I’m catching my breath after some 2000 miles on the road in a tight loop from Grand Rapids through West Virginia down to South Carolina and then over to the Flourish conference northeast of Atlanta and up again through Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, the northeast corner of Indiana and back home.  A trip like that in May is a joy: trees in all stages of bloom and leaf, riotous birdlife, thunderstorm fireworks far and near, the freshest, greenest grass of the season, and vistas grand enough to make imprints on the memory with only a few seconds of exposure as I speed past with the cruise set at seventy.  [Tent is my "motel" on Lake Lanier.]

Dinner guest

My now being 67, the most significant feeling resulting from such a trip is thankfulness—feeling grateful to once again be allowed the opportunity to re-experience a journey I first took in 1955 riding with my parents as they took my older brother, Jim, to look into attending Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC.  At thirteen, I had no idea that in four years I would be taking that trip at least twice a year from 1960 to 1968—because I too ended up at BJU, first as a student and then as a teacher.  Now our youngest son lives in Columbia, SC, giving Marge and me amply motivation to be taking that journey again once or twice a year.

Ironically, this trip ended with one of those “convenient blessings” I experienced often in those earlier days.  On one of those trips, as I pulled up in front of my parent’s place after some 18 hours on the road, stopping only for gas and food, I opened the door to hear the sound of air rushing from a tire going flat.  Yesterday, after two days on the road covering almost 900 miles, I pulled up in front of our garage door, turned off the key and saw a cloud of steam issue from beneath the hood—a radiator or hose leak happening at the exact end of the trip.

Pocahontas County WV

In the fall of 2007 Marge and I decided, for the first time, to take the Blue Ridge Parkway for a part of our return trip from Columbia.  After multiple vista stops along the way, we decided to drop down off the ridge to pick up something to eat in Roanoke, VA.  Spotting a Walmart at the edge of town, we pulled in and did some quick shopping.  When we returned to the car, the starter wouldn’t work—not even make a click.  So I did the “man thing” by opening the hood to take a look—wondering if I could even pick up a clue as to what was the problem.  I suspected corrosion on a battery post, so I jiggled one of the wires, and was surprised to have the post simply snap right off the battery.  Examination showed that it was a virtual miracle it had not fallen off miles earlier—when we were in the boondocks.  How the battery had been functioning with such a badly corroded post was a mystery to me.  Yet how convenient for this to happen right where I could run back into Walmart and pick up a new battery.  The convenience, however, soon seemed to have been less than first imagined: I couldn’t get the rusted battery hold-down clamps loose—even after going into the store again to buy one of those new Crescent slip wrenches.  It was too big for the tight quarters.

That’s when Mr. Boone showed up: an insistent gentleman who would not let me get my own hands dirty.  Seeing the problem and not having his tools available, he said something like, “Y’all relax.  I just gotta run on home and get my tools.  Be back in about fifteen minutes.”  Well, after waiting almost a half hour, we figured he might have just decided to skip it.  So I decided to go back into the store to buy more tools but was stopped by Mr. Boone showing up with his tool box—and with profuse apologies for taking so long.  In about ten minutes, the battery was in and the car was running.  We insisted, of course, on paying him for his wonderful help, but he declined.  “My mother is looking down on me from heaven,” he said, “and with all the help I’ve received in my life, if I took money from you, she’d come down and strike me dead!  Y’all just have a good trip home to Michigan.”  With that, our angel mechanic hopped in his truck and was gone.

When we travel, Marge and I always start our trips with that common and seemingly trivial prayer, “Lord, keep us safe on the road, keep the car running well, and let us be a testimony for You along the way.”  Why some prayers are clearly answered and others not is one of the mysteries of the Christian life.  But that simple prayer has been answered so often and so markedly that I’m struck with wonder—and with the conviction that what might appear to be mere lucky convenience is more likely Providence. And the testimonies?  They’re typically more often witnessed than given.

See you outdoors!

Dean

A new feature of WonderOfCreation.org is an occasional photo slide show from travels On The Road (OTR).  These photos were taken in Pocahontas County in east central West Virginia.  I’m on the road to Duluth, Georgia—a location name that’s an oxymoron to us Michiganders, for which “on the road to Duluth” means going north and west into Minnesota.

I had the joy of staying a couple days with Allen and Debbie Johnson who live in rural Pocahontas County, West Virginia—rural really being a unnecessary adjective for a county that’s mostly made up of national forest.  Allen has been a long-time friend in the Christian creation care community, of which I have now been a part for almost twenty years.  You might want to read a bit more about Allen from this write-up in Newsweek magazine.

Allen is a county library administrator who loves the mountains.  I know that in part because his car, like many in the county, sports a bumper sticker that says so.  Plus, Allen is also an activist in opposition to mountaintop removal for the mining of coal, an invasive method that is destroying thousands of acres of West Virginia’s beautiful landscape and threatening the historic Appalachian cultural heritage.  Allen’s particular cause is the effort of Christians for the Mountains.

I wanted to get some photos myself of mountaintop removal, but since those can be found at several websites and on Google Earth, I just meandered through the springtime beauty of the Appalachians with my camera.  Here is a sampling from my camera’s growing files from this OTR excursion.

See you outdoors!

Dean

“Where are you?” is a question I sometimes get on my cell phone from Marge.  My walk home from work is only about fifteen minutes if taken at a standard pace, so she tends to be a bit concerned if my walk is going on some forty minutes or so and she’s ready to put the beans on the stove.  The problem is that I am wont to amble: “to go at a slow, easy pace; stroll; saunter.”  And spring brings on radical ambling on my part–especially if I have my camera and/or binoculars with me.

It’s my old orchard that’s the issue (“My orchard” because I never see anyone else in it).  It lies between work and home and it will suck me in—a curiosity quagmire in all seasons except the dead of winter.  Like yesterday. The whole orchard was in glorious bloom, and I had to go in and shoot some pics of the many different varieties.   Then looking for nests in a few of the red cedars that have volunteered to fill the open spaces, I also found some galls—little balls of vegetation that look like miniature maces—that horrible weapon of the Dark Ages: a heavy, spiked iron ball on a chain.  They’re called “cedar apples,” and they’re created by a fungus that has to live part of its life both on the cedar and on apples or crabapples—both of which are certainly abundant there.  Of course a botanist like my friend Lytton Musselman would remind me that the blob is not an apple and the cedar is not really a cedar.  It’s a juniper.  But the scientific term for this oddity leaves me totally uninformed: Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae.

My search for nests, however, did pay off.  I found a robin’s nest that was still bearing eggs.  Others had already been robbed by crows.

And did you know that poplars have beautiful catkins—much more attractive than the pussy willow ones.  Port wine in color, the male ones hang down like miniature grape clusters. In another month, these will bloom with tufts of white “cotton” that will drop from the trees like puffs and blow into tiny drifts.  The cottonwood, of course, is the most prolific “snow” maker of this sort.

On my way home this week I do have to go out to our RBC water runoff catch pond to check on a pair of geese nesting there.   As I expected, the parents were a bit testy at my approach; so I moved in and out quickly.  My guess is that the goslings will be hatching in a day or two.

So with all that important stuff going on outdoors, it does take a bit longer for me to get home.  It’s a good thing that Marge has learned not to turn on the stove until she sees the whites of my eyes.

See you outdoors,

Dean

Protective mama

Ever heard of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore?  Marge and I spent the past weekend there with a couple friends, and we concluded that it is truly another of the best-kept secrets about Michigan—secret, of course, to non-Michiganders.  So maybe I ought to just stop here and not tell more about this wonderful place.  But since it’s not nice to keep secrets, I guess I’ll have to reveal that Sleeping Bear Dunes is probably the most dramatic setting in the state for experiencing the beauty of the Lake Michigan shoreline.

Early May is still a little too soon for full spring foliage, so it’s a great time of the year for birding—before the woods fills up with it’s green drapery.  Evidence of the work of the giant pileated woodpecker is everywhere: large oval-shaped holes in dead trees where the crow-sized bird leaves mounds of chips on the ground—a dead giveaway of its presence. We didn’t see one this time, but we did hear one drumming away out of sight—sounding like the echo of a distant Gatling gun.  On the backside of a large dune yet devoid of leaves, sound travels a long way.

The early buds in their golden and bronze hues reminded me of the Robert Frost poem I typically afflict my family with at this time of the year, so I did have to afflict my friends with it.  And if you don’t stop reading, you know I’m going to lay it on you!  It does have a lot of meaning, though—Christian meaning that Frost is not typically known for.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Many leaves, when they first emerge, have a golden hue to them before they darken down to the full green of maturity.  This reminded Frost of nature’s original “golden age”—the paradise of the Garden of Eden before the Fall.  His generalized conclusion is that the golden stage of every good thing we experience never remains.  Missing, of course, is the hope of the coming golden age when Jesus will return to remove forever the curse that Frost alludes to.

So while it is true that the first golden blush of spring will give way to green, it does herald the coming glory of summer at Sleeping Bear when the golden sands will stand in rich contrast to the almost infinite shades of green provided by the conifers, hardwoods, shrubs, and grasses that bound the verges of this awesome natural wonder.

Like the fabled white cliffs of Dover on the English Channel, Sleeping Bear’s monumental dunes often send out invitations to fliers who travel the northern air corridors above the Great Lakes.  I recall being on a westbound flight on a crystal clear day when I had the opportunity to pick up the dunes a hundred miles to the north and keep them in my sight until the plane was well beyond Green Bay, Wisconsin—almost 130 miles away!  Of course it helps that the tallest dune towers upward some 400 feet.

So here I extend my own invitation for you to come and experience another of the countless wonders of God’s creation.

See you outdoors!

Dean