Fall Trip Rescheduled

The Rebel Rivers Fall 2005 canoe trip will now be November 19 and 20. Is that even a Fall Trip? October was our first choice, but member schedules and the success of the Vanderbilt football team have pushed the date way back. The good news is it will give everyone time to finish their required reading, and we will take our trip at exactly the same time as the book (and it will probably be just as cold):

Chapter 2

When Michaelmas moon was come with warning of winter,

then thought Gawain full oft of his perilous journey.

October is the good month, in a normal year at least. But normality in Southwestern weather is at best a stacking together of extremes, and that was the year the drought broke that had been the norm for seven burning years - from the tree rings, they said, the worst since early Spanish times. Oil money from the cities, looking for a place to invest itself, had kept land from selling quite so cheaply as fat Jack Falstaff's stinking mackerel, but otherwise it would have. No one was certain that the region was not about to become another Middle East, its tenuous fertility transmuted by misuse into desert. Some fundamentalist ministers expressed gratification and said sin had brought it on, and maybe that was so, if in another sense than theirs. . . . But in the spring it broke with tropical flooding rains, and summer was lush with weeds and flowers, and even scrub stocker steers brought show-cattle prices on the hoof, and in October there was rain again, all month long.

With luck, though, November can be all right. . . .

This means the Halloween costume party on the river will have to be cancelled, of course. But the good news is it will be replaced with a riverside Thanksgiving feast. Jim, can we talk you into cooking your famous Trash Can Turkey? And if so, can we use the can for our double bass when you're done?



The alternate date will be November 12, but only if Vanderbilt loses to Richmond and MTSU between now and then. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to schedule this trip on the weekend that the Commodores may clinch their first winning football season in a quarter of a century. The trip is now the same day (November 19) as the Vanderbilt - Tennessee game, which is best experienced on the radio anyway. Or anything else with an on-off button. UT fans on the trip are welcome to listen if they think they can still get reception from their nice wet spot in the Bell Witch Cave. Hey, Roy. Does that yellow Steamboat hat come in orange?

Here at the RRCC Sports Desk, we think the Sunday paper had one of the best football photos we've ever seen. This is what a mechanical engineer looks like when he's scoring three touchdowns:
















By the way, "alternate date" does not mean "rain date". When the levee breaks, we just head to the Superdome: