THE SKY ABOVE

The moon is doing you a favor this week. Take it.

We're in the waxing crescent stretch to start, that thin fingernail hanging in the west after supper. It fattens up fast. First quarter hits Tuesday morning, July 21, which means by that evening the moon sits high at sundown and drops below the ridge around midnight. From then until dawn, the sky belongs to you.

That matters. The Delta Aquariid meteors are already running. The Perseids started up on the 17th. Both showers peak later, but late July brings a full moon that'll wash the whole show out like somebody left the porch light on. So the dark mornings this week — after midnight, before the birds start — are the best seats you're going to get.

Look southeast. Be patient. Meteor watching is 90 percent sitting there feeling foolish and 10 percent hollering at nothing.

Venus is the easy one. Look west after sunset and you can't miss her — brightest thing up there, steady, not twinkling. Jupiter's gone. It's sliding behind the sun this month and won't be back for a few weeks. Saturn comes up in the east before midnight by the end of the week. Mars is a rusty little dot low in the east before dawn, over in Taurus.

Two nights worth stepping outside for.

Thursday and Friday, the 23rd and 24th, the gibbous moon parks right next to Antares — the red heart of Scorpius, low in the south. Ruby red star, silver moon. That's a good one.

Then Saturday the 25th, the moon slides over to the Teapot of Sagittarius. If you're somewhere dark, that pale smudge of steam rising off the spout is the center of the Milky Way. Twenty-six thousand light-years away, and it looks like woodsmoke.

Some folks pay good money for scenery. This one's free.

THE GROUND BELOW

Blackberries. That's the whole report, and you already knew it.

The banks are loaded. Old strip jobs, fence rows, the edge of any field nobody's mowed. The ripe ones come off in your palm without a fight. If you have to pull, leave it — it'll be there in three days.

Wear long sleeves. In July. I know.

Chiggers don't care about your comfort. Neither do the ticks, and this has been a year for them.

The wineberries are running too, and if you've got them, you know it's a short window. Bristly red canes, berries in a little husk. Sweet-tart. Eat them standing there. They don't travel.

Elderberry is a waiting game. The white flower heads are gone by now, turned into hard green nubs. Those go dark purple sometime between August and September, depending on your elevation. Don't rush it. Green elderberries will make you sorry, and nobody eats them raw anyway — cook them or leave them alone. Stems and leaves too. Mark your bushes now and come back.

Mushrooms are the real story if we get rain.

Chanterelles are up in the hardwoods — golden, apricot smell, ridges under the cap instead of proper gills. They come up alone or in loose scatters, straight out of the dirt. The jack-o'-lantern that'll ruin your weekend grows in tight clusters on wood and has real gills. If you're not sure, you're not sure. Leave it.

Chicken of the woods is showing up on oak. Orange shelves. Take the young tender edges, not the leathery back end.

Wild grapes are still green and hard. Pawpaws are still green and hard. Everything's still coming.

Dog days. It'll wait.

THIS WEEK IN APPALACHIAN HISTORY

July 21, 1925. Dayton, Tennessee.

A jury took nine minutes to convict a 24-year-old football coach named John Scopes of teaching evolution, and Judge Raulston fined him a hundred dollars. Then it was over. The reporters packed up. The chimpanzee they'd trotted out on Main Street went home.

The day before, Clarence Darrow had put William Jennings Bryan on the witness stand out on the courthouse lawn, because the courtroom was too hot to breathe in, and took him apart in front of the whole country. Bryan won the case. He was dead five days later.

Scopes admitted years afterward he might not have even taught the lesson.

The rest of the week reads like a coalfield ledger.

July 22, 1930 — fire took the Dunglen Hotel at Thurmond, West Virginia, the fanciest and most disreputable building in the New River Gorge, and the town never got it back.

July 24, 1926 — a bridge at Whitesville, in Boone County, gave way and killed six people.

July 23, 1966 — an explosion at the New River Company's Siltix mine near Mount Hope killed seven miners.

Seven men. On a Saturday in July.

And on July 20, 1969, two men walked on the moon, and every porch light in these hills went dark while the whole county crowded around one television set.

A CLOSING NOTE

The part of the Scopes trial nobody tells you is why it happened at all.

Dayton didn't stumble into the trial of the century. Dayton went and got it. A fellow named Rappleyea ran the coal and iron works there, and the coal and iron works were dying, and the town's population had fallen by nearly half. So he sat down in a drugstore with the school superintendent and a lawyer and cooked up a plan to put their own schoolteacher on trial.

It worked. For a couple of weeks in July, Dayton, Tennessee, was the most famous place on earth.

Then everybody left.

A hundred and one years later, the arithmetic is still running. The Census Bureau's newest estimates show Pike County, Kentucky, down 3,946 people since 2020 — the biggest raw loss of any county in Central Appalachia. Harlan is down to 24,725 from a peak that once topped 75,000. Breathitt has fallen 8.5 percent in five years.

What's changed is the reason. It isn't the young people leaving anymore. In 29 of Eastern Kentucky's 30 coalfield counties, more folks are dying every year than are being born. You can build a factory to keep a young man home. You can't build anything that argues with an obituary page.

The blackberries don't know any of this. They came in heavy this year, same as always, on ground where houses used to be.

Go get some.