I was six when our family moved north to a suburb of Detroit. My parents and grandparents were all from the area and they wanted us to be raised there, closer to extended family. In Michigan, we’d be grounded in a solid midwestern and very Presbyterian way of life. One of the first things our father did after we arrived there was to drive along the road adjacent to Lake St. Clair. St. Clair is a part of the Great Lakes story that takes place between Lake Huron and the Huron River to the north and the Detroit River which flows towards Lake Erie to the southeast. It’s the one place in Michigan where you are slightly north and west of Canada. By Michigan standards, St. Clair is literally a little fish in a big sea, but in reality, at the widest part of the lake you cannot see across. Lake St. Clair can be deceiving – changing from calm and tranquil one day to a boiling foam whipped up by the wind the next. On this particular day, Dad encouraged us to “look across the lake and you might see Canada”. I gazed out the car window, where I could just barely make out a row of greenery across the lake. The edge was dark and it looked fuzzy against the horizon. “Who is over on that side looking back at us?”, Dad asked us excitedly.

The history of the Great Lakes is fascinating. Some think the first settlers were the French explorers, trappers and missionaries who named Detroit and Grosse Pointe, and streets like Gratiot and Cadieux. There are rivers with French names like Au Sable and Pere Marquette. However before the French arrived, there were the Iroquois, Chippewa, Algonquin, Ottawa, and Shawnee Indians, led by the great chiefs, Techumseh and Pontiac. And before the Indians, we were told, were the great glaciers that created the Great Lakes.

Now most school kids in Michigan get back at least to the Indians and some as far back as the glaciers when they learn about the state. But few go all the way back to when the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was a rift of black trap rock coming up through the primordial ooze resulting in semiprecious gemstones and world renowned iron ore deposits. The most beautiful rock formation in the world, in my humble opinion, is the one named BIF, for the Banded Iron Formation, found in the upper peninsula. All of this was eons before the glaciers, and long before our little nuclear family moved back to Michigan.

A book called “Paddle to the Sea”, written and illustrated by Holling Clancy Holling was required reading in grade school. It was and still is, one of my favorite books. The story is about a young Indian boy who carves a wooden canoe with a small version of himself in it and sends it off for an adventure exploring all five Great Lakes. The little wooden boat ends up making it to the St. Lawrence seaway and beyond to the ocean. It was easy to embrace this story because we would paddle in the rivers and could see the freighters making their way across Lake St. Clair. We could hear their somber fog horns at night as we drifted off to sleep. We knew the boats were on the same course as the canoe in the story. From the lumber and iron ore lake freighters, long and skinny in the middle, to the ocean freighters which were shorter and thicker around the middle, we watched the flags and smokestacks pass by on long and slow summer days, and saw the ice-cutters in the winter, churning up a path towards the river.

In school they would show us movies with nerdy-looking stereotypical scientists wearing white coats, bow-ties, and glasses. The science movies were my favorite, especially the one where they implored us to “Imagine, if you will, a world without water!” The best movie of all was the one called “The Rise and the Fall of the Great Lakes.” In this movie, another person in a canoe goes up and down with the lake levels through time, as the glaciers advance and recede across the Great Lakes. It’s a quirky Canadian film, full of visuals showing the impact of man on nature and vice versa. Coincidentally, or maybe not, the teachers thought this movie an appropriate lead-in to studying the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Having at least dunked under or dipped my toes in all five of the great lakes, I can say that my favorite by far is Superior. I am in awe of this lake. Gitchigummi is the stuff of legendary poems. It is an ocean sized lake with ocean scale swells and water so cold your brain freezes swimming in mid-July. The rocks along Superior’s shores and the perfectly preserved shipwrecks also confirm that this is no ordinary lake. The glaciers melted over a deeply faulted synclinal chasm, creating a marvelous body of water like no other in the world. In high school, we backpacked along the Pictured Rocks National shoreline where you can see the change in lake levels sculpted into the cliffs. I spent one summer at Isle Royale National Park. The island is the upside block of that faulted and then tilted, syncline. Differential erosion made beautiful long finger lakes with ridges where the moose like to roam and feast on blueberries along the tops and thimbleberries near the lowland bogs. The island has many interesting features, including one infamous smaller island that is in a lake, on an island, in a lake. Exposed at the Rock Harbor end of the island is the precambrian basaltic trap rock, containing small amygdolites, voids filled with semiprecious gems more commonly known as greenstones. People who arrive at the island by boat usually look greener than the tiny greenstones with sea sickness from the lake swells. People who arrive by float plane just look relieved.

In 1975 I was walking home from high school in blustery November weather. When I arrived home, my mother was watching the news reports from Lake Superior, where twenty-nine imperiled men had lost their lives on the Edmund Fitzgerald. I still remember what those gale force winds did to my face walking home, and how the white caps roared across little old Lake St. Clair. I could not imagine what Superior must have looked like. My friends’ father was the minister at the Mariner’s church in Detroit where as the song accurately portrayed, “the church bell chimed 29 times”. Everyone in Michigan felt the loss, in the wind and in the ice-sharp slivers of gray etched across the sky. The morose and chilling sounds of the Gordon Lightfoot song capture the climate we all felt perfectly.

I went on to study a little about glaciers in college and to marvel at their amazing footprint across the midwest. Rolling hills, beautiful river terraces, dunes, eskers, kames, and drumlins and the irrepressible beauty of the greatest lakes in the world all tell the glacier story better than any book or movie ever could. Empires rise and fall, Indians, trappers, missionaries, settlers, and nuclear familes all come and go. The lakes were there before we arrived and will be there long after we are gone. Immortalized in poems, songs, and childhood memories, their legend lives on.

(lwr Oct 8, 2017)

It was 1963. Our house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains had a creek behind it. One of my earliest memories is that creek. I was three going on four and these seem to be my very first memories. Of course, a carousel slide show could jog me all the way back to age 2 and memories of crawling around under trendy and sleek 1960’s furniture. Listening to Percy Faith and Petula Clark could take me back even further. My three year old memories include scenes of my mother packing us a picnic lunch and sending us off to the woods and creek to explore. And there are scenes in my early memories of being in the back of a car, no seat belt, joyously bouncing in the air as the car went over a hill on the way to the Piggly Wiggly supermarket.

This was the early 1960’s and mothers were accustomed to kids flying around in the car when they went over hills. And sending three year olds off for a day of fun and frolic outside with only their older siblings to watch them was the norm. Mothers were probably close by but we never noticed. My original heroes were the older siblings who seemed to be authorities on everything from snapping turtles to gravity and swingset dynamics: “don’t swing too high!”; to health and welfare: “don’t eat the sand in the sandbox!”; to hydrodynamics: “don’t go to the place where the creek connects to the James River!”. The James River represented everything unknown and dangerous in our little world. It was the same river that made the rust in the bathtub, the same river that stole our little creek and sent it to the ocean.

When we weren’t playing in the creek we would go on family vacations to the ocean and dig, dig, dig, until we reached more water! Then we’d lie down in the surf and clean all the sand off and head back to digging again. You shouldn’t eat the sand at the beach either, but we probably did. And we stopped being curious about the James River and rust in the bathtub because the ocean bathtub was huge, with waves, and sand dollars, and shells, and crabs and snails.

Flash forward to 1980 and I’m in college on a field trip at the Cannon River in Minnesota. We are throwing sticks in the river from a bridge and an unlucky classmate is standing in the river with a current meter and another with a stop watch. Does the stick method give us an accurate reading? I could stay out here all day, measuring and watching this river. I think, it’s like being three again. We meticulously take notes, and gather sediment samples for drying and sieving. When we get back to the lab we will make cross sections and river profiles, and compute sediment load, sorting, and other parameters.

I am carried back again to my early memories when we went to the creek and found a good rock to sit on for lunch and built dams and bridges, and sent leaves and sticks downstream to a fateful journey towards the mighty and scary James River. The voices of my classmates fade and I am transported back, my siblings shouting up and down the creek as we find rocks, and sticks, and bugs and treasures. In my memory, the creek dances with us and shimmers, and acts like a mirror, glowing on our faces. I can imagine us watching our little creek as it carries green leaves, then red, orange, yellow, and brown, all off to embellish the picture we have colored in our minds of James River water.

The leaves fell and 1963 was just about over we when wandered into the living room one day to find our German babysitter who we loved more than the creek, crying, the tears streaming down her cheeks. I sort of remember touching her face and tracing the route the tears made. She gathered us in her arms and told us a great man had died. The little creek ran all the way down her face, presumably on its way to the mean and mighty James River. We watched silently. My siblings remember the event better than I do, but what made the biggest impression on me as a three year old who was almost four, was the little three year old boy on the TV staring back at me, saluting bravely. I don’t recall what my parents said, I just remember that was a time when even our trendy and sleek living room was swallowed up by the outside world, and our faces glowed from the TV . The following years we would go back to the creek, to the ocean, and beyond. And every year the picture of the brave boy would get clearer for me. In the same way I learned to appreciate the complexity of rivers and hydrodynamics, I appreciate now the journey our little creek represented, as it gathered up its nerve and tumbled over the rocks carrying sticks and leaves, and a generation of kids like us.

(lwr Oct 7, 2017)

My story begins the day I was born, or maybe well before that.  I have no Y chromosone.  Neither did my mother. Neither do any of my female friends, my daughter, or my sister.  We’re all X’s.  Now I know that nature is more complex than this, but for the most part, humans  either have two X’s and are female or an X and a Y and are male.  This is who I am, female, with X’s.   Do not misunderstand.  I like who I am, I like being female, I like that I can cry at movies, and give birth, and drink wine with my friends,  go shopping without apologizing, and that I was never required to do the same amount of push ups as guys during the President’s Physical Fitness Challenge.  I am happy with my lot in life and the fact that I have no Y has not limited my freedom as it does for many other women in the world.  That said, every now and then, I am bluntly reminded that not having a Y means I have less importance or at the very least, less clout.

At work there was an astute colleague who once said, what we need is “borrowed clout”.  At work, men and women were generally equal as long as they got the job done, and as long as they had “clout”, could get others to do things too.  Clout can come from hard work, from talent, from having a good reputation, from a good track-record, from reciprocity, from position, from luck, and unfortunately, in some cases, from having the right chromosomes.  I worked in a male-dominated industry and some of this comes with the territory. Some men and women have quiet clout.  Both men and women can lose their clout because their mouths get them into trouble.  There is no gender requirement for clout, until there is.

Yesterday on the news I watched a sports figure apologizing profusely for suggesting a women sportscaster lacked knowledge in her field.  I saw the offense right away.  I also saw the age-old criticism of “she’s too sensitive” and the observation coming from all corners, that some of this comes with the territory of being an X-X among X-Y’s. I personally thought the apology was good and sincere and that the incident was small but very representative of life in the X-Y realm. The man also realized that as a father with daughters, he needed to change, to allow them to be all they can be without risk of bias.

There were many times in my career when I was asked to get coffee or asked to order more paper for the copier, which were not my job.  I would be asked where the boss was, even when I was the boss. While these were for the most part, honest mistakes, they were biases based on assumptions about women’s roles and capabilities. Women and men are different.  Men are (in general) physically stronger.  I cannot carry a couch up a flight of stairs, and I am okay with that.  But I can hike up a mountain and program a computer.  At one point, I was proficient in  four programming languages.  There are people who assume I cannot turn on a computer because of my gender. Some of them think that older women should  not climb a mountain, they should be knitting doilies. I am pretty good at that too. Most of this is not intended to insult, its just that they have not met someone like me before. We all have biases, some of them grounded in truth, and some grounded in ignorance.

When I encounter these limitations – people who won’t answer my email until I add a professional title, people who won’t give me a good appointment time, but will give my husband one because “he works”, it’s irritating and frustrating, but when it happens I know it’s a bias. In these times, I “borrow clout”.  I either make my name sound generic and androgynous, or I add my husband’s name to the appointment request.  When I was young and single and needed my car fixed at the shop, I invented a fake boyfriend who was good with cars. When I did this, I not only had better service, but got a better price. I’m a terrible liar, so maybe the shop just took pity on me.   Its annoying but a fact of life that the world does not treat people equally.  We all need to “borrow clout”  at times to get attention.  When traveling for work I have had business men cut right in front of me in line, only to find me sitting next to them in the elite section of the plane.  Sometimes clout can feel like sweet justice.  Now that I have retired I have no more clout with the airlines.  The only thing worse than having  no clout, is having it, getting used to it, then losing it!

So all of this is to say that although I know men and women are different and are called to have different roles in life, there are many women who are good at “men’s work” and vice versa. The males in my household are better cooks than I am.  I am better at cleaning and organizing. When my son is home he mows the lawn.  When my husband is traveling I mow the lawn. In our house, there is no “men’s work or women’s work”, there is “just work”. My husband is better at handling spiders and mice, and better at installing dishwashers than I am. I take care of ants and weeds.  In fact, I cannot do many of the chores my husband is proficient at. It might mean he is more skilled than I am, but it does not mean he is more important.  That’s where bias comes in.  If you need to “borrow clout”  to be important as a human being, something is wrong with the universe. Yet we see it all the time.

Jesus had a very impactful life. But he started with no clout in a world that was likely biased against his mother and his father. In Jesus’s world there was a serious bias against first born sons. Jesus didn’t need clout because he trusted God in all things. People were so threatened by his brand of humble power they crucified him. And still, centuries later, he has more “clout”, more impact, than the average world leader or pop icon. Jesus didn’t have to lie or boast or add names to his request to get things done – his directions and his influence came from the Almighty. In God’s world there is no need for us to distinguish ourselves based on accomplishment or traditional roles. We are important to God because we “are”. While this gives me peace, it also makes me realize that losing clout (or no longer needing it) challenges the way I think about the world. For starters, I should no longer look for bias. Rather, I should train myself to look past it. I should not borrow “clout”, but following the example of Jesus, I should strive to personify it, to deserve it. Jesus earned a clout that comes from being a decent and extraordinary human being, through faith in God. Here was someone with no clout who eliminated bias and made more difference than anyone with it. The lesson he taught was also sweet justice: watch who you cut in line in front of, they may wind up sitting next to you. In God’s world, there is no bias, no need for clout, no need to jump the queue. We all have the opportunity to stand in Group 1. Every time I board a plane, I think of the parable of the workers in the vineyard: “So the last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16, ESV). There are many interpretations of this parable, but to me it means that clout might work differently in Heaven than it does here on earth.
(lwr Oct 6, 2017)