer). They told him to come quick to see his son before he died because they knew they couldn’t get him to a hospital quick enough from way out in the field. The old timer just said, “I don’t want to see him.” It was just like that, a simple statement. It sounded cold but he somehow conveyed that he just didn’t want his last encounter with his son to be under a horrifying circumstance like that.
The company had Christmas parties which almost everybody enjoyed a lot. There were some guys who had a hard time relaxing. I remember a driven, work-devoted surveyor, who was thinking about work. I could tell because there was some kind of game we were playing which involved writing something like a question on a piece of paper and giving it to someone else, some inane thing like that, I can’t remember the details. I gave him my slip, and he took it. While he scribbled something on it without looking at it, he looked away and mumbled, “I really don’t have a whole lot of time.” He was at the party but his mind was out in the field.
It’s hard not to absorb experiences like that early in your life when you’re still young and impressionable. Work can become a way of life. It doesn’t seem to make a difference what kind of work it is. Even Agent J in Men In Black 2 gets a short lecture from Zed after Agent J returns from a mission and seems like he’s on autopilot, asking Zed for yet another mission, “What do you got for me?” Zed says, “Dedication’s one thing, but this job will eat you up and spit you out.”
It’s even hard for some of the guys in Highway Thru Hell and Heavy Rescue 410 to relax; even after a heart attack, one older guy can’t wait to get back in the tow truck. But even he knows that it’s a young man’s job.
Anyway, I promised I would show a video about how to throw a chain, which I learned how to do back in the day. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t do it today.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 