The Beauty In The World
Edie Welty is a unique member of the McCall Hiking Club with a love for the outdoors, and a passion for helping people
Edie’s husband, Tom Welty died in November, 2024 after a battle with prostate cancer.
The charm of McCall is plain to see wherever you go.
Whether it’s a stroll around town, or a hike down a nearby trail, the vibrant greenery, the alpine scenery, and the countless little sounds of the forest are an overwhelming chorus of natural beauty.
Bear Basin is a wonderful example of the harmony that can exist between civilization and nature. The trails are well maintained for hikers, bikers, and even cross-country skiers, but the users are all conscious of their impact on the environment and attempt to minimize it—for the most part.
One of the hikers you might see every now and again is Edith Welty, though she prefers Edie, with her small bag and two hiking poles. She enjoys long walks when she can smell the blooming flowers, the Chickadees are chirping, and the sun feels warm on her face.
“I don’t carry a backpack anymore because I have too much arthritis and other problems from backpacking. But I do still love to hike,” she says.
Edie and her husband, Tom, are members of the McCall Hiking Club and love the community they’ve found since moving to McCall in 2007 to be closer to their daughter.
“It’s great because they know a lot of the trails and the trailheads and even a lot of the hikes that have no obvious trails to get you there,” Edie says.
Along her hikes, Edie only catches glimpses of her surroundings—the green foliage spotted with pink, purple, and yellow. She chats with Tom or a few club members, and all along the way, she keeps her pace steady and deliberate.
Ever since her eyesight began to fade in 2000, she’s had to be a little more careful on hikes.
“I can still see a lot of what is around me, and I use a pair of hiking poles all the time; they’re like my extra eyes, so I’m constantly feeling what’s ahead of me with my hiking poles and trying to keep up with other people in hiking club,” Edie says. “So, I don’t trip too often, but I had to quit running probably three, four years ago because I can’t see things that quickly.”
Blindness is not one specific thing that happens, and sight is not a simple binary—there are several ways vision can fail. For Edie, there is a growing blind spot in the center of her field of view that is shaped like a horizontal football.
“My particular visual problem is similar in location to macular degeneration, which is pretty common, except that they can’t figure out what is causing mine,” Edie says. “When sitting in a car, if you try looking directly at the dashboard and watching the road, you’ll see what I see.”
As a former officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, Edie is more knowledgeable on her codition than most, and she attributes a lot of that to the benefits she received from the Veteran Affairs (VA) and their rehabilitation program.
“They have a fantastic blind rehab program for blinded vets. They teach you when you go there that there are all different kinds of blindness—like people with retinitis pigmentosa lose their peripheral vision usually, but they have central vision. So they can read, but they can’t see what’s around them,” Edie says. “Mine, I can’t read without an aid, but I can pretty well see my surroundings as long as I don’t look directly at them.”
After spending years retraining herself with the help of the VA program and resources, Edie can still read, hike, ski, and enjoy many of the things she has enjoyed throughout her life.
“I definitely will keep hiking and skiing as long as I can—though I sometimes fear for people who may be below me when I’m going ripping down a hill,” she says with a laugh.
The Blind Spots
Edie is constantly scanning her surroundings. She can’t simply rest her gaze directly at what she wants to look at, so she has to look around where she’s going.
“If I’m looking at the trail, I can’t just look right where I’m going to step. I have to look above and below and above and below continuously,” she explains.
The blind spot began to take shape sometime around 2000. Edie first noticed something strange during a medical conference. During one of the presentations, part of the PowerPoint slides seemed to disappear.
There were other odd occurrences over the next few years, but it wasn’t until 2002 when Edie realized it was becoming dangerous.
It was a pitch-black drive along the Snake River. She was heading home to Nampa from a call to a clinic in Homedale, and it was a bit harder to see than usual.
As she cruised onto a bridge, she was shocked to see a pair of headlights coming straight at her. That moment of confusion nearly ended in disaster.
“I almost went off the bridge,” Edie says.
That’s when she started seriously searching for a diagnosis. At first, the best idea was cataract surgery, but as she described the little oddities and divots in her vision, her ophthalmologist instead called for a visual field exam to look for blind spots.
Edie’s blind spots actually started out as rings before they filled in and widened out.
“It was like seeing through the center of the bullseye,” she says.
With that new information, the next step was a differential diagnosis. They checked for brain tumors and found none. They thought it might be the anti-malarial drugs she had taken for her volunteer trips to Cameroon, but that seemed unlikely.
All the while, the blind spots kept growing. For a time, it would be gradual, and then suddenly Edie would notice a big change. Eventually, it became large enough to cover an important part of her vision.
“It’s called the macula, which is the area of your retina that’s your central vision—you read with it and see colors with it,” Edie says.
When she and Tom moved to McCall, another big shift occurred and she decided to stop driving.
“I suddenly realized I can’t really see the sides of the road very well, or the vehicles in front of me very well,” Edie says. “I was lost for what to do. Like it’s getting worse, and I was thinking, ‘how quickly am I going to go completely blind?’ And I was seeing various doctors, having one eye doctor refer me to another kind of eye doctor and then to another and so on, trying to figure out what is causing this.”
Nobody knows. All the countless doctors told her there’s nothing to treat, and there’s no way to prevent it from getting worse.
“So, I don’t know whether I will become, eventually, totally blind or not,” Edie says. “If it stays near the center, I will still have the peripheral dish, but it was really hard to deal with that. At first, I was grasping at straws searching for somebody who can find a diagnosis and can treat it, for goodness sake. And now nobody can treat it.”
Stories
When talking with Edie, it’s difficult not to feel inspired. That’s not because of the hardships she overcame, or the weight of what she endured. It’s the simple way her stories pour out of her, and how her kindness and curiosity pulls a story out of you.
Her interest in helping people began in high school.
“I was on a swim team, if somebody sprained a joint or something, I’d be the one to tape off the joints and give them a muscle massage if they had a sore muscle,” she says.
When Edie left for college, she was set on a physical-therapy program, but a desire to travel and see the world led her toward medicine.
As she and Tom graduated from med school, the Vietnam War was ongoing and the opportunities were frighteningly limited, especially since they had just gotten married.
“We were given the choice of either going to Nam—he would have been drafted, they weren’t drafting women at the time—going to the Bureau of Prisons, or going to the Indian Health Service (IHS). So, it was like a no-brainer.”
The pair of them served in the U.S. Public Health Service under the IHS for more than two decades.
At first, they were assigned to a town called Barrow, Alaska. But before they could move, their assignment changed multiple times, and they eventually landed in Tuba City, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation.
“Most of the adult Navajos didn’t speak English. So, we took courses in Navajo and learned to speak enough Navajo to take a brief history and do a physical exam, but not enough to really get any of the nuances of language,” Edie says. “So, we worked through interpreters a lot of the time.”
Because she and Tom were working within a federal organization, many of the odd barriers between patient and private practice—like billing, office administration, and maintenance—were absent from their relationship with their Navajo patients.
“A lot of doctors now have so many administrative chores, and by the time you get around to taking care of people, you just can’t help as many patients,” Edie says. “We could just concentrate on patient care. Over time, as we learned more and more about the [Navajo] culture and the beauty of their culture—their world view of being in harmony with nature, we just really appreciated that and came to love the culture and the people we worked with.”
The two of them spent 27 years as practicing doctors and helped countless people, but even after they retired in 1997, they applied their skills to help a non-profit healthcare organization in Cameroon, West Africa.
“The Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Services has about 85 facilities in nine of the 10 regions of Cameroon,” Edie says. “So, they provide a huge amount of the medical care in the country. The facilities range from a 200-bed teaching hospital to tiny little primary-care clinics out in the bush.”
Edie and Tom flew there every year up until 2020 to help the local doctors with grant applications, training, and various other projects. It was a whole new world to explore, from the culture to the gorgeous landscape of Central Africa, but it was also more of the same—helping people and learning about their lives.
“To me, and I think to both of us, it’s especially gratifying to see people learn to do all this themselves,” Edie says.
Today, they continue to support the work from afar. The Navajo Nation and other tribes they worked with slowly took over some of their own healthcare, and now in Cameroon, they’re applying for millions in grant money.
“They don’t need us to write grants anymore,” Edie says, excitedly. “They’re getting multi-million dollar grants from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief for HIV prevention and treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission. They’ve got some super grant writers and very highly qualified people there.”
One Step At A Time
Edie loves McCall because she loves being outdoors in any season. Whether you’re strolling in the shade of the trees or stomping around the forest in snowshoes, you might see her out on the trails enjoying all of what nature has to offer.
“We love it, it’s the first place I’ve lived where I like winter and summer about equally well,” Edie says with a laugh. “How many places can you live where you’ve got three or four different places that have groomed trails, and you can just go out in the woods and ski or snowshoe?”
Edie grew up on the East Coast, and while she fell in love with backpacking at an early age, skiing left much to be desired.
“My husband doesn’t like downhill skiing anymore, and since I can’t see to read the signs, we’re mostly into Nordic skiing,” Edie says. “But my grandson keeps saying, ‘I’ll take you down, I won’t take you over anything you can’t do.’”
The whole appeal of backpacking for Edie was getting to stay at the scenic spot she hiked to. There was always something about eating lunch and then heading home that lacked fulfillment for her.
“It’s just too beautiful here to just go by and look,” Edie says. “I feel like I don’t want to leave yet.”
So, it seems appropriate that she ended up in a place where she spends as much time as she wants enjoying the outdoors.
While there’s still no diagnosis for her blind spots, Edie is an active research subject at the University of Iowa, where a lab is attempting to find treatments for the more common kind of macular degeneration that comes along with age. She goes back every two years for tests, but she’s not holding her breath.
Still, Edie takes each step with purpose. Still, enjoys the little moments spent with her family and talking to friends. Still, spends every second that she can doing the things she loves because, despite it all, she sees the beauty in the world.
Edie enjoys helping other people who are losing vision—she asked I provide her contact information for anyone who wants help: ediewelty@gmail.com.