I use my phone as an alarm clock. It has a simple way to set alarms and I use it not only to tell me when it is time to get up in the morning, but also to remind me of meetings and other scheduled items throughout the day. Once in a while I slip into bed tired and forget to put the phone in its charging stand at the headboard of the bed. That is no problem, because I will still hear the alarm and the phone can be charged while I work at my computer. The phone, however, has other alerts and sounds that it makes through the night. There is a tone, which I usually remember to turn off, when e-mail arrives, another when a text message is received, a third when breaking news is reported. I’ve learned to sleep through the various beeps and buzzes of my phone most of the time. I turn the volume down. Decades ago we had a land line installed in our bedroom and we have a phone on the headboard of our bed. That phone’s ringer is kept turned off. We can hear the phone ringing elsewhere in the house, but have the option to answer it without rising from bed. It is a luxury for a family that often needs to respond to calls in the middle of the night. Now I sleep with two communications devises near my head each evening.

It is enough to get me thinking about the appropriate uses of technology. I do appreciate the ability to stay in touch when important things are going on. I enjoy the calls from our children, the little messages with photos of our grandson, and the ability to check in with my wife throughout the day. I like to be able to check the weather or traffic while I am on the go.

But I am aware that all of our devices, while filled with lots of possibilities, present challenges to contemporary people. Having a phone at hand all of the time means that the possibility of being interrupted is constant. There are some things in life that deserve our full attention. There are some times in life when interruptions are not appropriate.

The one time when I am consistent about not using my phone is when I am leading worship. I don’t even take my phone into the Sanctuary during a service. It stays in my briefcase. For that hour, I focus on what is at hand. I am aware that there are some people in the pews who cannot turn off their devices. First responders who have to be available in the event of an emergency, physicians who might be called to the hospital, parents awaiting critical news from their children and others need to have their phones (hopefully set on vibrate instead of a loud ring tone) in worship. But I am able to leave my phone knowing that I can check messages after worship.

I am trying to work with the youth in our church to develop reasonable protocols for a few sacred moments when we set aside our devices. I used to ask the youth to turn off their phones when we were traveling in the car. I thought that the conversation of the car was valuable and sending text messages distracting and a way of opting out of the community as members of the youth group traveled to and from activities. The youth protested. Some even had some good arguments for using phones in the car. They were reporting to their parents what time to meet after youth group. They were telling their friends about our church and its activities. They wanted to share pictures while the memories were fresh. I have relented about the use of the phones in the car. I try to model for the youth by not using my phone while driving. I have the ability to use my phone hands free, but I try not to use it while driving most of the time and to never use it when I am driving a carload of the church’s youth. But I do allow the youth to use their devices. In order to do so they have to endure a bit of my commentary about the use of technology, but most of the youth are used to that.

I do, however, maintain some times and moments that are “sacred space,” when we ask the youth to put aside their devices. When we pray and share devotions, we focus our attention on being together and worship without the distraction of the phones. This means that there are some things we do that are not photographed. The youth are used to a constant stream of photos from their phones to social networking sites. Some of those photos help to promote our church and its ministries, but there are some times when I ask them to stop taking photos and simply experience the moment.

The use of devices is an element in human freedom in our time. Some become addicted to the devices and don’t know how to behave without them. Some constantly use the devices to mediate their experiences. Too many use them to work longer hours and fail to make a separation between work and home. Instead of liberating us, the devices enslave us. I can imagine that God might want to add another commandment: On the Sabbath thou shall refrain from using any cell phone or computer or tablet device. One day each week you shall be liberated from constant connection.

I know a day is too much to ask, but how about a dinner hour without the devices? How about a worship service?

When we go on vacation, I turn off all of the alarms in my phone and allow myself to sleep without interruption. I barely notice the difference. I tend to rise at about the same time. I’m not sure that I sleep any better than when I have the phone on my headboard ready to wake me. I am, however, open to considering other times when I declare my independence from the devices and refuse to allow the phone to rule all of my activities.

New occasions teach new skills. New technologies demand new ways of living. I don’t think we’ve mastered these devices yet. Until when learn to set them aside, we are not fully in control.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I read an article in National Geographic about rising sea levels. The article had large, foldout maps that showed coastal areas that were threatened by extreme sea rise. One map showed the entire state of Florida under water. None of the maps showed our corner of the world to be particularly vulnerable. If the sea levels rise by a dozen or more feet, we’ll still be high and dry in the hills at the center of the continent.

Most of the time we enjoy being out of the news. Part of what we like about the place where we live is that we aren’t as crowded as some of the big cities. We like to have a little space and a little privacy and we don’t care if others make the headlines while we enjoy a bit of obscurity.

But there have been a couple of stories from our area that made national news lately. Our Governor Dennis Dugaard got his picture in the Washington Post. He wasn’t dressed for a state dinner with his hair perfectly combed. Actually our Governor’s hair is thinning quite a bit and he doesn’t wear it very long so it looks pretty much the same no matter what he is doing. But the photo isn’t one of him signing an important piece of legislation or meeting with industry leaders. It is of him skydiving.

Skydiving isn’t the Governor’s usual hobby. In fact he made his first skydive Wednesday evening, jumping tandem with Dan Spisak, an instructor with Skydive Adventures in Madison. The governor was fulfilling a promise he made as part of promoting the Children’s Miracle Network. He said he’d skydive if the Madison Dairy Queen restaurant sold 32,000 Blizard treats to benefit Children’s Miracle Network. Last year they sold 31,351, so the goal was definitely achievable. With the Governor’s support and promise, the restaurant broke all records and sold 38,412 Blizzards. So Governor Dugaard took the leap after the original date had to be rescheduled due to inclement weather. He landed safely and uninjured and from the news reports he enjoyed the experience.

I have no objection to the Governor taking a skydive. And I am happy that he supports Children’s Miracle Network. But the jump was pretty much assured from the time he made the promise. A little background is in order. The Diary Queen corporation backs all of its franchisees when they raise funds for Children’s Miracle Network. The corporation has chosen the charity as one of its focuses and supports it in a big way. Like many other corporate charities, they promote giving through the company and the company takes advantage of the tax deduction. And the Madison Dairy Queen has been the largest seller of Blizzards for Children’s Miracle Network for many years running. This is a successful fund-raiser and was very successful before the Governor appeared for his photo opportunity. Still, his pledge probably boosted sales a bit. I’d buy an ice cream treat if it contributed to the charity in the first place. I’d also buy one if it would get the Governor to skydive. Getting both bonuses for the same purchase put the people of Madison and the surrounding area in just the right mood and the ice cream fairly sailed out of the store.

Children’s Miracle Network funds support local hospitals, so the money raised by the Madison Dairy Queen will go to the Sanford Health USD Medical Center. I’m sure they do good work at Sanford Health, but it doesn’t strike me as being under-funded in the first place. Healthcare is a huge multi-billion dollar industry in the United States and Sanford Health is the biggest player in South Dakota. Although they are a non-profit corporation, the quarter of a million dollars that is raised in the Dairy Queen fundraiser is a tiny drop in the bucket of the money that flows through that institution.

It would have been more impressive if the Governor had found a way to support one of our struggling rural and isolated hospitals that serves people who would otherwise have to travel long distances for health care. Nobody raised a quarter of a million dollars for the Eagle Butte Clinic or the Bison hospital last week, and nobody is going to do it next week, either.

Still, if the Governor is going to make the national press, it is kind of nice to have him do so in a charitable and adventurous way. He does us good by helping the outside world to see what community-minded, generous and adventurous people we are.

The news from Leith, North Dakota wasn’t so good. That town made the New York Times. Now you have to have spent some time in Southwestern North Dakota to know where Leith is in the first place. It’s not like it is on the Interstate, or even a US highway. Leith is south of the road between Elgin and Carson. Originally laid out in a grid of four blocks by four blocks, the city now has two short streets south of Main so residents can have addresses on one of six east-west streets or four north-south avenues. It isn’t the county seat. It isn’t a big town. It made national news because a white supremacist, who has been driven out of other states and is wanted in Canada on charges of promoting hatred, has bought a home in town and has been about the business of purchasing additional properties for like-minded friends. He is using Craigslist and white power message boards to attract others in the movement to move to Leith.

House prices in Leith aren’t too high. Mr. Cobb paid $8,600 for his house, which doesn’t have functioning septic or running water. He is the talk of the town at the Leith Bar. The 2010 Census lists Leith as having 16 residents. Most locals wouldn’t mind growing to, say 25 or so, but they aren’t happy with someone trying to make their town a place where hatred is spread. I spent enough time in North Dakota to know that things might look differently after a long hard winter. I’m hoping that Mr. Cobb is treated to at least a couple of weeks of -30 this winter so he can sit in his house without running water or working sewer and contemplate whether or not he wants to live there.

The folks who have survived winter after winter are far kinder, more tolerant and better people.

As we used to say when I lived in North Dakota, -30 keeps the riff raff out.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I listen to a wide variety of different podcasts each week. Some of my favorites are on scientific topics. I am fascinated by advances in human learning and understanding of the nature of the universe. Yesterday as I was driving to and from a variety of errands I listened to a recent podcast of WNYC’s Radiolab that told the dramatic story of Jenna Giese who had contacted rabies. Her presenting symptoms were puzzling to doctors and her family did not make the connection between her illness and a small bite from a bat. The diagnosis came slowly and only after her condition was critical. After two weeks in induced coma, Jenna began to wake and now has survived. She has some lingering disabilities, but the fact that she is alive is an amazing story.

Until recently, physicians believed that rabies was 100% fatal once the disease progressed beyond the stage that can be treated with the vaccine. The treatment that Jenna received has now become known as the Milwaukee protocol and has been used in other rabies cases. While only about six of thirty people who have received the protocol have survived, that survival rate is a dramatic increase over what was previously thought possible. Before the protocol physicians provided comfort care and waited for death to occur.

The dynamics of the case are not fully understood. Researchers have found evidence of others who have survived the disease and the existence of human antibodies that seem to be capable of fighting off the disease. It is possible that Jenna Giese was one of a rare number of people who have the ability to survive the disease. It is very difficult to accumulate additional data about the disease and treatment protocols because even with the protocol, survival is rare.

The fact that there are survivors, however, brings new hope to the process of research. We humans naturally look for opportunities to beat the odds. The difference between a disease that is 100% fatal and one that is only 99.99% fatal is huge when it comes to human hope. Of course the hope is that we can discover ways to effectively treat the illness so that the survival rates increase. In the past, medical researchers have discovered effective treatments for other diseases that were once thought to be always fatal.

We don’t live forever. Even those who survive against great odds will someday die. But premature death from illness seems to us to be a deeper tragedy than death that occurs after a long life. The hope that we might find effective treatment for a dramatic illness like rabies is inspiring.

In the back of my mind as I was listening to the report of new hope in the treatement of rabies is a tragedy that came to our community on Monday when a 94-year-old woman died in a traffic accident. Her 95-year-old husband was driving and has been hospitalized with serious injuries. Also injured and hospitalizes is her 98-year old brother. The members of our congregation are all caught up in the tragedy because we know the victims. The twin sister of the woman who died has long been a member of our congregation. The pain of the loss is raw and deep for her as she adjusts to the new realities of her life.

We all knew that the people involved in the accident would someday die. Realistically, we know that those who live into their nineties have had long and meaningful lives and that the number of years that they will continue to live are few. Still the suddenness of death in an accident is shocking. It is another reminder that life is fragile and can come to its conclusion suddenly and without warning. And the pain of loss is not less when the person who dies is an elder.

I suppose that twins are aware that the odds are that one will die first and the other will survive to have to deal with the grief of loss. But there is no way to prepare for that loss. So the tragedy is overwhelming. The situation is grim.

But it is not hopeless.

The two persons who were in the van that struck the car were both treated and released from the hospital. They have the possibility of decades of meaningful life ahead of them. The community is rallying around the husband and brother as they undergo treatment in the hospital. The community is also supporting the surviving sister as she moves through the valley of grief.

Our faith reminds us that death, even tragic and sudden death, is not the end of the story. There is more than the crash of the vehicles to the stories of the lives of these people.

Even in the darkest night the sunrise is just beyond the horizon. We humans have the search for hope deeply engrained in our nature.

The difference between 100% fatal and 99.99% fatal is dramatic. Before we understand the complex medical processes of survival, we know that there are a few survivors of rabies. We can wait for the data and deeper understanding of what has occurred. Before we know the details of life after death, we can find hope in the midst of death because we understand that love never dies. The end that seems to us to be so final isn’t really the end at all.

The powerful 11th chapter of the letter to the Hebrews begins with “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” There are many things in this life that are not seen. The old adage, “seeing is believing” simply does not describe the way things are. We believe in things that are unseen. We discover hope when all seems hopeless.

The search is now on for others who have survived rabies. Many medical researchers believe that they can learn more from those who have survived than from studying those who have died. I’m with the researchers. I am not unaware that 99.99% are overwhelming odds. But knowing that the other .01% exists is sufficient to keep hope alive and move us on the road to fuller understanding.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

One of the fascinations of paddling on small lakes and ponds is the visual impact of reflection. The water reflects the elements that rise above the water in such a way that paddling a canoe or kayak is a bit like gliding across the surface of the mirror. If you look straight down right next to the boat, you can easily see that the world under the water is quite different from what is above. It isn’t difficult to see the plants that grow in the lakes and ponds around here. It isn’t rare to see the fish that make their home in that world. But if you gaze outward toward the horizon, especially in the morning or evening when the light angles are low, the lake shows an upside-down rendition of the space above the lake. Mountains and hills become symmetrical shapes with the waterline running right down the middle. The colors of the sky and cloud forms get a second display on the canvas of the water. Some days the water is glassy smooth and the reflection is like a gloss photograph held up against the matte of the real world. Some days the wind moves the water so that the reflection has texture that isn’t present in the land above.

It never ceases to fascinate me.

In a sense, a reflection is an illusion. Trees don’t look the same below the ground as they do above. Hills don’t really extend below the water line. The clouds are in the sky and not in the water. Colors are even a bit trickier. The colors of the sunrise or sunset are the product of light that has been filtered by dust, smoke and other particles in the air. The light is then reflected, often off of clouds or other water vapor suspended in the atmosphere. The reflections on the surface of the pond may indeed be reflections of reflections as the light bounces around the atmosphere. Water is good at both filtering and reflecting light.

But I am rarely in a scientist’s analytical mood when I am paddling. The process is more like art appreciation. I look and behold beauty and use my memory and my camera to capture enough of it to remember and perhaps even to share with someone else. The result is that there are a lot of my photographs that are taken with the water line crossing the middle of the picture. A trained photographer will tell you that this makes for a boring photograph. The rule of thirds applies to classic photographic composition: make one-third sky and two-thirds water or the other way around: one-third water and two-thirds sky. Frame the shot so that the eye is drawn to the symmetrical line, but the line doesn’t run right in the middle of the picture. Still, I like to place that line in the middle. It captures the feeling of paddling. Being in a canoe or kayak is like sitting right on the water and the perception is of being in the middle of something, not at the top or bottom.

Lately, I have taken quite a few pictures that include the bow of the canoe. The canoe gives perspective. It breaks up the symmetry. There is no equal and opposite canoe in the sky.

Traveling on the water is a unique gift. When we go for a walk in the forest, we leave our footprints behind. Sometimes we trample a small flower or other plant. Our footprints, combined with those of other hikers and walkers, compress the soil. On a steep hillside, our trails become pathways for water during the spring runoff and summer showers and the water further erodes the landscape. The presence of people on the surface of the land often leaves behind many signs that we have been there. On the water, in a canoe, there is a gentle ripple of a wake that soon dissipates and there is no sign of where we have gone. You can’t track the path of a canoe after it has passed. Traveling by canoe gives me the sensation of being able to observe nature without disturbing it. Of course my presence does have an impact. The ducks scatter and complain at my approach. I interrupt a heron’s fishing with my attempts to take pictures of the bird. Usually the birds return quickly after my passing, but they have responded to my presence. And I transport my canoes to the water in a car or pickup. Such modes of travel consume resources and leave their imprint of pollution. Still the impact of traveling by canoe is lighter than that of many other modes of transportation.

But I don’t paddle for transportation. I paddle for the pure pleasure of gliding across the water. Some of the best paddling experiences of my life have been times when I had no destination that had to be reached. It is common for me to paddle around the perimeter of a lake, putting in and taking out in the same place. I paddle out and back or around in a circle. Making a circle is a good way to gain perspective. I look all around. I see the effects of the light from different angles. I make mental notes of the play of light and shadow in the reflections.

Even though I often paddle on the same lake many times in a row, each trip is different from all of the other ones. I see a bird or animal that I have not noticed on previous trips. The shape of the clouds in the sky is always new and different from other days. Temperature has its affect on how much mist is rising from the surface of the lake. Changes in weather change the colors of the plants and the activities of the animals. Some days I am energetic and paddle quickly. Other days I am lazy and paddle slowly. Each trip to the lake is a unique experience. I could do it over and over again and not become bored. And there are advantages to the repetition. I know where the beaver lodges and osprey nests are located. I know some of the heron’s favorite fishing spots. I know which parts of the lakeshore are favored by the ducks for their nests and where to find the red-winged blackbirds perched atop the cattails.

Most of all, the lake gives me the opportunity to reflect. To sit on the horizon between the past and the future and contemplate my place in all of it.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There are a variety of versions of the story, but one version of the story is that President Calvin Coolidge packed up his family, his dogs and his pet raccoon for a three-week vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Teddy Roosevelt had recommended the destination. Old Cal had never before even gone fishing. He got to South Dakota, had great luck with his first attempt at fishing, due in part to the over-zealous stocking of trout just ahead of his arrival at the stream. At any rate, he ended up staying three months instead of three weeks. He ended up staying long enough for a photo op on the front steps of our church.

We are camped at Stockade Lake, just a few miles from our home, right on the edge of Custer State Park. We have come for just two nights and one day, but it is enough for a lot of stories. If President Coolidge could get three months and a half dozen things named after him and his dear Grace out of a three-week vacation. I ought to be able to get a week’s worth of blogs out of a day spent exploring Custer State Park.

Let’s see . . . I could write why I like the gravel roads in the park better than the paved ones. It is partly due to the summer traffic on the paved roads. It is partly the great names: North Lame Johnny Road, Swint Road, Lower French Creek Road, Oak Draw Road, Fisherman Flats Road.

There could easily be a blog about the antics of prairie dogs and the postures assumed by otherwise normal human beings when they are trying to capture pictures of the little critters. I imagine that the prairie dogs are as amused watching the people as the people are amused watching the prairie dogs.

The old bull buffalo deserve their own blog. They look hot and tired as they sit in their dust wallows on a hot August day. I’m guessing that the flies are a major nuisance even when you are the biggest critter in the region and should have no fear. The coyotes don’t have nerve to mess with the old guys, but the flies won’t leave them alone.

I could write about the young antelope trying to decide whether or not to cross the road with mama on the other side and a great big pickup just stopped right in the middle of the road. Should he go or should he stay? The pickup wouldn’t hit him, but he has no way of knowing that all the people in the pickup want is a picture.

There is a blog in the tree swallows harvesting insects over Legion Lake in the late evening. They are such skillful fliers. The come close to collisions, but avoid them at the last minute. Watching them fly is as exciting as the Indianapolis 500 or the Reno Air Races.

I could blog about how I think that even though it is not as far, hiking Stockade Loop is more challenging than hiking to Little Devil’s Tower because the path is so steep and almost entirely covered in scree that moves each time you put your foot down. It is a good workout to hike up to the top of the ridge and worth it for the view of the Needles and other features of the hills.

And I should blog about seeing four immature osprey fledge. They made it across the lake, even if their first landings into trees were less than graceful. Mother kept fishing across the lake and called out to them from time to time, but they weren’t bold enough to come back to her and she had no intention of going to them until she caught a fish.

But I decided to write a bit about the burros. I know a bit about the subject because we raised burros when I was growing up. I know that the burros in Custer State Park are left over from a concessionaire who used them to transport tourists from the old Sylvan Lake Lodge to the top of Harney Peak and back. When the business went belly up, the burros were turned loose to fend for themselves, and so far they seem to be doing a pretty good job of it. But it is a bit more romantic to tell the story that the miners imported the burros to work the mines and then abandoned them when the riches didn’t come in as quickly as planned.

We raised Spanish Burros, with the dark cross across their back. The legend is that the burro got is cross marking as a reward for carrying Mary to Bethlehem when she was expecting Jesus and for carrying Jesus into Jerusalem. I know that there are lots of other names for burros. I was reminded of that frequently by some of my adolescent classmates who gave me the unofficial and unwanted nickname by modifying my last name. They removed the “Huff” from Huffman and replaced it with another name for a burro. They were adolescent boys, so you can imagine what they called me. It wasn’t donkeyman.

We owned ½ interest in a Jack donkey, so we had at least one colt each year. One year one of our colts broke her leg in a cattle guard and we ended up keeping her so we had two breeding Jennies for a while. The little one proved not to be the best mother, however. The guy who had the other ½ of our Jack had a mare. She produced mules for the Forest Service. Now fractional interests in mules has probably never been a great investment but owning ¼ of a mule is not a way to get rich the year the Forest Service gave up using mules for their work. It seems that at our auction there were no more customers left. In those days a brand inspection cost $12, so if the mule sold for $8, the net loss meant that the ¼ shareowner had to pay the brand inspector $1. That would have been less painful if the brand inspector hadn’t been the one who bought the critter in the first place. It seemed a bit of indignity to have to pay to get rid of the animal.

So I like to visit the burros in Custer State Park. They are gentle animals and a few of them remind me of the ones we used to raise. Growing up the way I did, I have no desire whatsoever to own a burro, but it is nice to know where I can visit one when I want to.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I like to think that the dominant pattern of our marriage has been side by side. Having passed our 40th wedding anniversary, we are well aware that we are a partnership. So many aspects of our lives are build around the things that we do together that it is not possible to imagine life apart. We were married in the early 1970’s, a time when we were becoming more aware of the roles that men and women play and the possibilities for increased equality in marriage. I grew up with parents who were equal partners in marriage and business and so I had good models of how to form a partnership. We have been intentional about forging a life where we go together side by side with neither taking the lead and neither being a follower. We are equals facing the world together.

But there are some things that are nice to do in tandem. Canoeing is one of those things. A canoe that is wide enough to sit side by side would be awkward and very slow on the water. Our long and slim boat is a far more efficient way to take to the water and we enjoy paddling together.

For those who are not used to paddling tandem, there are a few things about the process that might not be evident. The person in the front of the boat may be leading, but the one in the back is the one who does the steering. There is lots of leverage in a paddle extended beyond the end of the boat and a simple flick of the wrist can have more authority than a sweep by the bow paddler.

Canoeing is one of those sports that takes just a few minutes to learn and is complex enough for a lifetime of study and practice. Full mastery is elusive and I am nowhere near, though I paddle a lot compared to other folks I know. Paddling tandem uses all of he same skills as paddling solo. The paddle strokes are the same. Remarkably, once the stern paddler has learned a few basic steering strokes, such as the J stroke and a basic pry stroke, the two paddlers do not need to be equal in ability or strength. There is a small advantage to having the most experienced paddler in the stern. The boat prefers to have the heaviest paddler in the stern for trim, except on the windiest of days. Fortunately in our case the heaviest paddler is also the most experienced. Back in the stern, I can alternate between siting on he seat and kneeling right in front of the seat and the boat stays well trimmed with Susan in the bow.

Tandem paddling is quicker than solo paddling in most cases. The strength of two people goes into the propulsion of the craft.

When we canoe, I sit in the back and we go through the water with a different partnership than the side-by-side that is our usual style. There is nothing less equal about a tandem relationship and even though the roles of bow and stern paddler are defined by the needs of the boat, there is a basic equality to the relationship.

There are other times when a tandem relationship works better than side-by side. Hiking narrow mountain trails is easier in single file than side-by-side. One has to lead and the other follow. On a longer hike, it makes sense to put the slower hiker in front so that the pace is naturally adjusted. If the faster one is in front, setting the right pace requires careful concentration on the pace of the other hiker. Reverse the order of the hikers and everyone can pay attention to the trail and the beauty unfolding as you walk. Hiking isn’t about speed in the first place. A slower pace can result in more endurance. And we hike for exercise and to see things that would be missed if we were going too fast. We hike to go places that aren’t accessible by other means. Sometimes slower is simply better. There is time to really see what is around you.

One of the discoveries over the years of our marriage is that side-by-side doesn’t mean that you are glued to each other. Space between partners is part of the ebb and flow of normal relationships. As time passes, trust grows and a natural balance of togetherness and separation develops. The complexities of life often demand a “divide and conquer” approach. We work well together, but there are many times when we need to be working separately. In the flow of activities, we seem to have forged a balance that always leaves us wishing we had just a little bit more time together. That wish is a good thing because when we do have time together we understand how precious it is and are able to savor it.

Stockade Reservoir in Custer State Park is a small pond, really. It is overgrown with aquatic plants and you cannot see through the water for all of the green growth in the pond. But it has an island and several coves worth exploring. Last night it was perfectly smooth and ours was the only craft on its surface. The water reflected the hills and the sky as we paddled. Our task didn’t require much talking, allowing for the chatter of the ducks to be the dominant sound. We had no set destination or schedule so we were able to paddle at a leisurely pace. It was a beautiful conclusion to a long and busy day that had been filled with worship, a host of people that needed to talk after worship, a retirement gathering for a colleague, and much more.

A few paddle strokes out onto the lake, however, brought us to a place where the pace wasn’t critical. We were able to remember and process all of the events of the day. We were able to witness the glory of creation. We were able to share a moment. We may have been arranged in tandem, but we were truly together.

We have been blessed. Our gratitude is beyond words.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

People have struggled with the concept of time for generations. We have the capacity to remember and the ability to anticipate. So we think in terms of past, present and future. Those concepts work well for interpreting the events of our lives most of the time. People have a great capacity to endure discomfort if they have some sense that it is temporary. When they are able to anticipate the end of the present situation they will endure discomfort or even pain in order to reach a reward.

There are, of course, all kinds of limits to our ability to perceive time. When we look back, our memories are inaccurate. After the passage of time the ability to discern the difference between what happened and how we remember it fades. We become convinced that our memories are the truth, even when confronted with memories that are different from our own. The old adage that history is written by the victors applies to events that are smaller than wars, conquests and international conflicts. In families there are often multiple interpretations of past events. Which story becomes official often depends on who is telling the stories.

If our sense of the past is often fuzzy, our sense of the future is even more so. We don’t really know what is going to happen at any point in the future. We often make plans that include a particular vision of future events only to find out that things don’t work as planned. There are so many factors that influence any event that our predictions are often not even close to what actually unfolds.

Religious faith often plays a part in our understanding of the flow of time. Many world religions have a canon of stories that gain official status as the treasures of the faith. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all share the portion of our bible often called the “Old Testament” or “Hebrew Scriptures.” These books are not simply history, but rather a very complex collection of poetry, history, interpretation, liturgy, with a bit of politics thrown in the mix as well. The value of scripture lies not just in the words that have been saved, treasured, translated and interpreted over the generations, but also in the ways in which our people have used those words. The very fact that we have kept them over millennia makes them a part of our identity.

Anticipation of the future can also be a major part of religious expression. The promise of a future reward is woven into the stories of our scriptures. Abraham and Sarah leave the home of their ancestors to find a promised land. Israel came into occupation of that land generations after the death of Abraham and Sarah. Moses led the people out of Egypt, but he himself never entered the Promised Land. Story after story of our people speaks to an understanding of belonging to a multiple-generation process. The people of God are on a journey that exceeds the span of a single lifetime.

Preachers have used promises of heaven or warnings of hell to inspire and motivate people. Jonathan Edwards’ classic sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is just one example of an entire genre of public oratory meant to motivate people to particular patterns of behavior and belief.

There is, however, also present in many religions, an invitation to experience, savor and understand the present moment. The Buddhist concept of “presentness” is, in part, a practice of clearing one’s consciousness of thoughts of the past and anticipations of the future in order to more fully experience what is going on right now in the moment. You don’t have to be a Buddhist or engage in meditation practices to experience the richness of the moment. A brilliant sunrise or an intense encounter with a child can change the center of your attention. People who receive diagnoses of life-ending illnesses often report that the quality of their time changes. Losing dreams of the future can result in a more intense experience of the present.

Confronted by the Pharisees about the nature of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus spoke not of some other place or distant time, but rather the here and now, saying “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” (Luke 17:21)

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy used this single verse as the basis of his magnum opus published in Germany in 1894 after having been banned in his home country. Tolstoy uses the verses of the bible and the principles of Christian faith to call for an end to violence and vengeance. The sort of social anarchy outlined in the book, however, never came to exist within the confines of human institutions and governments. The picture painted by Tolstoy is probably too idealistic for the realities of this world.

So we live our lives in the midst of an imperfectly remembered past and a vision of the future that is limited by our lack of insight and imagination. We use terms like heaven and hell without fully understanding what we mean. We plan and save for a future whose nature we cannot know. And sometimes we become distracted from the beauty and glory of the present because we spend too much of our energy in looking back or worrying about tomorrow. Despite numerous invitations from religion to let go of our worry, we find that an impossible challenge. Jesus asks us to “consider the lilies of the field,” but we look at the field and worry about winter snow.

A religious lifestyle requires practice. We don’t easily let go of the past. We don’t easily release worry about the future. It is only through a process of discipline that we learn a bit about living in the present. But such discipline is deeply rewarding. The ability to sit and listen to the beauty of music, to look at the beauty of nature, to dwell with the words of faith – these are joys worthy of our discipline and investment of time.

So today we will gather to worship once again. Our worship will be imperfect. We have not ceased being human. But we will once again practice living in the moment and appreciating the gifts of the present. And that is enough for today.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

With all of the famous people who frequent the area, there is a certain attraction to Sun Valley Idaho. I made the trip several times during the decade that we lived in Boise. Most of those trips were made in the winter. Baldy is a fun mountain to ski. The prices were high, even then, but the ski resorts had an exchange program that meant that my ski pass from Bogus Basin earned me a discount and there were a few days each year, usually toward the end of the season when the all Idaho program allowed you to ski at any resort with your pass from your home hill. I once performed a wedding in Sun Valley and was given a day’s skiing as an honorarium.

There is a romance associated with the area. After all Earnest Hemingway chose the location for his home after he had lived and worked all around the world. His Ketchum home was his last and the place of his death. For someone like me, soaking up a bit of the culture of a writer is always interesting.

During our Boise years, Picabo Street was near the top of her game, having earned gold in the Super G at the 1998 Winter Olympics. It was not uncommon to see her making runs on the mountain. I admired her from a distance. She wasn’t part of the money crowd. Her family couldn’t afford to live in Sun Valley when she was growing up. Instead they lived on a farm near Triumph. Her name comes from another small nearby town: Picabo.

I never fit in at Sun Valley. I wasn’t interested in the coordinated ski outfits in the current colors. I thought that the duct tape on my ski pants was a sign of honor. I earned those tears with some great falls. I never had new ski equipment, obtaining mine from the ski swaps. I would occasionally stop by the thrift shop run by the library, where I could get brand new silk ties for a couple of dollars. Other than food and ski passes, that was all I ever bought in Sun Valley. I’m not exactly the kind of person who runs with the rich and famous.



Still, it seems sad to me to think of the Big Wood Valley filled with smoke and the rich and famous people being evacuated from their homes. A week ago they were calling the fire the “Beaver Creek Fire.” Now they are calling it “The Beast.” Drought conditions are exaggerated by the unique terrain and the natural interface of desert and forest of the Idaho front. With the Sawtooths to the north, the desert to the south, the hills are covered with brush and other easy fuels for fast-moving fires.

It is a story that is being repeated over and over across the west. With at least 50 major fires burning out of control, the forest service has exhausted its funds for firefighting. With a billion spent and no end in sight, other programs such as conservation, access improvement, restoration and prevention will face the budget axe in order to pay the bills from the rest of the fire season.

There are three active fires burning in Yellowstone National Park. After 1988, I have a bit of a different attitude about fire in that beloved place, and my fear and worry is a bit smaller than it once was. Still I hate to think of the trees around Fishing Bridge and Mud Volcano being burned away. The Lake is one of the most gorgeous places in the world and part of its beauty is the way the trees come right down to the water’s edge.

And the big fire in California has now spread into Yosemite. Just outside that park a gated community that is another hangout for the rich and famous has been evacuated. Having money and fame do not make you any less vulnerable to the ravages of an out of control forest fire. The rich people will find safety and will find ways to recover from their losses, but if you are a small business person eking out a living providing service to those folks, making up the lost business from a summer of fire might be more than your reserves will tolerate. If you are a cleaner in a motel or a dishwasher in a restaurant, the fire-forced layoff spells financial disaster. The rich and famous can board their private jets and go anywhere they want. The people who provide their services are still stuck in the valley breathing the smoke and wondering what happens now that the paychecks have run out.

There could easily be another two months of fires before winter weather comes to the rescue. Hundreds of firefighters are risking their lives every day on each of the fires.

We don’t know what else to do. The firefighters are trained to protect homes and other structures. Fire lines sometimes hold. Backburns can create zones with no fuel for the fire to spread. It is not a good time to discuss philosophy or even fire ecology. While the positive effects of fire are known, so too are the destructive effects. And the forest service doesn’t have any extra money to fund research, buy back homes in vulnerable areas or conduct public education and prevention. For the rest of the summers, the crews will work hard, try to keep safe, and hold on until the end. For some of the firefighters the summer’s wages will support a winter of ski bumming, maybe even at Sun Valley. Last I heard they were running all of the mountain’s snow making machines full time in an effort to protect the trees and equipment on the mountain.

Far away, in South Dakota, where things are just beginning to dry out after a wonderful spring and summer with ample rainfall, we are grateful for our conditions and know that our turn will come. When the drought returns to the hills there are acres and acres of tinder-dry conditions and plenty of beetle-killed trees to provide fuel for really big fires. This is not our summer, thankfully. But as we watch and wait and pray for the safety of the firefighters, it won’t hurt for us to work hard at thinning fuels and doing what we can to help the firefighters when we have our season of fires.

In the forest, it is not “if” you have a fire, it is “when” you have a fire.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I think I had a pretty normal education. I wasn’t an engaged student during High School, and I probably did a pare minimum of reading in English class, but I read some of the classics of American literature. In college, I focused on philosophy and Christian thought, but I read more widely and added to my base of knowledge. I didn’t read much fiction during my college and seminary years, so, when a novel showed up as assigned reading in graduate school, I quickly read most of the books written by that author. Upon graduation, I began to read more novels.

Now after more decades of reading, I am occasionally surprised that I missed some of the important books. There are gaps in my reading that I discover even today. Recently, I have been reading a collection of essays of Ralph Ellison. Years ago I read “Invisible Man,” a watershed novel. Published in 1952, the book takes readers on a journey across the racial divide, but created a new model of the American novel. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. Just remember “Invisible Man” by Ellison is not the same as “The Invisible Man” by H.G. Wells. You’ll get it if you read them both, I suppose.

I don’t know if I thought that Ellison was a one-novel author, or just didn’t pay attention, but Invisible Man was the only thing he wrote that I had read until a week or so ago. His perfectionist nature meant that his novel was a singular effort and he never matched that creation. He did, however, publish many essays and short stories during his lifetime. He was a master of the English language and he was a skilled self-editor, who crafted his language carefully. In some ways his style was the opposite of mine. I write an essay every day and then forget it. He went over and over his work, changing and tweaking until it met his standards.

His standards meant that his works are well worth reading decades later. Even essays on topical subjects are fascinating because they provide an insight into the history that has shaped us. With the recent Supreme Court decision to reverse some of the elements of the Voting Rights Act, it is especially important for all Americans to understand the history of racism and bigotry in our nation and to understand the dynamics that can threaten civil society. Ellison had a deep understanding of those dynamics and wrote words that can well inform our contemporary situation.

He also wrote about the process of writing. These essays fascinate me. From time to time I am drawn to examine the process. What gives the inspiration? How do I come up with a topic for a daily essay? What do I learn from my writing? I don’t mean to discount craft and technique, which are important elements of good writing, but there is a deeper process of finding a voice. Writers have to delve into their own identity to discover who they are as a writer. The choices that a writer makes reveal much of the identity of that person. And before you can write you have to have a basic understanding of your subject. Part of writing for me is a continuing journey of self-discovery. Ellison writes of his need to process the meaning of his existence as a part of his writing. He also notes that part of understanding the meaning of one’s own life is understanding the context of one’s life. This leads to the need to delve into history. As an African-American, Ellison had to look past the popular and socially acceptable accounts of history to truths that dwell beneath the surface. Somehow in the process he merged his images of personal identity and reality in a way that he discovered his subject and crafted a magnificent novel.

I have yet to write a novel. I may never do so. But I am fascinated by the process of storytelling. I too find that telling stories requires that I know who I am and how I fit into this world. At its best, I believe, stories are ways of processing experiences into meaning. The stories of our Bible, for example, are more than historic reports about what happened. They are our people’s interpretation of the meaning of those events. We don’t just hear the report of God sending plagues on Egypt, for example, we also hear about God’s investment in the cause of freedom and how such events are not ends in and of themselves, but rather a way of participating in this universal human struggle. The Exodus has become the story not only of Israel in slavery in Egypt, but the story of the quest for human liberation and freedom in many different places and times.

If the story is told right, it can expand from the story of one time and one place to become a story for all times and places. Such stories are rare. Some of them have already been told. One of the roles of a writer is to keep telling the great stories of our people.

Writers are, however, driven by a sense that there is a story that is yet untold. The possibility that we might discover a way to say something that has not yet been expressed keeps us working with words and consuming resources with our writing. And the more I write, the more I understand that it is a process and not a product. I used to write because I had a vision of someday writing and publishing a book. Now I understand that it is unlikely that I will ever produce a book, but it is even more unlikely that I could stop writing. The goal is no longer a book with my name on the cover. The goal is to keep using language as a tool to understand the events of my life and the relationship of those events to a wider context. My ideas exist in a world of other ideas and they are shaped by the words I read and the conversations I share.

And even today, I write because I am fascinated by the process. It remains a process that I do not fully understand.

Ralph Ellison would have gone back and taken the passive voice out of that sentence. “I write because the process fascinates me.” But then, I’m no Ralph Ellison.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I remember learning about slavery in America when I was a child. One of my elementary school teachers read Uncle Tom’s Cabin to us. There were plenty of questions in my mind and I got more books from the library and learned more about this dark chapter in the story of our country. Of course, most of the things that I read simplified the situation, but the basic facts were accurate. Africans were forcibly removed from their home country, transported in slave ships in miserable conditions, sold at auction, and forced into labor. They were not treated as human beings. Families were often broken up. Living conditions were often substandard. I learned about the Emancipation Proclamation and the bloodiness of the Civil War. I read about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

As I read about these things, I would imagine what I might have done, were these events occurring in my life. I imagined that I would have been compassionate and helped the slaves. I imagined that I would be willing to take big risks to shelter slaves and participate in the Underground Railroad. I never imagined that I would be a silent bystander. In my imagination, I was always willing to become directly involved in hands on action.

I remember reading about the Nazi holocaust. I read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and later Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” I wondered what I would do if our religion was targeted for special persecution. It wasn’t easy, because I am a member of the majority and I have never experienced much that might be called religious discrimination. But I imagined what I might have done, were my family threatened. I also imagined what I might have done to shelter and save the lives of Jewish people had I been living in Germany at that time. As I read and learned about the holocaust, I never imagined that I would have stood by and ignored such atrocities. When we visited Dachau Concentration Camp, I was mystified that the people of the town could have allowed such horror to occur so close to their homes and done nothing, not even questioning the guards and executioners that were their neighbors.

These events, however, were largely theoretical in my mind because they occurred before my birth. Thinking about the past and imagining how I might have responded was an exercise in imagination. I was in my twenties and a student when the news of the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge party, under the leadership of Pol Pot in Cambodia, became known by the world. I read the stories of the genocide with horror, but I didn’t become directly involved.

It seems that since those days, gross examples of human inhumanity towards other humans, systematized terror and genocide continue to occur on a fairly regular basis. I don’t think I can even name them all. There have been mass killings in Bosnia, Ivory Coast, Darfur, Democratic Republic of the Congo, North Korea, Rwanda, Somalia, Sri Lanka, and Sudan. In each case I have tried to become educated, though the details are horrifying and difficult to digest. I have contributed to humanitarian relief efforts, but I have remained detached and uninvolved.

I read the stories. I am shocked by the horrors. And I do not know what to do.

And the horrors continue. The details are not yet clear, but it does appear that the Syrian government has killed as many as a thousand or more rockets loaded with toxic agents blasted in to the suburbs of Damascus. The Syrian Government is denying the allegations, but the photographs and reports clearly indicate that something terrible has occurred and that there are many victims. Counts are not yet accurate, details are unknown, but there is no doubt that Syria already had created too many innocent victims and now the situation has grown worse.

I read the stories. I am shocked by the horrors. And I do not know what to do.

In Egypt the hope of democracy seems to have been dashed as the country slides back into a military republic. The Muslim Brotherhood is all but banned and its members are being slaughtered in the streets. There have been brutal reprisals by armed militants and churches have been bombed and burned to the ground. The violence seems to be escalating and the number of innocent victims continues to rise.

I read the stories. I am shocked by the horrors. And I do not know what to do.

These days I question my childhood fantasies about what I might have done had I been a living witness to African slaves in the United States or the out-of-control hatred of the Nazi holocaust against Jews. I like to imagine that I might have been a hero, willing to risk everything to save a life and help the struggle toward freedom. But I know that it is possible that I would have been a silent bystander, uncertain of what to do and unable to take the risk for the sake of others.

I fear that I am becoming calloused and insensitive to the suffering of others. There is so much death and grief in this world that I sometimes do not imagine how it could be different. I might rail in my conversation about failures of leadership and ineffective responses by world leaders, but I know that I do not have a solution for the problem. I wonder if I am even able to imagine a world where no innocents die, where grief is not the constant companion of so many widows, where children are fed and treasured and nurtured in every place, where conflicts are resolved with peaceful means. I fear that my passivity is part of the problem when it is so clerar that the world needs solutions.

I pray for peace with earnestness. I seek guidance from God. I do trust God to be the author of justice in the big picture and to bring peace in God’s way and in God’s time. But I also pray that I might never lose my shock and horror when I hear of genocide and murder of innocents. I pray that I might discover a path to meaningful action rather than silent passivity.

And I read carefully what I can and try to learn as much of the real facts as possible. At a bare minimum, the world needs those who witness and refuse to forget. I could be a witness.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

The parking lot at the church is filled with big machines. And the crews have been working hard. Yesterday they put in nearly 12 hours, milling asphalt, cleaning out cracks, filling, patching and repairing. Most things that we human beings make require maintenance from time to time. The time has come when we need to have some repairs made to our parking lot. They will be making the major repairs this week. Next week is sealing and striping and the work on the lot will be finished. By the standards of our small church, the cost is high. The benefit is that our church will be more attractive to visitors, more accessible to persons with disabilities and more useful for all of our members. We have the money in hand to pay for the work. We over subscribed phase one of our current capital funds plan, and now we are proceeding with the work that we envisioned as part of the project. Other phase one projects include repairs to the entry way including new energy-efficient glass front doors; new flooring paint and sound system for our fellowship hall; and a new sound system for our sanctuary. When we have completed these items, we head into phase two of our project that has major tasks like a new fireproof roof and heating, ventilation and air condition systems.

It is important work and it is not hard to convince me or other church members that we need to do the work. The fund raising was surprisingly easy. More difficult than raising the money are the decisions about how best to invest it. For example, the architect designed a flagstone entryway for our church. After 54 years of use, some of the stones are cracked. The surface is uneven because they have settled unevenly. The cracks are a hazard to those who use wheelchairs and walkers and to those who don’t see well. The proposal presented to the congregation was to replace the flagstone with stamped and colored concrete. It seemed simple. Then questions arose about slipperiness with the concrete. There were problems with the color we wanted. There were differing opinions about maintenance. The task force ended up reconsidering how best to do our entryway. They considered everything from having the original flagstone re-set to pavers of a different kind to concrete that was not colored to stamped and colored concrete. The decision is not yet made, but there are now advocates for different solutions. Since a single solution must be chosen, it is evident that not everyone is going to get his or her way. Since the project was pitched to the congregation with the stamped and colored concrete, a different choice runs the risk of having missed donors. It is complex and although I am confident we will see our way through the decision-making process, there is more involved than just raising money and spending it.

Because we like our building and want to preserve its look while upgrading systems to serve the next several decades, we have made inquiries into the original design and colors and somehow we were put in touch with the proponents of historic preservation in our community. While we do want to preserve our historic building, we didn’t set out to obtain grants from others and we are wary of the strings that may be attached to having our building designated as historic. Apparently once you are on the register of historic buildings there is no way to get off of it. That means that the decisions we make in this generation could have large impacts on the choices available to following generations.

And the bottom line to all of these decisions is that the heart and soul of a church is not in the building. Yes, we need a building to house our mission and ministry. Yes, we need to be responsible with the resources we have received from previous generations. But a church is so much more than a building. Focusing too much attention and energy on the building threatens to distract us from the work of serving others. Yes, spending over $100,000 on building improvements is important and the money needs to be invested wisely. But we do more than three times that amount each year in mission and ministry in our community. Our real task is listening and responding to the needs of our neighbors. Our business is providing meaningful worship that is connected to the call to service.

Again, life is never that simple. As much as I wish I could ignore the sound system and allow others with expertise and training to make all of those decisions, the bottom line is that we are in the business of communication and when people can’t hear, they can’t participate fully in worship. When the echoes in our fellowship hall literally drive some people out of the room, we are not serving all of our people. So I need to learn about the sound system and pay attention to it.

It is one of the balancing acts of ministry. My training is in planning and leading worship and in providing pastoral care. More and more my job is administering an institution: managing the complexities of building and employees and funds. The church has struggled with the tendency to become institutionalized from the early days. Jesus’ call to be disciples is a call to serve others. The institutions that grow out of that call to service can be a distraction. Throughout the history of the church there have been many times when we focused too much on hierarchies and chains of authority instead of simply walking with God’s people in need.

I certainly don’t have the answers. We live into the solutions by trying to be faithful in each of the decisions and each of the challenges. But as we move into the fall this year, I have resolved to pay attention to my time. I am not going to spend so much time in meetings that I neglect the simple, hands on service to others. I intend to be involved in workdays and firewood delivery and serving food at the mission. I am resolved to spend more time praying than fretting, more time studying scripture than meeting with vendors, more time in worship than in meetings.

As usual, it will be a challenging and inspiring year to serve as a pastor.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There has always been a bit of wanderlust in me. I love to travel and I can think of places that I would like to go and sights that I would like to see. The list of places to visit is longer than my ability to travel and I will never run out of interesting trips that I would like to take. Dreaming and planning is an important part of travel for me and I get great pleasure out of imagining trips that I may never take.

Being a wanderer, I can imagine the beauty of Alaska, or South Africa. I can imagine myself exploring India or Thailand or taking the train across Siberia. I’d love to go to New Zealand or American Samoa or Tahiti. A visit to Scandinavia would be wonderful just to look at the historic boats and visit with boat builders.

The problem with such a love of travel is that one can be complacent about the place where one is. And I have the good pleasure of living in a beautiful place. I don’t have to travel to see great beauty.

I have always lived in places that are rich in natural beauty. I grew up North of Yellowstone Park in Montana with the mountains always in sight and blue ribbon trout fishing right outside of my door. There was plenty of scenic beauty all around. Growing up in an aviation family, I was able to see many beautiful sights from the air. I took it for granted that I could look down on the falls of the Yellowstone or Mammoth Terrace or the Norris Hot Springs. Granite Peak at nearly 13,000 feet was in an area where we regularly flew and flying by the spectacular mountain was a regular occurrence. We played in a gorgeous fresh water river and backpacked at the edge of the wilderness.

I went to college at the base of the rimrocks in Billings. We had opportunities for climbing and exploring caves within walking distance of the campus. Billings is only 80 miles from my hometown and we had opportunities to visit the Beartooth and other mountains throughout my college experience. I belonged to a touring group that traveled all around Montana and Northern Wyoming and got to see places that were new to me.

Seminary was in Chicago, where all you have to do is head east to find the seemingly limitless expanse of Lake Michigan. You can count on dramatic sunrises over the lake whenever you go to the edge of the city. Our time in Illinois also gave us the opportunity to travel to and from Montana in all kinds of weather and to see the upper plains in all of their glory.

From Chicago, we moved to southwest North Dakota. I had lived in Montana long enough to have developed a bias about real mountains, alpine lakes and clear mountain streams. I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy the prairie on the edge of the badlands. But my biases were all based in ignorance. North Dakota is beautiful and there is much to see. Spotting antelope alongside the Grand River is a treat not to be missed. Exploring Theodore Roosevelt National Park is a treat for anyone who is interested in natural beauty.

Next we spent a decade in Idaho at the base of the Boise range. We were right between the desert and the mountains with quick and easy access to both. I used to brag that I could ski and mow my lawn on the same day and often did so. Idaho has a great deal of wilderness and although access can be challenging, there are good ways to get away from people and into the midst of incredible scenic beauty with a little effort. We camped and skied and swam in the hot springs and fished the clear waters in the time that we lived there.

And now I live in the Black Hills with a daily visit from wild turkeys and deer fawns playing in my back yard. Our home is on a hill with great views to the north and east – a perfect place for catching the sunrise. We live just minutes from a gorgeous lake. Every once in a while I have to remind myself that people from all around the country scrimp and save so they can afford to visit the hills for a vacation. I get to live here all the time. When the plains are sweltering on a hot, dry, windy August day, we sleep in the natural cool with a breeze blowing in our windows. Whenever I want, I can take a canoe and head out on a lake to check out the ducks and geese and herons and eagles and perhaps even a visit from a beaver. With the exception of bears, almost all of the wild animals of my growing up live within a very short distance from my home: deer, elk, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, mountain lions, bobcats, antelope.

I still have a deep love of traveling. I still plan trips to exotic places in my mind. I still love maps and can spend hours staring at “Google Earth” on my computer. And I believe that there are a few more grand excursions in store for us before we reach the end of this life’s journey. But I hope that I never lose the ability to open my eyes to see the things that are close by. A visit to Sylvan Lake and a walk to the top of Mt. Harney can be accomplished in half a day. Bear Butte is there for the climbing. The game loop of Custer State Park is always worth a drive and the wild donkeys are entertaining and interesting. Wind Cave and Jewell Cave are worthy of much more exploration. Mt. Rushmore and Crazy Horse can provide inspiration. Sheridan, Angostora, Deerfield and Pactola are just the larger reservoirs. There are plenty of small ones to explore as well. The badlands are a short drive away. There is much to see.

The glory of God surrounds us. Sometimes all we need to do is to remember to open our eyes.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

We know from the biblical narrative that our people have struggled with the concept of Sabbath from the very beginning. The idea seems so simple: Take one day each week for rest, restoration and appreciating all that God has done. God did it in the beginning with the Creation. Who are you to think that you can work harder than God? Who are you to think that you don’t need a day of rest?

By the time I came along, we had mixed Sabbath theology with something that we call the “protestant work ethic.” Somehow our people had deeply ingrained in us that to find meaning in life one needs to work hard. Hard work equals success was the formula that I was taught. And it was demonstrated in the lives of the relatively successful people that surrounded me.

Such a notion came late to this world. It is accurate to make a connection with Protestantism, if for no other reason than the simple fact that the idea that there could be some sort of social mobility arose around the same time as Protestantism. Ideas of democracy, upward mobility and many other similar concepts find their roots in the time of the invention of the printing press. Before books became affordable and there was a level of literacy, such lofty ideas weren’t accessible to most people. If you were born poor, you would die poor. If you were born rich, you would die rich. There was no thought that you could change your circumstances.

As the notion of social mobility arose, there was a kind of competitive nature that arose with it. Ideas of equality and common good were slower to develop.

In my time, the Protestant work ethic has risen to a kind of social competition. People seem to think that if you are poor it is because you didn’t work hard enough. If you didn’t “get ahead” it was your own fault. Although this is incomplete thinking, it took deep roots in my psyche. I have lived much of my life as if I could solve problems by working harder, putting in longer days and taking less time off. Rationally, there is a flaw in this kind of thinking. I know that working longer can mean working less efficiently and accomplishing less. I know that success comes from a variety of factors of which hard work is just one. But emotionally, I almost always respond to a problem by trying to out work my colleagues. When I lead a camp, I am first to rise in the morning and last to go to bed. At the office, I am often first to arrive in the morning and last to leave in the evening.

But much has changed in my lifetime. When I was a child, Sabbath was a social norm. In our town, it was expected that businesses would not be open on Sundays. Merchants were supposed to take the day off. Most of us went to church every week. My dad would occasionally go back to the shop and do a little work on a Sunday afternoon, but usually that was incorporated with some family activity and we went with him.

The world isn’t that way any more. We live in a 24/7 world where stores never close and there are people working at every hour of every day. Although schools and government offices take the weekend off for the most part, many minimum wage workers have multiple jobs and rarely have a day off unless they are sick.

Being a minister, the concept of a weekend has never taken a firm place in my way of living. I once joked with a search committee that was raising the question of why I expected four weeks of vacation after only a year of service, that I didn’t think many of them would trade all of the weekends of the year for two weeks of vacation. I usually take a day off each week, but am less disciplined about it than the scriptures suggest.

This summer, we got the idea of taking some “weekends.” The plan was that we would take Mondays and Tuesdays off each week. With an associate pastor, the duties at the church could be covered and we could take our camper on some adventures in the nearby hills. The idea seemed like a good one at the time, but I have found that I rarely am able to take Tuesdays off. We have some Tuesday meetings, I have a list of things that need to be done and there is no real way that another person can do my job. I have convinced myself that I am indispensable. There seems to be a real theological problem with that way of thinking, but I catch myself at it from time to time.

So it is August and we have yet to take a “weekend” camping trip. We have decided to give it a try. Yesterday after church and after a lunch meeting of the young adults group of our church we went home, hitched up our camper and came out to Sheridan Lake. It is only 12 miles from home and I come her several days a week to paddle for exercise. We will be heading back home in the early afternoon and our entire trip will have taken less than 24 hours. But we have had a lovely supper outside, paddled on the lake at sunset and I was paddling again at sunrise this morning. We have gotten away from cell phones and the Internet. And we are taking a break. Next week, we’re taking the concept a bit farther with a two-night reservation in Custer State Park. We hope to actually take Tuesday off from work. It is the last week before labor day, but we finally have arranged for a weekend.

It may take some practice and a bit of thinking before we go so far as to take a three day weekend. Sometimes we do so at Thanksgiving, but a lot of people take a four day holiday for that celebration.

For now we are resting in a very beautiful place and enjoying a break. The commandment about the Sabbath is a good one. I should take it more seriously.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you might be concerned if I don’t post first thing on Monday morning, August 19. Never fear! We are taking a simple, overnight camping trip to an area in the hills where there are no services, thus no Internet. I don’t think that the cell phone coverage in that area is good enough to post the blog over the phone, either. So I will write the blog as usual tomorrow morning, but may not publish it until afternoon or perhaps even early evening tomorrow. Things will return to their usual on Tuesday. Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

p.s.: No need to send out the rescue squad. Our children know where we are.

I was sharing a conversation recently with a church member about how some people “fall through the cracks.” In a church, like any other institution, there are some people who become involved and are at the center of activities. Other church members get to know them and sustaining relationships are formed. In many cases these relationships extend beyond church activities and people meet each other quite naturally in community and social situations.

But there are some individuals who find it more difficult to form friendships. They often come to church and participate in the programs without getting to know other members. They are often not well known among the members of the church. I am frequently surprised by the simple fact that members of our church don’t know the names of other members.

I suppose that all of these differences are quite normal and natural. Different people come to the church with different needs and they have different experiences based on their levels of commitment, needs, and circumstances. The problem comes when life situations change. A rather simple disability can result in a person no longer being able to drive a car. One of our members, who cannot drive, rarely misses anything that happens at the church. He maintains his independence mostly by using a van service that is offered through his residence. But he also has a network of friends at the church who are willing to give him rides to and from church events. He also finds ways to get out to concerts, sporting events and other community activities. In stark contrast, we have some members who once they stop driving suddenly disappear from church activities. Even when rides are offered, they are sometimes not accepted. The person becomes isolated and withdrawn.

Rides are not the only commodities that are distributed unequally in our church community. Some people are overwhelmed with visitors when they have an illness or are cut off from the community. Others sit in loneliness with very few visitors.

We have tried a wide variety of different systems to maintain contact between our members. We have been formal, assigning specific individuals to make sure that members receive visits. We have been informal, making suggestions and trying to promote relationships. For several years, we had our members report their visits so that we could track them. Each time we come up with a new system, we are aware that there are flaws. The people who are best at visiting aren’t the best at keeping records. The folks who focus their attention on maintaining relationships sometimes don’t like to come to meetings.

And some people are particularly difficult to visit. Their life experiences have left them bitter and they express anger to those who visit. Or they lack relationship skills and don’t know how to sustain relationships. Some people experience personality changes that are caused by medical conditions. They just aren’t the same as they used to be.

And so we confess that as hard as we try we are imperfect at maintaining and sustaining relationships as our members go through various changes in their lives. Part of this reality is a lesson in humility for our church. We need to humbly admit that we make mistakes land that we could do a better job of being a church. Systems of visitation need to be reinvented over and over again. Ways of maintaining contact need to be reinvented in each generation. Relationships need to be nurtured one by one with sensitivity to the differences in situation and personality.

But this reality is also a lesson for individuals within the church. As I work with people, I have the opportunity to observe how a small shift in attitude can make a big difference. One member of the church frequently greets me with stories of how long it has been since the last visit and how lonely her life is. Another member with very similar circumstances always greets me with gratitude for my visit and a warm welcome. You can imagine that one is easier to visit than the other. Now we are not called into this life to seek the easiest path and both are deserving of time and attention. I try to be fair, but I note that one of the members gets more visits from friends and family. So does the bitterness come from a lack of visits, or does the bitterness contribute to the lack of visits? I suspect that it is a bit of both.

It does seem to be important to practice relationship skills over and over again. Being gracious, learning to forgive, listening carefully, maintaining an active interest in the lives and activities of others – all of these things are skills that potentially will yield great meaning when life circumstances change and illness or disability forces a withdrawal from the community.

I have also noticed that some people are simply more comfortable with being by themselves than others. I come from a long line of “loners” who have been very comfortable with solitude. We seem to always have some kind of project or thought that leaves us comfortable with being by ourselves. On the other hand, my life and vocation don’t give me much time alone. I find myself seeking moments of being by myself. As a result, I can be a bit judgmental of others who become lonely quickly. It seems to me that they could connect with others in a lot of different ways. Read a book. Say a prayer. Look through a photo album. Listen for the voice of God. These are all ways to move from loneliness to relationship.

We humans are complex beings and changes in our circumstances produce different results in different individuals. The result is that a church needs to continue to work at honing its skills of reaching out and providing care for all of our members, those who are easy to visit and those who present a challenge. It is work that is never fully accomplished and to which every member of the church is called in some way.

We live our faith best when we continue to listen to that call very carefully.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

The Central States Fair kicked off yesterday. You’ve been able to see the preparations for a couple of weeks as the campground filled up, the vendors started to set up their booths and there was a lot of extra activities around the main gate and the arena. Now the fair is in full swing. The Carnival Americana has all of the rides set up and the bright lights and sounds fill the area. The grandstands fill up for the bands and other entertainers. The fair features a big barbecue festival, horse and livestock events, auctions, rodeos, a demolition derby and a lot more. It is a big deal.

I used to attend the fair every year. I grew up in Montana, which like South Dakota, had two big regional fairs. The official State Fair was held in Great Falls, but the Yellowstone Exhibition in Billings was often bigger and drew larger crowds. It was 80 miles to Billings for that fair, but we almost always got in at least one day at the fair. And, once I became a teen, I worked at my uncle and cousin’s farm and so was in the Great Falls area at State Fair time.

I still like to wander among the livestock and look at the show animals. The judging areas for food and gardening and art are worth a visit. But I’m not as big on riding all of the carnival rides as was once the case. And I no longer feel that I have to be in the audience for Chis Cagle, Joe Diffie, Diamond Rio, Smashmouth and Finger Eleven, Justin Moore and Little Texas. I’d enjoy walking through the antique tractor and motor display, but I probably should steer away from the upside down cake showdown, the funnel cake and some of the other food booths.

One of the unique features of the Central States Fair is the German Tent and Sommerfest. There’ll be plenty of beer as the polka bands fire up for dancing and just plain socializing. The German Tent is a really big tent, about a half block long, and it fills to brimming on weekends.

I don’t have the excitement about the fair that I once had, but I expect that there are plenty of people who are glad to be a part of the events and there are plenty of teens who have passes to ride all of the rides at the carnival.

Unlike the fairs of my youth, the Central States Fair goes on for ten days. A full week plus two weekends of activities will keep the crowds coming.

One of the things about living in the place that is a vacation destination for so many people is that we sometimes fail to realize how good we have it every day. There are plenty of people who saved all year for two weeks in the hills. I put my canoe into a Black Hills reservoir three or four times a week most weeks. My contact with the beauty of the hills isn’t confined to vacation. A similar thing occurs with the events in town. There is good entertainment every week in Rapid City. We can hear live music in Main Street Square every Thursday all summer long. There is the emerging artists’ series at the Dahl. Concerts and events fill the Civic Center. Live drama and plays are often available. There are all kinds of things to do in our town that folks from other places drive in to see. We, who live here, take those things for granted.

Perhaps it is a sign of age, or perhaps it has always been part of my personality, but I don’t find myself attracted to crowds. If everyone is headed in one direction, I find myself heading in the other direction. I didn’t go to Sturgis at all during the Rally. I might not make it to the fairgrounds at all during the fair. I’m not sure yet. There is plenty to attract me, but there is plenty to attract me in other places as well. I’m sure that I’ll be paddling at the lake some of the mornings during the fair, but I don’t know yet whether I’ll brave the crowds and check out the sites of the fair this year.

The Average German Band will draw a crowd whether or not I head down to the fairgrounds.

Still, I enjoy living in a place with such diverse opportunities for entertainment, activities and getting together with our neighbors.



There are a few other creatures that won’t be attending the fair this year. I’ve been watching the same young beaver for weeks at the lake. He doesn’t like people and he’ll slap his tail and head underwater if I approach too closely. The great blue herons at the lake are also solitary critters. They keep a wary eye on me and will fly away if I approach too closely. I’ve learned to keep my distance if I want to observe these beautiful animals. The carefully groomed heifers and steers at the fair don’t have anything on the creatures in the wild. They are all beautiful and worth taking time to observe. Sometimes I think that the critters at the fair are a little embarrassed to be so shampooed and gussied up. Perhaps they are just waiting for it to be all over. Most of them haven’t been told what awaits them after the auction.

The bottom line is that there is something for everyone in the hills this weekend. If you like crowds, there will be crowds. If you like solitude, there is solitude to be found. If you want to ride the wild rides and dance a jig those possibilities await. If you want to hike a trail or paddle a canoe, you can do so.

We truly are fortunate to live in such a wonderful place. Our out of town guests know how lucky we are, but we sometimes don’t take time to notice.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

In 1890, at the age of 24, Rudyard Kipling had traveled extensively. He has spent 7 years in India and then traveled the long way around the globe back to Britain, going from India to Japan, from Japan to San Francisco, crossing the North American continent and sailing back to England. He seemed to be nostalgic for the people and places of the east when he wrote his famous poem, “Mandalay.” Mandalay was the capital of Burma when it was a British protectorate. The city, its buildings and people may have become a bit exaggerated in Kipling’s memory, but his poem describes it all as a most attractive and alluring place. I have never been to Burma, but one line from the poem comes to my mind in places far from Kipling’s experience: “And the dawn comes up like thunder.”



I do like the sunrise. It is, perhaps, my favorite time of day.

Living in a scientific era, I know the basic reasons why the sky is so beautiful as the planet rotates to bring the sun into view from wherever I happen to be. At sunrise and sunset, the sun’s light travels tangentially to the earth’s surface from the perspective of a person on the surface of our planet. Because of the low level of the sun, its rays travel long distances through the lower and most dirty layers of the atmosphere. As the light travels through this atmosphere closest to the surface of the earth the dust particles filter out much of the blue light. What we see are the remaining colors of the visible spectrum: red and orange and yellow and pink. The actual colors of the sky give some information as to how much dust and smoke are in the air. When it is smoky or dusty, the sun is bright red. When the air is a bit clearer, there might even be a bit of purple in the sunrise.

Add a few clouds to reflect the colors and the glow is enhanced. A sunrise can inspire with breathtaking beauty.

I like to be outside in the predawn time, when the sky is still dark and at least some of the brighter heavenly bodies can be seen. Outside of the sun and the moon, Venus is the brightest light in the night sky. Brightness in heavenly bodies from our perspective is a factor of how far the light has to travel. The closer the object, the less distance the light travels and therefore the brighter it appears. I don’t own a telescope, so I gauge things by how they look to my eye. On a clear night, I might be able to find Sirius and Rigel. There are several bright stars in Orion. The middle star of Orion’s sword is not a single star, but a cluster of four stars, but to the unaided eye it appears to be nearly as bright as Rigel and Sirius. Betelgeuse is one of the stars of Orion’s shoulder and although I am not exactly sure that I can identify it most of the time, I look for it because it has such a fun name.

If you are out and about before sunrise, the light comes slowly. At first it just seems like it is harder to see the stars. Then there is a bit of a glow that appears to the east. In the hills the glow allows for the outline of the hills to become visible as shadows a long time before the sun makes its appearance. There is plenty of time for anticipation and if you are moving about the actual first appearance of the sun seems sudden and surprising. Wow! There it is. It seems warmer even before the temperature begins to rise.

The best place to observe a sunrise, in my opinion is on the surface of the water. On a lake everything is doubled. The reflection means that there is a double set of hills with two glowing horizons and when the sun makes its glorious appearance, I can row or paddle my small boat right into the middle of it all. It is like floating in the midst of the sunrise. When the sun makes its first appearance, there is just a yellow strip on the horizon and then suddenly an orange ball that glows in the sky and shimmers on the water. If there is a bit of a breeze, and the surface of the water has a bit of texture, the sun sparkles on the water like a thousand 4th of July sparklers.

It doesn’t last long. The sparkles disappear. The orange becomes yellow and suddenly it is daytime. But in a boat on a lake in the hills, I can prolong the sunrise. By moving around the lake in and out of the shadows of the hills, I can watch the sunrise multiple times. I can paddle into the middle of the reflection on the lake and then follow it by paddling toward the hills. When I am greedy for the beauty, I can watch the same sunrise over and over by chasing the shade of the hills with my little boat.

It is not difficult to see why the ancients thought that the sun was a god. It would not be difficult to develop rituals around the sunrise. I suppose that an observer watching me paddle at sunrise might think that I worship the sun. But I live in a time when we know much more about what gives color to the sky and how our planet moves in the vastness of a universe of unimaginable proportions. God is much bigger than the warm glow in the midst of the hills. God is much bigger than the experience of a paddler in a small canoe.

But if watching the sunrise in South Dakota can bring to mind Kipling’s 19th century longing for Burma, it is not difficult to imagine that the experience of sunrise has been shared by all of the generations of people throughout all of history. It is not difficult to imagine that generations yet unborn will also experience the same glory. There are connections that link us to others even when we feel alone.

It is a beauty of which I will never tire.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There was a sign in the churchyard yesterday that was most definitely appropriate. The “Workers Ahead” sign was erected by the crews of a tree trimming service who were working on the utility right of way on the north slope of the church’s property to trim trees away from power lines that run through that easement.

But the sign was an equally valid description of what was going on inside of the church. There were definitely workers ahead and all around in the church. Tomorrow is the first day of a rummage sale. Twice each year, once in the spring and once in the summer, our congregation has a gigantic rummage sale. The sales, begun by the women’s fellowship to raise funds for the mission of the group, were already fairly big events when I came to be pastor of the church 18 years ago. And they have continued to grow. For this sale, there is merchandise outdoors on the lawn and the porte cochere, in the entryway and narthex, crammed into the fellowship hall, in a classroom in the west wing and in the fireside room in at the end of the north hallway.

It takes days of hauling, sorting, organizing and pricing to prepare for the sale. The volunteers at the church are very good about working around the other mission and ministries of the church. Life goes on in the midst of preparations for the sale. Yesterday we had our office open, met with a couple planning a wedding, had meetings of groups in the church, planned a leadership retreat and engaged in the normal business of the church. The rummage sale workers began set up after worship on Sunday and the building will be returned to normal and ready for worship next Sunday. The amount of labor required is immense.

Of course, like other jobs in the church, it is fun work. The people enjoy being together, there is plenty of good food, conversation is lively and there are plenty of jokes and laughter as the work proceeds.

We are amazed at the amount of rummage that is donated. We are amazed at the numbers of customers who show up at the sale. With each sale, we wonder whether or not the next sale will have to be smaller simply because we will have run out of rummage, or customers, or workers to set up and staff the sale. And each year the sales continue to grow. Each time we hear the words, “our biggest ever!” and then that record falls with another successful sale.

The funds raised are invested predominantly in mission and outreach. The women’s fellowship does make an annual contribution to the operating budget of the church, but the majority of its budget goes to groups and agencies providing direct service to people in need. The sale itself provides a service to the community by making quality merchandise and clothing available at very low prices. As they retire and downsize, there are members of our congregation who donate many quality items. Much of the merchandise is very serviceable. There are always a few large items. This year, there is a snow blower, a rototiller, a patio furniture set, plenty of other furniture, and many new or like new household items. Persons living with modest incomes can find some real bargains at the sale.

Rummage sale time is always a bit hectic for those of us who work in the building. There is a lot of coming and going, frequent distractions, interruptions with questions and concerns, and opportunities to visit with the people who are volunteering their time. For the most part, it is a lot of fun. We enjoy working in the church and we like to see others enjoy church work as well. We like the people of the church and having them around. We probably are a bit less productive during the week because we have to take a look at all of the things on the sale and want to stop and visit with the people. But all of that is part of the real business of the church. The work of the church isn’t confined to offices and computer screens. It consists primarily of what our people do to serve others. And a lot of that service is just plain hard work, lifting and carrying, sorting and arranging – doing what it requires to get the job done.

Yes, there are workers ahead. There would be no church without the dedication and service of the volunteers who are so generous with their time and labor. And quite frankly, it is an honor to be allowed to work alongside such dedicated people.

During my training to become a minister, I worked in a large multiple-staff church. One of the amazing things that happened each week in that particular congregation was the staff meeting. There were a dozen people who worked full-time in the church and another four or five part-time employees. We would gather once a week. The meeting would begin with a prayer and then the senior minister would line out the work that others needed to attend to. When he finished, he’d leave the room and those of us who remained sorted out how to accomplish the tasks he had lined out. I vowed never to be that kind of a leader. If a job is worth doing, I was going to be willing to get in there and do the work. I don’t want to ever become someone who is above any of the jobs of the church. That attitude is a good fit for a congregational church where the members are in charge and the work is shared in a non-hierarchical arrangement.

When the sale is ended on Saturday and the excess items need to be boxed for donation to other organizations and the tables have to be taken down and the furniture arranged for Sunday, I plan to be there, lifting, carrying, cleaning and helping.

There is no better place for a pastor than in the midst of the people of the church. When people see the sign “Workers Ahead,” I hope that I can be among the workers.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

The image of the idyllic family farm where the labor is all provided by immediate family members, the amount of land is relatively small, and the family struggles against odds to survive is not quite an accurate picture of the family farms I know. To make it in the world of farming and ranching in Western South Dakota you have to be a good at business, not adverse to handling large amounts of money, astute in the appropriate use of technology, and willing to work very long hours for tight wages. It is a tough market, but some families are making it through a combination of educated knowledge of production techniques and markets and a close relationship with a banker. Most of the family farms and ranches with which I am familiar are significantly larger and require a much larger cash flow than was the case a few decades ago. In our neck of the woods the average age of a rancher is quite high in part because the cost of land is so high that young people simply can’t find the financial backing to get started in the business.

Many of the ranchers I know have embraced technology and modern methods in order to survive in a very competitive business. The days of simply turning the bull into a field of heifers in late spring or early summer are mostly gone on many ranches. The use of artificial insemination insures a greater rate of conception and therefore higher production. There is nothing new about AI. Ranchers have been doing that for decades. More recently have been the use of timed AI. Instead of using various methods to determine when the cow is ready for insemination, a series of hormone injections is used to synchronize the estrus and allow the animals to be managed in groups instead of individually. This is a different use of hormones than the controversial use of growth-producing hormones that is employed by some beef producers and shunned by advocates of natural foods. There is no need to go into details, but most of the beef producers that I know employ some form of AI, but also keep bulls on the ranch. After the AI procedure is completed, they turn the bull in with the cows to allow the natural process to take place and afford a higher rate of successful insemination.

That is probably more detail than you wanted to read this morning, and further detail isn’t necessary to my story. When I go to the lake to paddle, the road passes through an area of open pasture. Often the cattle are back up the draws and away from the road, but for most of the past week, they’ve been down near the road. So far as I know they escaped collision with motorcycles during the rally. It is a caution for drivers, especially at night. An Angus cow can be hard to spot on a dark night. These cattle have at least one Charolais Bull in with them. These top bulls don’t come cheap. The best of the bread has been known to sell for upwards of $12,000. That means that a collision between a bull and a car rivals the price of a collision between two cars in terms of property damage and insurance claims. I drive carefully whether or not the cattle are in sight. I’d like to leave the bull safely behind each trip I make.

Ranchers enjoy the natural cycles of the year and the processes of their animals. Even though the market and economics dictate the use of modern technologies, most of the ranchers I know prefer the natural ways of producing food for humans to eat.

So I am having trouble envisioning a world where the human population grows so big that we are forced to eat meat that is produced in the laboratory. Recently, a $330,000 genetically engineered hamburger was cooked and eaten in London. The synthetic burger was made up of thousands of strips of artificial muscle and fat grown from stem cells. It was cooked and eaten at a press conference in London. The burger was died with beet juice to give it a more beef-like color and flavored with breadcrumbs, caramel and saffron. One report stated that Google co-founder Sergey Brin financed the effort. $330,000 for a hamburger might not be out of his financial means, but it is a high price for an alternative to traditional meat. Like most technological innovations it is expected that the price will go down once mass production is instituted.

The potential impact on agriculture is huge. About 70% of agriculture worldwide is in the production of meat for human consumption. Ranchers, who have embraced many modern technologies, are not going to embrace a way of life that is devoid of open spaces, live animals, and working outdoors. The people who earn their living in laboratories are significantly different than those who work outdoors in all kinds of weather.

I’m reserving my judgment for now. I’m not enthusiastic about laboratory-grown meat. We purchase most of our meat from local producers. I like knowing the folks who grow my food. I like seeing the bull on my drive to the lake and watching the calves in the spring. I like living in ranch country and getting to know the good people who care about and care for the land.

On the other hand, I know that there are too many hungry people in the world and that we need to be willing to invest in new ways of thinking to produce enough food for all of those people. For now the problem seems to be more distribution than production. We can produce enough food, but we aren’t getting it to the people who need it. When we can grow corn to fuel our cars while people are starving for lack of food, there is some problem in the system.

For now, I’m grateful that the bull isn’t out of a job yet.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Yesterday was our day off, so we filled it with the kind of activities that others do when they have a day away from the office. I went to the lake and paddled in the wee hours of the morning and then came home and organized items to take to the church rummage sale. I stopped by the blood bank and donated platelets and plasma and made it home in time for lunch with Susan. There were plenty of household chores and a trip to the hardware store to fill the afternoon. In the evening, we went out to supper.

There are a lot of different places to choose from when going out to supper in downtown Rapid City. Tally’s Restaurant is a local icon and serves up good fare. There are hotel restaurants like Paddy O’neill’s in the Alex Johnson or the Enigma in the Adoba Hotel. Firehouse Brewing is a local favorite. Susan and I like Curry Masala and their downtown restaurant is usually a good place for a quiet conversation. Botticelli is definitely the place to go for Italian and Murphy’s is the place for pub food. There are several spots in Main Street Square including the new Que Pasa, Dakota Thyme and the Chicago Hot Dog place.

However, we chose the barbecue at Trinity Lutheran Church. Our friend and colleague Wilbur Holtz is the pastor at Trinity and we have been partnering with Trinity this summer in hosting barbecues to invite in the neighbors. Trinity is located in the heart of downtown Rapid City just across from the courthouse complex and among their neighbors are dozens of homeless people who are often in need of a nutritious meal. The barbecues provide an opportunity for the people of the church to mix with the people they serve through their regular Samaritan’s Food Pantry. This summer, our church has provided pasta salad to go with the burgers and fruit and cookies provided by the people of Trinity Church. We make up a few big bowls of salad and enjoy the opportunity to get to know the folks at Trinity and their neighbors a bit better.

Good food, good folks – that’s not a bad way to spend part of an evening.



As is often the case with such events, things didn’t exactly go as planned. When we arrived Pastor Will and another member of the church were staffing the grills, but the cooking wasn’t going well. They were out of propane to keep the grills going. So we made a quick trip up to our church to get propane. When we returned, things heated up quickly. In fact the usual flare up of a gas grill cooking burgers turned into quite a conflagration in one of the grills as the old grease in the grill provided fuel for a real grease fire. No one panicked, the propane was turned off and the fire was allowed to burn itself out before continuing. A little excitement is OK as long as no one gets hurt. Pastor Will may have singed a few of the hairs on his arm, but he emerged with a smile on his face. A few burgers were burnt into inedible chunks of black ash, but the grease had burned off of the grill and it soon was able to be used to cook the rest of the supper.

All of that was happening behind the scenes. There was plenty of other entertainment as Kansas City Street in front of the church is excavated about two feet below grade and the construction equipment operators were shutting down for the evening as the crew at Trinity started to serve food. Folks spread out on the steps and lawn in front of the church. The clouds threatened rain, but no rain materialized and it was a pleasant evening.

Summer is passing quickly. The list of things we were going to do is as big as it was in June. We haven’t taken time for all of the backyard barbecues that we intended. We haven’t had friends over as much as we had planned. We haven’t gone for short, one-night camping trips yet.

Of course summer is an elusive season in the hills. Most years, September is more summer-like than June when it comes to weather. This year we’ve been so lucky in the rain department that the hills are still lush and green and inviting as the middle of August is upon us.

But there is work to be done. The church rummage sale is a huge undertaking with the need for lots and lots of volunteers. The church leaders’ retreat is just over a week away and there is a lot of business for the Church Board to consider. It will take preparation and organization to have things ready for them to consider in an efficient manner. August is the season of preparation for the ramping up of fall programs. Plans need to be put in order. Volunteers need to be recruited and trained. And in the midst of all of that, our congregation is searching for a new choir director. It is a process that is increasingly complex and difficult as the years go by. The committee is wishing that they had a field of candidates to interview and from which to choose, but it just isn’t working out that way this time around. I am confident that God will provide the leadership that the church needs, but it is a bit difficult to see how we are going to have our fall music programs in place in time to have everything working on schedule.

So the gift of a quiet meal with friends and neighbors was a pleasant gift. There will be time to get the work done if we also take time to be with people, to listen, and to observe the work that God is doing in our community. No one left Trinity Church hungry last night. That in itself is a blessing. There are more blessings to come if we are willing to walk at God’s pace instead of our own.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Recently I listened to the podcast of Krista Tippett’s interview of geologist David Montgomery. The show contained quite a bit of conversation about the relationship between biblical stories and scientific discoveries. A few years ago David Montgomery set out to investigate the relationship between the biblical story of Noah and the flood and the geological evidence of flooding in the ancient Near East. The conversation in the podcast, however, was less about geology and more about the relationship between science and religion. We live in a time that tends to polarize and set things at odds. We’ve all heard the silliness of some fundamentalist and Christopher Hitchens yelling at each other. Such so-called debates serve very little that is useful. Instead they are simply an invitation to choose sides. Far more interesting are nuanced conversations that reveal how theology and other sciences inform each other and share a common quest for truth. The Tippett/Montgomery interview was once such nuanced conversation.

Flood stories are common in many different cultures around the world. We have heard first hand the flood stories of Cree and Ojibwa in Canada, of the Anangu in Australia, and the stories of our own tradition. The biblical story of Noah arose in the context of other flood stories, some even more ancient than our own. Flooding is, after all, a reality of geology and large floods create memorable events for the survivors. Talk to anyone who was in New Orleans when the levees failed as Hurricane Katrina swept down upon the city and you will hear stories of lives that were changed. We, here in Rapid City, don’t have to go that far. Those who were in our city on the night of June 9, 1972 and those who witnessed the aftermath of that flood have stories that are unforgettable.

One of the conversations that some students of the bible have with geologists and others is about the size and the scale of the flood. The notion that the flood of Noah was somehow larger and more dramatic than any other flood comes from the way that we have received the stories from generations of faithful people who have gone before us. The conversation about whether the flood was literally the whole world or just the known world from the perspective of those who survived is a modern conversation, however. For millennia, our people didn’t make the distinction. The flood affected the world as it was known to our people. They didn’t know or care about whether it was also flooding at the tip of South America or in the middle of South Dakota at the same time. Such distinctions and conversations arose much later in the story of our people.

What we do know from the stories of our ancestors is that the flood was huge and that it affected all of life as it was then known. And we also know that people and animals survived. The story is, at its core, a salvation story. Noah and his family survive and go on to repopulate the world. And the animals survive as well. From the perspective of our people, there is no question about the reason for survival. Faithfulness is the key element. Even when things go wrong, even when devastation comes with the rain, even when the night is dark and the way to get through it is not clear, God does not give up on the people. God does not stop loving. And God will provide the way to the future.

There is another theme in the story of Noah that has been important throughout the many generations of our people. We bear responsibility to be partners with God in this story of salvation. Noah has a unique role in providing for all of the animals, from the smallest to the largest. His faithfulness to God involves direct action not just to save his family, but to save the animals as well.

The problem with too many of the discussions of these stories, however, is that we have a tendency to simplify. For some the story is merely a story of history. It tells what happened way back when. For others it is a story of identity. We are the descendants of the survivors and who we are was shaped by the events that occurred long ago. For others it is a story of God and God’s power to save.

But Biblical stories are always more. They are not just stories about what has happened. They are stories that have been treasured and kept by our people precisely because of their importance to the living of our lives in this generation and their importance to future generations. They are stories about how to live.

We, who are living in the epoch of the greatest number of human-caused extinctions of all time need to think about God’s call to Noah to be a partner in the salvation of the animals. And for us, the call to our fathers and mothers is also a call to us. We inherit not just the traditions and stories, but also the relationship with God. We are more than descendants of Noah. We are called to participate in the work that he began.

Each time we read or tell one of the stories of our Bible, we encounter that story in a fresh manner. It becomes a part of us at a different level. To float upon the surface of the stories, to think that they have only their face value is to ignore the depth that generations of our people have discovered in these stories. They are complex combinations of meaning and tradition and hope and dream. To say that you know what a story means is to admit that you haven’t yet explored all that it has to teach.

Whether it be the flood, or the adventures of Abraham and Sara or Moses leading our people from slavery to freedom, these are stories about God. To encounter the stories and plumb them for their deepest meanings is an invitation that will continue to be offered to future generations. “God has yet more truth and light to break forth from the Holy Word.”

That’s why, in our church, we are quick to say, “God is still speaking.”

And we are still listening.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I don’t intend for this blog to be a confessional, but I have been aware of some of my failings lately. Yesterday I wrote about my tendency to start more projects than I can finish, my tendency to keep too many things and my lack of housekeeping skills. After working on our church’s firewood project in the afternoon, I was doing some weeding in the garden and was asking myself why I let things like that get ahead of me. If I had kept up with the weeding, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal to sort out the weeds from the plants I want to keep. Having to compete with the weeds isn’t good for my garden plants and a short time once a week would make a big difference. After all I find time to do other things, like paddle my canoes and read books.

Even though I have some disorganized parts of my life, it is not that I am a totally disorganized person. I can be well organized in areas that are important to me. I do a lot of advance planning for worship and coordinate a relatively complex worship team each week. I choose hymns weeks and even months in advance and although there is always a need for flexibility in worship, our services are well planned and the work is organized. I can bee organized when it is important.

Then, the answer came to me as I was sitting in my garden pulling weeds. It wasn’t a flash of revelation from God, though I am sure that God does speak to some people as they work in their gardens. It was the sound my phone makes when I receive a text message. The message was a simple request, a part of a conversation that I had been having with the individual earlier. I responded. That prompted another text or two and soon I was contemplating a minor change for today’s worship service. I was still sitting in my garden with muddy feet and dirty hands, but my mind was focusing on they dynamics of keeping a worship service flowing without having the entire service run over and take too much time.

The answer is not that I am inherently a disorganized person. It is that I have priorities. The truth is that in my life worship is more important than my garden. The people in my church are more important than having a clean garage. Engaging in hands on mission and serving those in need is more important than finishing the projects that I have started. That is just the way that things are.

It is an important lesson to consider when I look at others. I can be a bit judgmental when I don’t understand someone else. I notice when people don’t attend church and when they don’t have any time for volunteer activities. What I fail to do is to ask myself about what else is going on in their lives. We all have priorities and others arrange their lives in different patterns than I. Since I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is the same, I have to learn to accept and understand that others have different priorities. After all, someone who doesn’t volunteer much in the church may be volunteering a lot in some other organization. A person whose church attendance is rather spotty may be working two jobs to keep a family fed and provide a home.

It doesn’t take too much time visiting the home of our son and daughter in law to know that having small children in the home quickly rearranges your priorities. By comparison, Susan and I have a lot more time for our personal projects. When you have a young child the needs of that child must be placed above other projects and demands. As we have traveled this life journey, there have been many different phases to our lives. When we first married, we were both full-time students. Completing our educations had to be our highest priority. It couldn’t be our only priority. I still had to work to make ends meet, but I was willing to do all sorts of different pick up jobs such as being a janitor, working in a commercial bakery, working in a library and refinishing furniture because they were a means to an end that was important. After school, we were establishing our careers and then children came into our lives. We became homeowners for the first time about a dozen years after we were married. That created a new set of priorities. The years passed and our children were thinking of their own college careers and sorting out their relationships with others. They weren’t launched all at once. There were some brief returns to live at home while they sorted out their lives. Then we focused our attention on providing care for our parents in their aging years.

Now we are real empty nesters and we find ourselves with a really big nest. The things that we are sorting and dealing with are not all of our own making. Our children have a few things stored in our home. We have an excess of furniture and boxes of family items that need to be sorted because our parents didn’t complete the task of sorting in their lives. One room in our house is filled with items that came from our parents’ homes and need to be carefully sorted. We laugh as we try to identify the strangers in an old photograph and when we can’t we still don’t know whether the photo should be kept. Perhaps it is really valuable to another member of the family. But who?

Some priorities are carefully and methodically established. Others come into our lives by chance. Just living means deciding what is most important at any given moment. More often than not, we “muddle” through life’s busiest times and simply respond to the most urgent crisis. Having made it to the edge of the years some might call “senior” is an opportunity to look back and forward and to re-align priorities. I probably won’t have the cleanest garage in the neighborhood and the weeds will still get ahead of me.

But instead of feeling bad about the situation, I can remind myself that there are things in life that are more important.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I’ve been thinking about starting a new boat project lately. I guess it is fair to say that I have been thinking about starting a new boat project since I finished the Mister E, a Chester Yawl, over a year ago. That seems to be one of the realities of having building boats as a hobby. You want to keep doing it.

To be clear at the outset, I am not a professional boat builder. I cannot, in my wildest imagination, think that I could build boats well enough or fast enough to earn my living with the craft. I started building a canoe because I wanted to paddle a canoe. It came out pretty good, but I decided to build another one – this time a smaller one that would be fun to paddle solo into the smallest places. After swamping that canoe in the Puget Sound, I decided to build a kayak. Then I wanted a different large canoe and I built one. Then there was a restoration, another kayak, and a second restoration. A rowboat seemed in order, so I built one. Along the way, I visited the Old Town factory store and came away with a small plastic kayak that could be bounced off of rocks and paddled in a creek. That produced a desire for a second creek boat and there happened to be used one for sale at a good price and now, somehow, I have a couple of factory-made boats as well as my hand-made ones.

There is no doubt that I own too many boats. And boats take up space. There are two boats in my stable that haven’t seen any water this year. And I licensed both of them, so there is no excuse except a lack of time and owning too many boats. So the first challenge of starting a new project is the simple fact that I already own too many boats. In order to reduce inventory and gain space, before I start a new project, I need to get rid of at least two boats. And, frankly, I’m not quite sure how to do that. I’m not the world’s best salesman and I don’t know what a fair price would be. There aren’t many hand-built boats in our area and so comparing the prices charged in national magazines might result in having no customers. I have been watching Craig’s List, but haven’t found any true comparables. And the problem of watching Craig’s List is that when I see a boat that is priced seriously under its true value, the urge to buy it seizes me. And I own too many boats.

The solution would be to give the boats away, but I’m not sure to whom they should be given. The ones I would part with aren’t my most beautiful or easiest to paddle boats. They have some challenges and shortcomings that I know well.

Sigh . . . so the dilemma remains unsolved. I know I’ll figure it out, but it will be a bit of a challenge.

Another challenge is that in order to start another boat project, I need to move a few things around in my garage. It has sort of filled up with stuff since I finished the last boat. I did have the car in that stall a few times, but then I brought in some wood to make paddles and used the garage to store some other things and at the moment, there is no room to start a project.

I know people who have their shops and garages perfectly organized. You know the saying, a place for everything and everything in its place. My garage is more like, “a place for many things and many things all over the place.” I have made many different attempts at organizing my garage and I have some very nice toolboxes and other storage devices. The problem is that I am reluctant to get rid of something that might someday be useful and I tend to think that I might use that thing sooner than I actually do. That combined with the fact that I often have several different projects going at the same time results in more than a little bit of confusion.

I have the habit of stuffing spare screws and nuts and bolts into the same container that also has some odd electrical connectors and some parts for a roof rack and perhaps a few bits of wire and some actual boat parts. This has the happy side effect of when I am looking for something particular, say a 2½-inch, 5/16 stainless carriage bolt, I might instead find a couple of boat cleats, a perfectly good fuse and a small toggle switch. That might lead me away from the project that needed the bolt to the project for which I purchased the switch and fuse in the first place, except that I really don’t like wiring that much and that project was for the trailer and the trailer is in storage. No, I believe the fuse and switch were for a project on the old camper that we sold. But I should keep them in case I need them someday for a project on the new camper. Now where can I put them where I’ll remember where they go. Let’s see, with other electrical bits. Here is a coffee can with wire nuts on top. I’ll put them in here. Now, look, there is the bolt I was looking for! You get the picture.

This kind of event occurs all the time in my garage. Now, I remember seeing those boat parts. What did I do with them? These days there are enough unfinished projects around my house that every excursion into the garage threatens to have me going to the garage with one project in mind and emerging with another project.

I have discount cards at two different hardware stores and am a member of the frequent customer club at a big box discount home supply store as well. I think that I have so much hardware store experience in part because their supplies are better organized than mine. I know where to find the right stainless steel carriage bolt at the hardware store.

So this afternoon I’ll work in the garage for a while. I claim that I am organizing and cleaning, but I doubt that an outsider will consider the place to be clean when I finish. I, on the other hand, might just discover a new project worth pursuing.

You know, that fuse and toggle switch could work for a small electric winch to load boats on my truck. I bet I could build one if I made a few trips to the hardware store.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

After the extreme wildfires of 1988 and 1989, it was evident that the various federal bureaucracies were not very good at working together. There were problems related to the procurement of equipment for fire crews, confusions over who was in charge at actual fire scenes and other issues that arose in the midst of the crisis. It was clear that additional interagency coordination was required to tackle really large problems such as raging wildfires. We lived in Boise, Idaho at the time and watched as the National Interagency Fire Center grew into a sophisticated logistical support center. The Center had been in place for many years. It was created in 1965 because of the need for the US Forest Service to be able to work with the Bureau of Land Management when fires crossed the boundaries between their respective management agencies. The National Weather Service had expertise that was also needed and before too long the National Park Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs came on board. Sometime later the US Fish and Wildlife Service joined in. In the aftermath of the failures of FEMA to provide adequate response to Hurricane Katrina, that agency was restructured and the US Fire Administration-FEMA joined the interagency fire center as well.

The concept works quite well. When there is a big fire anywhere in the US one center goes into action to provide logistical support from helicopters and air tankers to handcrews and ground equipment. Everything from shovels to airliners can be procured in a single location. Boise is a good location for the center. It is located in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, close to the center of the west’s fire territory. Because there are more federal lands in the west than in the east, the need for interagency cooperation is most noticeable out west. Boise also has a large airport than can handle any of the air equipment and excellent weather for year-round dispatch reliability.

One of the outgrowths of the cooperation is the Incident Information System that provides a single source for information about fires on public lands. The Incident Information System supported by all of the agencies named above plus the National Association of State Foresters. I find myself visiting the web site frequently for information and updates about fires across the region.

Because our family business was involved in supplying air support to the Forest Service and the National Park Service, I grew up around some of the firefighters and others involved in frontline fire management. From my earliest years I have understood that fires involve the lives of real people. Whenever I read about hand crews or the operation of air tankers, I think of the crews. The Interagency Fire Center may have a huge focus on equipment, but the equipment is all used by real human beings.

For a week, now, I have been checking out the updates on the Salmon Fire complex burning in a rugged area of the Cascades in northern California, not far from the Oregon Border. The fires were human-caused and now have grown to more than 9,000 acres. Campgrounds and rural housing areas have been evacuated and there are some forest closures in the extreme, tinder dry, red flag fire warning conditions. There are 1,175 people in the fire crews working to establish lines and contain the fire. One of them is a good friend of mine.

Like other firefighters I have known, Monty is intrigued by fire behavior and he thrives on the excitement of being needed and responding to a distant location. He is in peak physical condition and able to take the rigors of sleeping on the ground, working hard and long days in dirty and smoky conditions. He is a quick learner and is very smart in the way he works.

Still, fighting wildfires is very dangerous work. There have already been several injuries on this fire and everyone working the fire is inhaling more smoke than is healthy. The potential for this fire to blow up into a much bigger fire is great. There have been lots of dry thundershowers in the area. Tonight brings the best promise in more than a week for some precipitation with those storms. But the storms also bring high and erratic winds that can change the character of the fire in minutes.

We, who work in the church, have been called upon to think deeply about our vocation. In our denomination the process of preparing for ordination requires serious reflection upon one’s call to the ministry. Our ordination vows are serious life-long commitments that remind us constantly that our calling is not just to a way of earning a living – it is first and foremost a calling to a life of service. Because we have focused on our own vocation so deeply, sometimes we forget that other people are called to other vocations and that those calls are as genuine and as real as ours. In my head and heart I know that there are some who are called to medicine and teaching and governmental service. I know that there are honorable and meaningful vocations in construction and trade and food distribution. Sometimes, however, I work with people who have jobs, but who haven’t yet discovered their true vacation. As they ponder and contemplate they still need meals on the table and a roof over their heads, so they work for money to live.

In the ranks of firefighters, however, I do not need to be reminded that there are other vocations. Firefighters often feel called and compelled to pursue their calling. There are easier and safer ways to earn a living. A firefighter who is motivated by money only won’t long endure the rigors of the job and will move on to another way to obtain money. Those who stay discover that there is meaning in saving lives and protecting structures. They understand that their work is essential to the safety of the community. They may be risk takers, but they take their risks for a purpose and have a sense of the meaning of their lives.

So I pray for their safety. I read the reports of the fires and I hope for cooler and wetter weather. And I thank God that there are other meaningful vocations to which people are called by the Holy Spirit.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

It’s an old joke. You’ve probably heard it before, but it goes like this:

One day a mallard drake was flying over a pond when he spotted a beautiful young hen bobbing on the water below. He flew down and landed next to her. He started talking to her, but she didn’t respond. Just then he heard a rustle in the bushes and yelled, “Duck!” as he dove under the water. A blast from a shotgun followed, but he escaped injury. A minute later, he came to the surface and began to scold the female duck, “You could have been killed! When you hear hunters, you have to duck!” Again he heard the rustle. Again he yelled, “Duck!” Again he dove below the water. And once again he rose to find her bobbing on the surface. Exasperated he scolded her again. He heard the rustle for the third time. He yelled, “Duck!” and dove beneath the surface. This time when he came up there were bits of the female duck scattered around the surface of the water. As he flew away he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Wooden Duck!”

OK it is a silly pun.

I’ve been getting to know a few ducks in my morning paddles. I can’t identify individuals, but I think that I am seeing the same brood each day when I paddle by the cattails along the shore of Sheridan Lake. For the most part, the ducks scatter and swim away from me when I approach in my canoe. But these ducks have become tolerant of my presence and if I approach slowly and quietly and don’t make any sudden moves, they will swim alongside my canoe and allow me to take pictures. Yesterday, they resumed feeding as I sat between them and the shore in my little boat.

Ducks are amazing birds, really. All water birds have a combination of hydrodynamic and aerodynamic features. Being good swimmers and also good flyers means that they need to have a unique body shape. The feet are situated far enough back on the abdomen to make them a bit ungainly when they walk on the shore, but they are graceful swimmers. The feed by putting their heads under water which at times means that their tails are the only part sticking up into the air as they float. When they aren’t startled they swim easily. It doesn’t seem to take much effort for them to paddle along with their feet and go where they want on the surface of the water. When startled,, they are a bit less graceful, with a bit of splashing as they accelerate. They can take off with a very short run and be flying quickly.

The ducks learn to swim long before they learn to fly and when they are in that phase of life when they can’t fly they are fun to watch on the water. A brood will mostly stay together as they scurry for the cover of the reeds at the edge of the water as my canoe glides by.

There are lots of dangers for the chicks. On land, there are foxes and bobcats and other mammals that eat baby ducks. In some places there are snakes and turtles that eat baby ducks. Owls and eagles will also occasionally take a baby duck. And there are dangers that come from fast moving water. Small ducklings who are born in river eddies instead of lakes are often washed downstream away from their brood. At the lake I notice a decrease of the number of ducklings in a brood between the first time I spot them and the time they head of in their own directions as grown birds. The mortality rate must be fairly high. That is why they often have more than one brood in a summer. They have to in order to keep the population stable.

It may seem that I am blogging about canoeing a lot this summer. My canoe excursions are the subject of most of the pictures I have taken this year. I do spend considerable time at the lake. I try to get in an hour of paddling three or four days each week. I do so in part because the exercise is important for my health and staying healthy and fit gives me endurance for my job. But there is much more to it than the exercise.

The canoe is a vehicle for going to the quiet places and taking time to observe the beauty of this world. It is not just that I enjoy watching the creatures, which I do. It is that I need to remain connected to the natural world in order to stay close to God and have the perspective that is required for the times of intense relationship with people. My life has moments when I am with people who are going through very difficult times. I see my share of distress and discomfort. I try to help people in times of crisis. In order to be fully present for those people, I need to be comfortable in my world and connected to the things that are beyond the crisis and panic of the moment. The lake and its creatures give me a sense of the wider world. The quiet time gives me an opportunity to think and pray and sort out my thoughts and my relationship with God.

Christine Jerome wrote, “The canoe, that most elegant mode of travel, takes us to places where silence calms the spirit and where perspective returns.” I need silence to calm my spirit and I need the perspective that comes from spending time in the natural world. And I am very fortunate to have a lake so close to my home that I can paddle virtually whenever I want. From the time the ice is out until freeze up all I need is appropriate clothing and a bit of time. Once I finish making a canoe, it requires almost no maintenance and other than a bit of gas for my car to get to and from the lake there are no other costs associated with simply going out and sitting with the world.

So I am thankful for the ducks and the lessons they can teach me. They have already taught me to paddle slowly and quietly and to flow with them as they explore their world. These are no decoys. They’re the real deal.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I grew up down by the edge of the Boulder river in Big Timber Montana. There were a couple of reservoirs in the area and there were a smattering of small lakes in the high country that could be reached when backpacking, but we didn’t have a boat and we didn’t know many people who did own boats. As a result I grew up as a shore fisherman. We fished bait from the trout opener in the spring until the peak of high water passed and then switched to spinners and lures until the water cleared and fished hoppers and flies for the month of August until we went back to school. We all got to be pretty good at fishing. The fish we caught were eaten. We didn’t know about catch and release. Since we had four brothers and the youngest was clearly a better fisherman than any of the rest of us, we engaged in regular adjustment of the catch in our creels and stringers to make sure that no individual was carrying more than the limit. There were some days when I came home with the limit but hadn’t actually caught any fish.

Part of the trick to being a good bank fisherman is good eyes. You can learn where to look for the big fish, but you have to have good eyes to see them. And you have to see the fish to be consistent in placing a dry fly so the fish will rise to take it. I had the most success with hoppers. We fished real hoppers and hand-tied “Joe’s Hoppers” from Dan Bailey’s Fly Shop in Livingston. Both were fished by floating them down into the riffles and pools were the lunkers were lurking. You didn’t have to see a fish if it took the hopper whole. That was the kind of fishing that I did.

We even fished from the shore when we went to visit our uncle, who had a place on Flathead Lake. He had a boat, but it was used mostly for water skiing and for sightseeing trips around the lake. I don’t remember ever fishing from the boat.

So I was an adult and a college graduate before I first landed a fish into a boat. I remember the first one very well. I had taken a group of high school youth to our church camp on Lake Metigoshe. There were a couple of canoes and after trying my luck at fishing from the dock, I decided to paddle out in a canoe and fish from it. I could see fish rising out beyond the reach of my cast. I didn’t really know what I was fishing for, but thought it would be neat to catch a fish and cook it for the youth who were with me. I was eager to impress them with my skills and prowess in a variety of different arenas. At any rate I managed to set a hook in a fish without knowing what I had on. It fought a good fight but I finally was able to get it alongside the boat. It seemed to be fairly long and a bit skinny so I gave the rod a jerk and managed to get it into the canoe with me.

Then I began to wonder how I might get it back out of the boat. The thing was big by the standards of trout that we used to catch in the river – over 18 inches and probably close to 2 feet. It was thrashing wildly and it seemed to me that it had whole lot of teeth. There’d be no getting my lure out of that fish until it was completely dead. And it didn’t appear to be planning to die anytime soon. I picked up the paddle, more as a defensive weapon than as an offensive one and tried to slide back as far into the stern of the canoe as I could go. The canoe was rocking and I was on the edge of capsize, something I wanted to avoid on the general principle that there were probably a lot of those fish in the lake and I could have made them pretty mad by hooking one of their clan. I had no desire to jump into a lake full of those toothy creatures.

At any rate, I survived and the fish didn’t. It tasted good fileted and pan fried in butter with a little flour batter. It did seem to have more bones than teeth and it had a lot of teeth.

Although I have canoes and kayaks and I love paddling, I rarely fish from my boats. I seem to have reverted to the role of a shore fisherman. I’m comfortable with that. From watching the critters, I know that some are shore fishermen and some prefer to fish the deep waters. Eagles and Osprey fish the deep waters.



Great Blue Herons are shore fishermen. Unlike the high flyers, the herons are patient birds, standing for long periods of time on a log or in the water, watching and waiting for just the right fish to come by in just the right place. When they actually strike at a fish, they are incredibly fast for a short burst. And they appear to bee good at fishing.

Yesterday I was paddling the smallest of my canoes. The ultralight “Wee Lassie” isn’t the smallest canoe made, but it is pretty small and quite light weight. I sit in the bottom of the boat with my feet out in front of me and usually paddle it with a double paddle like a kayak. The boat has no deck and is a great little craft for just playing around in the water. I was paddling around trying to get just the right angle to take a picture of the sunrise over the mist on the lake when I spotted a patient fisherman on the shore. The boat is quiet and I paddled gently and slowly so get a better look without disturbing the fisherman.

And I was fairly successful. I don’t have a fancy camera and if I did, I wouldn’t be inclined to take it in the boat with me. But I did get a couple of good pictures of the fisherman. And I admire his patience. I didn’t get to see him catch a fish yesterday, but know that he probably would have if I had had the patience to keep watching.

I hear that there are some northern pike in Sheridan Lake. I don’t know if they ever swim into the reeds at the edge of the lake, but I’d like to see a Heron latch on to one someday. If he were to catch a northern, I can guarantee he would earn his lunch that day.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Distinctive clothing can identify one as a member of a particular culture or ethnic group. A particular group of people can develop their own sense of fashion and the human tendency to imitate can result in groups of people dressing in similar ways. Part of distinctive clothing comes from available materials and the climate. People who live near to the poles, for example, tend to dress in animal furs. These are practical and available. They would hardly be appropriate dress for the desert regions of Africa or the sun-drenched Pacific islands.

People also wear distinctive clothing to demonstrate membership in a particular profession or sub group. Military uniforms have their origins in the need to be able to quickly and easily identify who is a compatriot and who is an enemy. The precise time and place of the first use of military uniforms is not known, but the practice was well established by Roman times. Around the time of Jesus, segmented armor was beginning to be used throughout the empire. There were considerable differences in detail due to the lack of unified production. The appearance of the armor was in part of product of the particular place where it was manufactured. As a result, different regiments had distinctive armor and those who were familiar with the Roman army learned to identify the regiment to which an individual belonged.

In some cases, ethnic dress evolved into military uniform. The kilts and sporrans of Scottish highland clans became standardized regimental dress when the British Army started to recruit from these groups. The distinctive and colorful clothing of the Hungarian hussars became the model for hussars throughout Europe.

Professions developed distinctive clothing through the unique needs of the occupation and through the dictates of fashion. Surgical scrub clothing became necessary as doctors learned more about germ theory and developed ways to keep medical treatment and surgery rooms sterile. The comfort of clothing that is easily changed resulted in doctors and other medical professionals wearing scrubs outside of the operating room. This led to the manufacture of the clothing in distinctive patterns and colors and now scrubs are worn in a wide variety of settings and locations. A desire to instill confidence in customers and lend an air of professionalism has led to distinctive uniforms in other work settings.

Uniform fashions come and go with changing times.

Over the centuries the church has gone through a wide variety of distinctive clerical clothing. The robes and vestments worn to lead worship and celebrate sacrament have evolved over the centuries. The basic everyday garb of ministers also has gone through many different variations and changes.

Many clerical fashions have their origins in a desire for the clergy to be humble and to focus their attention away from worldly possessions. Monasteries developed simple robes to coincide with the vow of poverty taken by the religious. The distinctive garb was once simply the least expensive clothing available. Habits worn by nuns often were based on the clothing worn by widows who were mourning. The origins of most clerical garb have some roots in the attempt at humility. However, there is something in human nature that makes individuals want to stand out. The clerical collar, sometimes called a “Roman collar,” is seen in many denominations as the mark of an ordained minister. Depending on the denomination, the collar is worn by bishops, priests and deacons. In many traditions it is also worn by seminarians who are preparing to become ordained clergy. The collar probably has its roots in the collar of a cassock, but modern clerical collars are usually simple plastic tabs that attach to the collar of a shirt. Sometimes studs are used to keep the white part of the collar in place and other times the tab is simply slid into channels on the collar. The detachable clerical collar arose in the Church of Scotland as a way to separate clergy from the secular world. The fashion was adopted by Scottish Presbyterians and now has become common in many different denominations.

I obtained my first shirt with a clerical collar as a gift from the widow of a deceased minister. I subsequently bought a second shirt to have one with short sleeves and another with long sleeves. I don’t wear them very often – sometimes during lent and Holy Week, sometimes for funerals of people who come from religious traditions where the use of the collar is more common. There are a few places where the collar is useful to make for an instant identification. Visiting in jails and prisons is simplified by wearing the distinctive shirt collar.

The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was a time of rapid change in the Roman Catholic Church and among the changes that grew out of the Council was a relaxing of the rules of distinctive dress among members of religious orders. Many nuns adopted simple secular dress for their work. Religious men also began to wear simple clothing that allowed them to blend in with society rather than stand out. Some of the more elaborate caps and hats, capes and collars have now been mostly relegated to museums while the modern successors of the ancient religious traditions go about their work in clothing from Target and Penney’s.

It might be hard for a modern member of a religious order to realize that it was only 50 years when instructions for clerical dress were inordinately complex and difficult. Just one sentence from the 1960 instructions for the caps and collars worn by the Sisters of Providence serves as example: “The cap should be worn just in front of the serre-tete facing and should fasten or rest about 1/8-inch from the edge of the serre-tete on the sides. The veil covers the tips and fastens beneath them on the serre-tete eyelet.”

If I’ve got my shoes tied, my belt fastened, my zipper up and my shirt buttoned, I figure that I’m dressed for work. On Sundays and when leading worship in other settings I put on a tie and often wear a jacket. We still wear robes and stoles when leading worship, but take a break from them in the summer when life in an un-air-conditioned space is not conducive to too many layers of clothing.

I find that, in general, the older I become the less concerned about clothing I am. It never has been what I wear that makes me a minister. It is who I am that speaks of my vocation.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

Here is one of the things that is wrong with our health care system here in the United States and how I am a part of the problem. In June, I turned 60. I had a “routine” colonoscopy when I turned 50 and most doctors recommend the test at 10-year intervals after age 50.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go into detail or describe the preparation for the procedure. People who are a lot cleverer and a whole lot more funny than I have already done that. Frankly, so far in the process, I haven’t found anything to write home about. What interests me is how I got myself to this place and how the decisions I make have an impact on health care for myself and others. And I am not convinced that I have made the best decisions, though I do understand how I got to this point.

First of all, it is important to note that I am not opposed to routine cancer screenings. I think they are a good idea. Many cancers, when detected early are quite treatable. Early detection saves millions of dollars to the health care system each year and saves countless lives that might otherwise be lost if the cancer were to go undetected for a long period of time. Additionally, I don’t believe that we amateurs should be spending all of our time and energy second-guessing health care professionals. Doctors have access to education and research that laypersons do not read. If you find yourself in a position where you don’t trust your doctor’s investment in your well being and care, I suggest that you look for a different doctor. There are plenty of physicians who are well educated and who care deeply about patient care. I have an excellent personal physician and I trust the advice and judgments of that doctor. Furthermore I am engaged in my own health care decisions and value the consultations that I get from my physician.

Have you ever wondered why so-called “routine” colonoscopies are recommended only once every 10 years when no symptoms are present? The polyps that develop into cancer in the colon grow slowly. There are different cancers that can develop in the digestive system, but the ones detected by routine colonoscopy screenings are the ones that grow very slowly. The aggressive cancers that are very dangerous and far more fatal usually present symptoms long before the colonoscopy is ordered. They are detected by lab tests and usually involve acute symptoms including bleeding.

Here is the thing. Most of the polyps that are detected in colonoscopy procedures could also be detected by a much less invasive and saver procedure called a sigmoidoscopy. The sigmoidoscopy involves examination of just the last part of the colon rather than the whole bowel. Flexible sigmoidoscopy is an office procedure that can be conduced by any trained physician and does not require sedation or costly apparatus. The number of cancers that could be detected by a colonoscopy but not by a sigmoidoscopy is very low, probably lower than the number of colonoscopies that involve serious complications. In other words, the risks of harm caused by a colonoscopy is probably higher than the risk of undetected cancer if the patient had a sigmoidoscopy instead.

The risks of colonoscopies are not insignificant. The most dangerous complication from the procedure is an accidental perforation of the bowel. This can result in infection, require surgery to repair and result in significant danger to the patient. If allowed to go untreated it is life threatening. Different endoscopy centers have different rates of bowel perforation, but in general rates are only about one in one thousand. Still, if you consider how many of the procedures are done each year in the several endoscopy centers in our city you will understand why most of us know someone who has experienced that particular problem.

Much higher risk comes from the use of total anesthesia when the procedure is performed. There are always risks associated with anesthesia and these must be weighed against the benefits. This is of particular interest in colonoscopy procedures because the use of total anesthesia is mostly a matter of convenience for the doctor. The procedure can be successfully completed with conscious sedation in most cases, yet conscious sedation is usually not used for colonoscopies unless the patient refuses anesthesia.

Here is the situation. Routine colonoscopies with anesthesia are expensive. People who don’t have insurance generally don’t get the test performed. People with insurance are going to pay the out of pocket expenses and the insurance company is going to pay the rest. And insurance companies don’t often balk at colonoscopies. They save the company money in claims. They detect problems. So the insurance company pays for the procedure. My insurance has pre-approved the entire procedure with anesthesia. The cost of the procedure is the same to me whether or not I have anesthesia. It probably is very close to the same out of pocket cost for me as a sigmoidoscopy, had my doctor performed the less expansive procedure.

So I am spending the money of the insurance pool on a procedure that probably is not necessary and certainly could be performed for hundreds of dollars less than it will cost.

And, quite frankly, I’m not quite sure why. It is the path of least resistance. My doctor ordered the procedure. My insurance company approved it. The endoscopy center is so practiced at the procedure that it is almost like a factory, processing patients quickly and routinely. The surgeons perform many procedures each day. They are set up to do this. The risks are statistically very small. I have little reason to suspect that there will be any problems. I am in good health. I’m a cooperative patient. I have been studious in reading all of the literature provided as well as doing a bit of extra research on my own. I complied very carefully with every detail of the preparation instructions.

But it does bother me that our city has more centers and more of these expensive machines than we really need for our population. It does bother me to spend money out of the insurance pool that might be better invested in treatment of someone with an acute disease. I am perfectly healthy and symptom-free. Although I’d like to remain that way, I’m not convinced that consuming health care dollars is the best way to do so.

And no one, from my doctor to the folks at the endoscopy center to the insurance company, seems to be interested in discussing what we might do the best we can to assure continued good health without spending so much money. Unlike other areas of our life, we don’t seem to see the connection between the things we buy and the cost of the insurance premium. When it comes to health care, it seems that we often take a “the sky is the limit,” “or no matter what the coast” approach.

Don’t worry, I’ll be a compliant patient and I won’t be arguing with the doctors today. If they get their way, and they probably will, I’ll sleep through the whole thing anyway.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

They’re here. The hills are rumbling with the sound of motorcycles. The billboards are filled with advertisements for bands, venues, foods and other rally fare. The annual Sturgis Rally is in full swing. We’ve lived in the hills long enough that we are a little bit used to it. Playing host to thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts is just part of what we do. For the most part, the folks of the hills are supportive of the event. After all the cyclists spend a lot of money during their visit. The event provides jobs and a burst of income that keeps some businesses in the black for another year. We have learned to take routes that involve as few left-hand turns as possible when we drive into town. We have learned to look very carefully for motorcycles when pulling on to the road. We have adjusted to the roar of the bikes going by our home so that we don’t interrupt our conversation with each passing motorcycle.

Yesterday, when we were finishing up a morning of splitting wood we were standing around talking. It was a pleasant day, not too warm and not stormy. We had had a small crew but had accomplished quite a bit. As we visited we noticed the helicopter ambulance heading toward the hospital. “Yup,” someone said, “the rally is in full swing.” Increased activity for law enforcement, ambulance workers, and the hospital emergency room are also a part of the rally each year.

We’ve all learned the drill. Look for motorcycles. Look again. They don’t always travel in groups. The individual bikes are a bit harder to see. Avoid following too closely, give them room. And when you do see an accident, make sure you aren’t making things worse. Find a safe place to pull over and dial 9-1-1 before you attempt to render aid. Most of us have seen an accident or two. They happen every year.

According to our local newspaper’s web site, there have been three fatal motorcycle accidents this weekend. One took place on the Interstate in eastern South Dakota and involved a group of four cycles riding in a staggered formation heading to the rally. Another occurred just west of town on Nemo Road. The third was also west of town near the intersection of highways 44 and 385. One of the attractions of the hills for the motorcycles are the winding and scenic roads that are filled with beauty and have enough curves and grades to be a challenge for a cycle. And most motorcyclists enjoy speed. They aren’t however, the only ones on the road. The rest of us, though we try to stay off the roads a bit more than usual, continue to drive to and from our regular business. And our roads are often crossed by turkeys and deer and other critters.

The cattle grazing in the open pasture area on Sheridan Lake Road near Dakota Point didn’t get the memo about the rally. While they often are up the draws and away from the main road, on Friday they were all down alongside and on the road. In addition to the dangers of large slow-moving animals on the road, many of which are black and amazingly difficult to see in the dark of night, they leave behind their normal business that creates slick spots on the road. Hopefully the motorcyclists are warning each other and everyone is slowing down a bit.

The accidents are the part of the rally that I dread. I’m not a big fan of the noise, but it is only a couple of weeks each year and there is an up side to the noise. It announces the presence of the motorcycles. I try to drive with my windows down as much as possible during the rally so that I have the auditory warning as well as the visual sight to keep me aware of and safely out of the path of motorcycles. I’m not a big fan of crowds, but I can put up with hoards of visitors for a short time. The same natural beauty and western hospitality that drew me to the hills and has made it such a great place to call home is attractive to others. And guests are an important part of what makes it work for the rest of us to live in the hills. The income from tourists is a very important part of our local economy. I can tolerate the crowds. The craziness of huge outdoor concerts and parties are easy enough to simply avoid. I prefer to keep my clothes on in public and like it when others do as well, so I simply don’t go to the places where huge temporary bars are attended by waitresses wearing swimming suits.

And I am a people watcher. There are all sorts of interesting people to see. Some of the motorcyclists go in for decoration. There are more tattoos than a navy reunion in our town this weekend. I’m especially a fan of those on the upper shoulders of men who are wearing sleeveless shirts this week. You know that when they go back to their regular lives and white-collar jobs those tattoos are covered up by a short sleeve shirt. Other cyclists go in for costumes. You can see some pretty strange modes of dress if you sit on a street corner and watch the bikes go by. You wouldn’t normally think that a hot August day would be a time to wear a buffalo robe, but I’ve seen it. Some cyclists have expensive, matched outfits and have chosen their colors to look good with their bikes. I’m more drawn to the duct tape crowd, who wear old jeans and faded leathers and sport t-shirts that proclaim that they were at the rally years, and even decades ago.

But I don’t like the though of people getting hurt. I cringe at the sound of the helicopter and pray that I don’t become involved in an accident. I cut back on my driving and stay at home more.

A perfect rally for me would be one in which there were no people injured in accidents. But that dream will have to wait for another year. This year has already been bad for some of the participants.

So be careful out there. We want you to come and visit. We want you to have fun while you are here. But we also want you to come back and you can’t do that if you get ground up in an accident. We’ll do our best to help and provide care if you get injured, but we’d really prefer that no one gets injured in the first place.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

When I was growing up, we ate a lot of meals outdoors. My great uncle had made a picnic box for our family. It fit into the trunk of a car back when cars had very big trunks. It had a drawer for silverware, places for pots and pans, and even room for a two-burner Coleman white gas stove. The Front of the box was hinged so that when it was unlatched, it became a bit of counter space for picnic items. My father ordered paper napkins and paper plates by the caseload, printed with the John Deere logo, of course.

We lived in great country for picnics. The mountains were a short drive away in a couple of different locations and our father had lots of customers spread out in the countryside. He could combine a sales call to a customer with a family outing. And we lived close enough to Yellowstone Park to drive the loop in a day, if we made a long day of it. Our family got a new “Carry All” in 1963, and we happened to be in Yellowstone in 1964 and got to see an eruption of Steamboat Geyser. The geyser erupted Wednesday afternoon after eight years of silence, but back in ’64 it blew it steam 29 times and we were there for one of them. We also thought that it would be hilarious to pour out mom’s coffee and refill her cup with hot water from the flows off of Mammoth Terrace. The prank didn’t work. The sulfur in the water makes it smell quite different from coffee.

Most of our outdoor meals, however, didn’t involve any trips at all. We spent our summers at our place down by the river, which involved camp living all summer long. We had old cabins with a walk to the bathroom facilities. There was a kitchen in the main cabin, but we had meal after meal cooked outdoors over an open fire. Our mom got really good at producing hamburgers and fried fish and other delicious meals from a cast iron skillet over the fire. We cut willow sticks to cook hot dogs and roast marshmallows and there was a campfire every night. We learned to make smudge fires with green leaves and other things that would make smoke to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

Now, as an adult, we live in a home with a beautiful deck and we could take all of our meals outdoors, but we eat outdoors less than one might expect. If there are too many flies, we move inside. If it is too windy, we come back in. When the sun is too bright, we seek the shade of the kitchen. The big sliding patio door makes it easy to go from the kitchen to the deck, but it also makes it easy to come back indoors. I still cook outdoors a lot, especially in the summer. We have a very nice grill and I’ve learned enough about Dutch oven cooking to make biscuits, cornbread, and other items. I can even bake a reasonable pie in a Dutch oven. We like a wide variety of foods grilled or smoked.

When we have time, we love to go camping. Over the years we have upgraded from our tent to a pop-up camper, to a pickup camper and now to a camp trailer. Our current camper has most of the amenities of home. We have a stove with an oven, running water, and a complete galley of cooking items. When we are plugged into shore power we even have a microwave that we were sure we didn’t need, but we find we use quite a bit. We have a very nice dinette in the camper for eating, but we like to eat outdoors and have most of our meals outside unless it is raining. We even have an awning to provide shelter from the rain on occasion.

But we rarely go out for picnics. Packing up a meal and just going out for lunch or supper isn’t as rare as an eruption of Steamboat geyser, but we just don’t seem to think of it as often as we might. The closest we come some months is taking our lunch to work and eating outside on the church patio.

Last night, however, we just went on a picnic. It was delightful. I packed up a few things to eat in a grocery bag. We got in the car and went to the lake. We loaded up our canoe and paddled to a place that is difficult to access from the shore and had a lovely evening meal while we watched a pair of eagles fishing in the lake. Since we have a canoe that almost lives on the roof of the car during the summer, I’m always ready to head for the lake and it was no work at all to have a picnic. The spot we chose was a fairly rocky bit of shoreline, with lots of places to sit, but one brave ant did make its way across the rocks to check out our picnic spot. I decided to leave a few breadcrumbs just in case he wanted to take something back to his anthill.

Our meal was simple: some bread and cheese and meat, a few cookies and a bit of ice tea. It all fit into a single grocery bag. We have a rather fancy picnic basket, but we didn’t even bother to get that out.

There were a few thunderstorms in the hills last evening and we had to time our picnic to allow for paddling back to shore and stowing the canoe on the car before a shower hit, but it was easy to see the clouds coming and we had no trouble at all getting all of our gear stowed before there were any rain drops or flashes of lightning.

The question in my mind this morning is, “Why did I wait until August to plan the first picnic of the year?” We could do this nearly every day if we wanted to. I guess that part of the answer is that it is such a treat to do something that is different from the normal.

There is plenty in my life that is like Old Faithful. Maybe I need a few Steamboat eruptions from time to time as well.

No way I’m waiting eight years before the next picnic!

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

I have been paddling at Sheridan Lake for 18 years now. I suppose that it isn’t much of a lake by the standards of the world. It’s just a small reservoir. But 375 acres is plenty big enough for a canoe. If I put in at the marina, which is closest to my home, I can paddle to any other point on the lake and back within an hour or so. Some days I paddle to the dam. Other days I paddle to the cabin area on the south side of the lake. Other days I paddle to the inlet. Some days I paddle into a little cove near the campground. Many days I just paddle out into the water and practice a variety of canoe strokes: forward, back, draw, sweep, pry, etc.

At the edges of the season, in the spring and in the fall, I often paddle a kayak. With a spray skirt, the kayak is warmer for the legs. I also have a yawl that I love to row. But my real passion is paddling my canoe. In 2001 I made a woodstrip canoe to the lines of a Chestnut Prospector that is as close to an ideal canoe for me as I have yet found. That canoe has been living on the roof of my old Subaru Forester this summer, ever ready to head for the lake. I’ve been able to paddle 3 or 4 times a week for most of the summer. I can get up, head to the lake, paddle for an hour, come home and shower and still be in the office by 8:30, which is often early enough for summer.

I have three paddles that I like to use, but one is clearly my favorite. I used to do a lot of paddling with a large-bladed paddle. My Sawyer Voyager paddle has a big laminated blade and a prominent t-handle. I’m a short guy with quite a bit of upper body strength and I can move a lot of water with that paddle. The handle makes it very easy to turn the blade as I begin recovery and the big blade has a lot of surface to turn water and control the canoe without too much effort. For playing, however, I simply don’t need that big of a paddle. My Bending Branches Loon is a more typical canoe paddle. It is laminated with a fiberglass-reinforced tip and nearly indestructible. It would be a good expedition paddle, but I don’t do much expedition paddling. I used that paddle to teach myself about Canadian style paddling.

These days, however, my clear favorite is a Shaw and Tenny Racine model. Shaw and Tenny is a small shop in Orono, Maine. My paddle is made from a single piece of Maple. It is simple, clean and just the right shape. And it is perfectly balanced. It is a great paddle for strokes when I want to have both hands near the end of the paddle. I have plenty of reach, even for a guy with short arms and the paddle feels so good in my hands.

I suppose that for a true explorer, paddling in the same lake day after day might become boring, but there is just too much to see and too much change going on at Sheridan Lake for me to ever get bored. This year I know of at least four pairs of Great Blue Herons on the lake. One pair has fledged three chicks. When you flush five Great Blues at once on a still, misty morning, you can’t help but be impressed. There is a young beaver that I think is male, who has been spending more time than usual out on the main lake. I know what he’s looking for, but his methodology may be wrong for that search in that location. Finally, he has started to build a new lodge, downstream from the other lodge, but still well into the creek before it gets to the lake. He’s got two little dams going, but neither is strong enough to survive spring runoff. There are plenty of young willows and other trees to provide the food he needs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he decides to make a bigger migration upstream at some time.

The Canadian geese only have one brood each year, but I’ve seen them successfully hatch as many as seven chicks. The chicks can swim within the first couple of days, but they have to survive much longer before they can fly. It takes all summer for the geese to raise their little ones. Some of the broods I get to know enough to notice when they lose a chick. I think it has more impact on me than it does on the mother goose. She seems to always be a bit busy with her chicks, even though they seem to be adept at feeding themselves very early in their lives.

The mallards often have a second brood in the summer and their clutches are bigger. I’ve seen as many as 10 or more chicks with a single mother. The mallard chicks are on the water in the first day and they are a hoot to watch when they are little. They can put on a burst of speed when alarmed and they all scatter into the reeds at the edge of the water when my canoe approaches too close. It is amazing how much splash the tiny birds can make.

The lake offers eagles for watching and deer along the shoreline. There are lots of other creatures to observe as well. I’ve learned a fair amount about humans over the years as well. It is rare for there to be any boaters on the lake before 8 a.m. who are not fishermen. Fishermen generally like the quiet, which is another quality that I enjoy. They motor out to their spot and work the lake without bothering anyone, including the campers and others who are often still asleep in the early hours.

So I won’t be bored with my little lake. In fact my advice to someone who thinks that their lake is too small is simple: get a smaller boat and learn to paddle more slowly.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.

There have been several times when technological advances have come from the offering of prizes. Lindbergh made his Atlantic crossing in part in quest of the $25,000 Orteig prize. Several famous aviators made unsuccessful attempts at the New York to Paris nonstop before Lindbergh succeeded.

The XPrize provided the motivation for a new generation of privately-funded space exploration and a new XPrize is being offered for a successful human return to the earth. The XPrize foundation is also funding prizes for a new generation of digital medical records, world exploration, global development and education.

Prizes to fund technological developments are not new.

The 1714 parliament and parsons act in Britain established a series of prizes for a portable system of determining longitude that could be used aboard a ship rolling on the seas. The amount of the prize, up to 20,000 British Pounds, was determined by the accuracy of the method that was developed. The act also provided funds for subsidies for entrepreneurs in their efforts to develop navigational tools. Prior to the offering of the prize it was felt that someone who was searching for the solution to the longitude method was searching for the impossible. There is a famous etching of the Bedlam Asylum that depicts a longitude lunatic.

In the 1700’s the problem of determining longitude became urgent. Longitude is the distance, east or west, from a fixed point on the globe. It is important to note that the urgency of this navigational conundrum wasn’t because sailors were constantly getting lost. There were many successful far-reaching sailing expeditions prior to that time. Global discovery had made huge progress before the development of successful, simple longitude measurements.

The motivation for the prize was almost purely economic. There was great wealth to be had in the shipping trade. The slave trade and the sugar trade were enormous motivators behind the prize. The ability to determine longitude also had significant military applications in the age of great navies and piracy on the high seas.

At the time Greenwich Observatory was the center of scientific and geographic exploration in Britain. The head of the Greenwich Observatory was a member of the board of longitude. It was a director of the observatory, Nevil Maskelyne, who developed the first nautical almanac in 1766. The almanac provided the data required for the method of lunar distances, a mathematically complex method of determining longitude in a time before precise timepieces were available to know exact times. By using the almanac, you could look up where the moon was in relationship to certain known stars at a certain distance from Greenwich and then you could determine you position east or west from Greenwich.

The almanac, however, didn’t provide the complete solution to the problem. Two additional pieces of technology were required. Telescopes of the day, used for viewing and measuring angles in the sky, were long and very difficult to hold by hand on the deck of a ship on the ocean. The constant motion of the ship make it impossible to fix the instrument to the ship and trying to compensate for the motion of the ship by the movement of the body made it extremely difficult to make precise measurements. The sextant could be held with one hand and used to measure accurate angles between the moon and other celestial bodies. The instrument gets its name from the fact that the instrument has length of turn of one quarter of a circle or 60 degrees. The first sextant was made by a glazier in Philadelphia, John Bird in 1757.

The second technological problem was the lack of accurate portable timepieces. Knowing the local time and also the time at Greenwich was impossible before the development of accurate marine chronometers. John Harrison made the first accurate and reliable clocks that could maintain Greenwich time.

The famous explorer James Cook undertook a series of expeditions that were in part tests of the new methods of navigation. His voyages tested the almanacs, sextants and chronometers that were being developed. The astronomer William Wales was a crewmember aboard The Resolution who kept very accurate records of his observations. The charts drawn during that expedition were among the most accurate of their day.

The Board of Longitude eventually went into the business of providing chronometers for navigation. The “sea watches” were extraordinarily valuable and precious. Losing such an instrument was a disaster. William Bly, captain of the Bounty wrote a letter to the Board of Longitude explaining that the sea watch entrusted to him had been taken by the mutineers.

In the end, the prize for longitude was never awarded. The problem was sufficiently complex that it took multiple technological advances by multiple people to solve it. It could be argued that Nevil Maskelyne, John Bird, and John Harrison all had a right to a portion of the price for their developments of the almanac, the sextant and the chronometer. Harrison went to his grave believing that he had been cheated out of the prize. His clocks were extremely accurate and portable. The Board of Longitude determined that they were so expensive and so rare that they couldn’t be supplied in sufficient number to solve the problem. It took Harrison about six years to complete a single timepiece.

Regardless of the outcome, the promise of the prize was a factor in the advancement of technology as can be demonstrated by Harrison’s anger at the dispute over the award.

These days, with Global Positioning Satellites and hand-held navigational devices, people don’t remember how difficult it was to determine position in years past. The art of measuring angles with a sextant is becoming lost and there are plenty of sailors who don’t know how to read a marine almanac. Times change. Technologies advance and the skills required to accomplish a certain task change with the development of technology.

But we humans remain eager to obtain wealth and the promise of a cash prize continues to motivate the development of new technologies and solutions for long-standing problems.

I shan’t be seeking any of the prizes, but I do pay attention and I do check out the XPrize website from time to time to see what others are doing. The winners are rarely individuals. It takes real teamwork to push the edges of exploration.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.