My Story

 “Safe Traveling”

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

At night the marine-VHF radio operator would connect callers on land to ships at sea—callers were queued up and awaiting their turn. Our vessel was about fifty feet in length, not a “ship,” but she floated on the inland sea of the Alexander Archipelago. Geographically speaking, with a good radio and antenna, about half of Southeast Alaska could listen in. For some privacy, the marine operator blocked half of the conversation. Skippers and crew members received heartfelt news from lovers and family and the big salmon tenders made calls to their 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 there was a parting expression that was new to me, one I mistakenly assumed was common only to mariners. At the end of the call instead of good bye I heard safe traveling. In reply, “Roger that, skipper. Safe traveling back to you.”

It made perfect sense. No longer on dry land, aboard an old, poorly-maintained “cannery boat,” safe traveling was my own fervent hope — a wish for good luck, sound judgement, and a prayer of sorts. I’ve learned that people in rural Alaska think a lot about safety when traveling, whether on foot, on the water, flying, or by snow machine. Visualize two skin-clad families long ago. They embrace with eyes and hearts locked together 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. The original working title was Food-Sick. It’s a story of the human body, modern culture, medicine, and the “chronic disease” (metabolic disease) epidemic that surrounds us everyday which cost the U.S. $4.05 trillion in 2024. My motives for the writing project are complicated. Now in my mid-60’s, I want to stay healthy, but I hope to educate. As a former science and math teacher I am saddened by watching generations of good people get food-sick in one small Alaska town. Kids who were healthy smart-ass teens aged into chronic disease and now some of their kids are getting sick too.

Today in any given U.S. high school classroom, most students today will know someone who is type-2 diabetic—a disease caused by lifestyle. In my childhood years (the 1960’s and 1970’s) that number would have been nearly zero. Based on current national disease statistics, about 30-percent (or more) of a typical graduating class will themselves become type-2-diabetic. What that says about the place we call “school,” obviously, is that it operates within a profoundly unwell society. And yet, the schools are not succeeding. Rather, they are fostering a populous that is incapable of avoiding — avoidable — life-shortening disease. That’s a pretty major failure.

Schools reflect the society. Alaska schools are staffed with wonderful, hardworking, and underpaid educators. Like society at large, schools don’t fully appreciate, and are not addressing systematically, the epidemic of chronic disease. Students and their teachers alike are absolutely overwhelmed by “free,” commercial speech (bullshit) that amplifies the need to buy and consume unhealthy “food.” And food-sickness is but the tip of the iceberg. Our pandemic of non-communicable disease is also caused by sedentary lives and the lack of exercise, chronic stressors, the lack of sleep, social isolation, and other factors.

Back to my Food-Sick writing project, when someone asks me, “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 science nerd, a health coach, and deeply concerned. You can find the bulk of this science-based writing project under the menu Food and Health. Separate pages with jump-links allow easy browsing and access.

Bon Appetite!

Burl Sheldon