Two New States & One Province Later...

Having grown up in a fairly rural part of a very rural state that is home to the start of the Appalachian Trail, I have never been able to survive very long in a big city without feeling the need for an escape.  So it was that after spending a grand total of 1 week in Boston, I decided it was time for this now seasoned urban dweller (yeah right!) to visit a couple of the surrounding New England states in which I had never been before.  Since my buddy who had helped me move was already back in class at UGA and since I had as yet to make any acquaintances worthy of inviting on a primitive camping trip, I set off on my own on an overcast Saturday afternoon in the general direction of the Green Mountains of Vermont.

This spontaneous escape from the city did not only come from my ever-present desire of seeing new places and crossing off several of the states still on my list to visit in the U.S., but also from the need to be alone and to sort through the many doubts I was having in regard to my future plans.  As I have already mentioned previously, I had come to Boston to continue taking the science courses that would allow me to apply for medical school next year.  Most of the doubts I had been feeling over the past year since deciding to pursue this course of study, I had been able to suppress with the notion that once I began studying at Harvard, I would all of the sudden become extremely motivated and driven, as I imagined everyone here would be.  I also knew that at this point in my life, getting to the age where I am one of the oldest that try to get into med school, I would need the support of a program like Harvard to boost my attractiveness as a candidate. 

As true as all of those ideas may have been, they do not address the personal issues at stake in considering this career choice…including questions such as:  Do I really want to dedicate the next 10-15 years of my life of constant study, exams, boards & the fight to establish myself in a profitable medical practice?  Am I prepared to forego the ability to live independently for the next 10 years of my life and then be saddled with possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt?  Am I not getting to the age where I’m ready to think about starting a family & wouldn’t it be nice to be able to actually spend time with said hypothetical family instead of working 60+ hours a week & being on call constantly? 

All of these questions and more are just a few of the things that had been swirling around in my mind ever since I began this course of study last year at UGA, but probably the main basis for the decision I was about to make came from a friend looking me straight in the eye and asking me this question: “Dave, if what you love studying more than anything else is language, why on earth are you trying to become a doctor?”  Indeed, why on earth was I determined to be a doctor?  I had always told myself that as a doctor, I would be able to work with medical mission groups in the developing world while at home “revolutionizing” the practice of geriatric medicine as it exists (read: non-exists) today.  This is where my idealism meets the cold reality of medical practice right now in our country.  With the uncertainty of how politics will affect medicine in the near future and the definite certainty of repaying a large amount of debt once medical school would be completed, I had begun to question the practicality of my desire to spend a large amount of time in travel medicine as well as implement innovation in a geriatric group practice wherever I might live in the U.S.  These doubts had been reinforced by the time I had spent over the last year volunteering and shadowing in hospitals, as well as through the advice of close friends that are either now working in the medical field or will soon be. 

So, here I was, having just moved over a thousand miles from home and considering abandoning the plan that was the very reason for my move!  Needless to say, a few days of camping and solitude with only God and the occasional forest critter to talk to sounded like just what I needed.  There were still 2 weeks left until class would begin, so I felt extremely peaceful about getting away and taking my time to sort through all the new ideas that were presenting themselves to me now that I had opened myself up to the possibility that maybe medicine wasn’t the be-all-end-all of my life.  

Within one hour outside of Boston, I was already starting to get into the mountains of New Hampshire, which I learned is known as the “Live Free or Die” state…seems like the latest Die Hard movie couldn’t even come up with its own original cliché title.  This motto struck me though as a huge contrast to what I had experienced so far in Massachusetts where freedom is not something to take for granted, as there are more laws in place here than you could imagine.  My first stop to grab some coffee turned into a little more than that, since I discovered an actual L.L. Bean store and decided to check out their camping gear (I needed a sleeping bag & mat, since my last bag had been given up in a sacrifice to the Poison Ivy gods…I know some of you understand this very well!)  Good to go on gear, I headed on and made it the rest of the way to Stowe, Vermont.  En route, I had made a phone call to the State Park office in this area and had been told a great place to hike in and camp…an added plus being that it wouldn’t cost any money!  The turn-off was just a few miles past Stowe & on the dirt road I was immediately surrounded by only trees, creek, light-rain & 60ish degree weather!  I only hiked in a couple of miles in order to get set up before dark.  I had spotted an island between a fork in the creek and after hiking down into a small ravine to get there, I waded across and began setting up camp.  Here are some pictures of the camp-site & some of the surrounding areas:

    

                          Creek & Wind...(It was dark)

Even though there was rain in the forecast for pretty much the whole time I was there, this didn’t bother me as I and my brother and sister had been trained in the ways of camping by our father with a few things pounded into our heads.  Among them: 

1-      Always be (over)prepared…(from his boy scout days of course)

2-      Learn to dig (and love) trenches…

3-      Tarps, tarps, tarps…bungee cords, bungee cords, bungee cords…

This last lesson on tarps and bungee cords has saved my family from much needless pain and was implemented religiously after our very first camping trip in one of those ancient canvas tents where we spent a miserably wet & cold evening during a severe thunderstorm at Harrison Bay.  Actually, what it meant for my mother was that she never slept in a tent again, but for the rest of us, the tarps (above & below the tent) have been a great solution (Thanks Dad!).

Anyway, the rest of my trip in Vermont went off without a hitch.  It was very quiet and I was able to spend a lot of time thinking and reading. Also, despite the wettish weather, I managed to keep a good fire going, which saved me on the first night when I decided to take a bath in the creek…I honestly felt like I would never be warm again…this water in these mountains up here is COLD!!! 

After Vermont, since I realized I was only about an hour from the Canadian border, I decided to drive on up into Quebec and camp for 1 more night.  The Parc National du Mont-Orford was the closest campground to the border and had a beautiful lake with amazing views.  This was still a part of the Green Mountain chain that goes through Vermont, but the mountains on the Canadian side are not as high and taper out gradually.  I enjoyed speaking French to the Québécois and spending time in a new place, but definitely preferred the primitive (and free!) camping conditions I had found in Vermont to the rigidly controlled environment of the Canadian National Park System.  There, you cannot gather your own firewood, you must buy their bundles & you must have your campfire in the grill, not on the ground!  Among many other rules, this was too many “musts” for me, so I headed on back to Boston from there & was again amazed by the view of a different chain of mountains through New Hampshire, the White Mountains. 

Here are some more pictures:   

All in all, this camping trip had been everything I needed it to be and gave me great clarity and perspective and the courage to return to my life here and make the difficult decision to not continue studying pre-med at Harvard.  What I was going to do now was a work in progress that I would and am in the process of figuring out.  I do know that I will return to the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire very soon, either to camp or to snow-ski and hopefully by then, I will also have some new friends (or old ones will come visit!) to enjoy it with me.                

"The British are coming! The British are..." Ok, you remember the story!

So, last thing you knew, I had just arrived in Bean Town with my buddy after our week long trek up the East Coast. After unloading the trailer and moving all of my stuff up 3 flights of stairs into the house, we were definitely ready for some food and drink. As luck would have it, I had moved to a city where it’s possible to go out and order food at mid-night. Trina’s Starlight Lounge was the place everybody was talking about, so we gave her a try. A plateful of mac-n-cheese for me & a burger for J.D. was just what the doctor ordered-along with a cold pint too, of course!


After a refreshing night’s rest, we were ready to get out and start exploring the town and seeing some sights. I put off indefinitely my unpacking, telling myself that since my friend only had limited time to spend in Boston, I wasn’t going to make him waste it watching me go through boxes of useless junk. What a great friend I am, right? On that note, 3 weeks later, I’m still making not so good excuses as to why I should continue putting off setting up my room and going through whatever’s in those boxes...either it’s too pretty a day, I’m too engrossed in reading Anna Karenina, I need to look for a job, I’m writing this blog…really just about anything will do.

Anyway, here we are in Boston, with 2 decent bicycles, beautiful New England summer weather and a pocket map of the city my old roommate had given me as a going away gift (or maybe it was just because he wouldn’t be needing it in nursing school in Augusta, Ga?) Therefore: Veni, vidi, veci...or in the plural: We came, we saw, we conquered. We found out there is no cap to how many miles can be ridden criss-cross around Boston, Cambridge & Somerville on a summer day with more daylight than dark. The greatest thing about riding bikes around a new city is that when you go the wrong way, you’re going fast enough that you don’t realize it until you’ve arrived somewhere you weren’t expecting to be, but where you’re glad you’ve gotten to anyway. Those of you, who like me, have gotten lost on foot as a tourist know the agony of walking miles and miles not knowing where you are and then finally having to give up and take that taxi back; it feels like such a waste. Not so on bicycles. Boston and Cambridge actually fill a relatively small area of space around the Bay & along the Charles River; so on bikes, this diameter of about 5 fairly flat miles didn’t seem all that daunting.

This is the spirit in which we traversed Harvard Yard, Central Square, Fenway Park, the Freedom Trail (along which you see a different “Paul Revere” tour guide on every corner…we didn’t go in for that needless to say,) Starrow Drive, Memorial Drive, Faneuil Hall, the North Shore and the Riverway to Olmstead Park, down in Brookline. J.D. was particularly impressed with the 15 mile green-way around the river and down through Brookline, even though we didn’t quite make it all the way to Jamaica Pond and the park that bears the name of the founding father of Landscape Architecture, F.L Olmstead. This is something that I still plan to do on my bike one of these great autumn days I sense coming up just around the corner.

During these first few days here, we also had the pleasure of meeting a couple of my soon to be 4 roommates. Our house is destined to be a bevy of multiculturalism, including, but not limited to: Asian, Jewish, Pacific Islander and mixed European descents…not something I’m accustomed to in roommates, but bound to be interesting with all the different languages & foods; although all of us were born in the USA, so how different can we be, right? Before my arrival, only one of the fellows had moved in already. Since he was coming from fairly close, Philly, he offered to bring most of the furniture for the common areas: couches, table and chairs & best of all, a brand-new 50” HDTV along with an unlimited collection of Blu-Ray DVD’s. I had never seen anything on Blue-Ray before, but along with his surround sound system, let me tell you, it really brings Harry Potter to life (he has the entire Harry Potter & Lord of the Rings collections among others…be jealous). Of course, no time yet for sitting around watching movies, although it’s been great for the start of football season, but I’m sure once those snow-storms of the New England winter set in, I’ll be piled up right here on this couch plenty happy to stay inside 24/7. There was some disagreement about who would take which rooms, but everything is good now & it seems that we are all content with the way things worked out (I will post a tour of the house sometime soon…)

Well, yet again, I feel that I’ve gone overboard with details on this post, so I’ll save more on my career plans for a later date, but I have to mention at least our trip to Fenway Park, the oldest, still-in-operation baseball stadium in the U.S. There’s not a bad seat in the house & even though we arrived a little late to a Tuesday night game against the Angels due to savoring some excellent Fish ‘n Chips and Shepherd’s Pie at The Druid in Inman Square, the game was all it was billed to be: Big Papi in all his glory (That’s David Ortiz for you baseball illiterates), Boston accents yelling epithets from every side, a grand-slam homer! & refreshments almost just as overpriced as the Braves games at home. But, the stadium itself has maintained that age-old, take-me-out-to-the-ballgame feel that has been lost on the new stadium (with a name like Turner Field who are we kidding anyway…) in Atlanta & I can definitely say that the opportunity of seeing one of the oldest clubs in America play on their home turf was unforgettable.

Hope you enjoy these pictures & 1 video below!
 

In Hahvahd Yahd...

Harvard Square

Memorial Hall (Built after the Civil War as a memorial to the soldiers)

Mine is the 2nd from right (ha!)

Riding the Greenway along Memorial Drive on Cambridge side of Charles River

Guess who loaned me on of his Thrift-store tank-tops?

Incredible place for a bike-ride...

River Park near Science Museum

Don't remember who he is, but nice modern cubist sculpture...

Brookline, at the mouth of Olmstead Park

Boston University's Boat House

The face of pure baseball bliss...

Thanks for playing, come again...

“…from 13 original colonies…” Part II

Now that I have described some of the background as to why I am living Boston for the year, I would like to give a brief recap and show some pictures of the road trip from Dalton to Boston. As I mentioned, my friend J.D. had agreed to accompany me & so we decided that since his sister had just provided him with a brand-new nephew in D.C., that we would stop in that area for a few days, so he could see the new baby & I could take the opportunity to visit family in VA, where one of my cousins who lives abroad was also visiting with her newest addition to the family…a baby boy!

Our journey was set to begin first thing in the morning on Wednesday, August 11th. But, as often happens with long road-trips and big moves, first thing turned into about 11 o’clock, after we had finally stuffed the last few things into the jam-packed trailer and somehow pulled that door shut. It really feels like quite an accomplishment when you can compact all of your earthly belongings into a 5X8 U-Haul trailer (with the exception of those few boxes of books and some furniture at Mom & Dad’s…thanks!) The drive to Virginia was for the most part uneventful and the conversation never dulled. J.D. had spent the summer in Portland for an internship in Landscape Architecture while I had been teaching one last Spanish course in Athens, so there was plenty to catch up on…and good thing too, since neither one of us had organized any iPod action for the trip and good radio stations were few and far between.

Just starting out...

We finally arrived at my aunt and uncle’s farm around 9 o’clock, which was just in time for supper…grilled salmon and shrimp served on the patio by the pool; an incredibly delicious and refreshing meal was just what we needed after 9 hours cramped in the jeep. This meal set the stage for the few days I was to spend there with my extended family. Great company and conversation, excellent food and wine and best of all, the chance to spend time my newest little cousin, who had travelled all the way from South America (with mom, dad and big sis of course) at only 3 months old!

The one snafu to this idyllic country life came when I was nearly killed (or so it seemed to me at the time) by a huge (ok Lou, maybe not that big…) tree that fell across the one-lane dirt road directly in front of me as I was out driving one day through a tornado style thunderstorm that happened up one afternoon (here's the evidence...)

Taken afterwards, had already been cut from across the road...

Looking back, it would seem, even to me, that I am blowing this experience out of proportion, but for anyone that has been caught out in their car in a tornado or been at the beach during a hurricane, you can understand what I was feeling at that moment, which is all that matters at the time. This experience makes the 4th time that my life has flashed before my eyes…the other 3 all involve being held under water; twice by sweeping river rapids (remember the time at Fall Creek Falls Mom?) or being held under a capsized kayak, not being able to find the skirt release cord (thanks Greggy!) I don’t remember so much what I was thinking or feeling in these moments when they happened to me as a child, but since two of these events have occurred in the last year, I can say that both times, I definitely sensed the possibility of my imminent death. At first, this provoked panic, increasing my heart-rate, spurring on the use of adrenaline by my nervous system (which is probably to thank for me finding that release cord and the driving reflexes to avoid that tree), but then also, I guess almost simultaneously, a feeling of peace and release as I uttered what I thought to be my last prayer to God, committing myself to His will and thinking about those most important to me, my immediate family (Mom, Dad, sister & brother). However real or imagined these fears might be to a casual observer, I believe the outcome has always produced a positive effect on my thinking; that is, causing me to evaluate my life at a given moment in time & to remind me of what’s most important in life. This experience, along with a conversation with my cousin Lou (who was born only 12 weeks before me) about how we are “getting older” & what our ideas are for the future in regards to starting a family, seemed to provide me with more needed focus relating to the questions I had been struggling with about my future career.

So…on Saturday, I reluctantly hooked the trailer back up, left the farm, drove into D.C. where I dropped off my Cousin-in-Law and his daughter for their flight back to S. America and then headed over to J.D.’s sister’s house for the evening, from where we would leave the next day to drive the rest of the way up the coast to Boston. J.D. had been loving the visit with his sister & brother-in-law and meeting his new nephew & it was great for me to see yet another young family so happy together as they begin to grow. The supposed 7 hour drive from D.C. to Boston in actuality took about 10, 3 of which were spent moving at a snail’s pace through NYC…which I vow NEVER to do again…The New Jersey Turnpike and the George Washington Bridge might possibly be a major cause of suicide in the Northeast, as evidenced by the road-signs that say “Call now!” and give the number of the suicide-hotline…we called, but being put on hold was just not what we needed right then! We did eventually make it to our final destination, where the incredible sunset view of Cambridge and the Charles River suddenly made the whole day more than worth it (see last picture below). 

NYC's gonna be a piece of cake...

Doesn't seem so dismal yet...

Ok, stand-still traffic before the bridge is not a good sign!

Hard to imagine that people live their whole lives here in the Bronx...

On the GW bridge (2 hours later...)

Ah...Connecticut seems like an oasis...

Coming into Boston...

The pay-off!

Coming soon (again)...Touring Boston on bicycle, 1st time at Fenway Park, meeting the new roommates, dropping out of school (it did happen), etc. (I didn’t realize it would take 3 posts to get through all of this…bear with me!)

“…from 13 original colonies…” Part I

As a kid anywhere in the United States, at some point you’re going to hear (and possibly memorize) one of the various songs from pop culture that names all of the states in our “nifty” union of 50. I would venture to say, however, that most of us never have the chance, or indeed are not even interested in visiting most of those places we sing about…they just seem so far away from our own experience that they might as well be in a foreign country. I once was asked, along with the rest of Dr. Davis’ Intro to Sociology class at Harvard on the Highway (aka Dalton State College or simply “the Jr. College,” if you didn’t know…) to draw a map of the United States from memory with a time-limit of about 3 minutes. The results of this seemingly easy task were stunning across the board in that all of our quick sketches reflected that we somehow believed that the Deep South took up about ¾ of the country and the rest was made up of only California, Washington State & Maine. In most cases, Texas, if it appeared at all, was about ¼ the size of Georgia & you could forget about finding the Midwest at all, much less the smaller (read: insignificant) states of New England, such as Connecticut, Rhode Island or Vermont. After all, for most of the people in that class, our travels up to that point had only consisted in camping or road trips from Georgia to Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina or summer trips to the beach (always in Florida, Georgia or South Carolina), so our sense of placement of the rest of the states in the U.S. was slim to none. Only in the last several years, after having graduated from college, working a “real” job and then giving up said job to go back to grad-school, have I begun to break out of the cocoon that was my limited experience and book-knowledge-only of the rest of the country outside our beloved South.

And so it is that I begin a year of writing about my experiences living in New England; on one hand as a way of keeping my friends and family up to date with what I’m up to here and on the other, as a way of sorting through the personal impressions I have of this different culture and reflecting upon the changes that occur in myself as a result of living in a new place. Already, as I was making my way up here with my “vintage” Jeep Cherokee, a U-Haul trailer & an old friend who agreed to help me out in return for a free road trip up the Eastern Seaboard (Thanks J.D!), the very central purpose of why I was moving began to be questioned & evaluated, leading to yet another change of direction in my life. It all began about 2 years ago, when as my Master’s degree in Romance Languages was drawing to a close. I began to wonder if I had given up too soon (at 19 years old, after barely 1 year of college) the dream I had of becoming a medical doctor, which sprang from a trip I had taken at 16 years old with a medical mission team to a Hurricane-Mitch-ravaged Honduras. So, setting out to prove to myself that it could be done and to make sure I didn’t wake up at 50 years old and always regret never having given it a try, I embarked on a post-baccalaureate pre-medical program (sounds frightening, I know!), in which I would take all of the necessary sciences (which had always terrified me) required to enter med school. The idea was that I would study one year at the University of Georgia, taking General Chemistry and Physics while teaching Spanish full-time to pay the bills. Then, I would complete the Health Careers Program the following year (that would be this year) at Harvard Extension School, in order to obtain their sponsorship on my medical school application. All of this had been going surprisingly smoothly since the sciences do not come easy for me, but throughout the past year, never a day went by that I did not question my goal of becoming a doctor, wondering if I were making the right choice.

Coming soon...The trip through the original colonies with my buddy, J.D., stopping at Aunt & Uncle’s farm in VA, touring Boston on bicycle, 1st time at Fenway Park, meeting the new roommates, dropping out of school before it even started, etc.