The moon runs the show this week.

The full Buck Moon arrives Wednesday, July 29. It'll come up over the eastern ridges that evening looking big and orange and close enough to hit with a rock. The name comes from the deer. This is the time of year the bucks are growing new antlers, still soft, still wrapped in velvet. You've probably seen one standing in a hayfield at dusk looking half-embarrassed about it.

Now the bad news. The Delta Aquariid meteor shower peaks the night of July 28 into the morning of July 29. Twenty meteors an hour, on paper. In practice, that full moon is going to wash most of them out. It's like trying to watch fireflies with the porch light on.

If you're stubborn — and you are, or you wouldn't live here — the brighter ones will still punch through. Look south after midnight, toward Aquarius. Give your eyes fifteen minutes to adjust. Leave the phone in the house.

And take heart. The Perseids are already running in the background, building toward their August peak. The moon won't cooperate forever.

THE GROUND BELOW

This is chanterelle season, and it's a good one.

Those golden, trumpet-shaped mushrooms show up in the hardwoods after the hot sun and afternoon rains of midsummer, most often keeping company with oaks. Walk an old logging road on a north slope this week and you might find a whole hillside of them, glowing like somebody dropped a bag of egg yolks.

They smell faintly like apricots. Fried in butter, they'll make you forget every store-bought mushroom you ever ate.

One warning, and it's a serious one. The jack-o'-lantern mushroom looks close enough to fool a beginner. It grows in clusters on wood or buried roots, has true gills instead of the chanterelle's blunt ridges, and it will make you sicker than a dog. Know the difference cold, or go with somebody who does. Never eat a wild mushroom on a guess.

Elsewhere: the blackberries are winding down along the roadsides, and the elderberries are starting to turn. Wait until those clusters go deep purple, nearly black — the green ones are toxic, and you shouldn't eat elderberries raw anyway. Cook them down. Your grandmother knew that. Now you do too.

THIS WEEK IN APPALACHIAN HISTORY

One hundred and five years ago this Saturday, two men climbed the courthouse steps in Welch, West Virginia, and never reached the door.

August 1, 1921. Sid Hatfield, the former police chief of Matewan, and his friend Ed Chambers came to the McDowell County courthouse to answer charges. Their wives walked beside them. Neither man was armed.

Hatfield was a Kentucky boy, born over in Pike County, and by that summer he was the most famous lawman in the coalfields. The year before, a shootout in Matewan between Baldwin-Felts detectives and union miners had left seven detectives, two miners, and the town's mayor dead in the street. Hatfield stood trial for it and walked free, and the miners of southern West Virginia made him a hero.

The Baldwin-Felts agency didn't forget.

Around noon, as the four of them went up the steps, detectives opened fire. Hatfield was hit in the arm and chest and died where he fell. Chambers went down wounded, and a detective named C.E. Lively stepped forward and finished him with a bullet to the head, in front of a crowd, in front of his wife.

Broad daylight. Courthouse steps. Nobody was ever convicted. The shooters claimed self-defense.

Unarmed men. Self-defense.

Within weeks, the rage boiling through the coalfields became the miners' march and the Battle of Blair Mountain — the largest labor uprising in American history. But it started on those steps in Welch, with two women screaming and two men bleeding out on the stone.

A CLOSING NOTE

Stay in Welch a minute longer.

In 1950, McDowell County had nearly 100,000 people. Coal camps stacked up every hollow. Welch was called "Little New York" back then, and on a Saturday you couldn't find a place to park.

The Census Bureau's new Vintage 2025 estimates put the county at 16,878. That's a loss of more than 82 percent of its midcentury population. It lost 2,245 people just since 2020 — the steepest five-year decline in the region — and at this pace it falls below 15,000 before 2030.

It's not alone. For the first time since the 2020 count, every one of West Virginia's sixteen Central Appalachian coalfield counties is losing people — more deaths than births, more moving vans leaving than arriving.

The courthouse where Sid Hatfield died is still standing. The steps are still there. What's thinning out is the county around it — the people whose grandfathers marched on Blair Mountain because of what happened on that stone.

Places carry their history a long time.

They just need somebody left to carry it.