Today is a day to be glad that I am a private citizen who happens to write essays and not a newspaper editor who makes decisions about how to cover the news of the day and what stories should occupy the banner position in a newsletter. It is pretty obvious that the banner article for most news organizations today will be the historic conviction of a former US President who is the presumptive nominee of a national political party to run for president in this fall’s election on 34 felony counts. It is easy to identify the big story. It is difficult to know what to say about it. It is easy to point out that this is something that has never before happened. It is unprecedented in American history. It is difficult to say what it means.

Many years ago, I served as a radio DJ and part of my job was to take the news stories off of the teletype machine in the station office and select the ones to read during a short news program at the top of the hour. I was on the air for three of those newscasts. While our station did receive a direct satellite feed from a national news source and we played a short national news cast at the top of the hour, my job was to pay attention to the news that was going out over our broadcast while sorting through the headlines that came over the wire and choose which stories I would read. My job was to look for local connections to wider news stories. Every time I read the local news, I left some stories behind. I only had a few minutes and we timed our programs to the second, so there was a limit. I can still remember the feeling that I was leaving important stories without coverage.

Later, during a brief stint working for two small town weekly newspapers, I did a similar job of deciding which stories appeared on the front page, which ones were above the fold and which were below. Most of my time in that position the owner and editor was making those decisions, but there was a short time when the owner was sick that I did the job and often I had to make decisions about what would fit onto a particular page because I did page layout for the papers. Again, I worried about there stories that didn’t make the paper. Who was I to decide which news was most important?

Fortunately, I do not have either of those jobs this morning. There is no one who will read this journal entry who doesn’t already know about the historic criminal trial. Everyone who reads it has access to other news sources and the intelligence to interpret the events reported. I am free to speculate about a lot of other topics.

In a way, though no one knew the outcome of the trial before the jury reported to the judge, that story is old news. As you sifted through the stories in you news feed, I hope that you didn’t spend so much time reading about the trail and its outcome that you missed another story. 12-year old Bruhat Soma correctly spelled aposiopesis, caixinha, and sciniph along with other words to win the national spelling bee. As a writer, it is interesting to note that there have been many examples of aposiopesis in the coverage of the historic criminal trial. Feel free to look it up if you want, but essentially the term is the name for deliberately ending a sentence unfinished allowing the hearer (or reader) to supply the ending from their own imagination. My mother used to be a master of aposiopesis: “You kids stop that right now! Don’t make me . . .” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. We knew that whatever came next was something that we didn’t want to have happen.

Caixinha is a box rattle used in Brazilian dance orchestras. I wouldn’t know one if I saw it. I had to look the word up and the spell checker on my word processor doesn’t know the term, either. Sciniph is another term my spell checker doesn’t like, but it is a biblical term. When Moses pleaded with pharaoh to let the people of Israel go free from slavery, the people of Egypt were visited with plagues that eventually led to their release. The third plague was an example of the power of God over the power of the magicians of Egypt. In Exodus 8:16 it says, “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth, so that it may become sciniph throughout the whole land of Egypt.’ ” The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible translates sciniph as “gnats.” Exodus goes on to say that the Pharaoh’s own magicians recognized this as an act of God. They tried to produce sciniph, but were unable to do so. (Exodus 8:18) Of course, pharaoh remained hard hearted through the third plague and even the fourth, which was flies, which are bigger than sciniph.

We have a 13-year-old grandson who practices his spelling words at our house most Wednesdays. I can say with confidence that he cannot spell aposiopesis, caixinha, or sciniph. He is a year older than Bruhat Soma who spelled them correctly. It seems a bit sad to me that the crimes of a politician should somehow be bigger news than a 12-year-old who has studied the dictionary so much that he was able to spell all kinds of words that I cannot.

I don’t even know if any story, including the unanimous conviction of a candidate for the presidency, is more important than the coverage of the continuing violence in Rafah and the plight of the refugees who are trapped in that perilous city.

It probably is bigger news than the world’s biggest snail-eating festival in the Spanish city of Lleida, though that event drew more than 200,000 visitors. If you missed it, next year’s dates are May 23 - 25. You will be able to feast on barbecued snails even if you don’t want to compete.

It is a good thing that you have other sources of news than my journal. Otherwise you would find it difficult to keep up with conversation with your friends and family.

Before I get to today’s journal entry, I want to give two bits of information about me. The first is that although today’s entry addresses a medical condition I have, I want to reassure my friends and those who read my journal that I am OK. My condition is not life threatening. I am receiving the best possible medical care. Furthermore, I am feeling good and strong and am able to fully participate in all of my usual activities.

Secondly, this entry mentions something about myself that I don’t usually offer for conversation. There are people who have known me for many years who do not know this detail about me. It isn’t that I have any reason to hide it. Rather it is for me a personal commitment. I have no reason to convince others to believe what I believe. I’ll try to address this second item first.

I am a pacifist. I have been a pacifist for all of my adult life. When the time came for me to register for the draft at a time when the United States still had an active draft, I applied for and, after an appeal process, received the status of 1-O or conscientious objector. Had I been drafted, I would have gone to alternative service rather than military service. In my case, the service would probably have been at Intermountain Children’s Home in Helena, Montana. However, although I received a low draft lottery number, completed my service physical and was ready to take a leave from my college education to serve, the draft was suspended before any person in my age cohort was drafted. Ours was the first group not to face the draft after decades of an active draft. Not long after I became an official conscientious objector, that bit of my identity raised eyebrows in a church where I was serving as a youth ministry intern. There were some members who feared that I might try to recruit youth to become conscientious objectors. The pastor of the congregation went to bat for me and defended the decision to offer me the position. The pressure was shifted from me to him and he lost his job in the aftermath. It was a different time. The Vietnam War and protests against the war created divisions in communities. Ministers lost their jobs over their beliefs about the war. For me pacifism was a personal choice and not something I wanted to impose on anyone else. While I believe that I have remained true to that pacifism throughout my life, it is not something that I have often addressed publicly. I have served veterans and their families with respect. My daughter is married to a career Air Force member. I make no judgment about others’ decisions.

Yesterday a young doctor had an uncomfortable task to perform. I’m sure that it is a part of medical practice that doctors don’t enjoy. It is, however, a necessary task and it goes with the job for many medical professionals. The job was to inform a patient of test results that revealed the presence of cancer. While there are many different kinds of cancer and in this particular case the kind of cancer was not an immediate threat to the patient, it is difficult to know how a patient will react to the news. Cancer is a tough term in our society. There are a lot of people who have known someone who has died from an aggressive cancer. However, not every cancer is an aggressive cervical cancer, or brain cancer, or lung cancer. There are types of cancer that are effectively treated. There are patients who can live cancer-free after treatment. And there are forms of cancer that typically grow slowly and do not demand an immediate response. While a doctor does not want to alarm a patient, the diagnosis must be made in order for treatment to proceed. Furthermore, the patient knows that a biopsy has been taken. The patient is coming in with the clear mission to find out: “Is it cancer?” Delivering the news is one of the tough challenges of being a doctor.

This doctor is young and although she has the latest education and is very competent in her profession and has enough experience to be confident in her practice, her patients don’t see her as a peer. She treats a lot of people who are much older than she. Nonetheless, she was graceful, kind, and generous in her delivery of the news and reassuring in her openness to questions and conversation.

The news that I have prostate cancer is not the first time that the “c” word has come to me. I have had two biopsies that revealed squamous cell carcinoma that required simple out-patient surgeries to remove the cancerous cells. I have pre-cancerous lesions treated at least twice each year. Squamous cell carcinoma is not life threatening when closely monitored and quickly treated. It only spreads to other parts of the body if it is left untreated for long periods of time.

I knew that a doctor would not have ordered a prostate biopsy if there wasn’t a reason to suspect cancer. But somehow, I didn’t expect this diagnosis. Men my age often have enlarged prostates and there are many different treatment options for some of the problems that develop with normal aging. The news threw me a little bit. Fortunately, Susan was by my side when I went to the consultation with the doctor and I have the support of a loving family and friends.

While I intend to use the best medical advice and treatment possible and I am confident that I will be able to comply with treatment instructions and have a positive outcome, I have decided that I will be very careful in the language I use when thinking or speaking of this condition. I am not going to use any war language. This is not a battle for me. I am not out to win over cancer.

These are cells in my body, made by my body and I will live with them. Some cells might be removed by surgery. I accept that. I am, however, going to be a conscious objector to thinking about this as battle. I’ll find other words to speak of my treatment. It may only be a matter of language, but it is language that is important to me. This condition will not be the cause of my death. I have every intention of living as fully and loving as deeply as I am able. I know that I am no longer a young person. I know that I am mortal. I also know that I am fortunate to live in a time when there are many treatment options. Prostate surgery is minimally invasive, performed by a robot with the use of a laparoscope. The cancer I have is slow growing and I have time to consider options and make reasoned and informed decisions about care. I have access to very well-trained and experienced doctors. Most importantly I am surrounded by love and prayer.

With love and prayer I go forward to explore new life that is given to me each day with deep gratitude.

On the bathroom counter, next to the sink where I brush my teeth, are a variety of skin care products. There is a had lotion, another lotion for repair of particularly damaged skin, a tube of sunscreen, a different tube of sunscreen for the face, some special cream to heal rough and cracked skin on my feet, and a general skin cream. Just looking at the various products surprises me even though I’m the one who bought them and who keeps them on hand.

I have typical skin for a senior who grew up with light colored skin in the days before awareness for skin cancer. a couple of decades ago, I experienced burns on my hands, face, and chest in an accident. The skin doctor cautioned me that the experience would leave me more prone to skin problems. Add to that a general tendency for dry skin and a couple of experiences with squamous cell skin cancer. These days I set up a new appointment to be seen by a dermatologist on the way out from each visit. Each six-month visit reveals dozens of pre-cancerous lesions that must be treated.

I joke about my skin care regimen and the array of lotions and creams that I use, but I continue to do what I am able to protect my skin and address my tendency for itchy skin.

When we were growing up there were fewer choices in our home when it came to lotions and creams. We always had vaseline on hand. The petroleum-based substance seemed to be a general first aid product. We also generally had a small container of lanolin available. I grew up in sheep country. Lanolin was used to treat dry and cracked skin, prevent nosebleeds, and a variety of other things.

There was one more skin care product in our home, but this one didn’t come from the drug store. It was sold in our father’s farm supply store alongside a few other veterinarian supplies. Bag balm was developed to heal chapped udders of milk cows. Dairy farmers who had dry and cracked skin on their hands and feet used the product to help their skin heal. The product came in half-pound green tins and in 5-pound buckets. Bag balm is a mixture of petroleum jelly and lanolin.

It was common knowledge that many farm families used veterinarian supplies to treat a variety of ailments and bag balm was one of the items that every farm family kept on hand. It helps to seal cuts and prevent infection. It repairs chapped lips as easily as it soothes cow udders. It reduces pain from needle pricks and small cuts on fingers and hands. Generations of farm babies have had bag balm applied to tender areas to cure diaper rash.

Bag balm is also a handy lubricant when other products aren’t available. A little applied to bolts makes it easier to install them. It works to stop a squeaky door hinge. A small amount applied to a drawer prevents sticking.

I hadn’t thought about bag balm for a long time until recently when I read an article about the product’s newfound favor among younger people. It may be the only item that you purchase at Tractor Supply that is promoted in articles in Vogue Magazine.

Apparently the stuff is finding a new market among the users of TikTok. I generally enjoy it when a person younger “discovers” something that I’ve known about for a long time. It amuses me that young people who have never lived on farms, never milked a cow, and don’t plan to ever do so are pleased to find a product that has been around for a century or more. The one drawback to the popularity of the product in today’s market is that it probably is driving up the cost. I don’t know what bag balm cost when I was a kid, but it wasn’t much.

A few years ago the family that owned the company that makes bag balm sold it to a private equity firm. The new company began to market bag balm in small plastic tubes. The new managers even removed the words “sore teats” from the printing on the tins of the ointment. I guess they thought that there was a better market in human skin care than in providing products for dairy farmers. That is probably just good marketing as dairy production now mostly comes from very large commercial operations. The days of small family dairies seem to have gone the way of other small farms. Urban folk who haven’t spent time on farms probably don’t want to use a product that touts its usefulness for animal health care on its label. There is a general sense that products designed for animal care are not as pure as those specially designed for use by humans.

Now that bag balm has been “discovered” by a new generation who are applying it their faces to prevent wrinkles, I wonder whether or not the aroma of the stuff might be another thing that is less than appealing. It reminds me of the smell of turpentine, but I know that the smell comes from the lanolin. Because lanolin was applied to treat and prevent nosebleeds in our household, and I was prone to frequent nosebleeds when I was a kid, I know exactly what lanolin smells like. I don’t happen to like that smell. And it is exactly what bag balm smells like.

I wonder, too, if the appearance of bag balm might be something that isn’t agreeable to some customers. The yellowish paste with the consistency of vaseline doesn’t look all that appealing to me. After you apply it, you have to use quite a bit of soap to get it off of your fingers. Just rinsing you hands in water won’t do the trick.

I haven’t looked, but I’m guessing that they still sell bag balm alongside other animal care products at Tractor Supply. That’s where I’d go if I were looking for it. I suppose that it is also available at the drug store. I bet there is a difference in price depending on where you get it. And I doubt that the drug store has any 5-pound pails available.

Colleges typically award two types of undergraduate degrees. A Batchelor of Arts (BA) is awarded in fields where critical thinking, communication, and holistic learning are emphasized. The Batchelor of Science (BS) is awarded in fields where logic, reasoning, and quantitative skills are pursued. The distinctions are not always consistent and often based in subjective evaluations of career fields. From the perspective of a student, which type of degree is generally based on the student’s choice of major field of study. My degree, which focused on Christian Thought and Philosophy is a BA. My friend Steve earned his BS by focusing on mathematics. Generally, the major focus of an undergraduate studies and the type of degree earned has little impact on graduate studies. There are, however, some programs where undergraduate focus is important. For example medical schools generally accept those with BS degrees over those with BA degrees. Interestingly enough, our seminary had a mix of students who came with BA and BS degrees.

Undergraduate degrees in psychology can be either BA or BS degrees, based generally on the focus of a program and the coursework pursued by a student. Students leaning toward careers in social work and counseling often are awarded BA degrees, while those focusing on research and medicine are awarded BS degrees.

Looking back after a long career, I am grateful that I attended a relatively small college where students with different areas of academic focus regularly mixed and shared many activities. In our college there was no penalty for taking courses offered for other degree focuses. Although I was an arts student, I took logic from a mathematics professor. There was a lot of interplay between various course fields.

Students today often are counseled to be very focused in their studies. The high cost of college education has created pressure for students to pursue a course of study that will result in high paying work upon graduation.

I have long held deep respect for scientific study. My education did not involve hard core scientific study. My research was based in academic reading more than in laboratory experiments, but that did not result in any disrespect for quality research. Being educated has given me both a deep respect for science and an appreciation of the hard work that it takes.

However, the denial of science and distrust of scientific research is increasing. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, trust in scientists has decreased by 14% since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. That erosion of trust is likely more the result of political decisions and policies than the work of scientists. Certainly opposition to vaccination and rejection of public health measures such as wearing face masks were stirred and encouraged by those wishing to make political gains out of the pandemic.

I worry about eroding trust in scientific research, especially when misrepresentation of science is used to make political gains. There are some notable examples of the misuse of scientific data that have contributed to a decrease of trust.

The tobacco industry engaged in a carefully orchestrated campaign using bits of data and incomplete information to instill doubt about the connection between tobacco use and cancer. Millions of smoking-related deaths from cancer and heart disease might have been prevented had industry leaders paid attention to the science. Instead research results were misrepresented and there was outright denial of well established fact.

The same tactics that were employed by the tobacco industry have been used by the oil industry to deny the scientific facts of climate change. The climate crisis that now engulfs us with increases in severe weather events, rising oceans, out of control wildfire, and unnecessary deaths of animals and people has grown out of the use of pseudo science to refute the scientific facts about climate change. Recently the oil industry has pivoted from its earlier denial of climate change to promoting the idea that hope is lost. They point to positive changes such as the increase in sustainable energy production and say that those solutions are too small to work. Considerable funds are invested in denying the effects of changes that people are making to lessen their carbon footprints.

As a student of philosophy, I can see that misrepresentation of facts has been a problem throughout human history. Ours isn’t the first generation to misuse bits of evidence to deny the results of scientific study. However, the rise of the Internet and the increased use of social media to manipulate public opinion present new challenges to those who seek to communicate the results of scientific research. People put up websites and post on Facebook and engage in misinformation. There is a difference between a real expert who has data and evidence to present and one who uses social media to promote an agenda. The sheer quantity of information available on the Internet makes it challenging to find the quality science and careful interpretation of data that is also available.

Part of the solution to the problems of scientific denialism is for scientists to hone their skills at communication. The traditional structure of academic institutions with the distinction between the arts and science has resulted in trained scientists who do not have communication skills. It turns out, however, that the art of communication is essential to the practice of science. As our society begins the process of re-thinking academic education, it may be time to soften the distinction between the arts and science. A well rounded education must involve both traditional arts skills and traditional scientific skills. The time may have come for our colleges and universities to re-think the use of the distinction between a BA and BS.

At the same time, colleges and universities need to continue to expand education about critical thinking to equip students with the skills necessary to detect and counter misinformation and misrepresentation of the facts. The mere possession of a few facts does not make a person educated. Knowing what to do with facts and evidence is critical. So far the Internet has not proven to be a good source of learning about critical thinking.

The protests on college campuses over the war in Gaza present an opportunity to look closely at the shape of academic education and to make necessary changes. I hope that administrators and professors don’t miss this opportunity to think holistically about education and begin to make some of the changes needed.

When I was in my late teens, I set several goals for myself. I wanted to complete my academic education, including at least one graduate degree, in my mid twenties. After that, I planned to write a book and get it published by the time I turned 30. It is interesting now, as I look back from my seventies, now naive I was with those goals. First of all, my goals didn’t include what turned out to be the most important parts of my life: a loving and supportive marriage, children and grandchildren, and a meaningful career. I accomplished those unseen goals and they have been very meaningful to my life’s journey. I also completed my academic education in a timely manner. I was awarded an earned doctorate a few days before my 25th birthday. I didn’t consider that after that accomplishment I would discover some significant holes in my education and end up needing more serious academic work later in my career. Many of the other goals of that early list, however, still have not been accomplished.

I haven’t published a book. I haven’t written a book-length manuscript. Didn’t do it by the time i was 30. Didn’t do it by the time I was 50. Didn’t do it by the time I was 70. The fact that I have never been the author of a book doesn’t seem to have made me feel unsuccessful in life. I do have a list of publications, and on that list is one small document, a piece of curricula for adult education, that was published as a small book. It can hardly be called a book and I didn’t really write it. I was editor for a series of publications. One of the contract writers who was working under me failed to complete the contract and under the terms of the contract, that work belonged to the publisher. As editor, I completed the work and it was printed under my name as per the contract. The book didn’t sell well. The resource is still available online, but it isn’t doing very well in that format, either.

With the exception of a few publications in journals including one article in a professional journal, a series of magazine articles, and a poem that enjoyed a series of publications in several magazines in several languages, including braille, what I have written is educational curricula, all written as a free-lance contract writer.

I have, however, maintained this discipline of journal writing for many years. I started the process to practice the art of writing and to learn to think of myself as a writer. It has worked that way for me. I consider myself to be an essayist.

I own several books of essays by other writers, so I know that some have collected their essays, edited them, and published them as books. I have in the back of my mind that I might do that some day, but I have yet to put together a collection. the essayist and poet Ross Gay has at least two books of essays that have been published, made best seller lists, and won awards. He undertook the discipline of writing a short essay every day. The essays are about half the length of the ones I write and he didn’t maintain the discipline of daily writing. I think he missed the fourth day. His collection “The Book of Delights” contains 101 essays written over the span of 13 months. At least two of them are on the fact that he had trouble keeping the discipline and blew off writing many days. Nonetheless, he did prepare the collection for publication, found a publisher, and has produced a widely popular volume. I haven’t done any of that.

I don’t need to compare myself to other writers, however. And I don’t think that publishing a book is among my priorities and goals right now. I might simply accept that what I envisioned in my twenties was a bit different from the life I have lived and that is normal and acceptable.

I do, however, like to think of myself as an essayist. Part of that has to do with my love of exploring the origins of words and my continuing fascination, started as a college student, with the history of philosophy. The term essay was first used as an English term by the philosopher and writer Frances Bacon. Although, like other academics of his time (the early 1600’s), he published works in Latin, his book “The Advancement of Learning” published in 1605 is the first really important philosophical book to be written in English. In that work, Bacon uses the word essay. It is likely that he did so as a bit of a tip of the hat to the 16th century philosopher Michel de Montaigne. Borrowing a French word for a work in English was and continues to be popular. There are a lot of terms in English that came from French. Essay one of them thanks to Bacon.

In French, the word essay means “trial, attempt, or endeavor.” That is the way Bacon used the word. Later it came to have a new meaning in English: “a short, discursive literary composition.” I like the double meaning. By volume of words, the majority of my writing has taken the form of short discursive literary compositions. This is yet another of them. But in my mind, they are also trials, attempts, and endeavors. I think of them as incomplete ideas. If I were to publish some of my journal articles, I think I would be tempted to hone and revise them and make them much more polished. Maybe I would complete what began as trials and experiments. For now I like to think of the essays I write as initial offerings. Perhaps some of the ideas expressed here will be further explored by me or by others. Maybe even a few of them will become the foundation of a book one day, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. For now, I’m quite content to continue experimenting. I am, after all, an essayist: one who makes trials and attempts.

From a linguistic perspective, the word essay shares its roots with the English word examine. One of the dictionaries I use says that the term essay implies unpolished writing. I like the idea of unpolished. I can occasionally polish an essay for publication, which is essentially what I do when I write for a newspaper or magazine. Most of the time, however, I leave my work in the rough, unpolished. Since you are reading this sentence, you have tolerated my unpolished ideas. I advise you not to expect me to get them polished anytime soon.

Yesterday, at the invitation of our Lummi neighbors, we gathered with others at the Bellingham waterfront to welcome traditional paddlers who had paddled in from the islands. Yesterday was the end of seven days of paddling for those aboard the canoes. They paddled for about three hours yesterday to arrive on the traditional lands of the Lummi people. As each canoe arrived, they came to the shore bow first and ceremonially asked for permission to land, which was granted by an elder on shore. Then the canoe would back away from the shore, spin about and come in stern first where those on shore helped to steady the boat as the paddlers got off. Then the canoes were carried by hand up to a park a couple of blocks away where they were carefully placed on the grass. At that park folks had prepared lots of food to welcome the paddlers.

When the final canoe came to the beach there was a water blessing ceremony with greetings from many nations, including from paddlers who had participated from South Africa, New Zealand, and China who greeted us all in their languages, a Lummi elder who addressed us in Lushootseed (a Central Coast Salish language of the Salesian language family), and a Lutheran clergywoman who offered a blessing.

We welcomed three traditional canoes and two Hawaiian outrigger canoes paddled by indigenous Hawaiian paddlers who, among other things, commented on the cold temperature of the air and water and its contrast from the island waters where they traditionally paddle.

Local paddlers in canoes and kayaks joined the flotilla, offering their on water welcome to the arriving canoes.

After the ceremonies at the waterfront, there was lots of food, a group of indigenous vendors, dancing and more celebrating of the journey in the park.

I was honored to help carry three of the boats, each different. The first was a strip plank cedar canoe in the traditional shape of the Coast Salish canoes that in former times had been carved from a single cedar tree. This canoe was finished with a clear layer of fiberglass on the outside that showed off the beautiful grain of the wood. Because I build strip planked canoes and kayaks, I was especially grateful to see this canoe up close and to feel its considerable heft and weight. Weight is a friend in ocean-going canoes for stability in waves and the ability to penetrate ocean currents. This was the largest canoe, carrying about 15 paddlers. It also carried an elder with a traditional eagle staff and a ceremonial medicine bundle. This was the canoe that bore the guests from South Africa and New Zealand.

The second canoe I helped to carry was built in the shape of a traditional canoe out of fiberglass and painted with traditional designs. It was smaller with 7 or 8 paddlers. This canoe had been owned by a Lummi family in the past, but now belongs to Northwest Indian College, an accredited Tribal College serving Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, located in Bellingham.

The third canoe was a umiak, a skin-on-frame canoe, built in the tradition of Yupik and Inuit builders, but in the shape of the other boats. This was a smaller canoe for 8 paddlers. It was the lightest of the three, having been blasted with sandbags, which were carried separately. It also had removable floorboards which were taken out before we carried it to its trailer. this boat was painted with an octopus on its bow.

The Hawaiian canoes were paddled a distance across the bay to another landing place. They are paddled regularly in the bay and had been provided to the Hawaiian paddlers as a courtesy as they did not bring canoes from their home waters.

As a builder of canoes and kayaks, I noticed several things. One is that the paddlers are taught to never call their canoe a “boat.” One captain told us that if anyone aboard his canoe refers to the canoe as a boat, that person will be tossed overboard not to be left behind, but rather given a dunking before being brought back into the canoe wiser and always remembering its name. Each canoe had a name in a traditional language which was learned by its paddlers. the captain sits in the stern with honored guests in front of the captain. The captain steers the canoe with long strokes of a paddle and with instructions to paddlers on each side of the boat to paddle, hold, back paddle, or brace. Traditionally an elder sits in the bow responsible for songs, prayers, and spiritual leadership. I did not learn which person on the canoe took primary responsibility for navigation.

Another thing I noticed about the canoes was that the thwarts were called braces and the seats were not structural thwarts as is the case in the canoes I build. Of course these canoes are much larger and designed for more paddlers. The strip planked canoe was large enough for two paddlers to sit side by side with each paddler pulling from their respective side of the canoe. I suspect that they occasionally switched sides to even the work of their muscles, but I did not learn this detail.

And, as a builder, I examined the techniques of construction. Like the skin on frame kayak that I built to a Greenland design, the umiak was made with lashings and no metal screws or nails. The framework was strong and there were plenty of places to hang on when carrying the canoe as long as the ones carrying understood where to grasp the canoe. The other canoes were carried by the gunwales part of the time and lifted up on our shoulders when traveling longer distances, crossing streets, and such. We were led in chants as we carried the canoes, helping us keep a rhythm to our walking and hear the voices of those who were sharing in the work.

I am so grateful for the leaders who are preserving these traditions and who are willing to teach them to newcomers like myself. I have learned new respect for indigenous builders of canoes. I have also learned a bit more about the boats I build that are imitations of indigenous design.

The event, known as a gathering of eagles and protectors of the sky, land, and water, has become a tradition each year. Now that I know about it, I hope to attend many more times and to be on shore to welcome the canoes as they arrive from their journeys.

In 1985, when our children were 2 and 4 years old, we received a call to serve a congregation in Boise, Idaho. The process of receiving that call had been interesting. Children entering our family had shifted several dynamics. Whereas we previously had job-shared a single full-time position which gave us time to pursue other part-time work, having children at home meant that we needed the other half of our time to care for the young ones. Our growing family was also consuming more. We had grown more quickly than the capacity of the congregations we were serving to increase our pay. We began to consider a move to a new call. One thing that we wanted to find was a single congregation. Although we had really loved serving our small parish with two congregations, the dynamics of keeping two separate congregations served had been a bit of a challenge. We decided to limit the geography of our search to the Pacific Northwest, allowing our profiles to circulate in only three United Church of Christ Conferences: the Montana-Northern Wyoming Conference, the Pacific Northwest Conference, and the Central Pacific Conference. That meant that congregations in Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and a bit of northern Wyoming were able to consider us as possible candidates to become their pastor.

We had conversations with a few congregations, but the only one where the conversations proceeded to the point of interview was with the congregation that called us in Boise, Idaho. On our interview trip and again when we were presented as candidates for the position, we drove from our North Dakota home to Rapid City, South Dakota where we took a flight to Salt Lake City and from there to Boise. Both trips were in the spring when the weather in North and South Dakota was cold with snow and the weather in Boise was delightful. Boise sits at the base of the mountains, so we could see the ski hill from the city and we could sense the difference in the climate. The lilacs were blooming in Boise when it would still be months before they appeared in North Dakota. Meanwhile people were still skiing on the mountain. Folks told us they mowed their lawn and went skiing on the same day. It seemed magical to us.

After we accepted the call to serve the congregation, our first road trip to Boise was when we drove a U-haul, filled with our household goods, followed by our car on a tow dolly behind. The trip was an eye-opener for me. My previous experience with Idaho had been confined to driving across the northern part of the state, between Missoula, Montana and Spokane, Washington. The state is narrow up north and the drive across that part of the state is scenic and relatively short. It can be traversed in a few hours. On our trip to Boise, we got up after sleeping in a motel in Idaho Falls and it took us most of the day to drive from there to Boise. Our summer trip in a truck without air conditioning took us across the dry desert climate of southern Idaho. The trip seemed dry and hot and the land seemed flat and empty. For years afterward, I half-joked that I felt like I had been tricked. I thought Idaho was beautiful mountains and found myself moving to the desert.

Although Boise isn’t technically a desert, it is the driest place we have lived in our lives. Average rainfall is around 11 inches per year. It is the northern edge of what is known as the Great Basin, a unique geographical feature that includes all but the southern tip of Nevada, about half of Utah, a tiny bit of eastern California, and stretches north into souther Idaho and southeast Oregon. The great basin is a unique climatic zone where water enters by rainfall. The few creeks and rivers that run into the basin from the high country that surrounds it do not escape. Because Boise is just north of the Snake River, which flows west and then north and drains into the Columbia, it technically is not in the Great Basin. There are no rivers that naturally flow out of the Great Basin. It is a place where water enters but cannot escape. Mountains and other features mean that the way water leaves the Great Basin is evaporation. Once the area was part of a great inland sea and what is left are lakes that rise and fall with changing weather patterns. Salt Lake in Utah is the most prominent example. Water flows in and leaves the lake by surface evaporation leaving minerals behind.

Now, decades later, we have moved to a place that is climactically nearly the opposite. We now live in Cascadia. Where as the Great Basin is low ground surrounded by mountains, the center of Cascadia is high ground. The Cascade Mountains are the high point of our climactic region. Mount Baker, which we can see when we drive to our son’s farm, rises to nearly 11,000 feet. We live at about 80 feet above sea level. That means that water enters our climactic zone from the sky as rain or snow and exists by rivers and creeks and streams that flow to the ocean. Where we now live there is flowing water everywhere. Our neighborhood has a settling pond in its center filled by the rain that falls onto our streets. From that pond there is a stream, constantly flowing into Terrell Creek that empties into the Ocean. Unlike the sandy, porous soil of the high desert in the Great Basin, our soils are rich and loamy over beds of clay which hold lots of moisture. When I dig fence post holes at the farm, they have water in the bottom. The water table is only a couple of feet below the ground in the winter. Unlike the beautiful features of the Great Basin shaped by wind, ours is a land shaped by water. There are plenty of places that get more rainfall than we do. At 39 inches a year we are close to average for the US, but it is a lot more than other places where we have lived.

Like the move to Boise, our move to Cascadia is a move to a new place with a new kind of weather. It will take us even more years to adjust to the wonders of this new place. We continue to learn.

I grew up with a healthy respect for farmers and ranchers. My father was careful to make sure that we knew that farming and ranching were the foundation of society. When one of our customer’s dairy suffered a failure of some of their automated milking equipment, we were taken to the farm twice a day to help with milking because the dairy had to run even if the machines were broken. While we waited for new equipment to arrive and be installed, we had a responsibility to them not only as customers, but as suppliers of a vital resource for our community.

When I was a teenager, I worked on my uncle’s farm and my cousin’s farm. it was considered to be a good job and important work. The dry land wheat farm produced hard red winter wheat. We took wheat directly from the farm bins to our house where it was ground to make flour for our bread and cereal for our breakfast. My cousin also raised cattle and it was made clear to us that care for the animals was essential to our survival. Every year we purchased animals directly from the 4-H sale at the county fair that filled our freezer with food.

Our family never raised chickens for eggs. We sold equipment to several commercial egg operations and our refrigerator sported “Howe’s Farm-Fresh Extra-Large Eggs.” We did, however raise chickens for meat. Each spring the chicks that were unsold after the farms and ranches were supplied came to our place to be raised through the summer and make their way to the freezer for fried chicken Sunday Dinners throughout the winter.

Farmers and ranchers were treated with great respect in our household and that value was essential to the early years of our ministry. We began our pastoral career serving churches in two small towns where the majority of our members were farm and ranch families. We brought to the community our years of formal academic education, carefully thought-through theology, practiced pastoral skills, and a love of crafting liturgy. But we also brought knowledge of farm and ranch culture. I instinctively felt at home on the farms and ranches. I knew how to visit, even during the busy seasons. I would jump into a harvest truck or mount a combine operating in the field. I knew how to dress to find ranchers in the field or barn during calving season. I never was a real horseman, but I knew how to saddle and ride a horse and was comfortable around animals. It wasn’t just that I understood the culture. I loved the culture and the people who devoted their lives to producing food. I still do.

It was my cousin who began to help me think a bit differently about modern production agriculture. He was active in what eventually became known as the “Lentil Underground,” a movement of grass roots farm and ranch families who were changing their practices away from chemical and fuel consumption toward natural farming and ranching practices. They moved part of their operations into conservation reserves, learned about crop rotations to replace chemical fertilizers, stoped the use of pesticides and herbicides to produce organic produce. They had to develop new marketing strategies and formed cooperatives to take their organic grains and meat to market.

My cousin and I loved to have long talks and he taught me a lot about his philosophy of farming and ranching. When he was in his sixties he told me that he thought that the best farming he ever did was when he did nothing. He admired bison because they didn’t need help with calving, were worked by walking among them, and preferred natural grasses and wild open spaces. He watched as fields were left fallow and natural and recovered their subsoil moisture which was robbed by traditional rotation of fallow one year and wheat the next. He learned about raising lentils for food and for the replenishment of essential soil nutrients.

I used to think of myself as two generations removed from the land. My father’s businesses served farmers and ranchers, but we were only hobby farmers. Other than a few small garden plots, I didn’t actually produce food for our family, but rather earned money to purchase food by serving others.

Our son, however, is returning to the land a bit. Although both he and his wife work off of their small farm, they invest a lot of energy in producing food from their land. They have extensive organic gardens, tend an orchard, expand their berry production, raise chickens for eggs and meat, pasture cattle and work their land. I have become a small part of their operation by tending honey bees.

The bees, while important to the overall operation, and producers of very tasty food for our family, are products of production agriculture. They are not native to this place. There are plenty of natural bees in this area. We have mason bees, carpenter bees, bumble bees, and at least five or six other native species. Our honey bees are an invasive species, descendants of bees imported from Europe. Tending them means paying attention to their natural tendency to produce additional colonies when they are thriving. If I were to just keep them in optimal health they would produce swarms that would go out into the surrounding countryside and take up residence, displacing natural pollinators and contributing to the general decline of native species. Raising domestic bees requires a sensitive balance of intervention and understanding of natural processes. I keep our operation small and am learning about raising queens for other bee keepers to control the swarming of our colonies. So far, I have captured swarms when they have occurred and kept our bees from returning to the wild. As we transition our operation to more natural beekeeping, there is much for me to learn to work with nature rather than battle it.

I try to keep the lessons learned from my cousin in mind as I work with my domestic animals. I pay attention to the wild bees on the farm and work to encourage the health of their colonies. I build mason bee habitats and have learned about bumble bee nests and how to protect them from some of the farm’s processes.

In some ways, I’m circling back to the land and the respect for farmers and ranchers that has always been part of my life. It seems like good work to me and the right thing for this phase of my life. The more I watch the bees the more I find out how much there is yet to learn. I hope I can continue to correct some of my mistakes and work with the bees for the overall health of the land.

George Washington never visited the state that is named after him. Of course Washington wasn’t at state until 90 years after George Washington, first president of the United States, died. Other presidents have visited our state. Washington isn’t a state to which presidents are particularly attracted. Given the fact that the polls show where our state’s electoral votes are likely to line up, the state isn’t considered to be “in play” or likely to switch its loyalties. Candidates in this year’s election will find little reward in visiting Washington. It is unlikely that our electors will vote differently than was the case four years ago.

Our corner of the state doesn’t have much of a track record when it comes to presidential visits. Only one president of the United States has ever visited d Whatcom County and that visit was a long time ago. On October 9, 1911, William Howard Taft, the 27th president of the United States, paid a visit to our area. His train stopped in Bellingham. the President made two stops in Skagit County that same day.

Taft was at an interesting point in his career when he visited, part of a whirlwind tour that took him to 30 states in 57 days. He was playing a game of political survival. A former U.S. attorney and federal judge, Taft had served as governor of the Philippines, governor of Cuba, and secretary of war during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. Roosevelt endorsed Taft to succeed him in the White House in the 1908 election, but by 1911, Roosevelt had withdrawn his support of the President, especially over disagreements in foreign affairs. He was preparing to challenge Taft in 1912.

The presidential train pulled into Bellingham shortly after 4 a.m. on October 9. Taft emerged at 8 a.m. to the cheers of s substantial crowd that was waiting. Public school students were given the morning off from school, in part to swell the crowds for the presidential visit. After breakfast in a local establishment, Taft addressed a crowd of 15,000 people. It was a big deal in those days. Before long the president was off to Skagit county where he visited Burlington and then crossed the river for a visit to Mount Vernon a town that chose its name after the estate of the nation’s first president.

Since then, no U.S. president has paid a visit to our county. As far as I know no president or former president has any plans to come to visit us. That seems to suit us just fine. We don’t especially appreciate crowds and it doesn’t take much to create traffic jams around here. We are getting along just fine without the attention of the big politicians. From time to time, someone will dig out the old newspaper clippings from the archives at the Bellingham Herald and read the article that included the full menu for the breakfast the president had eaten during his visit. There will be an article in the paper or a presentation to a history class and presidential fervor seems to quickly die down.

There isn’t enough about the president’s visit for a full journal entry. This is about the halfway point and I know of nothing more to say on the topic.

The visit wasn’t a big deal for Taft, either. He soundly lost in his bit for a second term as president. Although Roosevelt got more electors than Taft, Woodrow Wilson won the election and became the next president. A decade later when Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court had wrote, “I don’t remember that I ever was President.” He might have actually remembered, but he probably didn’t remember his visit to Whatcom County.

If you don’t happen to be president, however, Whatcom County is a very interesting place to visit. Nestled between the beautiful North Cascade Mountains and the waters of the Salish Sea it is a place of astounding natural beauty. Our beaches are good places for whale watching as well as viewing Orcas. North Cascades National Park isn’t one of the most famous of our national parks, but it is a place of incredible alpine beauty and well worth a visit.

Our village is used to welcoming visitors. We think of ourselves as a destination for tourists. We have more than enough restaurants and short term rental properties to host the waves of visitors that come every summer. This week is the start of our season of tourists. We are getting prepared to having periodic shortages of parking. We are becoming accustomed to seeing a lot of cars with British Columbia plates on them. We’re practicing our smiles and waves and good manners so that our visitors might have an experience that invites them to return in the future and when they do so to spend a bit of money in our restaurants, gift shops, and other businesses.

Personally, while I try to be welcoming to guests, I don’t really feel a need for more people to come. I’m not a fan of big crowds. I enjoy having a few good places to eat nearby and I suspect that our restaurants are all dependent on visitors, but for the most part my life is just fine without the traffic and crowds. With Vancouver BC just across the border and Seattle a couple of hours south of us we have access to plenty of city when I feel a desire to visit one, which doesn’t happen very much these days. I’m pretty comfortable being in a place that is a bit out of the way. I make a few trips to town to visit the hardware store or see a doctor and am quite pleased when i have days when I just stay at home working on my projects. The main thing that cities have to offer me is access to an airport where I can meet guests coming to visit from far away places and board a plane to travel myself.

Consider visiting us some day. We’ll find space for a quiet visit and some time in nature away from the crowds.

I have sometimes joked that I have made it this far in my life without ever being the right age for anything. I went directly from being “too young” to being “too old” without ever hitting the imaginary sweet spot in-between. That makes an interesting story and perhaps will garner a smile or two as a joke, but it isn’t completely true. Each of the calls from congregations to serve came in part because I was at the right age and the right place in my career to be matched with the needs of the congregations I was called to serve. It wouldn’t have worked for me to serve those congregations in any different order. The delightful and productive two-year interim ministry at First Congregational Church in Bellingham that ended almost a year ago was a call that I couldn’t have afforded to accept at any other point in my life. Our call to the two small congregations in North Dakota was a perfect match for the beginning of a pastoral career. We wouldn’t have been able to serve the congregation in Rapid City successfully had we not gained the experience we had in our previous calls and we wouldn’t have been able to stay for 25 years had we not been in the first half of our forties when we accepted that call. So, in a sense, there have been times when I have felt that I was the right age for the events of my life.

There have, however, been times when I was aware that I wasn’t quite the right age for some things. I was only a year younger than most of my peers when I entered college, but I was a lot less prepared for the social side of college life. Although I was worried about the academics, it turned out that I could handle that side of student life well. Being homesick and not knowing how to deal with roommates turned out to be a bigger challenge. Had it not been for the generous welcome and dozens upon dozens of home cooked meals offered by Susan’s family, I think I might not have been as successful in my college years. Although I know how to operate a washing machine and a dryer, how to fold and put away my clothing, I have never been fully responsible for my laundry for any amount of time in my entire life. There has always been someone to help me with that necessary life chore.

Looking back, there have been a lot of “in between” times in my life. I was a college student between the time of moving away from my parents’ home and the time I moved to Chicago for graduate school. Three of those years was time between living in my parents’ home and being married. We lived in Chicago between our college graduation and our first call to full-time ministry. There were eight years between our wedding and the birth of our first child. My mother lived in our home between the time she was no longer able to live independently and the end of her life.

A lot of ministry occurs in “in between” times. I often was invited into family homes between the time they learned of a death of a loved one and the time of the funeral and public expressions of grief. I’ve been with folk between the administration of a test and the knowledge of the results. I have had some deep and very meaningful conversations with people between the time they received a devastating medical diagnosis and the end of their life. I have sat with families in hospital waiting rooms between the time of sending a loved one into surgery and the news of how the procedure went. I have shared the joy of the time between learning of a pregnancy and the birth of a child with a lot of people.

Preachers spend a lot of time exploring the meanings of a short “in between” time in Jesus’ life. It was only a few short years between the start of his public ministry and his crucifixion. We have only a few stories and a few memories of the things he said in that time, yet we have been speaking of that time and its meaning for millennia.

There is nothing particularly unique about being in the time between the end of my active career and the end of my life. Although retirement itself is a privilege known only be a small percentage of the people of the world and it has only been possible for three or four generations of Americans in the entire history of our country. It seems quite possible that the lifestyle I currently am enjoying is the product of being exactly the right age. Many people younger than I are not anticipating having the kind of retirement that was planned from the beginning of our careers. The congregations we served set aside savings for us all the way through our time of service that are now enabling us to life comfortably without the income of a regular job.

There are still plenty of “in between” times in my life, though. We are enjoying being able to spend a lot of time with our grandchildren right now, but before very long they will move on with their lives and will have less time to be with their grandparents. We often provide a short bit of childcare between the events of the very busy lives of their parents. “Can you be at the farm for a few minutes between the time the school bus arrives and the time I get home from an appointment?” Of course we can.

I’ve benefitted greatly from the “in between” lives of others. A very busy doctor squeezed time to have an EKG performed and interpret its results between other patients in a very busy day. I was seen between the delivery of a new baby and the administration of a dermatology examination. It was life-saving. There are many more examples of being served in between other important events.

All of life is the time between birth and death. Sometimes it seems like a long time. Other times it seems all too short. For now it is good to be in between.

Yesterday when we were driving to church, traffic on the highway slowed and merged into a single lane to go around emergency vehicles helping to assist at the scene of a motorcycle accident. We couldn’t see the details of the accident, but we did see the motorcycle in the median between the lands, lying on its side with obvious damage. We also saw two ambulances with EMTs tending someone on the ground. Because there is no news of the accident on any of the local online media sources, we are assuming and hoping that the accident was not fatal and that the person or persons involved will be able to fully recover from injuries sustained.

I do not know what happened other than a motorcycle seems to have lost control and drifted into the media where it crashed. It was raining at the time and the road surface was wet - an added danger to motorcycles on a highway with a speed limit of 70 mph. There are also dangers to motorcyclists caused by road debris. Probably the biggest danger to motorcyclists traveling on that stretch of Interstate highway is that drivers of cars and trucks can fail to see motorcycles and pull into their way when changing lanes or executing other driving maneuvers.

I have said that I believe that our children are better drivers because they learned to drive in Rapid City where motorcycles are very common and where the annual Sturgis Rally means that motorcycles outnumber all other vehicles for more than a week each summer. When you learn to drive around motorcycles, you learn to be more careful to look for them when driving. Motorcycles can accelerate more quickly than cars and can appear to be very small in rear view mirrors and there are some important techniques to be learned to always look twice, and to give extra space to motorcycles. I know that 25 years of driving on South Dakota roads including occasional trips into Sturgis during the rally has made me a more cautions driver and more sensitive to motorcycles on the highway.

Drivers and passengers of motorcycles are obviously more vulnerable to the effects of accidents. Accidents that might not involve serious injuries if they were between two automobiles can be fatal for motorcycles.

There is an important principle involved in motorcycles operating on highways. All drivers, regardless of their vehicle, have some responsibility for the safety of motorcycle drivers. Because we moved to South Dakota from a more populous city and moved to an even more populous area when we left South Dakota we are well aware that all vehicle operators pay increased insurance rates for living and driving in an area with more motorcycle accidents. Insurance rates are based on overall traffic liabilities and some of the cost of accidents is spread out over entire groups of drivers through insurance premiums.

We also participate in the costs of accident prevention by paying for additional safety devices in our vehicles. In the span of my lifetime several items from seat belts to air bags to adaptive cruise control to lane departure warning systems have been installed in vehicles. The cost of these safety measures is reflected in the cost of vehicles. The cost of designing and installing lane barricades, sign posts, guard rails and other highway features are shared by taxpayers.

By and large, however, we shy away from taking responsibility for the mistakes of inexperienced drivers or the behaviors of reckless or irresponsible drivers. Accident investigators are quick to name drivers as cause of accidents. Nonetheless we continue to enact some policies that hold society partially responsible for highway safety. Laws are enacted to establish speed limits, fund enforcement, restrict the use of devices such as cell phones, prohibit driving when impaired by the consumption of alcohol or other drugs. To a certain extent we understand that irresponsible behavior can affect innocent persons and invest in systems to limit the damages caused by irresponsible or impaired drivers.

One example of a change in public policy is the increased use of traffic circles and roundabouts by urban traffic designers. Such features often result in more accidents at a given intersection. The accidents, however, are generally less severe than those at intersections governed by signs or traffic lights. Municipalities install traffic circles and roundabouts in part because they cost less than signal systems. They also result in lowered serious injuries and fatalities as well as lowered total accident costs. Cars colliding when they are flowing the same direction are less dangerous than those going in opposite directions.

There do seem to be limits to what safety measures we are willing to accept. The statistics of the nationwide 55 mph speed limit imposed in the 1970s through the mid 1990s are very clear. Slower speed limits resulted in dramatically decreased fatalities and serious injuries. When the limits were raised again, fatalities and serious injuries increased. However, most legislative bodies proceeded to increase speed limits. In South Dakota, where we lived when the nationwide limit was removed, raising speed limits took place in an emergency session of the state legislature without any serious debate. Legislators were eager to raise limits by 20 mph including on highways that were designed and constructed during the nationwide limit. Similar changes took place in other states.

The Interstate highway where we drive most days was designed and built during the time of 55 mph limits. This is especially evident in the design of on and off ramps which often do not allow sufficient space for those coming onto the highway to accelerate to the speed of the traffic on the road. An additional 15mph takes significant space to accomplish. Sight lines are shorter, increasing the challenge in estimating where to merge into traffic that is traveling at speeds much faster than designers and engineers envisioned when the highway was constructed.

In contrast to US highway statistics since the mid 1990s, Sweden has decreased highway fatalities and serious injuries by more than half and has officially legislated the goal of zero fatalities. Sweden has the lowest rates of traffic fatalities in the world.

A single accident is enough to get me to think about what might be done to reduce deaths and serious injuries. It seems, however, that it will take something more than current statistics to motivate our society to make necessary changes to make real progress in reducing highway deaths and injuries.

I’m not much of a sports fan. I try to keep up with who has won some of the games so that i can carry on an intelligent conversation with friends, but I rarely invest my time in watching games on television or attending them live. Our daughter married into a family with a history of dedicated fandom of baseball and football teams. She has adopted the loyalties of her husband and of his father and grandfather before him. During the baseball season, I try to keep track of the Washington Nationals because it is their team. During football season it is the New York Giants. They dress themselves in the jerseys of their teams, have their favorite players, and can quote team statistics. I try to pay enough attention to wins and losses that I can hold intelligent conversations with our daughter and son-in-law. I get the impression that be and his parents are a bit baffled by our lack of attention to sports.

Back when we lived in Chicago in the late 1970’s, I got interested in the Chicago Cubs baseball team. It seemed to be a very Chicago thing to root for a team that hadn’t won the world series since 1908. Being a fan of a losing team seemed to fit my sensibilities and I have since declared myself to be a fan saying, “Anyone can cheer on a winner. It takes character to remain loyal to a team that doesn’t win.” So in 2016, when the Cubs did win the World Series, it was seen as a big deal to my friends who are real sports fans. I paid attention to the playoffs and series that year in part because it was a topic of conversation with our daughter and her family as well as a lot of folks in the church. It was kind of fun to be identified as a fan of the team that was winning.

However, I can’t tell you much about the Cubs except that they haven’t won the World Series since. They haven’t even made it to the final series since then.

I sometimes call myself a morning-after sports fan. I am not enough of a fan to watch the game while it is going on, but I pay enough attention to check the score the next morning.

I barely know the basic rules and flow of the game of hockey. We had hockey sticks and used to push a puck around the ice when we were kids and I know the basics of scoring by hitting the puck into a goal, but that is about it. When we lived in Rapid City there was a young man who was in our youth group who played hockey and I attended a few of his matches to support him. Sitting with his family meant that I learned a few of the nuances of the game and it was easy for me to support his team because I knew him. That was quite a while ago and I haven’t been to a hockey match since.

However, I do live just a few miles from the metro Vancouver, British Columbia area. I can see the lights of the city from my back yard. I can watch airplanes descending to land at Vancouver International Airport. I listen to Canadian Public Broadcasting on my radio. We can see the buildings of Surrey BC as we drive about our neighborhood or walk to the beach. On Friday when we drove to Point Roberts it took us about the same amount of time to drive to the border as we waited to cross.

These days I check the northern horizon every night when I wake during the night because there have been some intense solar storms and the northern lights have been putting on a pretty impressive show. They are supposed to reappear in our night sky within the next couple of weeks, so I’m sticking to my habit. I plan to pay special attention to the night sky and perhaps look a bit earlier tomorrow night. If the Vancouver Canucks win their home hockey game on Monday I’ll likely be able to see the fireworks from our back yard.

The Canucks are tied 3 games even with the Edmonton Oilers and the final match of the seven game series will be a home game for the Canucks. It’s a pretty big deal in Vancouver. Mind you this is not the Stanley Cup Championship Finals series yet. The two Canadian teems are meeting in what is called the second round. The Canucks made it to the second round by defeating the Nashville Predators four games to two in the first round. The Oilers won their series against the Los Angeles Kings four to one. The Oilers were preferred by the oddsmakers to win the series but the Canucks have held their own and there could be a slight home team advantage tomorrow night.

Hockey is a Canadian sport in many ways. You don’t think of outdoor winter sports when thinking of Los Angeles or Nashville. Then again the Florida Panthers have already advanced to the Conference Final round on the other side of the bracket. They’ll be facing the New York Rangers. At least the lakes freeze in New York in the winter. And the winner of the Canucks-Oilers series will face the Dallas Stars. Dallas is another place where one doesn’t expect to see much ice outside of arenas with artificial ice making equipment. Still, the Canadian match up seems like what one would expect from the Stanley Cup playoff series. Canadian Public Radio has done a number of interviews with families that have ardent fans of both teams in the same family. They’re especially keen on covering married couples who disagree on which team to cheer on.

I don’t think proximity is going to make me much of a hockey fan. Living in Chicago for four years didn’t really make me a baseball fan. Still I’ll be paying attention tomorrow evening. And, if the Canucks win, I guess I’ll have to pay attention to what happens in the next series. After all if they were to bring home the Stanley Cup we’d probably notice more than fireworks in celebration.

One of the things I like about wooden canoes is that they are nearly silent when paddled in calm water. I prefer wooden paddles, except when paddling in whitewater. My whitewater canoe also isn’t wood, but rather an advanced plastic material that makes the boat nearly indestructible, even if it strikes rocks or other debris. I enjoy the whitewater boat and the thrill of whitewater paddling, but I prefer flatware paddling. For most of my life I paddled in lakes and reservoirs. A fair percentage of the total paddling of my life has been in Sheridan Lake a reservoir in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The lake is relatively small and easy to cover in an hour’s paddle. I enjoyed paddling around the perimeter of the lake, going into small inlets and bays.

One of the treats of paddling in Sheridan Lake was the presence of a pair of Great Blue Herons that showed up every spring. Early in the season, I would occasionally see them both standing in the water near the edge waiting for small fish to swim close enough for a quick bill stab. The fish is then shaken before it is gulped down. Occasionally it would surprise me to see how large a fish a heron could swallow. It seemed like the fish might be too big fro that narrow neck, but I never witnessed a problem.

Herons are patient fishermen. According to one article I read they spend up to 90 percent of their waking hours stalking prey. I’ve known a few human fishers who could do that for a single day, but none who maintained that practice day after day. Herons aren’t strictly monogamous, but they stay with the same partner throughout the nesting season, building the nest together, sharing duties of sitting on the eggs and hunting to feed the young. When the birds are sitting on the eggs, which takes about four weeks, they hunt one at a time. This is when I was most likely to see a heron at Sheridan Lake, so I generally saw them one at a time. Since herons can live 15 to 20 years, I theorize that the birds I saw at the lake were often the same bird year after year.

I’m not sure I could identify an individual by sight, though.

Now that we have moved to a new place, I have discovered that the herons I saw at the lake in South Dakota were a bit atypical. Generally herons for nesting colonies. Out here on the coast we have several large colonies, sometimes called “heroines” or “rookeries.” There is one near our home in Birch Bay State Park with hundreds of breeding pairs. They spread out along the shore and it is not uncommon for us to see dozens, especially after the chicks have hatched and before they have fledged when they are constantly hunting for fish, crabs, and even a few insects.

We call them dinosaur birds, in part because of the sound they make. It sounds otherworldly, like I imagine a pterodactyl might have sounded. Their appearance is quite different from other birds. They are graceful flyers and swimmers and can fly at slow speeds and land quietly. However the transition from standing in the shallows to flight generally involves a bit of splashing and seems somewhat awkward. Calling them dinosaurs, however, isn’t accurate. The fossil record shows they have existed for at least 1.8 million years, but the general thought is that they date back to about 25 million years ago during the Cenozoic age. That’s a far cry from pterodactyls that lived over 200 million years ago.

As I grow older, I think I appreciate looking at herons a bit more. I admire their patience. I appreciate their ability to stand calmly and consume few calories while remaining alert and ready for quick action. The transition from standing completely still to holding a fish in the bill is lightning fast.

It might just be my memory or the fact that I generally view herons while walking these days while I used to view them while paddling, but it seems that the herons out here are a bit smaller than the ones I used to see in South Dakota. It may be that I see a few birds that are younger here. They are still large birds. They can stand up for 4 feet in height and have a wingspan of nearly 6 feet. That’s significantly smaller than the bald eagles which are common around here. Eagles can have a wingspan up to 8 1/2 feet. They are chunkier, weighing between 7 and 14 pounds. Thats a big difference from the herons that might weigh 5 or 6 pounds. The herons stand taller, however. Their long legs and necks make even the silhouette easy to distinguish from an eagle. Eagles soar high in the sky. Herons tend to stay low, gliding near to the water’s surface. Both birds, however, seem to prefer tall trees for nesting.

One of the images I hold of this place is the memory of the birds silhouetted in the evening appearing as graceful dark figures against the reflection of the water.

Yesterday we took a tour of Point Roberts, the western end of the border between the US and Canada, the longest border in the world. There is a monument on a bluff above the shore that marks the spot and you can stand with one leg in each country there. To get to Point Roberts from our town involves a 20-nile drive through Canada. Point Roberts has several lovely parks with walking trails leading to the water where there is plenty of bird watching. We could see dozens of eagles soaring over the cliffs and multiple herons patiently fishing in the shallows. In the surf they seem to prefer standing on rocks as they look for the tiny heron swimming in the shallows. We did a fair amount of walking, but we also had time to just stand and watch. We aren’t as patient as the herons, but we took enough time to lear a bit from them.

This weekend marks the official beginning of the summer tourist season here in Birch Bay. During the winter, our town is a sleepy little hamlet with only a few businesses and services. Many of the restaurants have shortened hours. The C Shop, a candy store where they make most of their own candy and sell popcorn, shaved ice, ice cream and a variety of other treats, is closed during the winter months. The locals get used to walking and biking in the middle of the streets. Our town is a golf cart zone, so we are used to folks driving around in golf carts often going only 10 of 15 mph. We get used to having the beach to ourselves and knowing that many of the houses and cottages are unoccupied during the off season.

But this weekend everything changes. Many tourist areas in the United States won’t officially kick off their season until Memorial Day next weekend, but we always start a week early because it is a big public holiday weekend in Victoria with nearly everyone having a three day weekend. There will be parades and fireworks on the Island and in Vancouver and plenty of folks have reserved time shares and vacation rentals in Birch Bay for the weekend. By tonight the majority of the cars on Birch Bay Drive will be sporting British Columbia license plates.

Victoria Day is a Public Holiday in seven of the Canadian provinces and all three territories. Only Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Quebec do not observe Victoria Day as a Public Holiday. As you might imagine, British Columbia, the capitol of which is Victoria, is a place where Victoria Day is observed with enthusiasm and rigor.

In the United States we have President’s Day, which is a combination of two former holidays: Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12 and Washington’s Birthday on February 22. Those holidays, however, were instituted after the deaths of the two presidents and were not recognized holidays during their lifetimes. Things are a bit different in the United Kingdom. In general, with the exception of Victoria Day, which is unique and not recognized throughout the kingdom, the queen or king’s birthday is officially recognized during their lifetime but not after their death. For example the birthday of Queen Elizabeth II was officially celebrated from the time of her ascension to the throne in 1952 until her death in 2022. Interestingly, her official birthday was not on the day of her birth, April 21, but rather on the second Saturday in June each year. She was not the first monarch to have a private birthday and an official birthday. The tradition was started by King George in 1748. With a November birthday being too cold for a celebratory parade, he tied his annual celebrations with the annual Trooping the Color military parade. While a parade could certainly have been held in April on the Queen’s birthday, Elizabeth chose to continue the tradition and have the official celebration of her birthday on trooping day.

The celebration is quite a spectacle. Over 1400 parading soldiers, 400 horses and 400 musicians take part in the Trooping the Color parade. The monarch arrives at the House Guard’s Parade in Whitehall, receives a royal salute, and inspects the troops. Military bands perform, and the regimental color is taken on procession down the ranks of soldiers. The royal carriage then journeys back to Buckingham Palace at the head of a parade. The Birthday Habits list is also released on that day.

While the events of Trooping the Color are reserved for England, Canadians have been observing Victoria Day for a long time. During the reign of Queen Victoria, May 24, the queen’s birthday , was declared a holiday in Canada. After Victoria’s death in 1901, an act of the Canadian Parliament established Victoria Day as a legal holiday to be celebrated on May 24 (or May 25 when May 24 fell on a Sunday). Now Victoria Day falls on the Monday between the 18th and 24th (inclusive) and, so, is always the penultimate Monday of May).

In the United States, Memorial Day was observed on May 30th, the date General Logan had selected for the first Decoration Day. But in 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established Memorial Day as the last Monday in may in order to create a three-day weekend for federal employees.

Susan reported to me that Mrs. Pfeiffer, her 5th Grade teacher, was Canadian and she learned that Victoria Day was May 24. Furthermore her teacher told the class that when she was a little girl Victoria Day was the first day that she was allowed to go barefoot outside. That gave me pause for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are some places in Canada some years when going barefoot on May 24 would mean walking in the snow barefoot. I’ve done it, but only for short distances, usually followed by dipping my feet into a warm pool of hot spring water. Secondly, had I know that when I was in elementary school, I would have deemed it to be a grave injustice because in our house, we were not allowed to go barefoot outside until Memorial Day. Memorial Day always being after Victoria Day, I would have been unable to understand why Canadians got to go barefoot before we did.

These days I rarely go barefoot outdoors. A couple of surgeries to remove squamous cell carcinoma combined with semi-annual visits to the dermatologist to have numerous precancerous cells frozen to induce me to cover up most of my skin when venturing outdoors. While I still swim barefoot, I do wear a swim top with long sleeves and am careful to slather on additional sunscreen. Most of the rest of the time I cover up my skin, including my feet. I have a very comfortable pair of plastic clogs that are easy to don that I keep near the patio door for quick excursions to the barbecue or to tend plants in the yard. And I own more than my fair share of shoes for other occasions.

So summer arrives today. We plan to mark the occasion with a day trip to Canada. One of the challenges that we have accepted is to go someplace new at least once a year. There are plenty of destinations that are close to our home just across the border for us to explore for years to come. We understand that we’ll have to wait a few minutes longer in line at the border crossing when reentering the US because many Canadians will be celebrating by coming to the US and the crossings will be busy, but we travel at a leisurely pace these days and a few minutes will not cause us stress.

Happy Victoria Day to our neighbors and happy start of summer to the rest of our friends who live north of the equator. I’ve heard that autumn is a lovely season in the southern half of the globe.

Many communities have “before and after” stories. The stories are memories of events that happened in the past that transformed the community, usually through some traumatic event. Members of the community who experienced that event or series of events are distinguished from those who joined the community afterward. Sometimes those divisions in the community play out in unexpected ways.

From 1985 to 1995 we served a congregation in Boise Idaho. Part of the history of that congregation is that the congregation had lost its building to a fire in 1942. It had been a real struggle for the congregation to rebuild a larger and more fireproof building during the war with all of the rationing and the shortages of labor that were the result of the war effort. Then, in 1952, a second tragic fire occurred. This one burned the roof off of the building, but the main structure was saved. The congregation once again re-built, this time adding an education wing to the building. After all of that building with the accompanying fund-raising required to pull it off the congregation was exhausted. There was no more building for a long time. When we arrived in 1985, the congregation was in need of a wide variety of building improvements and the building was too small for a growing congregation in a rapidly growing community. Part of our ministry of the next decade was enabling the congregation to believe that they were once again capable of building, raising funds to purchase additional land and to play building improvements and additions including new stairways, elevator access to all levels, remodeled and expanded offices, additional parking and more. By the time the remodeled building was rededicated the congregation had a sense of unity that it had not felt for a long time because the majority of the congregation had shared in the more recent building project and the old divisions of those who came before and after the fires faded from their identity.

Rapid City, where we served for the next 25 years was a community that had experienced a devastating flood in 1972. Over the night of June 9-10, 1972 more than 15 inches of rain fell in parts of the Black Hills. Rapid Creek and other waterways overflowed. Canyon Lake Dam on the west side of town became clogged with debris and failed causing a wall of water to tear through the town. The result was 238 deaths and over 3,000 injured people. Over 1,335 homes and more than 5,000 cars were destroyed. The aftermath of the flood and the shared trauma of the event distinguished those who had survived and witnessed the flood from those who moved to the area after the flood. It happened that we visited family in Rapid City during the year after the flood and so had some personal memories of having witnessed just a part of the aftermath. Those memories provided openings for us to talk with flood survivors as we served the congregation and helped to bridge the gaps in the congregation. Careful storytelling as part of the 25th anniversary of the flood helped the congregation to continue to offer healing to those who had been a part of the flood while still providing welcome to those who had come to the community after the flood.

One of the “before and after” stories of Bellingham, the community where we now attend church, is the Olympic Pipeline Explosion. It is interesting to note that the event, like the Rapid City Flood centers on June 10. On June 10, 1999, the Olympic Pipeline exploded in Whatcom Falls Park sending a fireball down Whatcom Creek killing three people and injuring an additional eight. Local businesses were evacuated, Interstate 5 was shut down, maritime traffic was halted in Bellingham Bay. Property damage was estimated at over $58 million. One house was completely destroyed and the city’s water treatment plant was severely damaged.

The Lummi House of Tears carvers created a story pole to memorialize the explosion and to help the community heal. The pole is displayed at the Woburn Street Trailhead in the park.

The Olympic Pipeline which transports gasoline from the BP refinery which can be seen from our home to Seattle, continues to operate. Last December at Conway, about 32 miles from the Whatcom Creek explosion, there was another spill on the pipeline. This one did not result in an explosion or fire. About 25,000 gallons of gasoline were leaked but no injuries or fatalities were reported. It was a reminder of the vulnerability of the pipeline and of all pipelines. Pipelines transporting oil and refined products made from oil have an important symbolic value in indigenous communities. The traditional stewards of Whatcom Creek are the Coast Salish tribes including the Lummi Nation and the Nooksack Tribe. From time immemorial the tribes established fishing and shellfish harvesting camps along the banks of the creek. The town of Bellingham grew from the selection of the creek as the site of a sawmill established by settlers intent on harvesting the wood to provide for expanding cities including Seattle and other communities as far away as San Francisco. The name Whatcom, now the name of our county, is an adaptation of a Coast Salish word meaning noisy or rumbling water.

Indigenous tribes across the continent have banded together to protest the construction and expansion of pipelines. In the winter of 2016, tribes and supporters from many nations gathered at Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. Police used crowd control weapons including water canons in an attempt to control the protestors. Since that event and eventual disbanding of the encampment members of many indigenous tribes around the world have adopted the name of “water protectors.”

As was the case with the church fires in Boise and the flood in Rapid City, we are late comers, having arrived years after the pipeline explosion and fire. It is not difficult, however, to see the effects of the event and to witness the ongoing healing that remains. Just like the trees in the park all of which are younger than the surrounding forests, it will take years - even centuries - for restoration and healing. The community will retain the distinction of before and after for a long time. Knowing the story and respecting the ongoing healing is part of learning to live in our adopted home.

There is no question that we live in a conflict-torn world. A quick trip through the headlines leaves no question about the brokenness of this world. The Biden administration plans a billion dollar arms shipment to Israel. Hundreds of French police officers are deployed in the search for an escaped prisoner and those who attacked a police van and freed him, killing and injuring officers. Lawyers for a former president attacked the credibility of a lawyer who once represented that same man in a criminal trial in which the candidate leading in the polls is the defendant. Aircraft manufacturer Boeing may face criminal prosecution over 737 max crashes. Fourteen people were killed, dozens injured and more may still be trapped because a billboard collapsed in Mumbai. Illegal shipments of rosewood to China fuels an insurgency in Mozambique. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing Rafah with nowhere to go and almost no food to eat. An Australian who exposed war crimes is in jail for stealing military secrets. A cyber attack caused the famous art auction website of Christie’s to go down as it seeks to sell high art and rare wine. The Scottish government has declared a national housing emergency.

In the midst of all of this and so much more, yesterday in what I am sure was a moment of perfect peace, a 92-year-old woman suffering from heart disease and cancer took her leave from this life. Alice Munro was widely acclaimed and given award after award for her mastery of the short story. She quietly slipped from this life leaving behind a literary legacy that will go on for generations. It was just a decade after she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.

She will be missed, but I can’t help but feel that the time for her death was right and we have no reason to ask her for another story. What she has written is sufficient.

There are other authors and other stories, but Alice Munro had the capacity to tell a story that makes you want to inhabit it not so much to find out what happens or how it ends, but rather to simply see the world from the perspective of one of her characters. It is worth reading her story just to know that such characters exist.

I one heard an interview with Munro in which she said she wrote short stories because she had no other choice. She was a young mother with three young daughters who didn’t have time to devote to a novel. She wrote stories sandwiched between the washing machine and the dryer because she could take a brief moment there to think without losing her focus on her life as a homemaker. I think that the story, while true, is only part of the story because by the time she published her first book, a collection of short stories, in her thirties, she had been publishing short stories since she was an 18-year-old student. She had more rejection letters than published stories, but she was a writer before she became a mother. But her life, like her stories, doesn’t require her stories to cover every possible truth or every possible angle. I love the image of a harried young woman, trying to live up to society’s often unfair expectations of women, while refusing to allow her creativity to be stifled by the responsibilities of home and the demands of raising children. Knowing that story is enough for me to believe in the creativity potential of every woman regardless of her circumstances or the judgment of the world.

I do not believe that Munro’s stories are scripture, but they do help me understand why sacred stories are so important in this life. We treasure stories that invite us to inhabit them without assurance of their endings, but rather because of the value of the stories themselves. I am a Christian not because of some preacher’s description of heavenly glory - of gold-paved streets, endless choirs of angels, instant ability to tune and play a harp, or face-to-face encounters with those who died before I was born. I am a Christian because I have been invited into the story in which the awesome power of empire, capable of judging and destroying humans by nailing them to a cross, is not the end of the story. I want to live in a story where justice comes to the dispossessed, the widows and orphans, those forgotten by society. I want to live in a story where the powers and principalities of this world do not get the final word on the beauty, the meaning, and the worth of human life. I want to live in a world where faith, hope, and love abide and the greatest of these is love. For that world, I need more than the headlines and the awesome communication powers of contemporary media. For that world, I need sacred story. For that world, I choose to inhabit stories that our people have been telling for millennia. For that world I choose to tell those stories to my children and grandchildren.

I choose to meet with the survivors of suicide and sit with them as they tell the stories of their trauma and loss not because I want to know the end of the story, but because I want to see the world from their perspective. I want to live in a world where the human spirit is capable of meeting the overwhelming power of that tragedy and not only surviving, but thriving and inspiring others to live.

I think Alice Munro understood that world enough to know, even in the face of debilitating illness and the realities of the frailness of the human body as it approaches a century of living, that the story does not end when the last breath comes. We can love her stories and accept her death.

I invite you to read a story by Alice Munro. Pick up Who Do You Think You are? or Boys and Girls or How I met My Husband. Read through a list of her stories or pick up one of her collections. Find about gutting turkeys and fox faming, of felling trees and harsh country schools, of lingering illness and obscure shame, of the lives of girls and women. Start reading wherever you choose and stop wherever it strikes you. Don’t focus on reading them all or knowing all about her as a writer. Take a moment to simply look at time and life and relationships from a new perspective.

The story goes on.

One of the values of the family where I grew up was a belief that people should follow their dreams. If there was something that you wanted to do, you received support from our family to pursue it. We learned that following one’s dreams was not a guarantee of success. Some dreams are more realistic than others. We all have limits and sometimes we come face to face with them. I grew up knowing a story about my parents’ search for a place to establish a flying business after my father was discharged from the army air corps following the Second World War. After serving in California during the war, where my parents were married, he used his GI benefits to go to school in Oklahoma and obtained his airframe and engine mechanics licenses to go with his commercial and instrument pilot’s ratings. Equipped with that training the couple set out to find a place to establish a business. They briefly considered buying an existing operation in Oklahoma, but when they could not obtain financing for such a large move, they decided to find a small town with an airport, but without an established fixed base operator. Since both had family in Montana, they focused their search on Montana and Wyoming, and through a series of trials and errors ended up selecting Big Timber, where they established their business, raised their family, and lived until after my father had passed away.

Although some of my brothers and sisters lived in Big Timber for some of the years of their adult lives, we have all drifted away from that town, most of us out of state. Only one brother remains in Montana and he lives nearly 300 miles from our home town. We were encouraged to discover our own dreams and follow them. One of my sisters moved to Minnesota, back to Montana, then to Missouri, from there to Oregon, from Oregon to Arizona, then back to Oregon, back to Montana and now lives in Oregon once again. Along the way she completed her undergraduate degree, earned a law degree, and has worked as an engineer, a corporate lawyer, a patent attorney a sheep rancher and a bus driver.

I was supported in my desire to attend theological seminary and have followed my passion for serving the church with the full support of my family.

One of my brothers pursued the dream of becoming a rock drummer and although he is an accomplished percussionist, the music business has never been a source of sustenance for him. However, he continues to drum as a hobby and plays with a big band as well as a symphony orchestra on a professional level.

Each of our stories is quite different from the other and none of us took over the family business, although that would have been an option for at least some of us. Looking back, I doubt that it would have been a good choice for any of us, given our particular interests and talents.

Life, however, has not turned out the way I once dreamed it would. When we moved to Chicago to attend theological seminary, I believed that I would return to Montana and serve a congregation there upon graduation. Over the span of more than four decades, I applied to congregations in Montana multiple times and each time was not called to serve that particular church. I served in four other states and enjoyed a wonderful career, but we have only lived in Montana for one of the 51 years we have been married. I wouldn’t describe it as a dream that was shattered, but rather as a life that took different twists and turns than anticipated. I have been happy and fulfilled in my work and we feel very fortunate to be able to live near our son and his family at this phase of our life.

There are other dreams that I once held that I have released in pursuit of different interests. I became a pilot as a teenager and pursued aviation as a hobby off an on during my life. I rented airplanes and we owned an airplane in partnership with others for a while. I flew my family on trips to Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota as well as several destinations in Idaho during those years. However, flying never became high enough of a financial priority for me to safely continue flying and I have found other hobbies and interests that have given my life meaning. I continue to enjoy being around pilots and occasionally flying with others, but have no intention of becoming an active pilot at this stage of my life.

If you had asked me more than 5 years ago, I would have said that driving to Alaska was one of my life goals. I still may make that trip, but I am getting older and have allowed some opportunities to make that trip slip by. We had already decided that this summer was not the right time for us because we have an opportunity to host our daughter and grandson in our home for an extended visit this summer as her husband is deployed overseas. That has turned out to be a wise decision for us for other reasons as well. Right now the alcan highway we would be following is closed due to the Parker Lake fire near Fort Nelson, BC. Even when the roads were open last summer there were large areas where visibility was greatly reduced due to wildfire smoke and the flare up of fires from 2023 in the past week promise an intense wildfire season along the route to Alaska.

Our trip to Alaska may involve a very different route than I originally envisioned. We may end up traveling by ferry or flying up there. There are other ways to see some of the places I want to visit. It is still possible that my life will take me to other destinations. Right now, I am happy to wait and dream and think of new possibilities.

I am learning that not every dream has to come true in order for life to be rich and meaningful. We have made wonderful friends and have had a wonderful life without living in Montana. We will continue to be happy and fulfilled regardless of the places we visit in the years to come. I have no intention of ceasing to follow my dreams, I’m just learning that dreams can change and that change can be rewarding.

Well, I’m moving a bit slowly this morning and got around to writing my journal entry several hours later than usual. I guess I was just tired after a busy day yesterday. It is one of the adjustments to being older land being retired that I find difficult. It seems that I still have energy for a busy lifestyle and I enjoy being busy, but when I put in a long day, which once was a common part of my life, I find that I slow down the next day or so.

Yesterday was a fun day. I got up a bit earlier than usual and got ready for church. Susan and I usually drive to church together, but I had some extra commitments, so I took my own vehicle and she followed a bit later. I had both a vocal choir rehearsal and a bell choir rehearsal before worship. Our bell choir rang for two worship services: our church meets at 10 am and Garden Street United Methodist Church meets at 2:30 pm. Between the two services, I visited with other church members, picked up a bit of lunch from a to-go restaurant, ate my lunch in the church library and invested the rest of the time processing new books into the church library. The bell choir had a short warm-up before worship and then rang for that service. I left immediately after the service, came home, changed my clothes, and went to work int he kitchen. I cooked ribs and sweet potatoes on the grill for supper and Isaac’s family came to our house for a Mother’s Day celebration. After our guests left Susan and I went for a walk and as dusk fell, I went over to the farm.

I have been working with a swarm of bees at the neighbor’s place for more than a week. They had taken up temporary residence around a small tree and clumped so tightly to the base of the tree that I could not get to the queen with a bee brush without being inundated with defensive bees. Two attempts resulted in capturing large numbers of worker bees but failing to get the queen. I relocated the captured bees into an empty hive with food inside of it hoping it would attract the bees to move, but without success. The swarm moved on and I though perhaps it had left the neighbor’s place.

Since my hives are all active and thriving, I am not sure that the bees came from my colonies, but it is possible that one of them has divided and made a new queen. The swarming bees are domestic honey bees and I am the closest bee keeper to the neighbor’s property. I want to be a good neighbor and don’t want my bees to be a problem for the neighbors, so I have been working diligently to help them with the swarm, but I am a new bee keeper and this is my first attempt to deal with a loose swarm.

Last night, however, I found the bees relocated to a taller tree still on the neighbor’s place. The day had cooled quite a bit and it was starting to get dark and the bees were tightly clumped around a single small branch. I suited up and within a short time had succeeded in clipping off the branch and capturing the entire swarm with the queen in a box designed to transfer bees. It was as easy as could bee, unlike my previous attempts.

Happy with my success, I helped with a few chores at the farm before closing the driveway gate and returning home to a bit of wind down time. I got to bed a bit later than usual.

There was nothing about my day that was especially strenuous. I had just planned a few more activities in a single day than my usual retirement pace. I used to have days as full or more full regularly just a few years ago. But I am not used to not getting any breaks in my day. The simple fact that I kept in motion for 14 hours or so without taking time to sit in my chair and doze or at least relax.

When I was working, I was aware that there were some people in my life who would have only one thing in a day. I was often frustrated with a clergy group that I participated in with a majority of retired clergy. Those retired pastors seemed to want to sit and talk after the meeting, often keeping me from getting to other important work. It was simply the case that they had only one meeting that day and I had many. I tried to be patient, but I remember saying to myself, “I’m not going to be like them.”

Now I realize I am more like them than I expected. So I am particularly careful about how my more leisurely lifestyle affects others who are working. I had brief conversations with the pastors of both congregations yesterday, but was mindful to keep them short and remember that they are busy and have other people with whom they need to speak. Susan and I have a meeting with the pastor of another congregation on Tuesday to do some planning for a couple of Sundays coming up when we will lead worship in the congregation she serves while she takes a vacation. I want to be respectful of her time and efficient with the time she spends with us. That means not telling too many stories and focusing my attention on her work and the congregation she is serving.

I realize that saying, “I’m not going to be like them,” doesn’t mean that I am not like them. I have much more in common with the many retired pastors I have known over the years than I thought I would have. Retirement and age have slowed me down quite a bit. The years of working in the church has filled me with stories and some of those stories are not as relevant to the lives and work of working pastors as I might think. Enabling them to succeed in their ministries means being respectful of their time and trusting them to bring themselves to the work without needing my mentorship or comments. It is, however, easier said than done.

Like other phases of life, I’m “winging it” a lot more in retirement than I expected. I hope that I can keep learning as I go and will learn to be a helper and not a burden to younger pastors who are serving the church.

The Northern Lights put on quite a show the night before last. Scientists are getting pretty good at predicting them, so we knew that there was a good chance of seeing them from where we live. We went out at dusk and drove through some isolated back roads that took us a bit farther away from the city lights than where we live. Although our village is small and we don’t have much light pollution, we are so close to the big city of Vancouver, BC that there is always a bit of light on the horizon to our north. However, I am not a night person and we were just a bit early for the main display. I got up yesterday and looked at the posts of my friends on social media and saw a number of brilliant photographs, including one that showed our bay with the moon over the water and the Aurora reflecting on the water’s surface.

i was a it disappointed, but I have been able to see the lights many times in the course of my life and there will be plenty of other opportunities to view them. Despite my habit of rising to write in my journal in the wee hours, I am not one for staying up late at night. I know that some of my friends who got a good view of the lights are night owls who are used to staying up later than I.

One comment I will make, however, is that unlike many natural phenomena, the Northern Lights photograph pretty well. One thing that we photographers are aware of is how difficult it is to accurately capture colors in our images. I take a lot of sunrise pictures and I know that what I see with my eyes is often quite a bit different than what shows up in my photographs. Sunrises, sunsets and the Aurora Borealis happen to be phenomena that produce dramatic photographs, often resulting in images that feature brighter colors than the actual experience. The Aurora is predominantly green when viewed above, with a bit of pink and purple around the edges. In the photographs pink and purple are often the dominant colors. The camera uses a different process capturing the image than our eyes use. Our eyes dilate in low light situations, opening the pupils to allow more light to enter. A photographer can control the aperture in a complex camera mimicking the effect, but most automatic cameras, including the ones built into cell phones use longer exposure times or, in the case of cell phones, computational processes to combine multiple photographs into a single image. The result is brilliant colors in the photograph but what is really a composite of several different moments into a single image.

My explanation is a bit fuzzy, but if you think about it, you’ll agree that colors are often a bit different in a photograph than in actual experience. That doesn’t make a photograph and less of a treasure, but it does make some of us a bit more critical of photographs, knowing that they tell only part of the story. Having said that, I am sure that I will take advantage of other predictions of the lights to be out and about in the middle of the night and you can be sure I’ll have a camera with more than one lens along for the adventure.

Among the images that I spent time looking at yesterday are images from Fort Nelson, BC. I’ve never been to Fort Nelson, though it is one of the places I hope to one day visit. People used to the United States, even those who live in some of the largest states, often make the mistake of thinking of Canada as being a bit smaller than it is. British Columbia starts just a short distance from our home, but it extends north for a long distance. And beyond B.C. are Yukon and Northwest Territories. Fort Nelson is a thousand miles from Vancouver. Even in the state of my birth, Montana, things that are a thousand miles away are in another state.

Fort Nelson is the home of indigenous people. The Fort Nelson First Nation is a generic name for Interior Salish people belonging to the Ktunaxa and Snit First Nations. Interior Salish is a bit different from Coast Salish, the language of the people indigenous to where we now live. Both tribes have fished for and been sustained by salmon for thousands of years. The salmon were once abundant, but now exist in much smaller quantities.

Fort Nelson made the news yesterday for a different reason. The town is being evacuated because it is being threatened by wildfire. Although there are many fires burning in northern British Columbia that smoldered all winter and have begin to spread and grow in the warmer temperatures of this spring, this particular fire, which is covering about two and a half square miles, is a new blaze, ignited when high winds blew down power lines that sparked in tinder dry grass. The fire is rushing toward the community where about 3,500 people have been ordered to evacuate. In that remote region, evacuation forces people to travel hundreds of miles from their homes because developed communities are few and far between. Additional fires are threatening homes in Alberta. Smoke is a health hazard in British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan according to Environment Canada.

It is not yet the middle of May. People are bracing for what will be a long fire season. And in many places the fire season is a continuation of last year’s season which never came to an end. Warmer than usual temperatures combined with lower than average snowfall to result in a large number of fires that burned all winter long.

The smoke from wild fires has already resulted in poor air quality for much of Canada. Last summer’s fire season was particularly devastating in Canada. Over 37 million acres burned, eight firefighters were killed, and nearly a quarter of a million people were forced to evacuate from their homes. This summer could be much worse.

The combination of flames diffused by heavy smoke combined with a brilliant display of the Aurora Borealis to make some dramatic photographs. I am grateful, however, that even though I know the colors aren’t true to life, I can view the photographs instead of being an eye witness to the fires. For now, I feel fortunate to live is a somewhat safer location with the first a long way away.

Let me say this up front. I don’t want readers to think otherwise. I was born a citizen of the United States and I remain a loyal citizen. I try to exercise good citizenship, paying attention to this issues, voting in each election, following the laws of the land, paying my taxes, volunteering in service to my community, keeping myself educated about the issues of the day and communicating with my elected representatives. Although I will occasionally comment about our neighbors in Canada, I have no intention of becoming a Canadian citizen.

I regularly listen to the broadcasts of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The taxpayer supported public broadcasting network has some programs that I enjoy and I think it is helpful for me to learn their perspective on the news of the day. I also am an avid reader of U.S. news sites on the Internet and I also listen to US radio stations. Among the news in Canada yesterday was coverage of the third reading and debate in the Canadian Senate of bill C-226, “An Act respecting the development of a national strategy to assess, prevent and address environmental racism and to advance environmental justice.”

Given the news that has been coming out of our national legislature, it has been refreshing to listen to the debate in Canada about an issues that is important in both countries. I admit I was a bit jealous of our neighbors. I wish our representatives were engaged in a national conversation about the relationship between environmental pollution and racism. Regardless of whether or not you think that current environmental policy is unfair to members of minority communities, I think a healthy conversation is a good idea. One of the challenges of our time is the need to reflect on our shared responsibility to improve our relationship with the environment. There is substantial evidence that some communities are disproportionately more affected by pollution and environmental destruction than others.

Meanwhile, news from our federal legislators seems to focus on some pretty silly and unnecessary issues. For example, this week the Speaker of the US House of Representatives unveiled a bill to ban noncitizens from voting in federal elections. The bill is entirely unnecessary. It is already illegal for non citizens to vote. In addition, despite significant rhetoric coming from one of our national parties claiming that such fraud is commonplace, there is no evidence that voting by non citizens is occurring or that such illegal action has any impact on the outcome of any elections held in the United States.

A couple of days ago, a member of the US House of Representatives sought to remove the Speaker of the House after failing to block an emergency bill that funds the continued operation of the government. That’s right. Upset that the House and Senate did their job of funding the operation of the government, a member of the House attempted to stop the process of legislation completely.

These debates, such as they are, seem trivial and are not focusing on the very real issues before us as a nation. In communities and on campuses all across the nation, people are debating the role of the US government in supporting Israel in the light of the continuing war against Hamas in Gaza. Like many other foreign policy issues, this is an extremely complex issue. The history of the 20th Century has made it clear that it is important for our government to support the State of Israel. Standing up for the right of Jewish people to have a safe homeland to protect their rights is important. The publicly avowed intention of Hamas to destroy Israel is abhorrent as were the killings and taking of hostages that provoked the war. On the other hand the people of Palestine also deserve a safe place to live and the excessive use of force against civilians, the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands, and the cut off of relief supplies leading to famine cannot be condoned. It would do us well to have careful and reasoned debate about what shape US policy should take in this time.

Our country has a serious problem with homelessness. There is a shortage of decent affordable housing. While some of those who are homeless suffer from addictions and mental illness there are hard-working citizens of our country who simply cannot afford the basics of life. A careful and reasoned conversation about how we might address this problem would be welcomed. The problem is nation-wide. A federal response is necessary.

The high cost of health care continues to be a serious problem in our country. Medical bills continue to be the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in our nation. We spend more per capita than any other nation on health care and yet our health statistics are much worse than other industrialized countries. We spend more with less success than other countries. A well reasoned national conversation is in order as we seek ways to address this ongoing problem.

I could go on and on about issues that are important to the people of our country and worthy of healthy conversation. Meanwhile our Senators and Representatives seem to be willing to hold press conferences and speak out on all kinds of things that are not real issues. Sometimes it seems as if they are avoiding the serious conversations that our country needs and for which they have been elected.

The business of politics in the United States has become so expensive that elected officials spend more time raising funds than dealing with issues. It is frustrating that there is so little cooperation in the federal government that we have no comprehensive budget and our government runs on stop gap funding will important issues such as climate change and its disproportionate effects on racial minorities and impoverished communities are simply not being addressed.

Some days I take a brief break from the news of my own country and listen to the news of our neighbors. It can be refreshing. It also reminds me that there are important conversations we need to have in our country.

I invested my morning yesterday working in the church library. One of my volunteer positions in our church is serving as church librarian. We use a computer program for our catalogue and our books are organized by topic and shelved alphabetically by author’s name. Since I became church librarian, I have been going through the library. As I go through the books, I am putting labels on the spine with the first three letters of the author’s last name to speed up the process of shelving books when they are returned to the library. I have also made new labels for the shelves assist people in finding the volumes. In addition, I have been removing from the library volumes that are not circulating and that we don’t expect to circulate to make shelf space for new acquisitions.

When I worked as Interim Minister of Faith Formation, we acquired new volumes for the church library. Some of those volumes could not be shelved because of a lack of space in their section. The library is strong in Bible reference, biblical studies, and theology sections. It has been growing in recent years in faith formation, spirituality, economic justice, gender justice, racial justice, and environmental justice. Shelves needed to be re-organized in order to make space for new acquisitions. Some older titles have not been used in decades. Because there is such a rich wealth of literature available online it doesn’t make sense for a small church library to have a large reference section. As we shrink that part of our library we are making room for more books that circulate.

Church libraries have an issue that requires constant attention. The issue is that people donate books to the church library at a rapid pace. When they clean out their homes and discover books they want to get rid of they don’t want to throw away the books so they bring boxes of them to the church library. there were at least six boxes of unsorted books in the library when I began sorting and there are still several that I need to go through and either process into the library or donate to some other place. Many of the donations go to a public library foundation that has an annual book sale.

I am making progress, but a lot of work remains before the church library is in tip top shape. Some weeks I don’t get much time in the library at all. But I had at least three hours to work in the library yesterday and was pleased with the progress I made.

As I worked I remembered other times from decades of working in churches. I still miss my work life even though I am nearly a year into full retirement and have been partially retired for four years. Working in the church library is different from other jobs, though. Part of the difference is that not many people come and go. When I was working as a pastor, there was a constant flow of members, visitors, and neighbors in and out of my office. The hallways of our church were filled with children and parents participating in the preschool. Church members stopped by for conversation. Members of the church staff met at the coffee machine, the copier, and in the hallways, often striking up conversations. One of my work habits was to come into the church building early in the morning to get an hour or more of uninterrupted work because during the day I needed to attend to all kinds of interruptions and distractions. Usually I didn’t mind the interruptions. They offered good and meaningful work and important connections with those I was serving.

Church staffs don’t work that way these days, at least not in the church to which we now belong. I think part of the change came from covid. Decreased physical contact had people working in offices with doors closed and wearing masks when venturing out of the office. More and more meetings are being held over Zoom or other computer formats, making some things more efficient, but not supporting the informal conversations in which so much dreaming, planning and ministry took place. There were six members of the church staff working yesterday morning, but I only spoke with three of them. Two of them came by the library expecting it to be empty and looking for a place to attend a webinar together. I happened to catch the third arriving to work and had a brief conversation in the doorway of their office. There was a small group meeting in the building while I was working in the library, but those attending the meeting walked right by without stopping to chat. The church is much more business like than the informal community-based environment in which I loved to work.

Some of the change is due to the new post-covid world in which ministry now takes place. Some of the change is due to differences in education and preparation of ministers. Most seminary education is obtained online or through other distance learning these days. When we went to seminary, living on campus was required. Being a part of an in-person community, worshiping regular with classmates, faculty, and administration was expected. Those expectations are no longer present. Much of theological education is asynchronous. People go on line on their own schedule and work independently. The result is that there are a lot of pastors who are used to working alone. Forming community is less of a priority as ministers become more specialized. Sermons are more likely to grow out of individual study and preparation than out of community experiences. Pastoral visits in homes are less frequent.

I could bemoan the changes, and sometimes I do. That, however, is not a valuable contribution to the church. What I can do now that I am a lay member of a congregation is to choose ways of serving that bring me into contact with other church members. I hope that I can make the church library become a hub of community by offering new services and lots of incentives for church members to just drop into the library. That job will require a lot more work, and at this stage of my life, I am eager for meaningful work. I am grateful to have this new challenge in my life.

OK drivers, here is a little pop quiz:

1. You are driving on a narrow street with multiple cars parked along both sides of the street. Ahead you see a car coming toward you. Do you
a. speed up so you can get to the next really narrow place in the street before the oncoming traffic.
b. stop right where you are and wait for the other car to figure out how to get past you.
c. slow, but proceed while keeping your car to the right of the center line
d. none of the above

2. You are driving down hill on a street that has a 25 mph speed limit. Ahead you see pedestrians walking. They are facing you, just to the right of the white line that a marks the edge of the road. Do you
a. honk your horn so the pedestrians will get out of your way.
b. speed up and continue to stay in your lane, confident you will miss the pedestrians.
c. cross the centerline when there is no oncoming traffic to give the pedestrians plenty of room
d. both a and b

3. You see a bridge ahead that is narrower than the road on which you are driving. Where you are driving there are substantial shoulders which do not exist on the bridge. Do you
a. proceed with caution because you can clearly see that the driving land is just as wide on the bridge as it is in other places. Only the shoulder is narrower.
b. slam on your brakes without a thought of the car behind you and proceed across the bridge at a snail’s pace
c. cross the center line even if there is oncoming traffic because you are afraid of hitting the side of the bridge
d. speed up so you will cross the bridge more quickly

4. You are approaching a traffic circle with other cars in the circle. Do you
a. wait until there are no other cars in the circle before proceeding.
b. treat the traffic circle like a four way stop, stopping before entering and yield to the car on your right.
c. merge smoothly into the traffic in the circle, yielding to cars on your left.
d. curse at the engineers who designed the traffic circle and show your middle finger to the other drivers in the circle.

5. You are on a long ramp that leads to an extra traffic lane on the freeway that will end about a half mile down the road. Do you
a. proceed slowly down the ramp and pulling into the freeway before accelerating to the speed you want to drive.
b. ignore the other traffic expecting cars on the freeway to make room for you to get into the lane when your lane ends
c. use the ramp and the extra lane to match the speed of traffic on the freeway while looking for a space to merge into the traffic to your left.
d. slow down hoping that there will be a break in the traffic where you can get into the other lane

I think I’ve seen drivers choose all of the options above. Most of the time it is pretty difficult to predict what other drivers will do. We live in an unincorporated village that is a tourist destination. There are often lots of pedestrians walking alongside our somewhat narrow streets. Our village, furthermore, is a golf cart zone where it is legal to drive golf carts on the road even though they are not licensed and lack the safety equipment of a car such as seatbelts and bumpers. The speed limit in our village is 25 mph, though since we are unincorporated, there are no compliance officers checking the speed of the cars unless a sheriff’s deputy happens to be passing through our community. A high percentage of the drivers in our village do not live here and are not familiar with the layout of our streets. They may be looking for a destination to which they have never been before and are uncertain of the location of intersections and other features.

Over the years, I have noticed that cars from particular places seem to share driving patters with other cars from the same place. Here are some examples:

In Montana where the speed limits for trucks are usually slower than the speed limits for cars, the majority of the trucks ignore the truck speed limit and generally drive as fast as the cars so that cars wanting to overtake them have to exceed their speed limit.

In Idaho people don’t fully acknowledge the authority of lanes painted on streets and highways and often ignore those painted lines, driving wherever they want to on the streets.

In South Dakota drivers generally speed up for a yellow light and it is common for two or three cars to proceed after the light turns red at an intersection.

In Washington drivers seem to ignore the general rules of merging into traffic, changing lanes without matching the speed of the traffic or allowing for room to merge, expecting the traffic on the road to adjust to their driving.

These are generalizations, but they come from observations of how people drive. To be fair to Canadians, I’ll comment on a few of the quirks of those drivers. Cars with Alberta license plates are likely to pass other traffic even when they can see oncoming cars. They seem to get a thrill out of close calls. Cars with British Columbia plates don’t seem to know how to convert km per hour to miles per hour and rarely drive at the speed limit when on US highways choosing to drive slower or faster than the traffic on the road setting their cruise control to some number in kilometers that is about what they think they would drive on a Canadian road.

I realize I am getting older and that my reaction times have slowed a bit, but I still know how wide my vehicle is and how to merge into traffic. I also know what the speed limits are where I routinely drive and generally follow those limits. Whether walking or driving it has proven to be a good practice to keep aware of all of the other drivers and their styles of driving. I hope you will be careful when walking or driving. I’ve seen some pretty dangerous behavior from the others on the road.

One of the communities in our county is the result of a quirk of history and geography. The southern tip of the Tsawwassen Peninsula was known to the Coast Salish people as a good place to fish and collect clams and oysters. The point of that peninsula was first seen by Europeans in 1791 when the expedition of Francisco de Eliza was exploring the Pacific coast of the continent. The maps produced by that expedition depicted the tip of the peninsula as an island, labeled variously as “Isla de Cepeda” or “Isla de Zepeda.” The next year another Spanish Expedition met up with the British expedition of George Vancouver and the two expeditions met each other in the region and agreed to cooperate in mapping the area. What had previously been thought to be an island was found to be the end of a peninsula. When expedition ships sailed into boundary bay they discovered that it is connected to the mainland. The Vancouver expedition named the tip of the peninsula Point Roberts after Henry Roberts, a friend of George Vancouver who had originally been given command of the expedition.

It isn’t clear exactly when Europeans first began to settle permanently at Point Roberts, but the protection of Boundary Bay and the excellent access to abundant fishing areas made the area an attractive place to live. In 1846, the Oregon Treaty established the official boundary between the United States and the British territory that became Canada. West of the Rocky Mountains the 49th parallel was chosen as the boundary. However, if that boundary was to continue west from the coast it would have divided the Vancouver Island into both countries and the established settlement of Victoria on the island would have ended up in the United States. The city was already serving as the capitol of the area and so the boundary dipped south in the Georgia Strait to make all of Vancouver Island in British territory. Later there were minor changes in the border as it snakes its way among the smaller islands, leaving the San Juan islands in U.S. Territory.

Also remaining part of the United States is the tip of the peninsula with the town of Point Roberts established there. This tiny area is included within the boundaries of Whatcom County despite the fact that travel between the point and the rest of the county overland requires driving through 25 miles of Canadian territory. Like other towns in the northern part of our county, there are many members of the Point Roberts community who hold dual citizenship while others are multi-national families with some members holding Canadian citizenship while other members of the family are citizens of the U.S.

About 1200 residents live in an area of about 5 square miles. There is no pharmacy in Point Roberts. There is no bus or taxi services. There is no veterinarian, no hospital, and while law enforcement is provided by the Whatcom County Sheriff, no officers are assigned to Point Roberts during the night. People who live in Point Roberts are used to making the drive through Canada to Blaine in order to obtain services. Students commute daily from Point Roberts to Blaine High School. Those who have dual citizenship are able to access health care and dental services in the nearby city of Vancouver, but U.S. citizens must travel to Blaine for those services.

Life in Point Roberts suddenly became a unique challenge in 2020 when the border between Canada and the U.S. was closed with a few essential services being allowed to continue. As the border closure continued into 2021, the isolation of the community became a big problem for U.S. citizens who live there. Businesses in the town of Point Roberts suffered from a lack of tourists. Although the border was re-opened to regular traffic later in 2021, the community has never fully recovered from the pandemic.

We have lived in Whatcom County since 2021, and we have yet to make a visit to Point Roberts though we have met several people who regularly travel between Point Roberts and the rest of the County.

Living right next to the border as we now do, I have come to realize how many families are made up of people from both sides of the border. There are members of our church who live in the U.S. and work in Canada as well as Canadians who work in the U.S. Our music director is a Canadian citizen who lives in the U.S. Borders are always arbitrary and artificial to the people who get to know and love those who live on the other side of the line.

Having lived in small towns for much of my life, I am attracted to rural and isolated places. I can understand why people might choose to live in Point Roberts and it is definitely on my list of places to visit. Now that the border has re-opened, we see people from Canada in our community nearly every day. Yesterday I stopped to pick up a few things at the Costco Store in Bellingham and it seemed that nearly half of the vehicles in the parking lot sported British Columbia license plates. Folks from Canada almost always stop to fill up their gas tanks when driving to the U.S. because of the lower prices for fuel on this side of the border.

Air fares, on the other hand, are a reason for U.S. citizens to travel to Canada. Vancouver International is the closest large airport to our home and before we moved to this area, we twice flew on International Flights from Vancouver because air fares between the U.S. and Japan and the U.S. and England were lower from Vancouver than from Seattle. Our daughter and grandson are coming to visit from South Carolina this summer and they will be flying in and out of Vancouver because plane ticket prices were lower for them than flying to Seattle would have been. Picking up someone from the Vancouver airport saves us hours of driving even allowing for a few moments to cross the border.

Except on the foggiest of days we can see Point Roberts across the bay from the beach where we walk most days. One of these days we need to drive the short distance to take a look at our bay from Point Roberts just to experience a different point of view.

My father enjoyed teasing and a few simple pranks. One story from the early years of my parents’ marriage shows a bit of his unique sense of humor. I don’t remember my father ever telling the story, but my mother told it several times. Not long after they were married, they were discussing favorite meals and he commented that he loved chicken and dumplings. Wanting to please him, she searched for recipes and made chicken and dumplings for dinner. She asked him how he liked the dish. He responded, “This is pretty good. The dumplings aren’t quite like my mother makes, but it isn’t bad.” Wanting to please him, she continued to search for new recipes for dumplings. He responded to each attempt with a similar answer that the dish tasted good, but the dumplings weren’t like the ones his mother made.

They were living in California in the early months of their marriage and traveling back to their parents in Montana wasn’t a possibility due to gas rationing. When the war ended and they were finally able to return to their home state they paid visits to both sets of parents. While they were visiting his parents, my mother asked Grandma Katherine for her dumpling recipe. Grandma responded with a strange look on her face that she had never made dumplings and didn’t have a recipe.

The gig was up for my dad. He had to confess that the whole dumpling story was made up and that he enjoyed chicken and dumplings enough to keep the story going just so mother would keep preparing the dish.

I’ve repeated the story many times and, according to several experts, the stories we repeat the most are the ones that are most likely to be exaggerated and not completely accurate. Thus I don’t know the absolute veracity of the story. In a way it doesn’t matter. The story has become one of my cherished memories now that neither of my parents are alive.

I know that my father enjoyed our mother’s cooking. Another time he went to a bake sale and purchased the cake the mother had made and donated to the sale. She was upset about it and told him so. He was surprised that his action upset her. He thought she would be pleased that he was proud of her and enjoyed her baking. Since he purchased the cake, it had done its part of raising funds for the cause. She, on the other hand, found the incident embarrassing. “People will think you bought it to keep others from tasting it,” she said.

In the end, it worked out for both of them. I can remember numerous occasions on which she baked two german chocolate cakes - one to go to a bake sale and the second to be served in our home. We all got a bit of the results of her baking.

I was thinking about my parents last night because Susan made chicken soup with dumplings for dinner. We have developed our own specialties in our 50 years of marriage and Susan is definitely the more experienced soup creator. There are several dishes I prepare that we both like, but I have never had much practice preparing soups. Since Susan makes so many tasty soups, I’ve sort of left that part of cooking to her and focus on other recipes that she is less likely to prepare. I like her chicken and dumplings. Furthermore, I can’t remember my mother’s chicken and dumplings. I know she made the dish from time to time, but I don’t have any distinct memories of how her dumplings came out. I think they were quite similar to the ones Susan makes.

Susan reports that she makes dumplings according to the recipe on the Bisquick box, except the recipe is no longer printed on the box - at least not on the box of the reduced fat version that we keep in our pantry. Like many other recipes, you have to do a quick internet search to find them. I still can’t get over the fact that you can purchase a package of Nestle’s Toll House Chocolate Chips and not find the recipe for Toll House cookies on the package. I don’t mind looking up the recipe, but it seems like the cookies are the main reason for purchasing the product. At any rate, Bisquick dumplings are a simple combination of the mixture in the box with a bit of milk. Thought I don’t think I’ve ever done so, I’m pretty sure I could come up with a passable version. The Betty Crocker website with the Bisquick recipe for dumplings has a link to a complete recipe for chicken and dumplings, which is pretty simple since it includes not only the prepared baking mix shortcut but also the use of a carton of prepared chicken broth in place of cooking down your own broth.

It is interesting to me that we don’t use many of the old recipes that we got from our parents. Over the years we have adopted our own cooking and eating styles and for the most part don’t consult recipe books for everyday cooking. Besides we have shifted our style of eating and preparing food over the years. Back when we had children at home and later when we prepared meals for our parents, we were more interested in convenience and often used prepared foods as part of our menu planning. These days ready access to fresh ingredients year round and an increasing harvest of home grown foods, combined with more available time, we find that we cook from scratch more often. In addition, we are slowly learning to prepare more modest quantities when cooking. Having served as cooks for a church camp in the early years of our marriage, we used to have the best success when preparing foods in large quantities. Then we would freeze leftovers and serve them until they were consumed. Now, we are learning to prepare the quantity we need for a meal.

We still have leftovers from time to time, but usually they are consumed within a day or so of the original cooking. I’m hoping, however, that there are a few dumplings left over for this evening.

There are a number of small volunteer tasks I enjoy performing at church. From time to time one of the head ushers asks me to ring the church bell. The bell in our church tower made the long trip around the tip of South America in 1883-84, having been donated by a generous party in New England for the dedication of the new congregation’s building. It arrived in Bellingham Harbor the day before the dedication of the church and was hauled by hand up the muddy slope from the bay to its place in the tower. That bell is now in the tower at its third location in Bellingham and is still rung by pulling a rope. My favorite times of ringing the bell are when there are children in the congregation who participate in the ringing.

I can remember how much I loved being asked to ring the bell at our church camp. Over the span of 25 summers at camp, being asked to ring the bell never got old for me. We had a bell at our church, but it was silent for may years because a church remodeling project left the building without a bell tower for many years.

The bell was an important fixture in one of the small congregations we served in our first call out of seminary. The small congregation in a small town in Southwestern North Dakota had constructed a bell tower on the church grounds. Bell ringers had to go outside to sound the bell and it was a favorite target of Halloween pranks. Outsmarting and foiling the antics of revelers became a small challenge in our years of serving there. On the 75th anniversary of the congregation everyone in the community was invited to come and take a turn pulling the rope. A significant number of people who were not members of the church joined the congregation in celebrating. We had the good fortune of being invited back to hear the bell ring for the centennial of the congregation.

Bells occupy a special place in my memories. There have been a lot of bells. Four the four years we lived in Chicago we listened to the bells in the tower of Rockefeller Chapel on the University Campus ringing the quarter hour. Most of the time, the bells rang the Westminster Chime, but the tune was changed to the Cambridge Chime to honor the visit of some member of the British Royal Family. The change in the tune resulted in my waking in the night when the bells were rung. On Saturday afternoons in Chicago we got used to the repetitious sound of change ringers practicing the bells at another University Chapel. The practice attracted musicians and mathematicians who honored the ancient practice. Speed control of a tower bell is a precise art, achieved when each bell is mouth upwards and moving slowly near the balance point. Instead of ringing multiple times as in a swing chime, in change ringing the bell must strike once in each change in a precise sequence with the other bells.

Years later, we taught campers at our Music, Arts, Dance and Drama camps the art of change ringing using handbells which were also used to play conventional tunes. We had change ringing exercises for beginners who were responsible for one bell each and also for more advanced ringers who were responsible for two bells each.

One of the joys of retirement for me has been participating in the church handbell choir. Our choir is a joint effort of two congregations and on the Sundays when we ring, we are responsible for two services one at our congregation and another at the Methodist congregation that shares our building. I have had the joy of ringing solo pieces on the handbells for worship as well.

This past weekend when I heard bells, I was remembering other bells that I have heard. We stopped by the library in the afternoon to return books and pick up others. I waited in the call while Susan ran in to exchange books and noticed that the flag was flying at half-staff. It took me a short while to remember that across the nation flags were lowered in honor of the National Fallen Firefighters Memorial Service.

There is a solemn and powerful ceremony that is incorporated into funerals for fallen firefighters that includes the ringing of a fire bell. The congregation is moved to silence as the ceremony ends with a calling of the fire fighter’s name and the ringing of the watch bell. It has been my honor to officiate at funerals for fallen firefighters and a privilege to observe the care and precision with which fellow fire fighters carry out the ceremony. Whenever I remember those who have died, the memory of the bell ringing before a silenced congregation is part of what goes though my mind.

The community of firefighters extends to professional and volunteers who train and are deployed to respond to fires whenever they threaten communities. The bell in our church tower was the alarm bell for our community for many years. It called together volunteers who walked to help with recovery from the Great Vancouver Fire in June of 1886. Again in 1889, the bell rang to summon volunteers from Bellingham who traveled south by boat to help fight the fire that raged through that city. That was a summer of fires in Washington, with significant blazes destroying many buildings in Ellensburg and in Spokane the same year.

Bells Across America is a national program that asks churches and fire stations to ring their bells at noon on the Sunday of National Fallen Firefighters. Some communities also participate in Sound the Sirens in which fire stations sound their sirens at noon in honor of fallen companions.

The sound of bells carries layers upon layers of meaning and memory for me. In my imagination I hear not just the sound of a solitary bell, but a chorus of bells from the tiniest handbell to the largest and deepest tower bell each ringing as a reminder of the many who have sacrificed that our generation might inherit the communities in which we live. May we honor and join them by recommitting ourselves to serving our communities and investing in their futures.

Fifty-one years ago, about a month before our wedding there was a unique race that took place in Whatcom County. Teams competed in skiing, biking, canoeing, and kayaking. That first run was the beginning of what is now a major event in our area. The race is set for May 26 this year. The date of the race is the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. Teams can be from three to eight members with seven unique sports: Cross Country Ski, Downhill Ski 0r Snowboard, Running, Road Bike, Tandem Canoe, Cyclocross Bike and Sea Kayak. The bicycles used in the biking portion of the race are specialized bikes. For the road bike portion, the bikes have very narrow tires and are designed for maximum speed on paved roads. The cyclocross bikes are designed for off road racing. They have wider tires and often have specially designed top bars to make them easier to carry if a particularly difficult obstacle is encountered. Both types of bikes are stripped of all unnecessary weight.

The race course runs through several towns in our county: Glacier, Maple Falls, Kendall, Everson, Lynden, Ferndale and Bellingham. It starts at the Mount Baker ski area and finishes at Marine Park in the Fairhaven District of Bellingham. The neighborhood of Fairhaven holds an annual festival with arts and crafts displays, food vendors, and special deals in shops and restaurants. People come from all over the Pacific Northwest, from British Columbia, and from more distant places. This year’s race will feature at least one team from Alaska that has competed in previous contests.

When we first moved to this area, I thought I might be interested in participating in one of the paddling portions of the race, but after I learned more about it I realized that I am not at all in the league of the competitors.

The race breaks down into seven legs. Leg one is a 4 mile cross country ski race. Leg two is a 2 1/2 mile downhill course on which competitors can either use downhill skills or a snowboard. Leg three is an eight-mile running race. Leg four is a 42-mile road bike race. The course is paved and there are some significant downhill sections with lots of winding and curves. At the town of Everson, the race goes onto the Nooksack River for an 18.5 mile tandem canoe run downstream to the town of Ferndale for leg five. Leg six is a 14-mile cyclocross bike race. The final leg is a 5 mile kayak race on Bellingham Bay ending at Marine Park in Fairhaven.

I like to ride my bike and I enjoy paddling both canoes and kayaks, but I am no racer. These days I appreciate going slowly and frequently find that I don’t have any need to go faster than others. The Ski to Sea Race, however, is a really big deal in our area and there are plenty of serious competitors who put a lot of effort into training and spend a lot of money on equipment for the competition. There won’t be any woodstrip canoes or kayaks in the race. Instead racers will be paddling ultra-lightweight boats made of kevlar and other special materials. I’m not sure how teams go about getting all of the equipment assembled for the race. In addition to boats, racing skis, and snowboards are prepared. The bicycles are especially expensive pieces of equipment.

There are seven divisions of racers: corporate, veterans, high school, Whatcom county teams, car-free teams, masters, and family. Car-free teams must transport all team members, supporters, and race equipment to and from each leg of the race without the use of any auto, truck, or other motorized form of transportation. Masters teams must have all members over the age of 40. Family teams must all be related, but can include step-relations, cousins, in-laws and long term partners. Within each division, there are three sub-divisions: open (racers can be any gender), mixed (four or more women per team or four legs assigned to female racers), and women (all female teams).

There are specific rules about the type of bikes and other equipment allowed. All boats are inspected and must conform to race rules that set minimum and maximum lengths and specific length to width rules. All paddlers must wear US Coast Guard approved life vests at all times. Unzipped life vests result in disqualification. Inflatable life vests are not allowed. Whistles and paddle leashes are required for the kayaking portion of the race. Racers must be able to demonstrate self-rescue such as a kayak roll, paddle float self-rescue, or cowboy remount. Kayaks must be paddled by a single racer. Tandem kayaks are not allowed.

Each team is issued a timing chip which must be carried by team members and handed off at specific locations. Paddlers must attach the chips to themselves so that they are not lost in the event of a capsize. Chips must pass by timing tables at each station. There is a ceremonial bell that is rung by each team upon completion of the race.

If the weather is rough on the day of the race the sea kayak portion will follow a different course than if the winds are calm and there are no waves on the bay. The ski portions of the race are set each year depending on snow conditions on the mountain.

There are a whole lot of other details that are part of the event. It is a really big deal and involves a thousand or so volunteers to make it a success. Considering that the race has been held for over 50 years, there are a lot of people in our area who have participated in the race in some way, either as a racer or a volunteer and it isn’t difficult to find someone who can tell a few race stories. Teams return year after year, learning from their experience and refining their race skills. There is plenty of camaraderie among participants.

It is just one of the things that makes our area unique. And, from personal experience, it is something that makes parking in Fairhaven on race day nearly impossible.

When I was growing up, coffee was considered to be an adult beverage. All of my adult relatives drank coffee, but I don’t remember it ever being offered to children. The first time I remember drinking coffee was when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was hunting with my father and he had a thermos of coffee. When we stopped to eat our sandwiches for lunch it was cold and he offered me his coffee cup. the cup was the steel lid of his thermos and the coffee was very hot. It burned as I attempted to drink it and it didn’t taste very good. But I was very pleased to be invited into the community of adults with the offer, so I didn’t complain. I didn’t, however, begin to drink coffee on a regular basis for several years.

When I went to college, I had to change quite a few of my habits. Prior to my college years I was primarily a recreational reader. In college I had large amounts of reading that had to be accomplished. I found myself getting sleepy when trying to complete my reading. Since I had been accustomed to reading myself to sleep at night, I decided to stop that practice. I told myself that I could only read when sitting at a desk. When I found myself still occasionally getting sleepy while reading, I decided it was time to replace the hot chocolate that I was used to drinking with my breakfast. Switching to coffee worked for me. Before long, I was drinking coffee with all of my meals and even had a small percolator in my dorm room. I told myself and others that the caffeine didn’t have any effect on me. I had no problems going to sleep at night. I’d crawl into bed and sleep soundly until time to get up in the morning. My college work study job was opening the library each morning, so I rose early. Generally I was the first one in my dormitory to rise. There was a coffee pot at the library and I made brewing a fresh pot part of the routine of unlocking the building and getting it ready for the day.

After college and graduate school we moved to North Dakota. We noticed right away that it was simply assumed that we drank coffee. When worship was finished everyone went to the fellowship hall and had coffee. When we visited church members in their homes they served us coffee. People didn’t ask us if we wanted coffee, they simply served it. We adopted the same practice. When people came to our house, we poured cups of coffee and sat down to talk.

As the years went by I became a bit of a coffee snob. I purchased a coffee grinder and began to purchase beans from specialty coffee shops. While we still lived in North Dakota, I was buying my coffee when I made a trip to a larger town. We didn’t do much shopping out of town, but I preferred the freshness of the whole beans I could get in bigger towns. I also noticed that I was brewing my coffee much stronger than was typical in our town. Folks drank a lot of coffee, but it wasn’t very strong. I got compliments on the coffee I served to others and I thought it was in part because I was brewing a stronger cup than they could get at the cafe.

Later, when we lived in Idaho, I purchased my first espresso machine. I went to a Starbucks store for the first time in Portland, Oregon and began to develop at taste for specialty coffee shops. I also allowed myself to pay much more for a cup of coffee than was typical in most places. Since I lived over 400 miles from the specialty shops, such coffee was a rare treat and didn’t have an impact on our family budget. Before we moved from Idaho, there were more specialty coffee shops, including a few in Boise, where we lived. The move back to the Dakotas meant that I didn’t find many coffee shops that were to my liking. Over our years in South Dakota there were more and more coffee shops opening as the trend swept the nation.

I began to notice signs of caffeine addiction. When I didn’t have my coffee, I began to develop headaches. At one point I decided to stop drinking coffee, except for an occasional cup of decaf. The first couple of weeks were rough. I missed the coffee, but after a few days the headaches lessened and I noticed that my heart rate slowed. Then one day my doctor detected an abnormal hearth rhythm. An ECG was ordered and the premature contractions were diagnosed. I wore a continuous monitor for a few weeks. Among the recommendations of the doctor was to cut back on caffeine. I decided to quit drinking coffee. I still enjoyed the process of making espresso drinks, so I switched to decaffeinated coffee.

After a scare with an irregular heart rhythm, my wife also stopped drinking coffee. We switched to tea and when we moved to Washington the espresso machine remained boxed for three years. There are many flavorful herbal teas that have no caffeine and we avoid black, green, and white teas that have caffeine in them. I still enjoy a cup of decaf from time to time.

Then I read an article about how decaffeinated coffee is made. Since coffee beans come from an naturally caffeinated plant, the process of removing the caffeine can involve a lot of processing. The most typical process involves chemical solvents, primarily with methylene chloride. Methylene chloride doesn’t seem to be a very safe ingredient, however. It is the chemical in paint strippers and paint removers and is also used in degreasing metal. A small amount of the substance, 10 parts per million, is still allowed on coffee beans.

I am careful to purchase beans that are decaffeinated using the Swiss Water method. That method doesn’t use any chemicals. The green beans are soaked in water for several hours allowing the caffeine to naturally separate from the beans.

It is simpler to select herbal teas. Peppermint tea has only one ingredient: peppermint leaves. It is easy to grow at home and inexpensive to buy in packages.

I still have a cup of decaf from time to time, but much less often than before. And that expensive espresso machine makes good steamed milk for tea lattes.

One of the features that makes it so wonderful to live where we do is that we not only have easy access to the big waters of the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and the west coast, we also have easy access to the rugged North Cascade Mountains. The picture with today’s journal post was taken from the deck of the Schooner Zodiac early last fall and gives a bit of the perspective of the area where we live. Mount Baker, known as Kona Kushan to the indigenous Salish people, is a 10,781 ft active glacier-covered andesitic stratovolcano and has the second most thermally active crater in the Cascade Range, after Mount St. Helens. If we take Birch Bay-Lynden Road from our town, it is a 65-mile drive from the bay to the Mt. Baker Ski Area. The road has a lot of curves and it takes about an hour and a half to cover that distance in a car. There is an annual race that takes a different route from the ski area to Bellingham Bay. Racers start out on skis or snow boards and travel by skiing, biking, running, canoeing, and kayaking. The Ski to Sea Race attracts teams of people who love the outdoors and is great fun.

The North Cascade Mountains are so rugged that there are no routes over them directly east of where we live. To the north, Canada Highway #1, running from Vancouver all the way to St. John’s on the east coast, crosses the Cascades at Kicking Horse Pass. The highway has been under construction with intermittent lane closures and overnight closures since we have lived here. The next crossing south is Washington Highway 20, known as the North Cascades Highway, that crosses the mountains in North Cascades National Park over Rainy Pass and Washington Pass, receives up to 15 feet of snow each winter and is closed during the winter, with an average spring opening date of mid-April.

The northern most year round crossing in the US is US-2 crossing Stevens Pass heading east from Burlington, WA. Interstate 90 winds up from Seattle over Snoqualmie Pass. We have crossed the Cascades on all of those high routes as well as the more southern US 12 that crosses the Cascades at White Pass. On the Washington-Oregon border, the Columbia River Gorge passes through the mountains with an Interstate Highway passing alongside the river.

We have easy access to both the big waters of the Pacific and the rugged and remote North Cascade mountains. That gives us plenty of wild animals to view from orcas and gray whales to elk and mountain goats. In the summer we have seen black bears on the side of Mount Baker and there is a plan to re-introduce grizzly bears to the remote wilderness. There are all kinds of stories about sightings of Bigfoot, commonly referred to as Sasquatch, a large and hairy mythical human-like creature.

This week, in addition to all of the other wild animals that can be seen in the North Cascades, there have been several sightings of a less common animal in our part of the world. At North Bend, on Interstate Highway 90 west of Snoqualmie Pass there have been regular sightings of a wild zebra. At North Bend, where the television series Twin Peaks was filmed and where you can still get a piece of cherry pie and a “damn fine cup o- coffee,” at Twede’s Cafe, located on the Snoqualmie River, animal rescuers have set up a feeding station where they hope to capture the zebra. Although we don’t commonly think of zebras as part of our local animals, I kind of like the idea of having a zebra to roam the mountains along with Bigfoot, occasionally sighted but never captured.

The story of the zebra began with four zebras being transported by trailer towards the pass on their way to Montana. I don’t know how they escaped, but all four were in a meadow where horses are kept. Three were wrangled by locals including brunch-goers and a professional rodeo clown within a few hours. The fourth, however, has so far evaded attempts at capture. A group that helps recover stray animals, usually dogs, that wander in the mountains, is attempting to help the zebra owners to capture the animal, but large numbers of sight seers are hampering the effort by spooking the animal and causing it to run and hide and visit the feeding station set up to lure it only at night. The escaped zebra is the source of a host of memes and silly advertisements in local media. It is probably the biggest news in North Bend since Twin Peaks completed its last season.

Tow truck operator and part-time horse trainer Dallas Clark is calling on locals and tourists from Seattle to keep away from the animal and allow it to calm down and get used to the feeding station so it can be recaptured. He is urging locals to keep their dogs on leash so that the zebra won’t get spooked and will continue to remain close to town. I don’t know how successful his efforts will be. You can’t keep people from trying to see a wild zebra in the mountains when you live so close to a city of 737,000 people. Swede’s Cafe probably appreciates the attention and the increased flow of customers. Just imagine how much fun it would be to see both Bigfoot and the zebra in a single outing. I might even brave Seattle Traffic, something I usually avoid, for that opportunity. However, Bigfoot might not spend the entire winter in the North Cascades. When the snow gets deep, the creature may venture south for a vacation. In June, 2018, a woman in Florida reported seeing Bigfoot in Florida. That’s a long walk from the North Cascades.

If you decide to come to visit us, keep your eyes open when crossing the mountains. You might catch a glimpse of a grizzly bear, or perhaps Bigfoot, and, if you are really lucky, you could see the black and white stripes of the North Cascades zebra.

Cleveland has a busy airport with flights coming and going around the clock. And Seattle is an even bigger and busier airport. Bellingham International, on the other hand is a very small airport with not many flights. BLI doesn’t even have a jetway. You board planes by walking up a ramp. I don’t mind the ramp or the small airport. I grew up around all kinds of airports and our home base was a very small airport. I like airports. I like to look at the planes. I like to watch the people come and go. I like to imagine all of the destinations. Being in an airport seems like an adventure.

Yesterday was a day of airports. Because BLI is a very small airport, there aren’t many flights that depart from or go into it. Since I chose to avoid the hassle of a more than two-hour drive to Seattle followed by a two-hour line to get through one of the world’s least efficient security checkpoints by flying in and out of Bellingham for this trip. And because I am no longer a business traveler, but a retired pastor who doesn’t travel very much, I have no mileage points to trade for seat changes or access to airline club facilities. And since I am retired and have significant flexibility of time, I asked the person who was making travel arrangements for this week’s meetings in Cleveland to schedule my flights so that I would not have to miss a minute of the meetings. So, my ticket was purchased with a return yesterday even though the meetings were completed the evening before. That meant that I woke up in a hotel room and had the day to myself before catching a flight out of Cleveland at 6 in the evening. Then, though the magic of traveling across several time zones heading west, I had another 2 1/2 hours in Seattle before catching my flight into Bellingham.

I had planned to stay at the hotel until checkout time at 12 noon before heading to the airport, realizing that it would still leave me 5 hours or so of extra time at the airport. I had plenty of work that I could do on my computer while I waited. Modern airports have counters and desks with power outlets where it is comfortable to sit and work. There are coffee shops and restaurants so that snacks and meals are easily obtained. I met a colleague for coffee in the morning and decided to share a ride with him to the airport, arriving hours before my departure.

I have walked the full length of all of the concourses at the Cleveland airport. I got my walk in without going outside. I saw people napping in the airport, but that isn’t my style. I can sleep on an airplane, but I stay a bit too much “on guard” when in the airport to be able to sleep. There is a limit to how many cups of tea one can drink and though it is tempting to purchase a lot of snacks, I don’t need the calories and the cost in the airport is high. Airports are designed around quick meals and moving on. Although I found a good salad for lunch and took my time eating it, that only take so much time. Perhaps the most interesting thing that happened in the Cleveland airport was that at one point in the afternoon all of the fire alarms in Concourse A went off. I was flying out of Concourse C so didn’t pay much attention, but having time to burn and being a bit too curious for my own good, I decided to go see what the commotion was all about. At Concourse A, the alarms were blaring and bright lights were flashing. Firemen in bunker gear were going from room to room checking all of the smoke and fire alarms. The interesting thing was that no one seemed to be reacting to the loud noises at all. The area was not evacuated. People just went on with their business as usual, ordering coffee at the coffee shop, napping on the cushions, working at the kiosks, heading to their crowded gates. When the alarms were finally silenced, it was a relief, but nothing else changed. I assume that it was a false alarm, but no information was offered over the PA system. It makes me wonder what would happen if there were a real emergency. Would people simply ignore the alarms? Would airport management fail to use the PA system to give instructions? I’ll probably never know.

It is interesting to see how people work in airports. I saw people sitting in front of their computers participating in Zoom meetings while they waited for their planes. I
Watching people work wasn’t that entertaining. Seasoned travelers seem bored with the process and try to make it look like their behavior is and everyday occurrence, which I suppose it is for some of them. It is a lot more fun to watch families traveling with young children. Those people need to have a lot of baggage. Generally there is a stroller to help move the child down the long corridors and cover the big distances in a modern airport. The children are usually a bit disoriented. This isn’t an everyday occurrence for them. They catch the excitement of travel and are interested in seeing all that is going on around them, but they have no concept of the distance that needs to be covered or the timeline that is weighing on their parents. A four-year-old doesn’t understand that she must take off her headphones to go through the security checkpoint and she doesn’t know for sure that she will get them back. And she can focus on a single item - her headphones - while her parents are worrying about getting everything collected after it passes through the machine without leaving any belongings behind. And they are trying to get to their gate on time and know they are already running late. And they might be running low on sleep because being a parent requires a whole lot of energy. Frazzled parents and a focused preschooler is rarely a calm or quiet situation. Then there is the two-year old who wants to run because he has never seen such a long hallway and it seems like he can run forever. He doesn’t have to worry about his safety as he has trusted his adults to take care of that.

I have heard some business travelers complain about children in airports and on airlines, but I am grateful for them. I wish the airlines had the option of requesting a seat near a family with children. I’d go for that option every time. I probably wouldn’t be much help to the parents and the children would probably be fearful of me. But I can be thoroughly entertained for hours just watching children and their interactions with their parents. I’m safely home and eager to return to some of my routines.