I grew up with Yellowstone National Park in my back yard. That isn’t literally true. To get to the North Entrance was a 90 mile drive from our town. It took over three hours to get to the Northeast Entrance if you went around outside of the park. The shortest route to that part of the park was actually driving through the park which was the only access to that area in the winter. But my father flew regular fire patrols over the park every summer and the park was only about a half hour away in our small airplane. I think we drove to and through parts of the park every year of my life. We loved winter trips and often stayed at a hot springs outside of the park and took day tours to view the animals. I drove dozens of guests through the park as a teenager and when I was older flew over the park myself in our airplane.

The nation’s first National Park is a wonderland of unique features, wild animals, and natural wonders. It is touted as “the most extraordinary collection of hot springs, geysers, mudpots, and fumaroles on Earth.” More than 10,000 hydrothermal features are found in Yellowstone, of which more than 500 are geysers. There were plenty of hot springs outside of the Park as well. Two of them in our county had public pools and we could ride our bikes to one of them. Yellowstone, however, is not exclusively hot water and steam. There are incredible mountain vistas, glaciers, and streams and rivers with ice cold water. There are places where hot water and cold water mix and you can find just the right temperature by moving around in the water.

Of course many of the thermal features of Yellowstone are so extreme that they are dangerous to humans. More than 20 people have died from scalding in hot springs, at least nine of which have occurred since 2007. Hundreds have been burned and survived, some with life altering injuries. In addition to the dangers of scalding water, many of the features of Yellowstone are acidic enough to burn holes in clothing. It is possible to get a thermal burn and a chemical burn at the same time from the same pool of water.

The hot waters of Yellowstone are not empty of life, however. Microorganisms called thermophiles, make their homes in the features of Yellowstone. These organisms are too small to be seen individually without a microscope, but exist in trillions and often appear as mats of color. Knowing that there are organisms that not only survive but thrive in the extremes of Yellowstone is a reminder that even if human caused global warming creates climatic conditions that are not conducive to human life, life on this planet will go on. The capacity of non human life to adapt to extreme conditions virtually guarantees that life will go on.

Human caused climate change is unlikely, however, to produce the conditions of Yellowstone on a widespread basis. The alteration of the climate will result in extremes of weather, but the heat of Yellowstone’s features comes not from the atmosphere but from the geothermal activity beneath the surface. Despite relatively heavy snowfall in the winter at Yellowstone, it is a relatively dry part of the country. Even prior to the catastrophic fires of 1988 that burned 1.4 million acres in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, there were a lot of dry days in the park. I can remember walking through the trees with dried pine needles crunching under foot and the wind capable of drying and cracking the skin of my face and lips. As our planet warms, there will be other types of heat that make some areas barely inhabitable by humans.

There may be a bit of an indicator of the planets future in the areas of geothermal activity that are located in tropical rainforests. There the intense heat combines with intense humidity to create extremes that make it difficult for people to study the ecology of some regions. Temperatures in the area of Peru’s Boiling River, for example reach over 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The steamy climate not only creates challenges for researchers, but actually decreases the vegetation in the forest understory. Trees that grow to giant sizes in other areas of the rainforest are shorter and les vibrant in the area near the natural hot springs.

The effects of heat and chemicals on trees is evident in Yellowstone. There are areas near geothermal features where the bare trunks of dead trees stand as testament to the changes that occurred when the underground heat reached the surface. Plant life responds to changes in climate very quickly and places that once were forested are now bare of plants. At the same time, areas that were burned by the dramatic fires of more than three decades ago now have vibrant and diverse plant life that regenerated naturally. It has been amazing to watch Yellowstone regain its balance after those fires. The intensity of those fires had a direct relationship to human involvement. We flew fire patrols and reported fires as soon as they occurred. Smokejumpers were dropped onto the fires and fires were quickly extinguished. A few decades of intense fire fighting resulted in the overproduction of plants in the forest that made more fuel for the large and uncontrollable fires that followed. Had natural fires been allowed to burn and extinguish naturally the scenario might have been different.

The bottom line is that all human involvement with this planet is part of a large experiment. We do not fully understand all of the dynamics of this complex ecosystem. We make guesses about what might happen, but often are surprised by the resiliency and adaptability of life on this planet. While we can predict some alarming consequences of human overconsumption and greed, we do not fully know all that will happen. Change often comes more suddenly and quickly than we anticipate.

We live in a time when paying attention and observing closely is critical. I no longer live near Yellowstone, but I do live in the unique ecosystem between the North Cascade volcanoes and the Salish Sea. The skills I learned growing up and observing Yellowstone are helping me to get to know this new home. Indeed there is much to learn.

I have a lot of fragments of song lyrics in my head. If you are like me, there are songs that you can sing a few bars and then can’t remember all of the words. Some of the song fragments I know come from musicals. My mother had quite a few albums of musicals and when I got old enough, I would put them on the turntable for a listen to songs like:

Hello, Dolly,
La, la, la, Dolly
it’s so nice to have you back where you belong
Your looking swell, Dolly
I can tell, Dolly,You’re still something and something and something
and still goin’ strong.
There are more words
I cannot remember
and I think somewhere the verse ends with
Dolly never go away again.

or
Some enchanted evening
You may see a stranger . . .

I don’t know any more of that song. And I used to sing bits and pieces of it because we have a friend whose brother Sam is married to a woman named Janet. I kept wanting to find an occasion to sing “Sam and Janet evening, you may see a stranger.” I should have looked up the lyrics so I could sing more.

I know a lot of hymns. Some of them I have all of the verses memorized. Most of the hymns I have memorized I’ve been singing since I was a child which means that for one reason or another the words have been changed in the hymnal we currently use in our church. Combine my less than perfect memory with my less than perfect eyesight and I can sing the wrong words even with an open hymnal in my hands. Fortunately the people who sit near me in church are pretty tolerant.

And I know a lot of fragments of kids’ songs. I like to sing them with enthusiasm. Sometimes when I don’t know the words, I just make up new ones. Lots of songs for children are easy to adapt. Pete Seeger’s Abiyoyo, for example is mostly just repeating Abiyoyo. We had the book and I would sing the lyrics before I had ever heard the tune. Then we discovered a recording of Pete Seeger singing the song. By then, however, I had memorized my own tune and adapted the words. For the life of me, I can’t sing that song the way it was intended. It is a song about a little boy who played a ukulele and all the grown ups wanted him to stop playing it. And his dad was a magician that folks wanted to get out of town. Then a monster came and the people wanted the magician to make it disappear and the people decided that the ukulele was a good thing if the magician could make the monster disappear. The monster’s name was Abiyoyo. Pete Seeger sang the song with the story all in the right order so it made sense, but all I ever did was sing the word “Abiyoyo” over and over again to a made up tune. I never did learn the song.

And there are a lot of other fragments of songs in this old brain. Sometimes they come out in bits and pieces. Sometimes they come out with a bit more volume than my wife, kids, or grandkids want. Sometimes they make people smile.

One of those songs is Bill Harley’s Zanzibar. I can remember Bill Harley’s name because there is a big Harley Davidson motorcycle rally in the town where we lived for 25 years. The song begins something like this:

Zanzibar, Zanzibar,
Zanzibar is very far
You can’t get there in a car
Don’t take your car to Zanzibar

Zanzibar, they don’t have tar
To put on roads to drive their cars
Men and women smoke cigars
There’s no tar in Zanzibar

Then I usually repeat the first lines as if it were a chorus. What is a bit funny about this song is that I can remember the story. Bill Harley was supposed to write a report on another country when he was in school, but he waited until the last minute and didn’t do his research. With the deadline looming he grabbed the last volume of the encyclopedia, opened it to the page about Zanzibar and wrote a song. There are verses about growing cloves and ground nuts and tea, but I can’t remember them, except that the song bends the word Africa to become Afriki so it will rhyme with tea. But I do remember this much:

Zanzibar, Zanzibar,
Zanzibar is very far
You can’t get there in a car
Don’t take your car to Zanzibar

The song came to my mind as I read a news story about scientists who were sorting through data from previous scientific studies. They used computers to compare pictures of whales that had been taken by researchers in different parts of the world over the years. The computers looked for features that identified individual whales, such as scars, markings on the flukes, and the like. Which reminds me that I think there is a song that is about whale flukes and people playing flutes, but I can’t remember it. Anyway, the computers sifted through a lot of photos and came up with a few identifications. One was a picture of a humpback whale off the Pacific coast of Columbia in 2017. The same whale showed up in a photograph taken in 2022, off the coast of Zanzibar in the Indian Ocean. Humpback whales are known for long migrations. They feed in the cold waters near the poles and breed in the warm waters near the equator. They have been sighted in all of the oceans of the world. But never before had a migration as long as Columbia to Zanzibar been documented. That’s over 8,000 miles if you use the closest route, which is a great circle route. Whales, however, don’t fly the great circle route. They swim in oceans and swim around land masses. The whale had certainly gone farther than the most direct route between the two places.

I don’t know why the whale made the trip. Maybe it was looking for a mate, though you might think it would have encountered others along its journey. Maybe it was looking for food, though it must have found a lot of food to sustain such a trip. Maybe it had its natural migration disrupted by climate change. Or maybe it got a song lyric stuck in its brain and decided to check out the rest of the lyrics:

Zanzibar, Zanzibar,
Zanzibar is very far
You can’t get there in a car
Don’t take your car to Zanzibar

The town where I grew up was named Big Timber. It didn’t really have much big timber, at least not if you compare it to the Douglas Fir, Spruce, and Hemlock trees that grow near where I now live. I am not completely sure of the origins of the town name, but local legend is that a spot near the present townsite on the Yellowstone River gained its name from the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery. On their return from the West Coast in the summer of 1806, the Corps divided into two groups. Lewis lead one group down the Missouri. Clark’s group took a southern route over to the Yellowstone River. Weary from the long trip, a discouraging winter near the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Coast, and over two months of overland travel, including waiting for snow to melt in the mountains so they could cross, they finally reached a place on the Yellowstone where cottonwood trees could be felled and hollowed out to make boats to enable travel downriver to the confluence of the Missouri and from there back to St. Joseph, Missouri on their way home. The site of the trees was named Big Timber.

In the late 1880s as the railroad pressed west a post office was established in anticipation of a train stop. At that time the land was part of the Crow Nation before the land west of the Boulder River was ceded to the United States Government in 1891. The townsite was called Dornix. When the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived, the townsite was moved up from the river bottom and renamed Big Timber. That was over eighty years after the visit of Captain Clark and his crew, so the origins of the name might not be exactly true to the legend.

Down next to the river, adjacent to the original townsite is a small triangle of land formed by the river, U.S. Highway 10, and the steep rise of the bluff next to the river. My parents bought that triangle of land when I was eight years old and from that time on we spent our summers down at the river, playing in the water, building tree forts in the cottonwoods, camping, fishing, and cooking over an open fire. Over the years my folks improved the cabins and shacks that were the remnants of a former motor court and our accommodations improved. Eventually my mother built a log home on the site. But more than the buildings what seeped into my soul from those summers was the river.

42 miles upstream from our place is the church camp where I was taken with my family when I was a couple of months old and to which I returned for at least a week every summer for the next 25 years. My family made frequent trips up to the camp to help with maintenance and for a few years in my early adulthood, we ran snowmobiles up the road in the winter to check snow depths for the weather service. During the first two summers of our graduate school years, Susan and I served as managers and cooks at the camp.

Upstream from the camp a dozen more miles is the Independence mining district. Gold had been discovered and claims had been staked in the area before the town of Dornix or Big Timber existed. Initially the US Government ushered the miners off the territory which was part of the Crow Nation, but as soon as the land was opened to miners, a gold rush began. By 1892, there was a town of 500 people in the high country. A telephone line was stretched up the river and a stage made three trips a week in the summer. An economic downturn resulted in a bust in 1893 and the mine closed in 1894. There never was a school or a church or bank in the town of Independence. Additional mines in the area including the Daisy, Poorman, King Solomon, and the Hidden Treasure operated off and on until about 1905. Over the years seven different stamp mills, a roller mill and a sawmill were built. All that remains are the remnants of several log cabins and the crumbling structures of the mills.

A hike of about three miles uphill from the old Independence townsite are the headwaters of the Main Boulder river. Although the glacier has since melted, when I was a young man we could stand next to it and listen to the drip, drip, drip of melting ice that formed the rivulets that merged into streams and flowed together to form the river. The glacier boasted algae blooms in the summer that turned the surface pink wherever we walked upon it.

I went away to college and although I spent several college and graduate school summers in Big Timber and in the mountains above town, I never returned to live. I’ve lived in four different states since that time. The river, however, continues to be a major theme of my story. When we go camping and are able to sleep next to a rushing river, I sleep better than in any other place. The sound of the river, even the rolling rocks at high water, calm my spirit in ways no other sound can. I’ve often slept where I could hear ocean waves at night, but it is not the same.

Etched into my memory and my spirit is the drip, drip, drip of the river’s source. It is an eternal gift of water, carried into the mountains by clouds, falling as snow to banks a dozen or more feet deep each winter and then melting and forming a river capable of flooding at spring runoff. It is a river where the trout spawn and will rise to a dry fly if cast by a skilled fisher. The river is eternal, but the water the flows through it is fresh every second. On average nearly 120 cubic feet of water flow by our old campsite every second. Although these days the water has been contaminated by human and animal activity, I remember when it was the purest and cleanest and best tasting water one could drink.

More than half of my body is water. Like the water in the river the water in my body is constantly changing. But I was formed drinking the water of the river. It has become a part of me and I am a part of it. No matter where I live I will always belong to that river.

When he was young, our son told us that he had two grandmas: “A sweater grandma and a cookie grandma.” My mother was the sweater grandma. As long as I could remember her knitting was a constant companion. While other women carried purses, our mom carried her knitting bag. It had a lot more than knitting in it. It was a seemingly endless source of band aids, chewing gum, useful tool such as rulers and scissors, and a lot of other necessary everyday items. My mother-in-law was the cookie grandma. She paid close attention to the food choices of her family and that included me and our children. She knew what our favorite foods were. Once she asked me what I would order for myself if I took Susan out to dinner. She served that menu for dinner the very next evening. She knew which cookies were our son’s favorite and made sure that there was a supply of them when we came to visit.

My father died before we had children, but I had the opportunity to see him with my sisters’ children and I know what kind of a grandfather he was. One thing he did that I imitate regularly was to get down on the floor with the little ones. He let them climb on him and allowed his laughter to spread throughout the room.

My maternal grandmother died before I was born and my mother’s father died when I was just two years old, so I don’t have much memory of those grandparents, but my father’s parents lived just an hour’s drive from our home and we saw them regularly when I was growing up. In addition to large family gatherings for holidays, we often would stop by their home for brief visits. My dad and I would sometimes stop in their town after flying fire patrol and walk down to their house for breakfast. I don’t know if my dad warned his parents that we were coming, but it always seemed to me that their house was a place where we could arrive unannounced and be welcomed to a meal.

For as long as I can remember, I have imagined that I would become a father and eventually a grandfather. Our children brought so much meaning and joy to my life that I wanted them to have the experience of being parents themselves. From the time they were fairly young, I saw qualities in both of them that led me to believe that they both would be very good parents and I have not been disappointed. Once I jokingly commented to our children that I thought that five grandchildren would be just the right number. “I don’t care how you do it,” I said. “One of you can have two and the other three or however you want, but 5 would be a good number.” Little did I believe that I would turn out to have five grandchildren. I don’t think I expected the number to be that high until we learned that our youngest grandson was on his way. But I think that five is a very good number for me.

I feel the blessings of being a grandfather every day. I am delighted with technology that lets me video chat with my grandson who lives in South Carolina. I even am able to read him stories over the computer. And four of our grandchildren live close enough to our house for me to ride my bicycle over to their place. I get to see them several times each week. It turned out not to be 2 and 3 or 3 and 2, our daughter has one child and our son has four. I find the luxury of modern technology combined with being retired and able to live near our son’s home to be among the joys of my life. When our children were growing up we lived hundreds of miles from their grandparents and were able to see them only a few times each year.

I was able to hold our youngest grandson on the day he was born and have lived just down the road from him for all of his life. He is at home in our house, knows where the toys are stored, and is able to entertain himself whenever he comes to visit.

I have good friends, however, who are not grandparents and who likely will never be grandparents. In the last decade falling birthrates in the United States have resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of people over 50 years of age who do not have any grandchildren. In 2014 roughly 60 percent of US adults over 50 were grandparents. The number is now roughly half and continues to decline.

I wasn’t a grandfather when I was fifty. In our family the children mostly came in my sixties. But I’ve got friends who like me are in their seventies who have no grandchildren. I don’t know exactly how they feel, but I wonder if they have a sense of longing and loss when they think of grandchildren. From what I know of them, most seem like they would be very good grandparents. Recently, when we learned that one of our friends is expecting her first grandchild, I commented to Susan, “That is one lucky kid! It will be born with a terrific grandma!”

I don’t subscribe to some of the things that are said about being grandparents. I don’t see our grandchildren as a reward for aging. We did nothing to “earn” our grandchildren. We are simply fortunate to have them in our lives. And I don’t agree with those who say that being a grandparent is better than being a parent. I love being a father and I enjoyed every stage of our children’s growing up. There were hard times and sleepless nights, but the overall experience was undeniably positive. Being a grandpa isn’t better than being a dad, but it is different.

Because we lived a long ways from our parents when our children were little, our kids got to know other caring adults in their age range. We often speak of and remember with joy their “church grandmas and grandpas.” So to my friends who do not have grandchildren and wish they did I offer this invitation: “Come on over! I have wonderful grandchildren and I’m glad to share. You can stop by and visit them whenever you like. And, most of the time, we’ll have extra cookies to share as well.”

Today is the second Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of peace. Like so many generations of faithful people who have preceded us we light the candle with a vision, but without a clear understanding of the path to peace, or of what a world at peace would truly be. Peace is a multi-dimensional concept that includes but is not limited to an end of violence and conflict between nations. Those seeking peace in the world have long understood that simply the ending of armed conflict between nations is insufficient when injustice prevails. The suffering of innocents has occurred in nations that are not ostensibly at war with other nations. There is no peace for the victims of sexual violence, human trafficking, and genocide. A world at peace requires justice for all. Huge imbalances in the distribution of power and wealth result in violence against those with the least.

As we lit our Advent candle and discussed the idea of peace with our grandchildren last night, they focused not on the international situation and the places of war in our world, but rather on the sense of inner peace. The children spoke of the sense of peace that they feel when they play with their younger brother, when they walk in the forest, and when they have time to simply lie still in a warm and comfortable place.

This year we are reading together “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” during Advent. The familiar story of the Herdman children, who are the worst kids in the world, and how they toke over the church pageant has now been made into a movie, but the book remains a classic and worth reading aloud again and again. At the point where we are in the story, there is little that resembles peace in the pageant preparations. Most of the children are simply afraid of the Herdmans, and it appears that chaos will disrupt the traditions that have been part of the church’s Christmas pageant for as long as anyone can remember.

Somehow, thinking of traditions, brought to my mind something that has been a part of my life since I was born. Eight years before my birth, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the only use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict and the results were devastating. It has never been possible to get a completely accurate count of the casualties. Between 150,000 and 250,000 people were immediately killed, most of them civilians, many of them women, children, and elders. A comparable number of people later died of burn and radiation injuries. It is estimated that 650,000 people survived the attacks. They are known as Hibakusha in Japanese.

I grew up under the threat of further nuclear war. We were taught to crawl under our school desks in the event of an attack, as if such behavior would have made any difference to the victims of the the attacks against Japan. Our neighbors dug bomb shelters and equipped them with non perishable food and drinking water as if surviving the initial attack would somehow be preferable than dying instantly. The doomsday clock has been ticking near to midnight for all of my life.

I don’t know how to teach my grandchildren about peace in a world with such a history of violence where peace between nations seems to be impossible and where the places of power and decision making seem so removed from our everyday lives.

This week, on Tuesday, the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded. This year’s recipient will be Nihon Hidankyo, an organization of local Hibakusha associations that also includes victims of nuclear weapons tests on various Pacific islands. The Nihon Hidankyo is an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of survivors and working to insure that nuclear weapons are never again used.

One of the privileges of my life is that I have traveled to Japan. I have walked the reconstructed streets of Hiroshima. I have stood outside of the ruins. I have pondered the paper cranes at the Children’s Peace Monument and seen the tiny cranes folded by Sadako Sasaki in the Children’s Museum. I have rung the peace bell with my prayers for peace and my promise to work for a world free of weapons of mass destruction.

Today, as we worship with our congregation and light the candle of peace in our church, I will look at the paper cranes that are decorating our sanctuary and I will remember my time in Hiroshima. And I will offer a prayer of thanks for the witness of the survivors and the victims. It is often the victims who bring us critical messages of peace. Nihon Hidankyo is not the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Price that has been the victim of violence.

Last year’s recipient, Narges Mohammadi, spoke up against oppression of women in Iran. In 2018, Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad were awarded the prize for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.

If we would truly seek peace, we must listen carefully to the victims. And we live in a world with so many victims. The death toll in Gaza has exceeded 44 thousand with 70 percent of the victims being children and women. As many as 100,000 have been killed in the war in Ukraine with an additional 400,000 wounded. It is nearly impossible to know the exact number of victims of the Sudanese civil war, but more than 60,000 have been counted. Over 7 million have been forced from their homes and over 2 million are international refugees from that war. And the list of wars and violence goes on an on. The number of victims increases every day.

Peace is a difficult concept. That is why it is so important for us to focus on peace and renew our commitment to peace every year. May we continue to listen carefully to the victims and join in both their prayers and their work for peace in the world, as we practice peacefulness in our personal lives each day.