APPALACHIAN ALMANAC

Last week the Perseids were clearing their throat. This week they sing,

Peak is the night of August 12 into the morning of the 13th. And the moon doesn't show. New moon that same day — black sky, edge to edge. No wash-out, no glare, nothing between you and the show but your own porch light. So kill that too.

Best year for this in a good while. When the moon's dark like this you don't just catch the bright ones. You catch the faint ones, the ones any other August would've swallowed whole.

Here's how it's done. No telescope. No binoculars. A lawn chair, a dark spot away from town, and about half an hour for your eyes to quit thinking about your phone. Then you lean back and look up. Northeast if you're after the radiant. Honestly, just up. They'll streak clear across the whole sky.

Late is better. After 11, and better still between 2 and 4 in the morning, when your side of the earth is plowing straight into the dust. Fifty an hour on a good night. Maybe more. Bright ones that leave a little smoke trail hanging a second after, like a kitchen match somebody flicked.

While you're out there, look low in the east before dawn. Around the 11th and 12th there's a whole string of planets down near the horizon — Saturn, Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter clawing back up out of the sunrise. Most folks won't bother. You'll already have been up half the night.

And that hard bright "star" hanging in the west after sundown? Venus. On the 15th a thin curl of moon slides right up beside her.

One more, and it's a strange one. That same dark moon blacking out your sky for the meteors — a few hours ahead of you, on the far side of the world, it slides straight across the face of the sun. Total eclipse. Greenland, Iceland, Spain. First one mainland Europe's laid eyes on since '99. Same rock, doing two jobs. They get the sun snuffed at noon. You get fire coming down at three in the morning. I'll take our end of it.

The woods are running up a flag this week, if you know where to look.

Ginseng. Mid-to-late August is when the berries go red — little clusters of them, bright as a stoplight, sitting up above everything else on the floor of the woods. All year that plant hides. Green on green, easy to walk right past. Then the berries turn and it might as well be waving at you.

That's the map. You still can't dig it.

Kentucky season doesn't open till September 1, and it runs to December 1. Go in before that and you're a poacher, plain and simple. So this is the scouting month. You find it, you fix it in your head, you leave it stand.

When the season does come, there are rules, and they're not there to pester you. The plant's got to be five years old at least — three prongs, they call it, three of those leaf clusters. Younger than that, you leave it. And every berry off a plant you dig goes back in the dirt within fifty feet of the hole. That's the law. It's also the whole reason there's any sang left in these hills to fight over.

It keeps company. Look where the mayapple and bloodroot grow, north or east slope, under the maples and poplars where the leaf mold's gone deep and black.

There's a man in China who'll pay real money for that root. Been that way going on three hundred years. But that's a September problem. For now it's just a red berry in the shade, telling on itself.

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