Safe Traveling

On a summer evening in 1979 a VHF radio rasped a few feet from my ear. A week earlier, freshly hired off the dock in Petersburg, Alaska, I was the “greenhorn” — someone new to commercial fishing. The skipper and I were on a four-hour wheel-watch, rummy and exhausted from days of little sleep. This old “cannery boat” Libby No. 10 was built when fisherman were shorter people. My head touched the ceiling beams in the wheelhouse and galley.

At night the marine-VHF radio operator would connect call to the ships at sea—and callers were queued up, awaiting their turn. The Libby No. 10 was about fifty feet in length, not a “ship,” but she floated on the inland sea of the Alexander Archipelago. A good VHF antenna would allow about half of Southeast Alaska to listen to the calls, but the marine operator blocked half of the conversation for some modest privacy. The skipper and crew might received heartfelt news from lovers and family. The big salmon tenders called-in to the distant processing plants located in Excursion Inlet, Ketchikan, and Petersburg — reporting the tonnage of pink salmon aboard, fish they had purchased from boats like ours.

In the radio chatter, one parting expression was new to me. Mistakenly, I assumed it was common only to mariners. As the call ended, instead of good bye I heard “safe traveling.” As in: “Roger that, skipper and safe traveling back to you.”

No longer on dry land, now aboard an old, rolling, poorly-maintained “cannery boat,” safe traveling was my own fervent hope. A wish for good luck, the skipper’s sound judgement and a prayer of sorts. It made perfect sense and in the intervening half-century, I’ve learned that rural Alaskans think a lot about safety when traveling, whether on foot, on the water, flying, or by snow machine.

Visualize bitter cold and two skin-clad families long ago. They embrace with their eyes and hearts bound in abiding love. Remember the elders and what they taught us. May we someday share another camp.

To you and your loved ones, I offer this same timeless wish for safety. This website contains a book-length, science-based writing project. It’s a story of the human body, modern culture, our hazardous retail terrain — and the disease pandemic that surrounds we Americans everyday — one that is expected to have a total economic impact of $47-trillion over the next 15 years. My motives are complex. Now in my mid-60’s, of course I want to stay healthy, but I hope to educate. As a former science and math teacher, I am saddened by watching “kids” I knew years ago when they were healthy, athletic, smart-asses, now aging into chronic disease. And I get to watch some of their own kids get sick too. That’s heartbreaking!

Now in any given U.S. high school classroom, most students will know someone who is type-2 diabetic—a disease largely caused by lifestyle. In my childhood years (the 1960’s and 1970’s) that number would have been near zero. Currently, the lives of about one-third of U.S. adults are affected by high blood sugar, including 40-million who are diabetic (many undiagnosed). Based on current national disease statistics, by 2050 57-percent of U.S. adults will be classified as obese (BMI 30 or higher), a statistic that will include the children in school today. Current U.S. obesity stands at about 40-percent, including the roughly 10-percent who are severely obese.

What’s that say about “school” and society? The place call “school” operates within a profoundly unwell society and they are not exactly succeeding in their mission to launch productive, capable, “life-long learners”, etc. My view is that they have neither embraced the threats, nor the opportunity for change. Rather, along with the many wonderful things schools accomplish, they also foster a populous that is not fully capable of avoiding — avoidable — life-shortening disease. That’s a pretty major failure.

Here in my home of Alaska, schools are staffed with wonderful, hardworking, underpaid educators. Like our society, schools don’t appreciate — and to a large extent are not addressing — the omnipresent, slow-rolling chronic disease pandemic. Many teachers, families and students alike, acquiesce or are overwhelmed by the paid commercial speech (bullshit) and marketing that amplifies the need to buy and consume unhealthy “food.”

And unhealthy food (and its addiction) is but the tip of the iceberg. Sedentary lives, screen-time, “social” media, the lack of exercise, the lack of sleep — all chronic stressors — plus social isolation that conspires against our being healthy, living to our full potential, and achieving our God-given health-span.

When I’ve been asked, “Burl, who is your audience?” I always answer the same — you and your family.  I wish you health, long life, and safe traveling. I am not a doctor and have never worked in the medical field. I am a senior citizen, science nerd, a health coach, and deeply concerned.

Burl Sheldon, Haines, AK