My apologies to whomever wrote the above-mentioned book; I’m stealing title only, not content, as we were neither near a Rascal Faire, whatever that might be, nor dancing. However, we were at a town fair, at Vernon, which is maybe 7 miles out of Red Bay, primarily because a guy came into the customer lounge yesterday and passed out a flyer about their hundredth-year anniversary celebration, and he made it sound like fun, so we went.

Interesting is closer to the truth than fun. The faire itself was tiny, consisting of a number of smallish booths selling cotton candy, ribs, T-shirts from the local bank, the same leather goods that every leather-goods-vendor in the US sells, getting them all from the same sweatshop in Taiwan, I suppose, a party train to take the kids around the square-block-wide event and a big shed which housed the main attraction. It looked like a group of young people either recovering from the effects of hypnotism, practicing a strange version of Tai-Chi, or, I supposed, something else, so I asked…and, yes, it was something else, it was “our church group teens, doing an interpretive dance about a young girl who has lost her way and was found”.

This fit in pretty well with the fact that, passing Vernon, we had seen maybe 15 different Baptist churches and, there on a hill directly above the fair, was yet another one. So I could get their sponsoring the event. And, although it was a bit much for my tastes, it sure beats the kids sitting home in front of a computer game.

This-all made me even more conscious of the number of churches around when we left via a different route. Even though we were studiously trying to get ourselves lost, taking in succession Alabama and Mississippi highways 19/23/24/74/78 and 11 to get back to Red Bay, we found good roads everywhere and churches at every hilltop. The most numerous by far were the Free Will Baptists, followed in relatively short order by the various “Congregations”…Congregation of Jesus Christ, Congregation of Hamilton, Congregation of Moderate Christians, some of this I’m making up but you get the drift. The Congregations seemed also to be Baptists, just different sects from the Free Will-ers. Beyond them there are certainly enough other Christian denominations and virtually no other churches besides Christian. I wonder what the Jews do to worship in this part of the world?