Long Way Down

Flatness For Reals (FFR)

A new day and a new post.

Today, I'm in Killeen, TX on Fort Hood, the largest military installation in the US, perhaps the world. I don't know if that fun fact is current. I've been here about a week working in the ER of Darnall Army Medical Center. Three more to go and then I move 3 hrs south to San Antonio for another month of baking. Actually, steaming is a better adjective. Surprisingly, it's been cool for the past couple days, in the low 80s during the day. But I'm sure it won't last.

Things I want to do or keep doing: 1) Advance daily pushups (45) and crunches (50) by 5 every 3 days. 2) Decide where to do my international rotation and start paperwork. 3) Start/finish ERAS and personal statement. 4) Think about starting a video journal archive. 5) Begin planning for the Long Way Down (lite).....

Long Way Down (lite)

LWDL actually was the end result of a little idea that drank the potion and ballooned into a certified adventure.....

My brother Ben and I were kickin it one day, thinking of things to do next spring after I had graduated from med school and he had finished his junior year of college. At the time, I was home in Chicago for 3 weeks, an unusually long time given the spats of moving I've done for school over the last 3 years. Alas, I was doomed to squander most of my "vacation" studying for board exams, damn them to hell.

Every day I headed to the public library, claimed my real estate and q-banked it up for a disgusting number of hours. I'd look out the floor to ceiling windows and see citizens jogging, moms pushing their strollers over sun-drenched sidewalks, motorcycle cops chug-chugging along on their gleaming mounts. I stopped sitting by the windows.

During one of my many coffee breaks, I stood on the 3rd floor watching the house league soccer teams practicing on the other side of the stream. I went from looking at swarms of kiddies encircling the ball from here to there, to swarms of dragonflies above that stream, to a trio of ducks paddling down the stream, to paddling, paddle boats, boats that paddle, stream boat paddle, iwonderwherethatstreamgoes---

To be honest, I had probably seen that stream thousands of times in my 23 years of living in my hometown. I may have wondered to myself a handful of times, "Self, aren't you curious about where that stream goes after it disappears from your vision underneath the boughs of those trees lining the banks? Don't you want to follow it....no, don't walk thru the window off the 3rd floor, take the stairs."

So I started googling, wikipedia-ing, and mapquesting to learn about this stream. I knew it was a part of the North Branch of the Chicago River, hence the town's name: Northbrook. From there, I was in uncharted territory, heh. Could someone float into the main River? Could you float the downtown? Into the Lake?

And that's when the train left the station. My Rand McNally brain lifted towards the heavens and expanded my view beyond the Chicagoland area. Could you go the other way?

Like any good Chicagoan, I knew that Lake Michigan flowed into the Chicago River, instead of the other way around. Seems odd, right? You can read about how the geniuses at the turn of the century figured out how to reverse the flow of the River in what the American Society of Civil Engineers called "The Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium." Moving on...

With eyes turned west now, I stumbled upon a genuine adventure that was closer than I imagined.

The Mississippi River is the 2nd longest river in the US, part of the largest river system in North America, and the 4th longest in the world behind the Nile, Amazon, and Yangtze. It's name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi ("Great River"). It floated the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Jean-Baptist Point Du Sable, and Mark Twain. I wanted to float Old Man River down to the Gulf. But when?

To be continued....