Terrible Analogies

It’s been nearly two years since I had back surgery.

At the time I couldn’t tell you how I injured my back.  I went to bed one night, and the next morning I simply couldn’t move.  What I was experiencing was a singularly unique form of pain.  If I had to describe it, concentrating the feeling into a pointed description, I would have to say that it felt as if a doomed wild beast had a death grip on my lower spine, claws sunk deep in the bone, twisting my nerves out by their roots while I lay on my stomach nearly paralyzed, unable to roll over to defend myself from this ferocious, invisible attacker.

After twenty minutes of incremental attempts I was finally able to fall out of bed and crawl to the cell phone where I called in sick for work.  An hour later I had somehow managed to make it to my feet, where I stood hunched over like an old man with a century’s worth of regret on his shoulders, slowly shuffling forward as I inched my way around the kitchen trying to make sense of just what the hell was happening to me.

To make a long story stuffy, I saw my doctor who referred me to a surgeon who scheduled an immediate MRI.  As soon as the surgeon saw my MRI he booked me for surgery.  A week later I was being wheeled down a hospital corridor, needles resting in my veins with a concoction of beautiful drugs swiftly blanking out reality.  During all the commotion I was more worried about Karin than I was about the upcoming surgery because I could see through her brave front, as she held my hand, that she was feeling sick to her stomach seeing me like that.  

Afterwards, when I woke up in my hospital bed, the doc told me that he had never seen anything like that before.  Apparently, some form of benign growth had latched itself around my lower spine, fiendishly compressing the nerve (see MRI below).

Let me tell ya, with all honesty, that’s something I never want to experience again.

It took me a year to fully heal from the surgery.  I’m still careful while lifting weights, but at least I’ve recovered.  I’m now benching 330lbs and training for a run up Mt. Whitney.  Thank God for modern medicine.  I can’t imagine living 100 years ago and having to suffer with a similar malady.  How someone could have lived with something like this without modern medicine is unimaginable to me.

Circled in red is the odd benign growth that was causing me so much pain

Wandering the narrow, musty isles of a now defunct used bookstore in downtown San Diego, I happened upon an oddly shaped tanned book buried deep in one of the hundreds of overflowing and teetering dog-eared shelves.  Sliding it out of the shadows and into the flicker of the florescent lights I flipped it over in my hands and was greeted by an mesmerizing picture of a elderly pipe-smoking Asian from a time long past.  What I was holding was an amazingly well-preserved copy of The International Cultivator’s Handbook written by one William Daniel Drake Jr.

In this book, William Drake discusses the cultivation techniques and serving suggestions for hashish, coca, opium, and cannabis.  Contained within its pages were brilliantly amateurish photos snapped from around the world showing peoples from various cultures growing, harvesting, and ingesting a bevy of exotic and illicit substances.  I instantly fell for the low-fi, xeroxed, and pixilated black & white photos that were shuttered in a time long before computers and Adobe Photoshop existed.  I could imaging this William Drake person traveling the world with nothing more than a Kodak camera and an adventurous desire to understand not only how drugs are manufactured, but also to appreciate the cultures from which these drugs originated from.

Personally I don’t use drugs, but I could appreciate the amount of work that went into this book and the bravery it took to willingly travel into what I’m almost certain were potentially hostile environments.  I’m sure the world was a bit tamer in 1974 when this book was published, but I’m guessing that the dangers and threats from a society dependent on the production of drugs was still tangible and I’m sure very real.

I’ve been wondering what ever became of William Drake.  Has his pace slowed with the years, possibly enjoying his golden years content with the knowledge that he managed to get several books printed in his lifetime, possibly helping to shape the lives of countless numbers of people?  Did he lose his mind or did he find enlightenment?  Would he be available to autograph a copy of one of his books?  Is he still with us, or has he left this mortal coil?

Regardless, to cover all bases and honor his passing/non-passing, here are a selection of the photos found in The International Cultivator’s Handbook (click to embiggen):

UPDATE: William Drake was kind enough to comment on this post, and even offered to sign my copy of this book.  Mr. Drake is still very much active, running an info-heavy web site entitled Smoke And Illusion where you can order an online version of his latest book The Cultivator’s Handbook of Native, Natural Tobacco.

UPDATE 2: Mr. Drake was a man of his word, going out of his way to sign my copy of his book.  Check it out in this post.