goings on in the Episcopal church

The diocese of South Carolina, along with two other Episcopal dioceses, today asked Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to assign them under some other authority than the recently elected presiding bishop. I am very thankful I am in the diocese of Upper South Carolina, not the diocese of South Carolina. I had heard several years ago that the diocese of South Carolina was ready to jump ship, but then I heard that it wasn't really going to happen because then they would lose their retirement benefits. The church buildings belong to the diocese, not to the individual churches, which gives individual churches an incentive not to leave, but for a whole diocese to leave gets around that. I wonder what they are hoping to do about their retirement benefits.

Our bishop in upper South Carolina has done a good job of trying to keep everyone together--his classic statement after Gene Robinson was confirmed as bishop was that it is going to take us a hundred years before we know what the right answer is. He's taking the same kind of approach now, and while I would wish he had voted differently, this is South Carolina and we easily could have someone a whole lot worse.

There is a diocesean meeting Saturday at 10 am at Christ Church in Greenville and I thought for a while today maybe I ought to go. I've been avoiding the issue, feeling that if I speak my views I will do more harm than good because what is needed is moderation, not impassioned attacks on those who are fighting against where the church is going. What I would want to say, what struck me most strongly about Gene Robinson (and can be said also about the new presiding bishop), is that the church cannot afford to reject the leaders that God is raising up. What has really irked me is that those who are leaving the Episcopal church make it sound like it is all about ordaining gays, when in fact many of them reject the ordination of women as well.

I don't get involved in politics here, except sometimes to work for a candidate for city council--it is just too depressing. I use all my strength to be moderate with my students, knowing that if I can do the most good by leading them a few steps, not by spouting a radical view they will reject. I don't think I can bear to listen to those who oppose the national leadership at the diocesean meeting.

home again

To find no telephone service. The city is replacing the sewer line that runs through our back yard, so our back yard (viewed from our second story porch) looks like:

Our back yard is the location of the transition between deep pipe that they replace by pipe-bursting (digging underground) and a shallower section that will be replaced via an open trench. They are currently working on another deep section and then will come back and do the open trench work. So our house is a major work area and staging area: our front yard at the moment (today is Sunday) looks like:

The telephone repairman is here and says that the sewer workers must have cut the telephone wire. They've already cut the wire connecting our satellite TV antenna to the house at least twice. Our kids discovered they could get a weak wireless internet signal from the next-door neighbor's.

pictures from the rail trail

Today I rode highway 28 to Orleans

and then the rail trail back to Chatham
There are only a few tunnels and bridges on the trail

mostly stop signs for road crossings. The trail runs not along the coast but inland through the woods, but there are several ponds

and cranberry bogs

The Harwich section runs near downtown Harwich along a graveyard

but the rest is woods

sandbars

Today our boat was fixed and the sun was out and we hit the tide just right to walk on the sandbars outside of Stage Harbor.

Not as much sea life, but the sandbars were beautiful. And we did catch a particularly active hermit crab:

On the way home we saw a pair of osprey that are apparently trying to nest just past our next door neighbor:

I got to forget for most of the day that it was my birthday.

riding the rail trail

The through roads on Cape Cod tend to be pretty trafficky even this time of year, so I only ride my bike on roads such as Rte. 28 from Chatham to Orleans if I get out early. Today it rained in the morning and I decided to go for a bike ride after lunch, so I took the rail trail shown in purple on the map below.

The Harwich extension now goes all the way to Chatham, so I started at our house about two miles from the Chatham end of the trail. I rode to the end in Welfleet and back, for 56.7 miles round trip. Except for a few rough sections of trail, particularly the oldest section of the trail in Nickerson State Park, it is easy riding, and lovely to be away from roads entirely. It isn't that fast, because one has to stop a lot for road crossings and slow down for little kids on bikes and dog walkers, but it is mostly flat.

It was grey and foggy when I left Chatham, but once I got to Brewster it was sunny, not a cloud in the sky. When I got back to about the same place it turned grey and foggy, and I thought uh-oh, here come those predicted late afternoon thunderstorms. Then I remembered how the weather can behave in Chatham--turns out it was grey and foggy all afternoon in Chatham, even when it was sunny in Orleans 10 miles away. There used to be a weather station on Morris Island and it was supposedly the foggiest place on the east coast.

The bike I ride here is a 1970s 10 speed:

It wasn't a fancy bike to start with, but it has some retro charm, particularly as I don't mind friction shifters, having used them when I rode a lot in college. And it has been a long time since there were Peugeot bikes sold in the United States that said:

Cape Cod Mousetrap

A local photographer has his own aerial photographs of the changing beaches going back to the 1940s. But what I ordered was a T shirt for my son with the legend Cape Cod Mousetrap. The photographer's wife said she heard the story from a local who came in to ask if Kelsey still had his old negatives. It seems that many years ago this local's mother was going to make a batch of chowder in the morning, and she left the "chowder 'hogs" out over night. These must have been quahogs a lot bigger than those you see today

When quahogs go to sleep their shells open a little, and it seems that a mouse recognized food and stuck its head into the shell. The first thing quahogs do when disturbed is clamp their shells closed. The photograph on the T-shirt shows a mouse body hanging from a big quahog.

wedding

Part of our family summer property gets rented out for weddings a couple of times a year to help pay the taxes. Today's wedding is a lesbian couple. My daughter and I watched a little of it from our upstairs window and it was impressive to hear the person officiating say: "By the powers invested in me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I now pronounce you wed." I've been away from that world long enough that I wondered what they would wear--it turned out to be more-or-less matching dresses, one in pale pink and one in pale blue. In the picture below one bride is behind the other, and one of their friends is speaking.