Sondra Willobee

     Sometimes, after a bad night, I drive to the Bearclaw Coffee hut on the corner of North Territorial and Dexter-Pinckney Roads to get an apple fritter. And a strong cup of English breakfast tea. Then I go to Hudson Mills Metropark and sit in the Rapids View picnic area to watch the Huron River.
     The tea steams in the cup. The fritter waits in the bag. The river flows by. And I am filled with gratitude for the baker who got up in the middle of the night to make the fritter I am about to eat. Here's my tribute to her:     

To the person who makes the apple fritters at the Dexter Bakery

Monday, it's always Monday,
when the desire for heavy pastry rises in me.
Perhaps it's the exertions of the weekend—the long

hikes, the high piles of laundry, the necessary exhortations
of the sermon—striving to be better than I am.

I think of driving to the little coffee house at the corner

of two country roads to wait my turn with commuters tapping
their consoles and construction crews shifting in their bright  
neon vests, waiting, waiting for the pony-tailed barista
to hand our treats through the window in a thin paper bag.

The thought of those fritters rousts me from the warm dent
I've made in the bed. I put on my clothes and shoes. Then

I remember: You are not there. Monday is your day off.

As it should be.

You, too, deserve, a rest from your labors, a break
from the heat of the ovens and the clatter of baking
sheets in the racks. The sugary dust that sticks
to your skin. Even if you still love the way the yeast
bubbles through the dough, and how the dough flares

in the fryer, and still admire how the glaze slides

into every crevasse.

You need your sabbath, too.

This summer when you took a week of vacation, every
day we went to the small window asking for fritters
only to be handed a grainy cake donut or some good

for you cookie with oats and millet and God knows what.
The barista agreed with our dismay: "No one makes

fritters like her. She'll be back next week."

Do you know, dear baker, dear maker of delectable
pastries, how many people you gladden on any given
day? How many tense fingers loosen just a little, how many
callused palms receive a bit of goodness from the work
of your hands?

Life is so often hard.

Yet this bread breaks in easy chunks
and fills our mouths with sweetness.

Just so, in simple and hidden ways,
we strengthen each other.

Scripture: "Bless, oh Lord, the work of our hands. Oh, bless the work of our hands." –Psalm 90:17 (paraphrase)
Playlist: "Take Our Bread," Joe Wise, 1966.

     I met someone the other day who just moved to Livingston County from Chicago. She and her husband had lived downtown in "The Loop" for thirty years and wanted to get someplace closer to nature. They chose southeast Michigan. She asked me, "Are you a native of Michigan?"
     I answered that I was born in Wisconsin, but have lived here all but six years of my life.
     So, yes, I consider myself a native.
     I could have told her some of the ways you can tell that someone is from Michigan. We pronounce "Mackinac" as "Mackinaw." We pronounce the town name of "Charlotte" with the emphasis on the second syllable, not like the girl's name. And Detroiters say, "Dee-troit."
     I could also trot out some of the jokes about Michigan. Such as: We have four seasons—almost winter, winter, still winter, and construction. Or, that we design our kids' Hallowe'en costumes to fit over a snowsuit. Or, that "vacation" means going up north past US-10 for the weekend.
     Most importantly, we point to the palms of our left and right hands to explain to people where we grew up or where we're going on "vacation."  
     I could have told her that I assemble Made-in-Michigan gift baskets containing Dearborn ham, Kowalski sausage, Pinconning cheese, Jiffy corn muffin mix, Michigan navy beans, Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, Better Made potato chips, Vernor's ginger ale (the only ginger ale worth drinking), Sander's hot fudge, Traverse City cherry jam, and Bell's Two-Hearted beer. My mom always told us to buy Michigan products whenever we could. I remember our pantry shelves containing Romeo maraschino cherries, Pioneer sugar, and Velvet peanut butter.
     I could have told my new acquaintance from Chicago about the perennial argument we have in this state. Do we call ourselves "Michiganians" or "Michiganders"? "Michiganian" has a whiff of privilege about it, whereas "Michigander" honks like a goose. I guess both could be true.
     Of course, none of us relative newcomers—white, black, or any of the other ethnicities that now populate Michigan's cities, towns, and counties—are true natives. That designation belongs to the indigenous peoples we displaced.
     My home river, the Huron River, is named for the Potawatomi and Wyandot who traveled in birchbark canoes to catch fish, harvest wild rice and barter with other tribes. A signboard beside the Huron River in Hamburg explains that French Traders referred to the local natives as "Wendats or Hurons." The map on the signboard shows Native American villages, encampments, and burial grounds throughout southeast Michigan.*
     The sense of being from somewhere is crucial to memory and identity. "Where are you from?" is one of the first questions we ask of a new acquaintance. Our answer to that question deepens over time as we consider the family ties and the lands that have shaped us.
     So, I don't agree with the sentiment expressed by the old spiritual my dad used to sing while accompanying himself on the guitar, "This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through." This world is our home. And, like a 250-year-old elm tree in Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit**, our roots go deep. My mother's family is planted deep in the soil of Macomb County. A road is named after us, Inwood Road, and my Grandpa, Orlin Inwood, farmed a Centennial Farm on 30 Mile Road. He and his five brothers collected the arrowheads that turned up as they cultivated the soil. After awhile, they affixed the collection to a piece of wood that had pride of place in the parlor. My mother donated the arrowhead display to Stoney Creek Metropark when the farm was finally sold.
     On my father's side, an uncle and two cousins still till the soil in Huron County, the fifth generation of family farmers, turning the furrows with enormous machines where great great grandfather George Smith would have used a horse and plow, setting their sights on the horizon of the flat land that once lay beneath prehistoric glacial Lake Algonquin.  
     This particular world—the glacial hills and lake bottom farmland—is my home.
     And yet, prompted by that song my dad used to sing, I would also have to say that there is another place that claims us, another identity that shapes us beyond our home soil. Jesus called it the Kingdom of God, a place where the values of God reign supreme. A place where everyone has a seat at the feast—newcomers and latecomers, landowners and the dispossessed. Some folks now call it the "kin-dom of God" to give it a gender-neutral label and to emphasize the family feel of this spiritual place. Whatever term you use, it is like a seed planted deep in our souls, or like a home for which we long without even knowing it.
     Where were you born? Where have you lived? What landscapes do you name?
     Wherever you are from, may you know the fullness of your identity. May you remember the stories of your people, for good and ill. May the soil and trees and rivers, and the beating of your longing heart, tell you who you are.

Scripture: "The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how." Mark 4:26-27 (NRSV)
Playlist: "This is My Song," Lloyd Stone, to the tune of Finlandia, 1934.

*Michigan History Center signboard along the Lakelands Trail.
**This elm tree, older than the Declaration of Independence, marks the site where Chief Pontiac fought British soldiers along Parent's Creek in the Battle of Bloody Run in 1763. https://www.freep.com/story/news/columnists/neal-rubin/2022/07/07/elmwood-cemetery-historic-elm-tree/7793612001/

     No songs today.
     No joyous recounting of trips to the river. 
     Only muffled sobs and the shock of loss.
     Another mass shooting. This time Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers dead.
     It could have been my grandson, Emmett, going to public school this fall. Or my grandnephews, Victor, Parker, and Elliott, or their mom, Catie, who works as a para-professional at their school. Or my sister, Sharon, or my nieces, Brenda and Michelle, all teachers. Or my grandniece, Emma, just turned 16, the same age as Tate Myre, one of the four students gunned down at Oxford High School last November.
     Or, it could have been one of the children or grandchildren of members of the NRA who oppose any restriction on access to guns. They love their families as much as I love mine. Based on what I see on social media, they hope the guns they carry will protect their loved ones if they are threatened by an intruder.
     But that's a fantasy. An illusion fed by movies and video games in which the brave hero saves the world by shooting all the bad guys.
     In real life, people are more likely to be killed by their own guns than protected by them, whether from accidental injury, homicide, or suicide. A 2015 study by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center reported that ordinary citizens are more likely to be injured after threatening attackers with guns than if they'd called the police or run away.*
     Nor do I want a well-meaning civilian shooting up a public place in response to a real or perceived threat. Leave that to law enforcement, who are trained and accountable.
     This madness of mass shootings must stop.
     In the 7th century BCE, the Israelite prophet Jeremiah stood at a site in the Hinnom Valley outside Jerusalem where human sacrifice was practiced. While some of the details are unclear, it appears that children were burned there as an offering to the Canaanite gods of Baal and Molech. Jeremiah condemned the site and prophesied that it would become a mass grave for inhabitants of Jerusalem during the coming invasion of the city. "Because they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent," he said.**

       My neck prickles with horror.
      What would Jeremiah tell us, whose schoolrooms and supermarkets and churches have become places of sacrifice? Would he say that we are as much in thrall to the gun lobby as the ancient Israelites were to the pagan god Baal? Would he say that we, like worshippers of Molech, are making our children "pass through fire"?
     It sickens me that the curriculum in schools across the country must include active shooter drills. That teachers are told to bring belts to their classrooms to help construct barricades. That supply cabinets contain materials to quickly staunch the flow of blood.
     We sacrificed our children to the great god Gun.
     Understand, I have no argument with hunters. We walk through the same woods in the autumn, breathing the crisp air, rustling through fallen leaves. In winter, we look for deer tracks in the same snow. We love many of the same things.
     And I know that many responsible gun owners teach gun safety, and make sure their weapons are secure.
     But no one—apart from the military and law enforcement—should have legal access to assault rifles. We cannot know for sure whether every person who enters a school, supermarket, church, synagogue, university, concert venue, or dance club is not suffering from a mental illness. But we can try to make sure they are not armed with military-style weapons.
     Please.
     Enough.
     Yesterday, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who represents the Sandy Hook community where 26 elementary school students and educators were killed in December 2012, pleaded with his colleagues for a compromise on reasonable gun control.
     Today I am writing my representative, Elissa Slotkin, to ask if the Problem Solvers Caucus, a bi-partisan group that championed her Lend-Lease Act to help Ukraine, could do something about this war in our streets. I will ask her for universal background checks, an age limit of 21 for the purchase of any gun, and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines and assault-style rifles for everyone except the military and law enforcement.
     Tomorrow I will write to those who represent me in the Senate, where gun control legislation favored by a majority of Americans has repeatedly been blocked by a filibuster of Republican legislators.
     It's hard not to feel hopeless. But I will keep trying.
     And I will join others at the Capitol Building in Lansing for "Woke Wednesdays" simply to stand and pray and write letters. "No talking, no demonstrating," the carpool organizer said. "Just standing against the violence."
     I will stand in grief and mute fury like the ancient Israelites in exile who hung up their harps in the willow trees rather than sing for their captors.
     There's a place on the Huron River in Island Lake Recreation Area where the remains of three huge willow trees stand by the water's edge. I will go there and weep. 
     Please.
     Enough.
     When Ed and I were walking at Hudson Mills Metropark this morning, we heard the voices of children in the distance. "Maybe toddlers at the playground?" I said to Ed. Then we came upon a group of six schoolchildren walking with an adult chaperone who was carrying a clipboard while the kids were peering into the vegetation along the trail. It looked to be a scavenger hunt.
     "Hello, fellow hikers," one cheerful kid called out to Ed and me.
     "We have to find a potato," another kid confided.
     I could have told him that both skunk cabbage and cattails have fleshy, tuber-like roots. But the only way this kid would find a potato along the trail would be if the teacher who created this fun science activity had placed it there ahead of time.
     May we show the same creativity and foresight as this teacher to protect our children's lives.
     May all children walk in the woods, in their classrooms, in their neighborhoods, in our nation—wherever their feet take them—joyously and unafraid.
     It's up to us.

"On the willows there we hung up our harps." Psalm 137:2 (NRSV)
Playlist: "On the Willows," Stephen Schwartz, Godspell, 1973.

*"Will a Gun Keep Your Family Safe? Here's What the Evidence Says," https://www.thetrace.org/2020/04/gun-safety-research-coronavirus-gun-sales/ ** Jeremiah 19:4-14, 2 Kings 23:10

     You don't want to be following us when we're driving down a two-lane highway that goes alongside a whitewater river. Ed and I will be craning our necks to look at the rapids and plotting how we would paddle through each one. Then, when a bridge over the river appears, we will slam on the brakes and pull off to the shoulder. Walking out on the bridge, we'll look down at the bouncing water to continue our discussion of which rock to dodge and which downstream "V" to ride.
     You see, we're following in the tracks of a beat-up brown van we once saw with two equally-abused kayaks tied on top. The van sported a bumper sticker which said, "This vehicle stops at all river crossings." It was a parody of the decals you see on the rear door of busses and other service vehicles warning that—just to be safe—the driver will brake at every railroad crossing.
     So many fine miles we've spent driving alongside whitewater rivers or standing on bridges above them, looking down. The Nantahala River along Highway 19, for example, on our way to the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC) in Bryson City, North Carolina. The New River along Highway 20 near Hinton, West Virginia. Or, the Yellowstone River along Highway 89 in Montana through Yankee Jim Canyon. Now, at this stage in our lives, we'd have no business paddling Yankee Jim—we'd get trashed in the Class III-IV stacked rapids.
     But it's still fun to look.
     During one visit to North Carolina, we stood on a bridge to watch some Olympic kayakers weave back and forth through the training gates set up in a slalom over a rapids on the property of NOC. The helmeted and spray-skirted young men and women were like demi-gods to me. I used to pore over whitewater guidebooks like I studied Bible commentaries, hoping to find some secret knowledge, some key to success that would allow me to ferry my canoe through gnarly rapids with the same insouciant ease. Such skill, to me, was a taste of immortality.
     Our car stops at all river crossings.
     In some camp songs and gospel hymns, crossing a river is a metaphor for entering the afterlife. Going to heaven. Receiving eternal life. Whatever phrase you want to use. "The Jordan River is chilly and cold," one song goes, "chills the body, but not the soul." Michael, row the boat ashore. The image is that of crossing over to the other side, that unknown place after death.
     We have to use metaphors because no one really knows what happens when you die. In recent decades, advances in medical technology have allowed us to hear reports about tunnels and bright lights from people who've had near-death experiences, but for most of human history, poetry has had to suffice.
     When we first started hearing about COVID-19 deaths, when horrifying reports came from Italy that bodies were piling up because the morgues were full, I told myself, "You, too, could die anytime." But the reality of that truism didn't really sink in until last summer when my good friend, Barbara Lewis-Lakin, died at 67—not of COVID, but of cancer. Since then, I've been thinking a lot about death. The death of my loved ones. My death.
     Perhaps these obsessive thoughts are an attempt to inoculate myself against the bare fact that death comes. If I worry enough about it, maybe it won't happen.
     Right.
     As a pastor, I'm no novice at death. I've sat in hospitals and nursing facilities and hospice units and family homes with people who are dying. One man, unmarried, middle-aged, who had hidden his cancer from his parents until it was too late for treatment, took his last breath at the very moment that I spoke the words from the 23rd Psalm, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." Though I finished gamely with the rest of the verse, "I will fear no evil, for thou art with me," we all were spooked. His mother reached forward and gently closed the eyes in his yellowed face.
     I remember sitting with another man, Dan Brown, a stout, square-faced beer salesman who'd served on a Navy destroyer in World War II. Dan told me about a great sea battle in October 1944 that they called "The Battle of the Tin Cans" because a few U.S. destroyers held off five Japanese battleships. Dan had a large, elaborate anchor tattooed in blue on his right forearm. He told me proudly that nowadays young men with spiky hair wearing chains and studs would come up and admire his tattoos.
     Once when Dan was at home on leave from the Navy, a hostile neighbor was speaking belligerently and strutting around his front porch showing off his muscles. Dan said to him, "You want a piece of me?" The neighbor backed down. Dan was a fighter.
     Underneath his tough exterior, though, Dan was also a lover. He'd been married twice, first to Nora, then to Ruth, and at age 85, still had an eye for pretty women. One of the first things that people in the church told me about Dan was how faithfully he had cared for Ruth when she got dementia. Every day he went to the nursing home and ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with her—for three years—until she died.
     In his last week of his life, Dan told me that he kept seeing Nora, Ruth, his parents, and his deceased sister Louise, standing in the corner of the room. "They're waiting for me," he said. I'd heard something similar from other parishioners—that their loved ones had come to help them make their passage into the next life.
     When my mother, Mary Smith, died in April of 2019, the last word I heard her speak was "Ma." She, too, was staring off into the distance at something or someone I could not see. I first assumed she was calling out for her mother, Rosalie Inwood. But she also could also have been speaking to Ma Peterson, a woman she'd met at a religious camp meeting and who'd been a significant spiritual mentor when she was young. It comforted me, anyway, to think that my mother was being welcomed into heaven by people she had loved.
     So, maybe it's safe to follow Ed and me after all. Though I'm in no hurry to cross over, I hope to be greeted by those who've gone before me. Likewise, I hope to be among those who welcome my loved ones when it's their time to go to the other side of the river.
     And you, when you need it most, may you hear someone calling to you, "Come on over. The water's fine."

"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you… I will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also." John 14:18,3 (NRSV).
Playlist: "Moon River," Peter Mayer, Elements, 2001.

     Ten years ago, on March 15, 2012, Ed and I heard a news report that a tornado had gone through Dexter, Michigan, twenty miles from where we lived in South Lyon. We knew many people in that area. But we didn't fully comprehend the extent of the damage until three months later on June 24 when we went canoeing on the Huron River through Dexter.   
     We saw large tree trunks snapped in half twenty feet up. We saw other trees blown down entirely, their upturned root wads lining the river with walls of dirt and twisted sticks.
     The slow-moving tornado had produced winds of 120-140 mph, touching down within sight of Hudson Mills Metropark (the place where we'd just launched), and moving parallel to Huron River Drive. One hundred homes had been damaged, in some places the roof joists strewn like straw.  
     Fortunately, no one had been killed.
     Money and donations had poured into Faith in Action, a local social service agency. Our friend, Nancy, the director of Faith in Action, had scrambled to set up a disaster relief fund with oversight by a local bank. She was putting in twelve-hour days to help coordinate relief efforts and to distribute funds and supplies.
     "What can I do to help?" I'd asked her over the phone. "I'm no good with a chain saw."
     "Not much right now," she said wearily. "I've got piles of used clothing I don't know what to do with. The trick is getting everyone and everything to the right place." Another call buzzed in at her end. "I've got to go," she said.
     "I'll pray for you," I'd said.
     Ed and I canoed through another corridor of root wads from overturned trees. What would it be like to be out on the river, unprotected, when such a storm came through? You'd be lucky to survive.
     We passed the wreckage in silence.
     A chain saw fired up in the distance. I felt vaguely guilty to be out playing when others were working so hard to clean up, even three months after the storm. It was like being tourists in a war zone. But this canoe trip wasn't only for pleasure. We were scouting the river before we took a young family on a guided trip they'd won at our church auction.
     I pushed my paddle hard into the current.
     When I hear news coverage about the war in Ukraine today, I feel some of the same helpless guilt I felt while canoeing after the Dexter tornado. There seems to be so little I can do. I can pray for the people of Ukraine, and give money for disaster relief. As so many others are doing. But how long can the Ukrainian army hold out against the Russian juggernaut?
     The war in Ukraine is not a natural disaster—this disaster has been caused by human beings. In particular, by a powerful, ego-driven leader who has been systemically silencing any who oppose him. What do we do when something terrible is happening and our efforts to make things better feel inconsequential?
     Our pastor said we should pray for Vladimir Putin, that his heart will be changed.
     I have prayed for Putin. I've prayed for God to strike him dead.
     I know—it's not a very Christian sentiment. But I'm not the first or only person to feel this way. I join my voice with the psalmist who prayed that God would "break the teeth of the wicked." (Psalm 3:7) In another part of the Bible, the prophet Jeremiah said to God in bewildered pain, "Why does the way of the wicked prosper?" Jeremiah wanted the wicked to be culled "like sheep for the slaughter." (Jeremiah 12:1,3)
     Take that, you scum.

     When I called our friend Nancy to check the facts for this blog, she and I talked about Ukraine and about the polarized political situation in the United States. Nancy said that we're being "lazy" when we pray for God to take down our enemies. "It's a quest for easy answers," she said. As always, she is so wise. I would add, though, that we also pray this way because we're frightened and exhausted. Of course we want help from a higher power if we believe that corrupt and self-serving leaders have thrown down the timbers of the house of democracy and sent them whirling in a violent storm.
     I guess I can pray that God will give me the strength to see the suffering of others and to do what is in my power to do. I saw on Facebook that some enterprising souls started buying nights at Ukrainian Airbnbs as a way of donating money directly to the Ukrainian people. Most religious denominations have disaster relief organizations already in place. The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) has already sent almost a million dollars worth of medical supplies. I can pray for these organizations and for the pilots who fly the planes bringing aid and for the brave relief workers on the ground. I can pray for those U.S. and world leaders who are creating strategies to oppose Putin without starting World War III.
     And here at home, when a storm of whatever size or cause comes through, I can hearken to the point-of-view espoused by Mary, the mother of Jesus, who praised God for having "brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly." (Luke 1:52). If this is God's plan, I, too, can oppose the proud and help the humble.
     As for Putin, I leave him in God's hands. Which is where he is anyway.
     Lord, have mercy.
     On us all.

Scripture: Luke 1:46-55 (NRSV)
Playlist: "Do Something," Matthew West, Into the Light, Sparrow Records, 2012. 

     All of my life I've been an outsider. Growing up in parsonages as a preacher's kid and becoming a pastor myself, moving from town to town, I was always the new kid in the classroom or the new person in church. I skirted the perimeter of conversation circles, listening to people talking or laughing, looking in.

     My husband, Ed, who couldn't wait to leave the small town in which he grew up, thought I was crazy to envy people who'd lived their entire lives in the same place. "They belong," I told him. "They know their place in the stories of the community."
     I had no place.
     Is it any wonder, then, when I got old enough to go out on my own, that I took to the fields and the rivers? I spent my childhood picking black raspberries and chasing butterflies with a net made from a broom handle, a coat hanger, and a curtain sheer. Tiger swallowtail. The well-traveled monarch. I waded shallows where bluegills darted in the shadow of an overhanging oak. Once I spent an entire afternoon cleaning sticks and debris out of a small rapids on the Huron River near Commerce Elementary School, happy as the freshwater clams I saw in the stream.
     Is it any wonder that I would call a river my home?
     I remember a morning in May when our girls were in elementary school. It was the time in the school year when everyone was tired of the grind, so we declared a "Willobee Skip Day." Ed and I took the day off work, we pulled the girls out of school, and we all went canoeing. Blessed respite.
     I also remember a particular day of pure joy in September of 2013 when members of our family came to celebrate Ed's birthday with a canoe trip on the Huron River. A thunderstorm had just passed through, chasing everyone else off the river, and the current was flowing clear and fast. Turtles crawled out of the water to climb on logs. An eagle perched high in a dead sycamore. An osprey rocketed upriver.
     On such days, the river was not just home, but heaven.
     And yet, I also remember times when I didn't feel like an outsider. How sweet those moments in high school, for instance, when I sat in the school cafeteria with my girlfriend, Linda, and the rest of our gang, laughing at Larry who was squirting chocolate milk out of his nose.
     Or, last month, when a group of kind and well-read women sat around my dining room table laughing and talking, drinking red wine and discussing our latest book club title. Though they'd known each other for many years, living in the same community and raising their children together, they let me in to their circle.
     Or, last week, when I stood in a queue at the front of the church in order to receive a white wafer and a tiny cup of juice. Holy Communion. "Everyone is welcome at the Lord's table," the preacher said.
     Also heaven. Also home.
     "You're not so alone," my soul tells me.
     I claim as companions not only eagle and osprey and bluegill, but also these dear human faces: family, new friends, the cadre of fellow seekers, and invisibly, around all of these, the communion of the saints. Those who've gone before us to show us the way.
     Today, may you know yourself held within a community. And if you see someone on the outside, let them know they are not alone.
     We are each other's home.

Scripture: "Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses… let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…" Hebrews 12:1 (NRSV)
Playlist: "Your Love, O God, Is Broad Like Beach and Meadow," Anders Frostenson, 1968, translated by Fred Kaan, 1972.

Part 1

     Back in our crazy days, when Ed and I were younger, we played at whitewater canoeing. With our sixteen-foot Mad River Explorer strapped to the roof of the minivan, we would drive 7½ hours to the nearest Class III-IV whitewater: Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania, where the strong and broad Youghiogheny River cut a spectacular gorge through pine-and-hemlock-covered sandstone cliffs.
     Ohiopyle was a boater's mecca. In the parking lot across from Ohiopyle Falls, we often saw kayakers stripping off their driving clothes and zipping up neoprene wetsuits. Brightly-colored kayaks and canoes shaped like bullets or bananas or bathtubs lined the road. There were six and eight-person rubber rafts, too, and solo inflatable kayaks affectionately known as "duckies." Towels flapped from roof racks. Paddles were strewn on the grass like pick-up sticks.

     Bronzed young men and women slung their kayaks over one shoulder as easily as I carried a book bag. The sinewy muscles in their calves worked as they crossed the road to the launch site, their sandals slapping against the pavement.
     We were all headed to the Loop, a great horseshoe bend in the river boasting seven  named rapids: Entrance, Cucumber, Piddly, Camel's Back, Eddy Turn, Dartmouth, and Railroad. Hardy paddlers could run the Loop in an hour and a half, climb a steep path out, walk a mile across the neck of the peninsula, hike back down to the put-in, and run it again.
     Well, that wasn't us. We were never more than intermediate whitewater canoeists, unlike the "squirt boaters," kayakers who surfed the waves or did enders in the holes. They would drive the bow of the kayak deep into the water until the force of the current popped them backwards like a cork out of a champagne bottle. Sometimes, they twirled their boats while flying through the air.
     We didn't get much whitewater practice. Ed and I lived in southeast Michigan, after all, where the nearest whitewater was Delhi Rapids on the Huron River outside of Ann Arbor, a piddling Class II, even in high water. We also had kids and jobs and middle-aged bones.
     We did our best to be smart, though. We wore helmets and life vests and stuffed our canoe full of air bags that would displace most of the water if we capsized. A tandem canoe full of water exerts a force of two-thousand pounds—you don't want to get caught between a canoe full of water and a rock.
     And, we took a two-day tandem whitewater canoeing class in 1984 from a barrel-chested instructor out of Washington, D.C., known as "Flip." We assumed he got the nickname because of his resemblance to the then-popular comedian, Flip Wilson. But he may have earned the sobriquet because he was strong enough to roll his open canoe, a recovery maneuver usually made only by kayakers or closed-deck canoeists. His bulging arms were thick as small trees.
     With Flip's help, we became fairly confident of making complex moves in fast water. He demonstrated various strokes—draw, pry, low brace, and high brace, the latter enabling us to stay upright even when water was pouring over the opposite gunwale. We learned how to thread tight passages, ferry around ledges, and take refuge in mid-stream eddies so that strong currents or irregular waves did not swamp our canoe.
     But, we were pushing it a bit to tackle the three Class IV rapids in the Loop by ourselves. Those rapids contained some large, unavoidable waves and some deep holes that required precise boat handling under pressure. However, the "pool-and-plunge" character of this stretch of the Yough reassured us: after every rapids was a pool of quieter water in which we could right our boat and gather our wits in case we flipped. Which we did. More than once.
     We were also aided by Ron Rathnow's "Flip Map of the Youghiogheny River," part of the Great American Rivers Flip Map series printed by Menasha Ridge Press, publishers of our well-worn Appalachian Whitewater: The Central Mountains. Each page of the palm-sized flip map detailed a different rapids, using dots, arrows, circles, and squiggly or diagonal lines to depict rocks, ledges, waves, hydraulics, and eddies. Bright red arrows showed your options: Hero Route, Sneak Route, or Portage Route.
     It was particularly important to note the hydraulics, also known as "holes," places in the river where a wave below a drop curls back on itself, creating a powerful and turbulent reversal of the current. A bad hole can capture and re-circulate capsized paddlers, tumbling them over and over, keeping them underwater. According to Appalachian Whitewater, Railroad Rapids has "a particularly juicy hydraulic known as Charlie's Washing Machine."

     Relying on Rathnow's graphics, and scouting from shore above the trickier rapids, we had a chance of avoiding disaster.

Part 2   

     I should have looked more carefully at Rathnow's diagram of Railroad Rapids when I ran the Loop solo on June 27, 1994. Fresh from a women-only whitewater canoeing class at the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC) in North Carolina, I'd graduated to my own solo canoe: a 13-foot Dagger Impulse constructed of red Royalex, a tough composite of vinyl, plastic and foam. I'd splurged to add gleaming ash trim. With a deep bow and four inches of rocker, the Impulse would pivot easily and ride up on the waves.  
     Kneeling astride the foam saddle, my thighs secured with straps attached to D-rings on the bottom of the canoe, I could lean out over my paddle and the canoe would lean with me, the more quickly to turn or the more solidly to brace. What a sweet boat.
     But paddling solo, I was responsible for every decision, every move. No Ed steering in the stern or lending strength in the bow. I was on my own.
     "It's all in the hips," my NOC instructor had said. "Sit up straight and turn your torso like a horse on a carousel pole. But keep your hips flexible. Loose hips save ships." 
     On that June day, I was paddling my new Impulse. Ed was paddling a beat-up old Blue Hole, the grandaddy of whitewater canoes, that he'd bought used from a friend for $250.
     The first rapids, Entrance, went fast. The water was up, brown and swirling, from last night's rain. I took the sneak route down the right. "Coward," Ed teased.
     I didn't want to play the waves or the holes. I just wanted to stay upright.
     The next big rapids was Cucumber, a tumultuous drop squeezed between large boulders. The guidebook said that swimming Cucumber must be like getting flushed down the toilet. The current above Cucumber kept pushing me right when I needed to go left to set up for the drop. Draw, draw. My arms felt limp, ineffectual. But somehow I made it to the left, and then bloop, I was riding the tongue, down the brown water, down into the standing waves that turned me sideways and squirted me into the eddy. "I did it," I whooped. And set to bailing the water out of the canoe.
     We took the next three rapids cleanly, except I broached on a rock in Dartmouth and had to lean downstream to let the current lift the boat free. "Steady, girl, steady," I told myself. Watching Ed pivot neatly into a micro-eddy below a rock in the middle of the stream, I became impatient with my own caution. I took off for Railroad Rapids without a word.
     Stupid, stupid, stupid. I couldn't remember which way the flip map had said to go. As I saw the railroad trestle high above the river, the roar from the water hit me and I was at the top of the drop. I couldn't see anything but a horizon line where the river fell away in front of me.
     Just as I planted my paddle deeply and pulled right, a man sitting on the shore yelled, "Go left, go left." But it was too late. The current swept me forward over the four-foot drop and a wave hit me. I was under water in an instant. And out of the canoe.  
     My head popped up and there was the red underside of the canoe beside me and my paddle in my hand and water churning all around me. Shit! I was in Charlie's Washing Machine, one of the nastiest holes in the river. I'd even aimed for it. All I could see was foaming white water.
     My shin scraped a rock. A kayaker pulled alongside me and I grabbed the tow loop on his boat, kicking toward the boulders by shore. I humped myself onto a rock like a sea lion, water streaming from under my helmet over my face and down my back. I stretched out, panting.
     Another kayaker was sitting in the eddy in a battered lime green squirt boat with duct tape on the bow. He raised one eyebrow, smiling.
     "That was an adventurous line you took," he said.
     I could see Ed downstream pulling my canoe toward the shore. I looked down at my dripping wetsuit. I'd made it! Every inch of me felt alive. I smiled back.

     "Yes, it was," I said.
     Sure, it's wise to avoid mishaps if we can. But the places where we've been trashed make the best stories. Our own personal flip maps, so to speak. I do know this: Turbulence doesn't last forever. And strangers are often kind.
     So, be a little crazy today. Dare something. Take the adventurous route. If nothing else, when it's all over, you'll have a glorious story to tell.

Scripture: "'Lord, if it's you,' Peter replied, 'tell me to come to you on the water.'

'Come,' Jesus said."  Matthew 14:28-29 (NIV)
Playlist: "Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)," Words and Music by Matt Crocker, Joel Houston & Salomon Ligthelm, Hillsong Music Publishing, 2012.

     Why do Ed and I prefer to canoe on rivers? Big lakes do have their glory, as when the golden path of the setting sun reaches to the horizon. And small lakes have their intimate charm, as when green firs rim a quiet, secluded shore. But give us a river any day.
     Water flowing under the hull quickens our pulse. Water frothing over rocks makes us sit up straight and pay attention to our route. And, we're a little lazy--we like to let the current do some of the work. But the biggest reason we love rivers is that you never know what you're going to see around the next bend.
     Maybe it will be a great blue heron stalking a fish in the shallows, beak glinting like a silver dagger. Or maybe it will be an otter sliding down the bank with gleeful abandon like a four-year-old in a slippery snowsuit who's just discovered how fast he can go.
     Once, while canoeing on the Ocklawaha River in central Florida, Ed and I made a game of counting alligators. The rule we set was that you actually had to see the alligator, not just the ripples left by its departing tail. We canoed without speaking, barely moving our paddles, hoping to see them before they saw us.
     We were only a little afraid. That far upriver, the ecosystem contained only enough prey to support young alligators. Two or three-feet-long from teeth to tail. The big six-footers were much farther downstream. But when we climbed up a small bluff to eat our mid-afternoon snack, we were amazed to see a rope swing hanging from a tree out over the river. I wouldn't want to swim with even baby alligators.
     That sentiment was confirmed late in the trip when we backed the canoe into a small tributary, and I was eye-level with an adolescent gator a few feet away on the bank. For several seconds, the alligator didn't move. It fixed its gaze on me, malevolent, unwavering, its reptilian eye with the vertical slit unblinking as it ever-so-slowly lowered itself into the water. In that moment I understood what ancient biblical writers must have meant by "the evil eye."
     On a different vacation, Ed and I got up before dawn to canoe the Oxbow Bend on the Snake River in Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming. We hoped to see otters, having met some wildlife researchers the day before who were using redlight cameras to study the nighttime habits of these playful mammals. We also hoped to see moose, even though moose can be dangerous to humans. "You don't want to get between a cow moose and her calf," a ranger told us.
     Well, we got part of our wish. Just as light from the rising sun was slanting across the valley, we rounded a bend and saw dark forms lying in a meadow bordered by a U-shaped meander in the river. Two big-eared heads rose above the tall grass, one large, one small. Moose! Mama and Baby. We stopped paddling completely and just floated. I held my breath. Without flickering an eyelash, they watched us pass.
     When we were safely downriver, I let out my breath.
     "Whoa-o-h-h-h," I said.
     Some of my most powerful experiences—and my most important relationships—carry a slight frisson of fear. I'm not in charge. I'm not in control. I don't know exactly what's going to happen next. Perhaps that's part of what the Bible means when it says that we should "fear" God. I used to chafe under that idea, but now understand it to mean that we should have a healthy dose of respect.
     It's good, sometimes, to remember that I'm not the only animal on the planet. It's good, sometimes, to be a careful guest in someone else's home.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Proverbs 9:10 (KJV)
Playlist: "How Great Thou Art," British hymn translated from Swedish and Russian by Stuart K. Hine, 1953.

     So, I promised you a story. Aialik Bay.
     I wanted to go. And I didn't want to go.
     We'd made reservations for a kayak tour of this remote, pristine bay in the Kenai Fjords National Park with Kayak Adventures Worldwide out of Seward, Alaska. This late August excursion was to be one of the highlights of our three-week Alaska vacation in 2019. The outfitter's website promised we might see harbor seals, puffins, and other wildlife. Maybe the glacier would calve right before our eyes. I'd been anticipating the trip for months.
     And yet.
     I was a much better canoeist than kayaker.

     I was afraid of deep, cold water.
     Michigan's Lake Superior gives me the heebie-jeebies, and this was the North Pacific Ocean. I flipped in a kayak once while paddling around Grand Island in Lake Superior. I rolled over and came up for air three times before I remembered to tear off the spray skirt and perform a wet-exit. "I thought I was going to have to do a 'dead-man rescue' on you," one of my paddling companions had said. I didn't trust myself in a kayak.
     When our Alaskan kayak guide, Glo, asked each us during the pre-trip shakedown what goal we had for the trip, I did not tell the group what I'd written in my journal the night before:

     · Hope to survive.

     · Hope not to capsize.

     · Hope not to fall behind.

     · Hope to have strength for the whole trip.

     · Hope the wind doesn't come up.

     · Hope not to pee my pants.

I said, instead, that I hoped to see a sea otter close up. We boarded the water taxi that would take us to Aialik Bay. As the taxi pulled away from the dock, up popped the head of an otter, six feet off the bow. "It's only 8:05 a.m.," I said to Glo. "What are you going to do for the rest of the trip?"
     Well. The water taxi took us alongside steep, forested basalt cliffs and snow-studded peaks. In Spire Cove, we squeezed between islands with weirdly wonderful graywacke rock formations. We saw harbor seals on a ledge, stellar sea lions on a rock, and a bird that one of the other guests identified as the rare kittletz murrelet. The captain of the taxi pointed out sea stars on the rocks right at the shoreline. Then he slowed to circle a horned puffin floating on the waves.

     After two-and-a-half hours, the water taxi deposited us on a sheltered beach south of Slate Island in Aialik Bay.  Glo removed the tarps from the sea kayaks stored there, and we dragged them down the steep beach, the flat oval stones sliding sideways under our feet.
     Fortunately, the water in the bay was very calm. I don't know what I would have done had there been waves. The kayak moved smoothly and easily through the water. Glo showed me how to space my hands on the shaft of the paddle to ease the strain on my shoulders. What a relief.
     We paddled toward Aialik Glacier for almost an hour. The glacier seemed so close to us, but appearances were deceiving. Glo told us that the face of the glacier was a mile wide and twenty stories high. And what we were seeing was just the terminus of the glacier—a great wall, a colonnade of vertical bluish shafts and shards topped with spikes. Several times we heard a sound like thunder and part of the glacier fell into the water, creating waves that finally reached our kayaks in gentle swells.
     Glo had us raft up half a mile from the face of the glacier, far enough away that the waves would not capsize us if a big portion of the glacier came down.     

     We kept our kayaks in formation for forty-five minutes, eating turkey sandwiches and watching the glacier calve repeatedly. Sometimes a harbor seal swam by. We were surrounded by large and small chunks of gray and blue ice, what Glo called "berg-y bits." She told us not to collide with any piece that was bigger than our cockpit. "That could do you some damage," she said.
     I picked a small piece of ice out of the water and bit it. It tasted clean and pure.
     As I gazed at what one writer called the "impossibly huge" face of the glacier, I imagined rivers of snowmelt flowing somewhere beneath what I could see. I remembered learning in physics class that even in the most solid-seeming structures, something is always moving. Every piece of matter is made up of atoms, electrons circling the neurons and protons in the nucleus like planets orbiting the sun.

     Something is always moving.
     Fear and anxiety do vibrate within us. Let them go. Let them ride like pieces of gravel down the cold, unseen river into the sea. Put your paddle in the icy water and keep going. Maybe you'll see a puffin. Or a seal. For certain there will be deep water. And above you, even more enormous than the face of the glacier, will be the wide arc of the aquamarine sky. 

"Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine." Isaiah 43:1 (RSV)

Playlist: "How Firm a Foundation," early American hymn, 1787.

     If you ask us, Ed and I would be happy to tell you that we prefer to paddle our canoe on rivers. But we've had some spectacular experiences on lakes. That time on Rollins Pond in the Adirondacks, for instance, when we saw a shooting star fall halfway across the sky. Or, on Kintla Lake in Glacier National Park, when we looked down into seventy feet of water so clear we could see our shadows on the bottom.

     Or, during a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Alaska I haven't told you about yet, when we kayaked on Aialik Bay through shards of ice that hissed against our hulls as we headed toward the steep wall of a tidewater glacier twenty stories high.
     However, on this particular day in 2018 beside Freeland Lake in Killarney Provincial Park, Ontario, I wasn't feeling spectacular. Though mid-September, it was hot, and we were resting before our 430-meter portage into Killarney Lake. We'd hauled our canoe and paddles and camping gear out of the way so others using the portage trail could get around us. We'd already paddled across Freeland Lake and George Lake. We had much of Killarney Lake yet to go before we reached our campsite.
     The trail was surprisingly busy for such a remote place. I imagined the other paddlers were going deep into the interior, maybe all the way to Threenarrows Lake, accessible only by a 3000-meter carry that explorer Kevin Callan called "the portage to hell." We wouldn't be doing that. We weren't as young as we used to be.
     Two twenty-somethings blew past us, not even stopping to wipe their faces. I rubbed my skinny arms and rolled my shoulders to loosen the thin sheath of muscles across my chest.

     Then two couples our own age pulled up. They did not even grunt when they leaned over to gather up their gear. They hefted their packs with practiced ease. Humpf. They reminded me of some of the paddlers in our club at home who were always first down the river on any outing, the ones who grumbled about the guy who was always falling behind to poke around a muskrat lodge or peer into the pools for bass. The front-runners stroked vigorously, their paddles thrusting up and down like pistons. The fastest had their boats loaded onto their roof racks while the rest of us were still easing up to shore.
     I unknotted my bandana and dipped it into the water to cool my neck.
     At least we're still out here, I thought, still making our way across the water and through the woods.  I remembered a line from the prose poem, "Desiderata," I'd read a long time ago. "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself."

     I know now what I didn't know then, in that miserable moment beside the portage trail. That when we finally got to our campsite and set up our tent on the promontory across the water from the white quartzite bluffs of the La Cloche Range, we would sit on our folding chairs in perfect contentment. That we would listen to the lap of small waves against the boulders below us and watch the setting sun spangle the turquoise water with gold.
     Later that night, under stars, I would fall asleep in my tent remembering that "La Cloche" is French for "bell." Native Americans used to strike the rocks in the range as a warning and the rocks would echo with a bell-like tone. In the perfect quiet of that night, I would hear the mountain ring its sweet earthly music into the sky.

     May you treat yourself kindly today. May you "go placidly amid the noise and haste." May your simple self be enough.

Scripture: "The last will be first, and the first will be last." Matthew 20:16 (NRSV)

Playlist: "Onward, Canoe," Douglas Wood, EarthSongs, 1989.