Happy Labor Day weekend and welcome to an abbreviated version of the newsletter.

This week we’re remembering 9/11, pondering pawpaws and recalling a nourishing childhood in the hills of Eastern Kentucky.

If you haven’t already done so, subscribe and receive the free newsletter in your inbox every Sunday at thewaynetrain.com

- Wayne K.

Everybody of a certain age has a 9/11 story.

This is mine.

I have never been able to stop thinking about them.

Those poor souls, frozen forever by the click of a camera shutter as they fell.

Some tumbled head over feet. Some went down feet first, straight toward the New York asphalt. The North Tower stood 1,368 feet. There was a lot of air under them.

What runs through a person's mind in the last few seconds they have?

Did they think about the family they'd kissed goodbye that morning, on the way to what was supposed to be an ordinary Tuesday at the office?

Did they pray?

Did they find any comfort at all?

Did they even know what had happened to them?

We'll never know. Twenty-five years on, I still get teary thinking about it.

Finally

That's the word I woke up with on September 11, 2001. After almost a year of deadlines, tight-lipped reporters, grumpy pressmen and unhappy subscribers, it was the first day of my vacation.

Osama bin Laden had other plans.

I started with a cup of hot black coffee, settled into the overstuffed recliner in the living room and turned on Imus in the Morning over on MSNBC. I liked the show. Editing the Citizen-Tribune in Morristown, Tennessee, I almost never got to watch it. It was and is an afternoon daily, so our work day usually began about 5 a.m.

It felt good to sit still.

About that same time, four airliners loaded with fuel were lifting off from Logan in Boston, Newark, and Dulles outside Washington. Two hundred forty-six passengers and crew among them.

A few minutes before nine, Imus got cut off by a bulletin out of New York.

Those first minutes were nothing but noise.

Was it an explosion inside the North Tower? Had a small plane wandered into the building? An accident of some kind?

Or was it something else.

We didn't wait long for that answer. While the announcers were still staring at the burning North Tower, millions of us watched a second airplane cross the screen for about a second and disappear into the South Tower.

America was under attack.

I called the newsroom.

Presses normally rolled around noon. So I stood there shaving with one hand and holding the phone with the other, working out a plan with the copy desk editor on duty.

We'd print the regular edition on the regular deadline with whatever we had. Then we'd come back that afternoon with a special edition, something we almost never did.

The internet then was not what it is now. Most people still counted on the newspaper to tell them what happened.

We knew the story was big. We knew it was still moving. And we knew we'd need the extra hours just to make sense of what was coming across the wire.

I drove the two miles to the office with my heart going like a hammer. All I could see was that second plane.

By the time I walked into the newsroom, the South Tower was about to come down. The North Tower followed it.

We stood around the break-room television. Some gasped. Some sobbed. The rest of us just watched.

History, right there in front of us.

And our little paper was going to cover the same story as the New York Times, CBS News and every major outlet on earth.

Heady. And sickening. Both at once.

We started pulling copy — hauling in the Associated Press stories as fast as they moved.

I took a seat at the copy desk. The first pictures were coming across the AP photo wire, shot by some of the best photojournalists in New York. Smoke. Chaos. Debris coming down.

And then the jumpers.

With the flames climbing toward the upper floors and no way down, people were choosing to go out a window rather than let the smoke and fire take them.

We clicked through frame after frame picking what to publish, and nobody at that desk said much of anything.

The worst of them we didn't run.

Terrible tragedy sparked national unity (for awhile)

We got out two editions that day. The first was bulletins and photos. The second went deeper — sidebars on the buildings, on the people trapped inside them, on the ones going up the stairs while everybody else came down.

Both sold out.

In the days and weeks after the deadliest attack on this country since Pearl Harbor, flags started showing up everywhere. Stuck in yards. Draped over porch banisters. Whipping off car antennas going seventy down the interstate.

Alan Jackson sang "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)."

"God Bless the USA" was on every station that had a signal.

I've never seen this country pull together like it did that fall. Before or since. It took the worst day most of us had ever lived through to do it.

Twenty-five years gone now.

The pictures we ran that day, I'd have to look up.

The ones we didn't, I still see.

Wayne Knuckles is a veteran of the newspaper industry and publisher of The Wayne Train. He began his career as a sports writer for his hometown weekly newspaper, The Pineville Sun.

The pawpaws are ready, and half of you have never eaten one.

That's the real Appalachian secret fruit — bigger than a plum, shaped like a stubby potato, hanging low in the understory along creek bottoms and shady hollows where nobody thinks to look. Most folks drive past a whole grove of them their entire life. The trees like to hide in the shade of bigger ones, patient as an old dog, and they don't ripen all at once — they drop when they're good and ready, one at a time, over a couple weeks come early September.

Cut one open and you'll swear somebody snuck a banana and a mango into the woods and let them have a baby. Custardy. Sweet. A smell that'll stop you on the trail. Old-timers called it the Appalachian banana, or the poor man's banana, back when a real banana meant a trip nobody in the hollow was making.

Here's the catch, and it's a hard one. A ripe pawpaw goes from perfect to mush in about two or three days. It doesn't ship. It doesn't sit pretty on a grocery shelf. That's the whole reason you've likely never had one — it's not that they're rare, it's that they refuse to cooperate with a supply chain. You either grow up near a patch, or somebody who loves you brings you one still warm from the ground.

Get to them quick, because you're not the only one interested. Raccoons, possums, foxes, even the black bears will beat you to a good patch if you dawdle. Deer won't touch the leaves — bitter as an argument nobody wants to have — which is half of why the trees survive to bear fruit at all.

There's an old song about going to the pawpaw patch, putting them in your pocket, and I always figured whoever wrote it never actually tried it. A ripe one in your pocket is a bad afternoon waiting to happen. Carry a bag. Eat them soon. That's the whole recipe.

THE SKY ABOVE

The moon's about to disappear on you.

It's been thinning down all week, a lazy waning crescent shrinking a sliver at a time, and it finally gives up the ghost late Thursday night into Friday the 11th. New moon, 11:27 your time if you're the type who needs it to the minute. That means Friday and Saturday hand you about as dark a sky as September's going to offer. No porch light in the heavens. Just you, the ridge line, and whatever's willing to show up.

Something small is willing. The September epsilon-Perseids peak Tuesday night, the 9th, and I want you to keep your expectations low as a coal seam. We're talking maybe four or five meteors an hour on a good night, best after midnight when the radiant climbs up out of Perseus. It's not a shower so much as a shower's shy cousin who shows up to the reunion and stands by the door. But it's got dark skies to work with this year, so a stray one might actually punch through where you'd have missed it against a bright moon.

Now for the planet that's actually worth your neck cramping. Saturn's running the show this week — up at or before sundown, sitting due south around midnight, and shining steadier than anything else out there short of the moon itself. It's fixing to reach opposition in early October, which is the fancy way of saying it's about as close and as bright as it gets all year. Point anything with a lens at it and those rings will still be tilted enough to read like a hat brim.

Venus is back too, hanging low in the west right after sunset, blazing away like somebody left a work light on. You can't miss it. It doesn't twinkle — it just glares, patient, the whole time you're trying to get the trash cans to the road before dark.

Mars and Jupiter are morning shift now, both climbing up in the east before the sun does, for anybody whose knees already have them up at that hour anyway.

Go stand in the yard Friday night. Dark sky, steady planet, a meteor or two if you're patient and lucky in equal measure. Cheaper than cable, better reception too.

I was born and raised in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, in a little town called Sand Gap, located in Jackson County.

I was the only girl of five children—four boys and me —and let me tell you, being the only girl didn’t always mean you got your way! No sir, not by no means!

Sometimes, not often, the brothers would give in to me. I’m not sure if they felt sorry for me or were just having a love my sister day. I still to this day try to figure them brothers out.

I suppose being raised with four brothers is the reason I was always labeled a tomboy during my childhood.

But, let me tell you about my brothers. They were as rough as a country boy could be, including with me. 

Now things would change in a hurry if someone else tried to harass me or treat me mean. Yes, you would see a different side of them brothers than what we were at home.

They didn’t let nothing stand in their way of protecting their little sister. Friends, family, or foe, it didn’t matter, nothing would stop them when it came to their sister.

We didn’t have much, but somehow we had everything that mattered. Family, laughter, neighbors who often knew your business before you did, and a whole lot of love. 

Sometimes I think people today don’t realize how much we learned from growing up with less. We learned to appreciate what we had, make something out of nothing, and take care of each other.

We helped the neighbor in need. Whether it was food, clothing, or helping on the farm. 

Yes, respect and dignity were taught well by my parents. We were taught that putting your whole heart and hard work into something may not always be what you wanted in the end, but it gave you great value and satisfaction that you tried.

Laziness was not something that was allowed or tolerated at our home. All of us children had our chores to be done, and unless we were sick, we better do them. Our choices had consequences, if you can imagine what I mean.

Playing sick didn’t work out for us. Somehow, Mommy always knew if we were acting to get out of the chores or if we were actually sick.

In 2018, my oldest brother passed from this life. 

He let his family know that he had received Jesus Christ in his heart and wasn’t afraid of death. The last words he said to me were, “Sis, if I don’t see you here in this life anymore, then I’ll meet you in Heaven.”

Eastern Kentucky raised me, and no matter where life takes me, those hills will always feel like home. 

This is a song that reminds me of my childhood. I sing it often.

Going Home
By Bill and Gloria Gaither

Many times in my childhood when we'd traveled so far,
By nightfall how weary I'd grow;
Father's arms would slip 'round me,
So gently he'd say,
"My child, we're going home."

(Chorus)
Going home, I'm going home,
There's nothing to hold me here;
Well, I've caught a glimpse of that heavenly land,
Praise God, I'm going home.

Now the twilight is fading and the day soon shall end;
I get homesick the farther I roam;
But my Father has led me each step of the way,
And now we're going home.

Bible Verse of the Week

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.

Luke 15: 18-20
‭‭

The Wayne Train visits all 423 Appalachian counties, one week at a time.

Population: 6,662 and holding, more or less.

Fourth-smallest county in the whole state of Tennessee.

If you're looking for a stoplight, keep driving.

Here's the setup. It's 1844. Some fellow up on Newman's Ridge is tired of riding three days to Rogersville just to file paperwork. So the locals scrape together their money and hire a Knoxville lawyer named W.H. Sneed to go argue them a new county out of pieces of Hawkins and Claiborne.

Takes two acts of the legislature.

Takes a fight that goes all the way to the Tennessee Supreme Court.

Takes four years, start to finish, before the thing is legal.

And when it's over, they don't name the county seat after a war hero or a preacher. They name it after the lawyer.

Sneedville.

Let that sink in a minute. A man argued a courtroom fight for four years and got a whole town put on the map with his name on it. Best legal fee in Tennessee history, and he probably didn't even bill by the hour.

Before that, the spot where they built the courthouse was just called Greasy Rock. Big flat stone on the Clinch River where the Cherokee and the longhunters used to clean their kill. Somebody decided "Greasy Rock, Tennessee" wasn't going on any welcome sign, and honestly, fair.

Now. Newman's Ridge itself.

That ridge runs north of Sneedville, right along the Clinch, and it's home to the Melungeons — a people historians have been arguing over for two hundred years and still haven't settled. European. African. Some say Portuguese, some say Turkish, some say a little of everything that ever came through a mountain pass. French traders were writing home about them back in the 1600s.

Whoever they were, they'd already claimed that ridge before the first "official" settlers ever showed up.

That's not a footnote. That's the whole county's origin story, and most of America never heard it.

Now let me tell you about Alex Stewart.

Man made barrels for a living. Coopering, they called it — bending wood staves into something that'll hold water without a drop of glue or a lick of metal, just skill and stubbornness. Stewart got so good at the dying art that the Smithsonian gave him the National Heritage Award. Only Tennessean to ever hold it at the time.

A barrel maker from Hancock County, Tennessee, standing in the Smithsonian getting honored by the federal government for knowing how to whittle wood into something useful.

That's about as Appalachian as a résumé gets.

And if you know bluegrass, you know the name Jimmy Martin. King of Bluegrass, they called him. Ran with Bill Monroe for a spell, then went and built his own band, the Sunny Mountain Boys, and never looked back. Hancock County is where he came from and where he stayed proud of coming from.

There was zinc mining out at Treadway once — put over two hundred men to work before it played out in '71. These days it's a furniture plant, a truss factory, a concrete outfit. Small operations, family names on the payroll, the kind of jobs that don't make the evening news but keep the lights on.

And this year, the state finally opened Clinch River Valley State Park, giving that river the kind of attention it's deserved the whole time.

Hancock County calls itself "Overhome."

Not home. Overhome. Like it's a little further back in the hills than regular home, a little harder to get to, a little more yours once you're there.

Sounds about right.

That's Stop #317. See you down the tracks.

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

Subscribe for free:
👉 thewaynetrain.com