Autumn Hiking on the Cumberland Trail

By Barbara Stagg

George Zepp and I hiked a 5-mile segment of the 9.8-mile Lawson Mountain portion of the Cumberland Trail. As you can see, fall color was at its peak. It's one of the more remote sections of the Cumberland Trail and is in Scott County in vicinity of the old Norma and Smoky Junction communities.

I'm writing a trail guide for the Lawson portion for a guide book on the entire Cumberland Trail that should come out sometime next year. Various Tennessee Trails Association members are doing the same for the many other segments of the trail that eventually will stretch from Cumberland Gap to near Chattanooga.

John and I have also "adopted" the Lawson Mountain trail for maintenance/upkeep and would love to hear from anyone interested in an occasional workday in a beautiful and remote area.

  Photos by Barbara Stagg

Erickson Talk Scheduled at UT
Christians Under Occupation

By Peter Erickson

I'll be giving a talk on November 14 at the I-House at 7 p.m. Eastern on the UT campus. Here's a short summary of the talk:

I will give a talk, accompanied by slides, about my journey through Palestine and Israel earlier this year. From February 20 through March 9 of this year, I traveled through the Holy Land as a member of the Northern California Sabeel group, a Palestinian Christian organization dedicating to ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Our group met with the leadership of many organizations (Christian, Muslim and Jewish) and visited a wide range of sites, from a Druze village in the Golan Heights to Bedouin camps in the Negev Desert.

Rather than attempt to cover everything that I saw, I plan to focus on the Palestinian Christian communities that I encountered and on their varying responses to the occupation. I will discuss my visits to the Tent of Nations, where a Christian family is struggling to hold onto its land against all odds, to the Church of the Holy Virgin in Beit Jala, an apparently flourishing parish which, according to its pastor, will most likely vanish within twenty years, to Taybeh, the last Christian village in Palestine, and to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, now a city under siege. I will provide several examples of injustices suffered by Moslems under the occupation and will emphasize that Christians and Moslems, with the essential help of Jewish peace activists, share a common struggle of resistance. Finally, I will briefly discuss Christian Zionism in the light of the above.

A brief bio of the presenter: Peter Erickson. Born in Kampala, Uganda in 1962; B.A., Department of Oriental Languages at UC Berkeley, 1989; M.A., Department of Sociology, UC San Diego, 1992; Chinese-to-English freelance translator from 1992 to the present; currently resides on a hobby farm with his wife and children (when they are not overseas) in Rugby, TN.

Autumn Marches On

By Eric Wilson

I looked out the bedroom window this morning to see the porch roof white with frost.  Out of the bathroom window I saw frost on each car roof and out of the bay window the front yard also white. Our outdoor thermometer read 29. It is definitely the end of a season.

Butternut trees (as we have in front of and behind the house)  have an interesting habit with their leaves. Unlike the walnuts, whose leaves all fell a couple of weeks ago, the butternuts cling to their leaves to the frosty end. So this morning Vi and I ate our breakfasts and watched the golden butternut leaves raining down. Butternuts have a large compound leaf and we noticed that first the side leaflets fall and then finally the central spine with the terminal still attached drops in a slow spiral. A couple of days from now the fallen leaves will have become brittle and crumble easily. A pass over them with the mower and they almost disappear. I can put the mower away for another year.

Photo by Steve Logan

Editor’s Note:  Next Sunday morning, Nov. 6, our time “falls back” as Daylight Savings Time ends.

Historic Rugby Says Thanks

The second (and last) evening of Ghostly Gathering ended on a great note. The sellout crowd enjoyed a beautiful crisp evening under the stars and moon. The sun had come out during the day to dry out the site of the outdoor bonfire. There were lots of good comments from visitors about the decorations in the buildings and throughout the village.

Cheryl Cribbet sent this thanks: “When visitors arrive at the village of Rugby and see the beautiful grounds, the decorations that change with the seasons and the welcoming faces of the staff, they cannot resist falling in love with this historical treasure. The story that is not often told is what happens behind the scenes. To all the staff members and volunteers who care so deeply, work so hard, and give their time and talents – we thank you. Historic Rugby appreciates each and every one of you and truly appreciates your dedication and support.”

Storyteller at the Tabard Inn site, and Rugby's historic library low-lighted for Ghostly Gathering. Don't worry. All of the lights are battery powered.  Photos by Steve Logan. 

This Week at the Café and Commissary

The Café will be having live music on Friday featuring Victory Bluegrass with Wayne Rogers.  Victory Bluegrass plays a bluegrass blend and is from the Scott County area.

One of the new items at the Commissary is some beautiful jewelry made of silverware. It's crafted just a few miles from Rugby by Elaine and Linda Asberry of Armathwaite. 

Rita Myers models some of the jewelry.

BIRTHDAYS

Nov. - 3  Carolyn Bankston and Rick Murphy

Nov. 4 - Bob Young
Nov. 5 - Charles Lovett
Nov. 6 - Jane Beavon

CALENDAR

A display at Spirit of Red Hill of women's neckware  cleverly fashioned from men's ties.

Rugby is in the Eastern Time zone, just barely.

Saturday, Nov. 5 – Community Potluck - 7 p.m. Eastern

Friday, Nov. 11 -- History Night, with Julian Bankston telling the story of the Robbins brickworks. 7:30 p.m. Eastern at the Friendly House behind Christ Church Episcopal. All are invited.

Sunday, Nov. 13 - Christ Church covered dish lunch at noon followed by an old-fashioned Hymn Sing. Rugby Road Methodist Church will be guests. Everyone in the community is invited. Bring your favorite dish to share and then join in for an afternoon of singing, singing, and singing.

Saturday, Nov. 17 – Presentation by writers of book BearsW,  at Johnson Theatre in the Visitor Centre.

Friday, Nov. 25 – Thanksgiving Marketplace

Saturday, Nov. 26 – Book Club - The next book club selection will be the nonfiction book In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Beasts-Terror-American-Hitlers/dp/0307408841. The meeting will be at 7 p.m. at Lisa Donegan's house.

Quilters’ Group - Wednesdays and Saturdays, 2–4 p.m. Eastern, at the Friendly House

Rugby Yoga – Wednesdays, 8:30 a.m. Eastern, at the Friendly House.

NATURE NOTES

Zombies!

 By Linda Konig

Since it's Halloween, I thought I'd write about something gruesome.  You may or may not have thought of it, but Hollywood got a lot of its horror movie ideas from good old Mother Nature.  Of course, the most obvious steal was accomplished simply by magnifying animals to gargantuan proportions and showing them knocking down skyscrapers, grabbing planes and people, etc.  Yawn.  It got more scary when they started showing things like reptilian alien creatures bursting out of people's chests, aliens practicing mind-control over innocent people, etc.  Yes, these more sophisticated concepts also came straight out of Mother Nature's bag of tricks.

In fact, we probably have had some mind-controlled zombies right here in Rugby and the surrounding area this very past summer, but I failed to see them.  Next summer, I hope to get out more at night, say about 9 or 10 o'clock on a July night, to look for these zombies in or near Newbury pond.  That's the time when certain kinds of hairworms will compel their parasitized hosts (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, praying mantis, etc.) to jump into the water and drown themselves.  They would have died shortly anyway because most of their innards will have been eaten away by that time.  Experiments have shown that if a grasshopper, for instance, is rescued quickly from the water before it drowns, it will simply return to the water if allowed to.  Meanwhile the adult hairworms will come out of the dead or dying grasshopper, cricket, or katydid bodies to swim freely about, form Gordian knots of writhing hair-like creatures, and mate.  Then the females will lay gelatinous strings of eggs to start a new generation.

You might be wondering what a hairworm is.  They're commonly called that because they look like long dark hairs.  In times past, people used to see them a lot in horse troughs or cisterns and erroneously thought that they were horse hairs that had somehow changed into worms.  These so-called worms used to cause trouble for horses and cattle that drank the hairworms when they watered at the troughs.  I think there's medication for that these days.  I was surprised to learn that there are about 11 different species of hairworm in the continental U.S.  You can see some homemade movies of them coming out of various insects and animals on the WEB.  To get your Halloween chillbumps, try Googling hairworms and you can watch these homemade movies while simultaneously playing the sound track from your favorite zombie movie. Woo-hoo!

This Week’s Editors: Rick Murphy and George Zepp