It's snot what you think

By M. John Fayhee

My sister, who lives in Brrrmont (official state motto (or should be): Almost far enough away from the Mountain Time Zone) is the kind of MD that makes many people of the quasi-aging-hippie demographic thumb through the Witch Doctor section of the Yellow Pages whenever we feel poorly. Or, for that matter, whenever we need open-heart surgery. You know the doctoral kind: Those stethoscope-bearing self-perceived super-humans who will never ever get over the fact that mere diplomas hang on their office walls, rather than certificates of beatitude, or even overt divinity.

My sister fits well into the East, where MDs understand on a deep-down DNA level the most fundamental tenet of the healing arts: Preventative medicine is bad for business. How can you pay for that new Porsche if you preemptively talk to your patients about improving their health before the spam hits the physiological fan?

“Here in the heart of heart rate monitors, we are the most consistently sick populace on earth.”

But my sister’s medical perspectives go deeper than simple economics: She was sufficiently brainwashed by both her alma mater (Eastern Virginia Medical College) and the organization that lays hands, confirmation style, on its members (the venerable AMA), that, whenever she looks any farther west than the pork rind belt, she shakes her head.

When my sister hears from her brother that people in Mountain Country make a habit of formulating, or at least being actively involved in, their own health-care strategies/perceptions, she is of the opinion that we all — every single one of us — might as well cast sheep viscera atop hot rocks and pray to the gods of Delphi for celestial opinions as to our well-being. When she hears that her eldest sibling regularly integrates the services of a massage therapist and an acupuncturist into his health regimen (worse, that he does so in a preemptive, rather than reactionary, way), you can tell she is tempted to drive out here and dump a truckload of Thorazine into our water supply.

Naturally, I make the argument that, by any aggregate measure, the Mountain Time Zone is the healthiest part in the country, and that, by any aggregate measure, the New West real-estate resorts/towns of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and New Mexico are the healthiest parts of the Mountain Time Zone. My sister has visited me here several times (too many), and, because she and I are always looking for old wounds to rip open, our running argument predictably runs back to the way we look at health and well being here in what George Sibley calls Never-Never-Land. I used to live in Brrrmont and remember well that, once you get out of Burlington, what you’ve got is Appalachia with snow. If you could cut-and-paste “yall” over “youse,” you could very well be in Pike County, Kentucky, instead of Rutland. People in most of Brrrmont define “healthy living” as “eating a little less cheese.”

Out West, I tell my scoffing sister, your average barfly is in better shape than most people who are considered athletes in New England. I point out to her body-fat ratios that would be treated as severe malnutrition cases in Brrrmont. I show her 80-year-olds who, instead of using walkers, use Nordic skis 100 days a year. I introduce her to people who speak eloquently about the latest nutritional research, the way people in her neck of the woods talk about the New England Patriots or the Boston Celtics.

Thing is, as I’m self-righteously laying all this on my sister the MD, often as not, everyone in the room is functioning, essentially, as hacking snot factories. The last time my sister was here, it was as though al Qaeda had lobbed snot anthrax into the jet stream and it dispersed throughout the county I then called home. Everyone we came across was hacking, wheezing and sneezing, and the average body temperature was hovering so high, snowbanks were melting as people walked by.

This is, of course, one of the great ironies of resort culture (along with our professed environmental awareness, as long as it doesn’t interfere with our desire to have fun): Here in the heart of heart rate monitors, we are the most consistently sick populace on earth. If a mud-hut village in central Africa had as many sick people as we have on an average Tuesday in Summit County or Alta or Silver City, the U.N. would send in truckloads of disease mitigation specialists wearing full-body bio-suits. The very bar where these words were penned while I was visiting Summit County a few weeks back (’scuse me, while I blow my nose for the 400th time since I began this sentence) ought to have been declared some sort of nasty quarantine zone, except that, there was no need for quarantines, as the entire area was one big sinus emission quagmire.

The most obvious reason for this, of course, is that the Mountain West is a heavily visited area. We get every form of virus, bacteria, foul protozoan and slimy disease-bearing zygote known to man brought to us by the millions of otherwise well-meaning tourists who bring themselves and their fatal, but not fatal enough, bugs to our humble hamlets, where they immediately meet, court and procreate with the other recently imported bugs in one giant bug orgy. By the time all those forms of pestilence and plague percolate and coagulate in our various mountainous petri dishes, we get mutated forms of pathogens that make such wimpy diseases as ebola seem tame by comparison. Ever wonder why the plague, ebola and hantavirus don’t make their way into the High Country? It’s because, if they had to go mano a mano with the resident endemic crud viruses, they would get eaten alive. Survival of the fittest, as it were.

My sister arrogantly points out another possibility, one that may or may not be mutually exclusive of the notion that the Mountain West is the vacation destination-of-choice for every microbe with mal-intent on the face of the planet. She points out that sickness is generally a function of how well one’s immune system is working rather than a function of what pathogens you cross paths with. She contends that, if we as a population out here are as healthy as we believe, then we simply wouldn’t mystically be transformed like clockwork every November into coughing, aching snot factories with dry red faces. Thus, she contends, we are only superficially healthy, or, failing that, partially healthy. My sister contends that healthiness is not measured alone by the ability to ascend a Fourteener; it is concurrently measured by the ability to avoid illness.

She contends that we actually live a more physiologically stressful existence here than most of us believe. Many of us push ourselves physically to the point that recovery time is defined as “doing less” than it is (as it should be) “doing nothing.” She contends that the never-ending fiscal battle most mountain residents endure every minute just to survive takes a significant toll that translates into faulty immune systems. She contends that living in a place that is transformed nearly daily by astounding amounts of building and development is hard on people, as is the traffic and lines at the grocery stores and dealing with the increasing amounts of vacation rage that tourists bring to our various little pieces of phlegm-laden heaven.

I hate it when I am forced to even consider that my sister might have a point. I look back to my now-deceased dad, who, as far as I could tell, never exercised a day in his life. He also never once missed a day of work due to illness. He once told me that it wasn’t that he was tough enough that he worked through illness; rather, it was because he simply never got sick. Of course, he never made it to the top of a Fourteener, either, but, then again, he never wanted to.

There is little doubt in my mind that many people do push it a bit too hard in the Mountain Country. We burn our joint-and-several candles not only at both ends, but simultaneously in the middle as well. And there’s no way that lifestyle reality does not translate into the fact that, while we’re seeing if we can make it to the top of Nutripper Peak and back in less than an hour, we’re leaving trails of nasal emissions in our germ-laden wake. It’s to the point that a lot of us take a masochistic pride in being able to hike all day, then party all night with our body temperature high enough that, should a thermometer find its way into any body orifice, it would likely explode.

What the hell, though. I guess that’s what mountain people are all about. Yin and yang, even if it kills us.

MG