Category: Blue Skies

adventure, Affirmation, beauty, Blue Skies, Cancer, canoeing, Creation, Creator, Darkness, Faithful Living, God, Hope, Lake Michigan, Lessons from the Wilderness, Life's Storms, Nature, Peace, Perseverence, Rain, River, Storms, Uncategorized, Water, wilderness, Wilderness Paddling, worry

It’s Going to be All Right

This Side of the River

The weather along Lake Michigan has been noticeably unsettled this summer, like a nervous groom before his wedding.  We are missing the long stretch of sunny days under high barometric pressure that bring such deep blue skies and the warm assurance that winter is still far away.

What we need is a really good storm.

Of course, the weather takes special watchfulness in paddling situations. You don’t want to be caught out on the water in wind and lightning when a big blow rises up. It’s one of the rules of paddling: to pay attention to the signs and barometer when heading out.

Once on a paddle on the Au Train River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we got caught in a late afternoon storm. The lightning was too intense to safely shelter under the big trees that leaned over the water. Paddling furiously back upstream, we returned to hunker down under a bridge we had passed earlier. The fury of the storm flashed and crashed all around us as the wind was funneled under the bridge. Trees came down, and grasses were flattened while the sedate river of just minutes ago became a roiling, angry maelstrom in pure, unleashed cacophony.

Life is filled with unexpected blows.

Things are sunny and pleasant, and we loll happily in our unwary hours. Then out of the blue, the skies darken, the storm threatens, and we are caught unawares. Examples abound: the day of 9-11; a cancer diagnosis; an accident; a death.  There seems nowhere to take shelter. Nowhere to turn. Nowhere to hide, or huddle.  Life’s storms can be terrifying, and sometimes they pile up and train down on us one after another.

All I can say is that with perfect predictability, all storms pass. In our canoe, after 30 long minutes of hanging on by our fingertips to the overhead girders, the tempest grudgingly moved on, leaving the river to calm its nerves, the trees dripping with diamonds, and a permeating whiff of fresh-bathed forest in every direction- abrupt silence, achingly beautiful crystal lighting, and a newly-birthed loveliness.

God himself set up the physical laws that create storms. He also has his reasons for allowing them to roil our lives.

But, no matter what assails us, God works only good for those who love him.  He is always for us, so that the storms of trouble and hardship cannot separate us from his love.

Not storms. Not evil. Not hate. Nothing high, nothing low, nothing in all of creation can separate us from how much God loves us.*  The most oft-written phrase in the Bible is,
“Do not be afraid.”

In a storm?  Let God be your bridge. Your shelter. Your hope. It’s going to be all right.  Don’t be afraid. Just hang on and let it blow.

~J.A.P. Walton

* loose paraphrase of Romans chapter 8 in the Bible

adventure, Affirmation, beauty, Blue Skies, Creation, Fog, God, Growing Up, Home, Lake Michigan, Lessons from the Wilderness, Life's Storms, Nature, Outdoor Adventures, Risk Taking, sailing, Uncategorized

Safely Into Port

This Side of the River

A peculiar delight of my childhood summers in northern Michigan involved the dueling foghorns of the Coast Guard stations in Frankfort and at Point Betsie. The old fog signals were automatically activated when sensors detected fog.

All through a foggy night, the two lighthouses would sing their duet, the throaty bass booooommm from Frankfort followed 30 seconds later by a nasal middle F note from the Point.

Big ships, obscured in the mist, would echo back with their own howls accompanied by their thrumming propellers. Whenever the horns were bleating at dawn, my brother and I could lazily roll over, cozy in the cottage blankets, sleepily glad because there would be no 9:30 a.m. swimming lessons today.

Just such a day occurred last week, when I had a dozen things on my to-do list, but awoke to the musical thrill of the foghorns.  I rolled onto one side to enjoy the concert, secretly glad that I would not waste a “good beach” day on so many errands. As I rolled, however, I could feel the sun on my face. What in the world? Why would the fog signals be singing out if the sun was out?  Sure enough, it was a clear morning with just a hint of mist on the far horizon.

The foghorns lied.

It turns out that, over the last decade, the US Coast Guard turned its automatic coastal warning system into one that is, instead, an on demand system for mariners.  It means that any sailor, or fisherman, or tugboat captain can activate the coastal foghorns from the cockpit of their boat.

Now, I find it disorienting to know that it can be densely foggy and the signals won’t sing. Or bright and clear yet the horns are bleating. It robs one of the assurance that things are as they should be. We can no longer rely on the signals to tell us the weather. Talk about getting your signals crossed!

It brings to mind a scary crossing in thick, disorienting fog that we undertook on a sailboat across Lake Ontario when we were newly married. The captain had paid us to help him crew his new boat from the Toronto shipyards, across Lake Ontario, and through the locks of the Welland Canal. He needed to get his boat into Lake Erie, and we needed the money. But, we should not have been out in that fog. It was my job to stand at the bow with a tight grip on the fore-stay (I am unsure, had I fallen over, if they would have been able to find me in that fog), and blow the air horn- one prolonged blast at two-minute intervals to indicate we were underway by engine.  Perhaps it would have been less nerve-wracking had we had the ability to summon the coastal signals at will.

Today’s onboard navigation systems make being fogbound a less daunting circumstance. Even so, I take great comfort in hearing a foghorn trill on a truly foggy day.

It is a lot like life; we can rarely see what’s ahead, and we often feel we are just barely muddling through, but we can have confidence that God will see us safely into port. He may even be calling to us on a sunny day.

~J.A.P. Walton

 

 

adventure, Affirmation, Blessings, Blue Skies, childhood, Creation, death, Growing Up, Nature, Risk Taking, sailing, Uncategorized

Unbounded Joy

This Side of the River

Last week I sailed my new little dory for the first time.  It was heavenly. Until the wind died that is. My one-hour sail turned into a 4-hour battle to move even one foot forward.  I know. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from being becalmed;

I can easily point out life stations in which discontent and a slovenly spirit toyed with my well-being.

Still. Just one brief hour skimming across the blue deeps, trimming sail and being consumed with the watery, foaming song of the bow slicing through the water was enough to make my re-entry into the world of sailing a delight I will never forget; an unbounded joy.

I grew up sailing an old Grumman aluminum dinghy that was my mother’s first boat. It was slow and stable, not good in light winds. When I was 12, she bought a new, fiberglass Butterfly, a beautiful, sleek turquoise boat, sail number 4607. Oh how I loved that Butterfly! It could nose ably into the wind, rising up onto the lee gunnel in a gallop across the water, straining like a racehorse to run fast. At 14, I was allowed to sail it alone, and it was then that I discovered the singular joy of a solo sail, where all the conversation is in your own head, and the music is orchestrated by God Himself. Sun. Wind. Crystal blue, cold, inviting water. Freedom and solitude.  Bliss.

Until one day at the age of 16 when I made a near-fatal error in judgment about the wind. I had been sailing a little recklessly, to be sure. I was experienced, had righted a tipped boat many times by myself, but on this day, when a gust took me and the boat right over, the boat quickly turtled, a term used to describe the mast sinking from parallel to the water to pointing directly down to the bottom of the lake. Butterfly masts take in water like a big straw, so once turtled, they are hard to right. On this day, as I slid across the fiberglass down the lee side of the boat to be dumped in the water, the tiller extension (a long bar that swivels off the end of the tiller to allow the sailor extra reach for hiking out) somehow slid under the shoulder seam of my life jacket.

As I kicked to free myself from underneath the boat, I was dismayed to learn that I was, in effect, tightly trapped to the boat deck. Of course, I was wearing my contacts and had my eyes closed (dumb).

I fumbled around long enough to realize that my life jacket was ironically going to kill me.

So, I unzipped it, scrambled loose, and burst to the surface to cling like wet laundry across the placid and welcoming big white underbelly of the boat. That incident frightened me, no doubt.

Until last week, I never again sailed a boat solo,

and I had very little trust when sailing with my husband that he would keep the boat upright and not dump me into the dark and deep waters of Crystal Lake. I spent years dreaming about sailing my own boat, but the doubt would hold me back. The Butterfly was eventually sold, and we went through a few iterations of sturdy little day cruisers for our family- the Flying Scot, the Wayfarer. They were too big for me to sail alone, and the gnawing desire to sail something small and safe kept growing.  I chose the 12’ dory because of its stability, and because when there is no wind it can be sculled for good exercise. The uncanny thing is that its tiller is too short, so we are building an extension- a nice smooth teak one without the T-shaped butt that can tangle in a life jacket.

Last week’s sail was fraught with a kind of humiliating comedy because I ended up needing to be towed in about an hour before dark (after refusing a tow 2 hours earlier with unexpectedly stubborn pride). But before the wind died, that sail was also a victory of will over fear, of returning to an important piece of my development from child into adult. It welcomed me back to my first memories of the power of the wind, the beauty of the white sail kissing the deep blue sky, and the sounds and smells of the water frothing its glad tidings underneath the bow of the boat.  Peace. Freedom. Delight. Solitude. I’ve only just begun to make up for the 40 years I missed out there.

~J.A.P. Walton

Starting August 1, WordPress will no longer connect with my Facebook profile. To receive future posts in your email feed, please consider clicking on the FOLLOW button! In the meantime, I will experiment with moving to a separate Facebook page dedicated to the blog. Wish me luck! Going on vacation for 2 weeks. More to come. Thanks for reading!

 

 

adventure, Blessings, Blue Skies, canoeing, childhood, Creation, Creator, God, Lake Michigan, Nature, Outdoor Adventures, Uncategorized, Water, wilderness, Wilderness Paddling

When the Blue Blue Sky is Your Cape

This Side of the River

There are particular and rare days in Michigan when a cloudless sky dawns a crisp, brilliant blue. We call that a ‘Michigan Day’ in our family.  Being so close to the lake, we are most used to clouds, fog, and haze. So, when the barometer abruptly rises, the immensity and intensity of a blue-blue-blue dome overhead brings a euphoria that can’t be contained.

We relished two such days this past week.  The heat and humidity were swept away by invisible winds, surrounding our part of the world in that uniquely ultramarine blue so favored by painters like Vincent Van Gogh, who once said that he never tired of the blue sky (as most of his paintings illustrate).

Such a sky, so sharp yet inviting, is alive with birds and insects, an expanse that welcomes all comers with its blue benevolence. These are days that make me want to wrap the sky around my shoulders like a cobalt cape, and remind me of my early childhood when I secretly thought I could fly. Oh to join the birds! I’ve settled for sailing and rowing instead. These kinds of days are energizing too. Maybe that is because of all the colors of the visible spectrum, the blue rays have the most energy. As a result, the blues are also the most easily scattered by atmospheric particles, thus we see a generally all-blue sky on days of unfettered sun.

In summer, the Walton brothers haunt the barometer with quiet intensity for these extraordinary days where water and sky are twins, when winds and waves are steady, the sun boundless, and the itch to paddle strong.  This time, they canoed from Point Betsie lighthouse to Otter Creek, just south of the Sleeping Bear (and back), a trip of about 20 miles. They were able to raft their Kruger canoes together and sail with the westerly wind most of the way, mesmerized by the sights, smells, and sounds that accompany a hearty day on the water.

When the wind moves you under the yellow eye of the sun, with that expansive ultramarine sky reflected in the cold, cobalt waters, it would seem that it might make you feel small and insignificant. Not so! Your heart swells in an inexplicably spacious way when riding upon the deeps with the sky around your shoulders.

It is like drinking bottomless draughts of beauty from the wellspring of the cosmos.

Some call it a high. For a time, you can understand that this is how God meant us to experience his Creation and appreciate that he gave us all this to enjoy and care for.

In my camp days, we sang a song about blue skies. I leave it with you as a benediction.

May all of your days bloom like daisies in the sun. May you always have stars in your eyes. May you not stop running, not until your race is won. May you always have blue skies.

~J.A.P. Walton

Photo Credit: MLWalton 7/7/2018