(Here reader is a condensed, Readers Digest like, version of the book I'm hopeful of writing should I succeed in surmounting laziness, disorganization, and questionable ability)

I suspect we all carry a vision of how our futures are likely to unfold. Being an emotionally labile sort, I had two. On sunnier days I anticipated enjoying sterling health into my golden years, happy as a clam, financially secure, maybe a grandchild or two. It seemed likely I'd meet a peaceful end at an advanced age, regretting nothing and surrounded by a multitude of loved ones. On those other days I imagined an untimely and unpleasant demise, broke and alone in a tawdry single occupancy motel on a frontage road outside of Toledo. Such has been my inclination towards extremes. As the years passed and catastrophe remained at bay, I began to trust more in the rosier scenario. My sense of entitlement to a placid old age seemed entirely reasonable. Hadn't I, for the most part, carried my own weight. I'd worked, paid taxes, voted, and on occasion put my shoulder to the collective community wheel. Admittedly, there were legitimate questions regarding my conduct as a younger man, but I mean, fair is fair.

This is a story that encompasses ten year period of my life. It begins in March of 1995. I was forty-five, married and I'd recently been present at the birth of my second child. After a prolonged period of medical inquiry my Neurologist told me I had Multiple Sclerosis. As the reader might guess, I found this pronouncement troubling. Multiple Sclerosis I was told, was a chronic, progressive illness. They weren't sure what caused it, didn't know how to fix it, and couldn't predict where it would take me. And to further dim my hopes that any of these questions might be resolved soon, I was disabused of the long held belief that Jerry Lewis pitched for this team. And here, reader is an unflattering admission. When I encounter misfortune or bad luck I have an almost reflexive inclination to look around for others worse off than myself. It's not something I'm proud of but I'm strangely comforted by the many ready examples. At about this time I read that Christopher Reeves, Superman himself, had fallen off of his horse. Now that, I told myself, that constitutes a real problem. Multiple sclerosis, I told myself consolingly was hardly the worst thing that could befall the complacent boomer. It probably wasn't even in the upper tier of misfortunes. It didn't, for instance, kill you.

What it did do, and almost immediately, was throw that assumed rosy future into the hopper. My illness, I was reassured by those trained in the art of reassurance didn't necessarily mean that my future would be any more troublesome than it might have been absent the affliction, but it did pretty much insure it would be different. Much of how this future would be writ, they told me, depended on me. I did not view this as good news.

The reader needn't be alarmed. This is not intended to be a maudlin account of physical decline, nor will it be of the "brave guy stoically faces down chronic illness" sort. It's more, I think, in the genre of the medical mystery. To further reassure those of you who instinctively balk at anything hinting at sorrow, I've decide to divulge the surprise ending right here at the onset. It is this: as I punch these keys, ten years into this illness, I'm physically at a rather sorry low. I am, however more content with my life than I've ever been. Noone, dear reader could be more surprised, or more puzzled by this acknowledgment than I. It's certainly not what I'd have anticipated. Those of you from the "buck up boy" school of crisis management may imagine that I've reached down deep and drawn from a store of internal resources to make a silk purse of this sows ear. This may work for some, but I don't think anyone who's known me well would think I harbor such reserves. I do know and admire such people, the sort herald for turning their lemons into lemonade. But in all candor, I'm more of a "folder" when confronted with adversity. This, I read in the literature, is not the ideal place to be situated when afflicted with chronic illness. The better candidate has ready reserves of will, courage, tenacity, and independence. These unfortunately have proven to be my weak suits. Experts on these matters, think it important that the bearer of bad tidings strive to "adjust and accommodate" to his/her changed circumstances. Professional wisdom further suggests that there are predictable and unavoidable tasks inherent in such accommodation. Some are practical, some more what we'd term emotional or psychological. All of this, of course, comes well after the afflicted persons initial panic. My first response was pretty much in step with the Hierarchy of Human Needs posited by the father of humanistic psychologist, Abraham Maslowe. I wondered if I could still afford lunch. Later I was beset by the more abstract concerns; a creeping perception that I'd lost control over the direction of my life and a fear that I was likely to lose many of the things that had always defined me.

The question I wish to explore through the telling of this story is how we might account for my inexplicable contentedness in light of my very real woes. I have my suspicions, and they do not point to personal resiliency. The answer I believe lies in circumstances and events set in play by illness, but largely occurring outside of any conscious intention. This is fortunate because my conscious intentions have a very bad track record. A convergence of events really, part serendipity and part hard science. The story may be read by the poets among you
as unassailable proof of the transformative potential of place. Those of a more scientific mind might see it as testimony to the brains incredible plasticity and adaptability. I think both are true. My brain, the very same organ that so often locks my car keys in the car, appears to have risen to the insult of neurological illness. When lesions destroyed particular paths, particular ways of doing things it, it seemed to invent new ones. When physical limitations made certain favored activities impossible it seemed to alter it's preferences. One could argue that even as my antibodies ran amuck gnawing insatiably on my central nervous system, my brain was busying itself fashioning a new me. My brain, he's clearly no quitter.

This is equally a story about my relationship with a small island and the people who live there. Washington Island, pop. 650, floats in Lake Michigan , six nautical miles off the northeastern most point of Wisconsin. I first visited the Island more than twenty years ago. My heart took up permanent residence there sometime after I was diagnosed. One thing led to another, and before long I was building a house, performing in the community theater, and writing clever little ditties for the island newspaper. What, the reader might reasonably wonder, does a place, charming island though it may be, have to do with chronic illness? It has, I think more to do with the contentedness part than with the sickness part. I'm convinced that limping into this little world, with clipped wings as it were, figured prominently in my ability to cope with my changed circumstances. That this island was available to serve as the template for my reconfiguration was largely coincidental. I'd been given to fleeting infatuations with people and places before, but no place had gripped me like this. Preoccupation with all things Island affixed itself to me like gum to a tennis shoe. I've come to believe that this was orchestrated by a part of me far wiser than the captain who normally pilots my ship. Readers less willing to concede serendipity or unconscious influences will likely conclude that I was just damn lucky.

There is, I believe, a related consideration necessary to the unpuzzling of my little mystery. Here we move to terrain more the province of poetry than hard science. I've come to believe that islands themselves hold the potential change people, that they enable a person to experience life with a heightened sensitivity. There's no hard science to validate my belief but there's lots of good literature. Homers epic poem the Odyssey, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, Peter Pan, The Swiss Family Robinson, the list goes on and on. Huck Finn knew where to go when things got dicey. Poet/ essayist Bill Holms, in his book Eccentric Islands, attempts to shed light on the mystery and power of islands. He believes that a predictable and risky process is set in play should you find your way to an island. They encourage what is truly important in our lives to surmount their illusory competitors and come to the fore of our awareness. Islands, Bill contends, compel us to think about who and what we are, and what may have gone wrong. Some of my favorites return again and again to islands. British writer Lawrence Durell coined the term "islomania"to explain the peculiar feeling that seizes his characters when they become islanded. Novelist John Fowles muses that islands are "special places, where the unconscious grows conscious, where possibilities mushroom, where the imagination never sleeps". These are not recently conceived sentiments. Early Celtic spiritual leaders revered islands as 'thin places', where this world and the world of the spirits came in closest proximity. Places, they believed, where a person was most likely to experience God's presence. I'm not a religious man, but I've had moments on my little Island when this belief rang exquisitely true. It seems entirely possible, dear reader, that our story has at it's heart, not one, but two maladies. All measurable indicators seem to confirm that I have contracted a very serious, possibly life saving strain of Islomania.

Induction into the subculture of the chronically ill carries with it certain responsibilities. I am obliged, for instance, to follow prescribed medical advice. I receive this counsel during my regular visits with my Neurologist. I'm told Doc Brooks is something of a giant in his field and I'm fortunate to have him on my team. He doesn't like to rush people, he never appears impatient when I prattle on and on. He's the kind of doctor we like to pretend characterizes the profession, but in truth are pretty rare. His sister has MS, which I think imbues him with a special sensitivity to my predicament. My visits invariably entail a lengthy wait in the clinic's waiting room. Giants, after all, are busy people. On my most recent visit the available reading choices were Golf Digest, Conde Nest Travel and Runners World. Neurologists it would appear, are a sturdy, well traveled lot. Neurology waiting rooms on the other hand, are the home court of the lame and the infirm. The old guy dozing in his wheelchair appeared as disinterested as myself in news that light weight carbon fiber materials could cut at least two strokes from our games. Doc Brooks only treats two illnesses, mine and one called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS, sometimes referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease. The latter is a truly grim illness, and his willingness to take it on as his life's work strikes me as courageous. Seeing the ALS patients in the waiting room invariably prompts me to count my blessings.

Some time back, when the various medical specialties divvied up the spoils of the unhealthy, Multiple Sclerosis became the purview of Neurology. Just speculation, but this specialty may be a particularly seductive refuge for the socially phobic. It's practitioners are narrowly focused on the minutia and schemata of the brain, on those thousands of tiny areas responsible for every aspect of our perception and behavior. The actual person hosting these intriguing component parts is of somewhat lesser fascination. My first Neurologist, the one who originally diagnosed me, appeared to have no discernable personality at all. I'm sure he was a capable scientist but I only glimpsed life when he launched into an animated account of my neural misfires. But Neurology was not always as narrowly focused as it is today. In earlier days it was viewed as the "romantic science" . The good Dr. Freud himself was trained as a Neurologist. Earlier practitioners like Russian A.R. Lurias, embraced a more all encompassing view of neurological disorder. He believed that when the central nervous system was thwarted by injury or illness the patients brain reflexively set about to reconstruct a coherent "self"or identity. Understanding the individuals unique compensatory response , how they went about reestablishing a "self" was essential to understanding the totality of their illness. Towards this end, Neurologists wrote rich, descriptive clinical narratives in their efforts to understand their patient's unique identities, and how their identities had changed. The difference in emphasis between these pioneers and the Neurologists of today is not simply attributable to the technical advances in biochemistry. It's an old argument about what constitutes the human in a human being that begun 2500 years ago between Plato, the poet and mythologist and Aristotle, the lover of minute concrete particulars. Writer/Neurologist Oliver Sachs has sought to revive the approach of those earlier "romantic" scientists. He describes his narrative accounts of neurological disorder as tales of metamorphosis, as scientific fables. They represent forays into internal worlds seldom glimpsed.

Well, I thought, this makes sense to me. My little neurological predicament obviously pales in comparison to the exotic situations described by Sachs. But, having been the sole inhabitant of this mind and body, I didn't feel my medical file adequately reflected my experience of recent years. What I needed was my own scientific fable, one, I hoped, that would cast me in a rather heroic, archetypal role. Doc Brooks, however, was a busy guy and this appeared a labor intensive undertaking. Undoubtedly a big bucks out of pocket expense. I checked in the patient handbook provided me by my HMO. I was curious as to their policy regarding the scientific fable. It was mute on the topic suggesting the procedure had not yet taken it's place in the all encompassing "DENIED: PROCEDURE NON ESSENTIAL" section. I looked in the handbooks other section, the "SUPERFLUOUS BITS OF WHIMSY NOT WARRANTING A FORMAL DENIAL" to the same end. It appeared that my interest was still way too "cutting edge". If my fable was to be written, it would fall to me to write it.

I have very modest aspirations for this tome. Ideally, I will finish the story, self publish a dozen copies and have them displayed prominently on the counter at my favorite haunt, The Red Cup Coffeehouse on Washington Island. I am not so presumptuous as to believe anyone will actually purchase the book, although I'm not averse to the possibility. I would hope it is occasionally picked up and thumbed through. When my churlish buddy Mike, the owner of the Red Cup, is asked by a tourist, "what's this book, is it any good?", he'll reply " don't know, didn't read it, there's supposed to be something about me in there that may be worth lookin at". This I will view as high praise. There is no ones benign disinterest and halfhearted approval I value more than my good friend Mikes. My ongoing responsibility, one likely to require long hours at the coffeehouse, will be to rotate the copies periodically until all twelve e become a bit soiled and have begun to evidence wear. I will then declare the 1st addition out of print, satisfied that my message has reached all for whom it seemed destined.

Why, you may be asking yourself as you stand patiently thumbing through this book at the Red Cup counter waiting on your skinny double latte w/hazelnut to walk, bother writing a book if you don't expect anyone to buy it or read it? This is an excellent question. You might want to take a moment and allow the robust steam of that latte to waft into your nostrils while I formulate a deserving response. I relish these rare opportunities to interact with my thumbers. As to my motivation for writing, the idea has tugged at me for quite some time. It occurred to me that my story might be somewhat heartening to others arriving at illnesses doorstep as ill prepared as myself. That possibility however, didn't seem to justify the time and effort it would require. But still, there was that pesky tug. I was watching Charley Rose on late night TV when I heard my elusive motivation voiced by his guest. Charley was deftly interviewing the author of a recent book award. He asked her what motivated her to write. She replied "I write to find out what I'm thinking". In a moment of perfect clarity I understood that the aforementioned tug had come from the tangled morass that masquerades as my thought processes. Ridding myself of that tug would require unraveling my experience, laying it out in sequential order to see what could be made of it. I would have to, lazy man though I am, write a book.

I believe we've now established the broad parameters of this effort. You'll agree, I'm sure, that it's an ambitious undertaking. The very breadth of it gives me pause regarding a promise made earlier. It may be necessary to include a modest sprinkling of maudlin content after all. But only, and on this I'm firm, in sufficient quantity to inject a bit of that gritty realism so valued in contemporary storytelling. The reader, should he venture further, may also have some questions about the frequent and far reaching asides that I've chosen to include. To this I can only say that I have it on the best of authority, that being my unconscious, that all of these forays are necessary to an adequate portrayal of the multiple sclerosis that is Dan Baker

My spouse has raised the possibility that you, the thumber, might be unfamiliar with the part of the world from whence this treatise comes. That you might be someone unacquainted with the remote corner of Wisconsin to which I allude, perhaps with the whereabouts of our great state altogether. I"ll admit, I was momentarily flattered by her belief that my little book might stray so far from the neighborhood. But alas, she hadn't envisioned it gracing the window of a quaint bookshop somewhere in the Northwest. She thought it more likely that a cohort, after a cursory perusal, would abandon their complementary copy in an airport somewhere. Then, she reasoned, it could fall into the possession of someone with strictly bi-coastal proclivities. So, for the benefit of those who may have unexpectedly come into possession of this text and are currently aloft we are approximately mid point across that huge and amorphous land mass visible from your window. This vast expanse of terrain is colloquially known as the heartland. Its referred to as the heartland because it's chock full of goodness. We see you up there, smug in your overflight, and we are only bemused by your patronizing view of us. We know, but for your inability to tolerate even the smallest of inconvenience, that you'd be swarming our small towns and cities. Winter may have its downside, but it's a great screening device. Though such a distinction may seem to you splitting hairs, we here in Wisconsin take pride in being a part of the heartlands blue, northern sector.

My daughter Janey is a part of the Y generation and she tells me that she and her compatriots favor a more "interactive medium" to that of the written word. In an effort to bridge this gulf, and so that we might further refine our geography, I'll ask you to do the following: Place your left hand flat on the table, your fingers together and the tip of your thumb about one inch from your index finger. You have before you an approximate map of Wisconsin. Your thumb represents the Door County Peninsula that extends northeast from Wisconsin proper into Lake Michigan. Between your thumb and forefinger is the body of water known as Green Bay. Washington Island lies six nautical miles or a half an hour ferry ride above the tip of your thumb. North of your pinky and it's neighbor is another of the great lakes, Lake Superior. On the far north side of that lies the civilized land of Canada.. This is where any sensible American with a concern for their well-being claims to hail from when traveling beyond our national borders. North of your retributive and index fingers is a part of Michigan known as the Upper Peninsula. This is land that was mistakenly ceded to, or swindled by, Michigan a long time ago. Efforts to right this wrong have come to naught. OK, you can pick up your hand now, I believe we are adequately fixed in time and place and we can get on with the story....