Thoughts for the Road - #64

Life must be lived forward, but understood backward.- Kierkegaard

Vicki Keith - Distance Swimmer

Vicki Keith was the first to swim across all five Great Lakes (completed in a two month period) in 1988.

Thoughts for the Road - #34

Running creates a sense of balance in my life. It's a great feeling to just get out and lose myself in a run. - Dr. Jill Biden, Second lady and college professor

Thoughts for the Road - #83

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. ~Steven Wright

Blessed Augustine of Hippo

Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.
— Augustine of Hippo

Thoughts for the Road - #78

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. ~Paul Dudley White

Rubies Heading South

To avoid the cold, and the scarcity of food when flowers stop blooming and insects stop flying, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds go south. Some adult males start migrating south as early as mid-July, but the peak of southward migration for this species is late August and early September. By mid-September, essentially all of the Ruby-throated at feeders are migrating through from farther north, and not the same individuals seen in the summer. This is difficult to see, since they all look alike, but has been proven by banding studies. The number of birds migrating south may be twice that of the northward trip, since it includes all immature birds that hatched during the summer, as well as surviving adults.

For a hummer that just hatched, there's no memory of past migrations, only an urge to put on a lot of weight (see above) and fly in a particular direction for a certain amount of time, then look for a good place to spend the winter. Once it learns such a route, a bird may retrace it every year as long as it lives. The initial urge is triggered by the shortening length of sunlight as autumn approaches, and has nothing to do with temperature or the availability of food; in fact, hummingbirds migrate south at the time of greatest food abundance. When the bird is fat enough, it migrates. It's not necessary to take down feeders to force hummingbirds to leave, and in the fall all the birds at your feeder are already migrating anyway. If you remove your feeder, birds will just feed elsewhere, but may not bother to return to your yard the next year. I recommend continuing to maintain feeders until freezing becomes a problem.

Many people notice that adult males migrate earlier than females, because in the last month or so there may be no birds with red throats at feeders. However, remember that immature Ruby-throats of both sexes look much like their mothers. Young males often have a "5 o'clock shadow" of dark throat feathers in broken streaks, and many develop one or more red gorget feathers by the time they migrate. Immature females may have much lighter streaks in their throats, but no red.

There is evidence that fewer Ruby-throats cross the Gulf in fall than in spring, most instead following the Texas coast back into Mexico. Perhaps the hurricane season is a factor, and the genes of many birds with a tendency to fly over water were lost at sea during storms.

There are many more questions than answers about hummingbird migration. Until technology provides radio transmitters small enough for a 3-gram hummingbird to carry safely, banding is the best tool to collect data on individual birds. But since only a few dozen people in North America - almost all of them amateurs like me - are licensed to handle hummingbirds, progress is slow and the odds of recapturing a banded bird are very low.

Thoughts for the Road - #23

Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a Lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest Gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a Lion or a Gazelle... when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.

90 Years of Women's Suffrage

The 19th amendment guarantees all American women the right to vote. Achieving this milestone required a lengthy and difficult struggle; victory took decades of agitation and protest. Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change of the Constitution. Few early supporters lived to see final victory in 1920.

Beginning in the 1800s, women organized, petitioned, and picketed to win the right to vote, but it took them decades to accomplish their purpose. Between 1878, when the amendment was first introduced in Congress, and August 18, 1920, when it was ratified, champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly, but strategies for achieving their goal varied. Some pursued a strategy of passing suffrage acts in each state—nine western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912. Others challenged male-only voting laws in the courts. Militant suffragists used tactics such as parades, silent vigils, and hunger strikes. Often supporters met fierce resistance. Opponents heckled, jailed, and sometimes physically abused them.

By 1916, almost all of the major suffrage organizations were united behind the goal of a constitutional amendment. When New York adopted woman suffrage in 1917 and President Wilson changed his position to support an amendment in 1918, the political balance began to shift.

On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and 2 weeks later, the Senate followed. When Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the amendment on August 18, 1920, the amendment passed its final hurdle of obtaining the agreement of three-fourths of the states. Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the ratification on August 26, 1920, changing the face of the American electorate forever.

Thoughts for the Road - #39

"The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare."
-Juma Ikangaa, 1989 NYC Marathon winner

Full Sturgeon Moon

Full moon names date back to Native Americans, of what is now the northern and eastern United States. The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which each occurred. There was some variation in the moon names, but in general, the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior.

European settlers followed that custom and created some of their own names. Since the lunar month is only 29 days long on the average, the full Moon dates shift from year to year.

The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this month’s moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month.

A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon
or Grain Moon.

Thoughts for the Road - #62

You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.

Thoughts for the Road - #91

Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Kelly, KY - 55 years ago

It started with a drink of water from a country well on a quiet August night in 1955.

What followed was an event that would give the tiny community of Kelly, Ky., its own permanent chapter in the nation’s paranormal history books and haunt one family’s reputation for years.

Now, a member of that family, one too young to have a role in their 1955 battle against beings believed to have come from another world, has come forth to offer the family’s personal version of their alien encounter — the true story.

“Alien Legacy” is one of three books currently nearing release from Princeton resident Geraldine Sutton Stith.

The book, a non-fiction account of the Aug. 21, 1955, alien encounter at the home of her father in Kelly, should be released in about six months, she said.

A novel, “Rollan,” written at the same time but unrelated to the Kelly incident, should be released next month, she said, and a third book, a children’s book called “My Guardian Angel?” is also in development.

The most personal of the tales, though, deals with the story of Stith’s father, Elmer “Lucky” Sutton, his family and friends, who unwittingly became a part of UFO history a half-century ago.

“I just felt like it was time to bring it back out and make it right,” she said.

“The real story had not been told. I kept thinking to myself, ‘This could be done better.’”

Stith herself did not find out about the Kelly incident until she was 7 or 8, more than a decade after the incident happened.

The family spoke little of their encounter, Stith said, attributing their silence as a reflection of both the ridicule they endured for reporting the incident and the fear that lingered long after the encounter was over.

Of her father: “It terrified him. You could tell by the look on his face, in his eyes. He just went pale,” Stith said. “He didn’t want to talk about it no more.”

And her grandmother, who was also in the home at the time: “My grandma was very religious. She would not lie if her life depended on it. She seen what she saw that night.”

What the family saw, Stith said, were a small group of glowing humanoid creatures, about 3.5 feet tall, with oversized heads and arms that nearly reached the ground.

Eleven people were in the Sutton house that night: Lucky Sutton and his wife; Billy Ray Taylor (a family friend) and his wife, Stith’s uncle J.C. Sutton and his wife; Stith’s grandmother, O.P. Baker (another friend of the family), and three small children.

The incident began when Taylor went out to the well to get a drink of water, between 7:30 and 8 p.m.

As the story goes, he saw a disk streak across the sky, with “all colors of the rainbow streaming behind it,” Stith said.

Taylor returned to the home and told the others what he had seen, but, with a reputation for being a joker, his story was laughed off and dismissed.

Soon, though, the barking and howling of the family dog outside alerted them that something was approaching, and the men, upon looking outside, saw the glowing beings coming closer.

Lucky Sutton, the patriarch, armed himself with a .12-gauge shotgun, and Taylor grabbed a .22-caliber pistol.

One went to the front door, and one went to the back, and when one of the beings approached, the first shot was fired.

“They fought those little things for almost three hours,” Stith said.

The aliens seemed relatively unaffected by the shots, though. They would roll from the impact and then retreat into the nearby woods, despite taking direct hits from the shotgun and pistol.

“These are country boys. They knew how to hunt,” she said.

When the men went outside to investigate, an alien hand reached down from the roof of the house and touched Taylor’s hair. It too, was fired upon, but floated off the roof and ran away, unfazed.

When they saw their weapons were having no effect on the creatures, the men and their families piled into their vehicles and raced to Hopkinsville to alert authorities.

The investigation, though, did not produce evidence of any alien presence. A small, luminous pool was reported on the ground, but apparently, no samples were taken, Stith said.

A U.S. Air Force investigation included the Kelly case in Project Blue Book, perhaps the most famous government study of UFO phenomena.

For Stith, though, the knowledge that her family, especially her father, believed in the reality of the encounter makes it real to her.

The media circus surrounding the incident placed a stigma around the family, she said, too often portraying them as uneducated hillbillies prone to delusion and out to bring attention to themselves.

“My daddy would not have put himself in a situation like that,” she said. “He was too serious. You did not laugh at that man.”

Neighbors would later report seeing strange lights in the sky, and in the woods, that evening, she said, but kept their mouths shut at the time.

“Everyone was afraid to say anything that they had seen that night,” she said, “because of what that family went through.”

Despite the ostracism, the family stuck to its story, giving it that much more credibility.

Publishing “Alien Legacy,” Stith said, will help reinforce that credibility, in an age when belief in extraterrestrial life is more acceptable.

“Now, I think things are different,” she said. “People are more open-minded.”

Stith began working on the book soon after last year’s festival commemorating the Kelly encounter.

Cat Nights Begin

The term “Cat Nights” harks back to a rather obscure old Irish legend concerning witches and the belief that a witch could turn herself into a cat eight times, but on the ninth time (August 17), she couldn’t regain her human form. This bit of folklore also gives us the saying, “A cat has nine lives.” Because August is a yowly time for cats, this may have prompted the speculation about witches on the prowl in the first place.

Now I Walk in Beauty

Now I walk in beauty
Beauty is before me
Beauty is behind me
Above me and below me
Around me and within me.


Now I walk in beauty
Beauty is before me
Beauty is behind me
Above me and below me
Around me and within me.


Now I walk in beauty
Beauty is before me
Beauty is behind me
Above me and below me
Around me and within me.


Now I walk in beauty
Beauty is before me
Beauty is behind me
Above me and below me
Around me and within me.


Now I walk in beauty
Beauty is before me
Beauty is behind me
Above me and below me
Around me and within me.


Now I walk in beauty
Beauty is before me
Beauty is behind me
Above me and below me
Around me and within me.