Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings April 2017 - 242

John Keats felt likewise and summed up my feelings when
he wrote, "Give me books, fruit, French wine and ﬁne weather."
Notice that he listed books ﬁrst.
TRAVEL
The world has certainly shrunk in my lifetime. In high
school I recall riding a bus to nearby Green Bay on spring
break. My 16-year-old granddaughter went to Patagonia this
past spring.
I began to travel when our children were young. There were
places I wanted to see before I became too elderly or debilitated.
I was motivated to begin early, during my medicine residency,
when a colleague developed leukemia and died 3 months later,
his dreams and goals unfulﬁlled. I also encountered patients who
desired to travel after retirement, only to develop a stroke or
cancer that made such plans unattainable. I would try to seize
the moment, avoid procrastination, and learn all that I could
in journeys to the seven continents.
I found that travel was a wonderful way to shrink the world.
When I read of events in Berlin, I think of Wolfgang Barth, a
physician-colleague in the former East Berlin. When troubles
ﬂare in Bosnia, I reﬂect on a beautiful day in Mostar, viewing
young daredevils diving oﬀ the Stari Most Bridge, built in 1566
by Suleyman the Magniﬁcent. The splendid stone structure had
lasted for 424 years. It would exist for only 3 more years before
it was destroyed by a mindless Croatian bomber, a symbol of
the destruction that was permeating every facet of that country's society. When apartheid ended, I was happy for Dr. Tim
Noakes, a friend in Cape Town, and for the residents I met in
Soweto, outside Johannesburg, who now had the potential to
be truly free. When Nepal suﬀered the terrible earthquake in
May 2015, I could empathize, for we had trekked through some
of the Himalayan villages that had been devastated (Figure 2).
As Tennyson wrote:
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world
. . . for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.

Figure 2. With my wife, Marilyn, enjoying (?) a trek to the Mt. Everest base camp.
242

I am occasionally asked what propels me to travel to remote
regions of the world, dealing with the inconveniences of third
world countries, enduring seasickness, foods teeming with
Coliform bacteria, and high-altitude illness. Why do people
climb mountains, other than that "they are there"? Maybe Rene
Daumal said it best:
You cannot stay on the summit forever,
You have to come down again . . .
So why bother in the ﬁrst place?
Just this: what is above knows what is below,
But what is below does not know what
Is above.
One climbs, one sees. One descends.
One sees no longer: but one has seen.

My family and I have fortunately seen some incredible things:
the ink-black sky and radiant stars, with snow-capped Himalayan
peaks soaring 25,000 feet or more on either side of the glacier; the
ﬁrst view of the Matterhorn through our hotel window in Zermatt;
Masai warriors, trekking up to our game park in Kenya to view the
placenta of a newborn elephant, an act said to bring good luck;
the little wave of an Israeli shepherd boy, as our van followed a
twisting road beneath his pastureland; the breathtaking view of the
illuminated Parthenon, as I sipped red Boutari wine from a rooftop
restaurant; the harbor of Portoﬁno, the walled city of Dubrovnik,
the ﬁords of Milford Sound, Chateau Pontet Canet in Bordeaux.
I have seen. And I plan to keep seeing, whenever the
opportunity arises. I share the spirit T.S. Eliot wrote about in
"Little Gidding":
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the ﬁrst time.

HEROES
It's good to have heroes. As mentioned earlier, my father
was the main reason I went into medicine. In sports, my ﬁrst
football hero was Doak Walker, Southern Methodist University
Heisman Award winner in 1949. I read Doak's autobiography
when I was 10 and decided afterward to become a triple-threat
left halfback too (7). I even wore Doak's number (37) one season. Even today I honor him by using his name or number in
my electronic medical password.
When I was 14, the Boston Braves moved to my home state
of Wisconsin. I admired their young second baseman-outﬁelder,
Hank Aaron. Little could I have imagined that years later I
would become his personal physician (Figure 3).
One has to realize that heroes are, indeed, human. It cannot
be easy to be one. Emily Dickinson wrote:
I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
How dreary to be somebody
How public, like a Frog
To tell your name the lifelong day
To an admiring bog! (8)

Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings

Volume 30, Number 2

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