Champion News

EDINBURGH—January 9, 2017

Looking out across The Waters of Leith to Arthur’s Seat in the distance on another sunny day in Scotland.

        Good news comes from Champion’s hub that the New Year has begun well and that the weather is on a warming trend.  Lannie Hinote had great adventures getting back to Mountain Village, Alaska.  It seemed like travel took about half her vacation, but the rest was great.  She posted, “I would like to thank all my friends and family for a great Christmas vacation… all that shared ballgames with me…cooked me some suckers and peach pie…let me help them build a gingerbread train…the card games and Fudge…eating out and the relaxing visits…”  She will be back in the summer ready for more fun, but meanwhile, she is teaching and coaching in a place even more rural and remote than Skyline.  She and our wonderful Skyline teachers and staff are doing some of the hard work in the world.  It takes special people to ride loose heard on our children, to instruct them and to give them the tools they need to become good citizens.  The chance to thank a teacher, board member, administrator, cook, maintenance person, or bus driver is one that few Champions will pass up this year.  They know how far a little recognition and encouragement can go.

        Appreciators of Lonesome Dove and Augustus McCrea will be happy to acknowledge the birthday of the actor Robert Duval.  He has played many sympathetic characters and a few bad villains.  It may be news to some that he is married to a lovely Argentinean woman and is an aficionado of the tango.  His birthday was January 5th.  Elvis’s birthday was the 8th of January.  Mr. Eric Stevenson has been singing at The Royal Oak twice a week for more than 30 years and has written a song about an Irish girl who came from Galloway to be with the king.  She became obsessed with Elvis.  It is lively ballad that The Champion News will endeavor to share.  Mr. Stevenson gives permission, but has not yet shared the lyrics.  Along with Elvis on the 8th of January, thoughts often go to Jimmy Driftwood and The Battle of New Orleans.  It is not a very popular song in Great Britain, though the Scots might like it.  Elizabeth Johnston has some fiddle experience and a birthday on the 9th.  Phillip Moses celebrates that day too, watching his flock of chickens grow.  Tom Van Dyke has visited Champion over the years and will hopefully feel like doing it again this year.  His birthday on the 10th.  Teeter Creek herbalist Bob Liebert celebrates on the 11th and so does Wilburn Hutchison, who lives just a couple of hundred yards from where he was born, but that was some while back.  Elmalyn Masters and her brother, Willis, have both passed away now.  Their birthdays were on the 12th and 14th.  Diane Wilbanks celebrates on the 13th.  She has a sweet smile and a big heart.  Norris Woods was like that too, and the 13th was his birthday.  Father Bert Godkin has the 15th as his day.  Miley Schober shares her birthday with Skyline third grader, Aaliya Irby on the 16th.  Skyline Coach Davault celebrates that day too.  Recently a little girl was born and was given the name Ava.  It turns out that her Great Auntie Brook Quiet Timber is celebrating her birthday on the 17th along with Rese Kutz who was four on his birthday last year, also on the 17th.  Happy birthday all you special people.  Know that you are Champions, loved and remembered.

Good music at Betty’s Bluegrass Jam

        News came across the ocean that the Vanzant Bluegrass Jam was canceled last week on account of the weather.  Generally, if school is canceled, the jam is too.  Here in Edinburgh there is a first Thursday of the month bluegrass jam in a posh pub on the low end of the Royal Mile at #1 High Street.  About 8:30 in the evening musicians started drifting in and by 9:00 there were 4 guitars, 4 mandolins, 2 fiddles, 1 base fiddle, 1 dobro, and one banjo playing in Betty’s Bluegrass session.  There were many familiar songs and many new ones to the foreign ear.  They were all played with the enthusiasm and good humor associated with that genre of music.  Erelong, perhaps as soon as in a couple of weeks, there will be videos of this wonderful jam and of other exciting musical times in Fair Edina up on the website at www.championnews.us.  Look for the announcement here.  Look there for a decade’s worth of The Champion News and examples of our sweet local music.  Across the wide Atlantic, friends are enjoying a video of young Dylan Watts with his banjo singing, “I Traced Her Little Footprints in the Snow.”  He is a credit to his Granddad and a joy to the family.

        With 120 more days of winter ahead in the Northern Plains, water protectors in the Standing Rock Sioux camp were grateful to Henry Red Cloud from the Pine Ridge Reservation when he and others installed eleven solar powered furnaces to help the activists stay warm.  They are outside all day and the temperatures have been brutal.  A pipeline leak discovered by a landowner when the electronic monitoring failed in early December had already let 130,000 gallons of the 176,000 gallon spill flow into Ash Coulee Creek which feeds into the Little Missouri River.  They have been able to catch about 40,000 gallons of it, but they say that it will be spring before it is cleaned up.  A spill in September of 2013, which let go 840,000 gallons of oil is still being cleaned up.  That is all right, though.  The Texas company behind the Black Snake says it is ‘safe’ and the archeologist they paid so well to survey the land probably would not mind if the graves of their own grandparents and great grandparents were bulldozed.

        The Edinburgh Tool Library is the UK’s first tool library, promoting sharing as a way of reducing environmental impact.  They lend tools to members for DIY carpentry projects, for gardening, decorating and machine repair so that they do not need to own all the tools.  It is a collaborative approach that makes sense environmentally and it gives members access to over 500 tools without the need to store them, maintain them, or buy them in the first place.  Membership dues are minimal and the young people running the place are full of good ideas like “borrow-learn-give-teach.”  Most of the tools have been donated and there is an active program to have older people with various skills teaching younger people how to do things.  They had an open house on Friday evening with tours of the workshop and offerings of opportunities to volunteer.  It all sounds like good neighboring in Champion.

        Come down to the wide, wild, wooly banks of Auld Fox Creek and meet your fine neighbors.  If it is sunny, stand out on the wide veranda for gander at one of the world’s truly beautiful places.  If it is cold, sit around the old wood stove and listen to your interesting neighbors spin yarns.  Spin your yarn at champion@championnews.us.  “Can’t you hear the night birds crying far across the deep blue sea?  While of those others you are thinking, won’t you sometimes think of me?  Don’t that road look rough and rocky? Don’t that sea look deep and wide?”  Don’t Champion look just like Heaven over there on the Bright Side?

Ducks out on the river.