The Sky Above

The moon clocks out this week.

New moon comes Tuesday, July 14, a little before six in the morning. Which means the middle of this week is about as dark as the sky gets around here. No moon to wash things out. Just black, and whatever's behind it.

If you've got a ridge that gets you clear of the porch lights, this is the week to walk out to it. Late, after the last dog quits barking, the core of the Milky Way stands up in the south like somebody spilled flour across the whole sky. You need dark to see it. This week hands you dark.

Two meteor showers are just cracking their eyes open. The Delta Aquariids got going around the 12th, and the Perseids start on the 17th. Neither one's at full song yet — that comes in August. But you might catch a straggler dropping out of the south while another one cuts across from the northeast. A warmup act. Worth a look up.

The moon comes back thin at the end of the week. Low in the west, just after dark on the 16th and 17th, you'll find a fingernail of a crescent sitting close to Venus.

Early risers get the better show. Saturn's up after 1 a.m. now, and Mars climbs in behind it, sliding past the orange star Aldebaran over in Taurus on the 14th. If you're awake before the birds anyway, look east.

Blackberries.

That's the headline down here this week. The brambles along the road banks and the old fence lines are coming ripe, and if you've got a patch you keep quiet about, you already know. Lower ground first. The high hollows run a couple weeks behind (Blind Pig and The Acorn). Wear sleeves. The thorns don't care about your feelings.

The black raspberries that came on back in late June are about spent. That window's short and it's closing (Swift Silent Deadly). Get what's left.

Up under the oaks, if we've had rain, the chanterelles are out. July's their month. Little trumpets the color of a school bus, coming up one at a time out of the leaf duff, not bunched on dead wood like the jack-o'-lantern that'll pay a careless picker back with a rough night (Feral Foraging). Know what you're doing or go with somebody who does.

The elderberry's still green. Flowers gone, berries not ready. That's an August job, maybe September. And the dog days are on us now — that stretch of heavy heat the old-timers named for the star Sirius rising in step with the sun. The woods go quiet in it. Everything's just holding on till evening.

This Week in Appalachian History

On the night of July 14, 1891, three hundred armed men walked up to a stockade outside Briceville, Tennessee, and took it without firing a shot.

They were coal miners. Anderson County, East Tennessee. The company had locked them out that spring and reopened the mine with convict labor — men leased from the state prison, most of them Black, worked half to death for pennies, brought in to break the free miners and hold wages on the floor (Tennessee Encyclopedia). The company even tore down the miners' own houses to build the pen that held the convicts.

So the miners surrounded it. Marched the forty prisoners and their guards five miles to Coal Creek, loaded them onto boxcars, and shipped them to Knoxville. Nobody fired. Nobody died. Not that night (Tennessee Encyclopedia).

The governor marched the convicts right back. The miners freed them again. This went on for two years — stockades burned, militia called out, men killed before it was over. They called it the Coal Creek War. The miners lost most of the fights. But Tennessee ended convict leasing in 1896, and it was these men who put the first crack in it .

Coal Creek goes by Rocky Top now. Most folks who sing about it don't know.