Happy Sunday and welcome aboard!

This week, we take a peak inside the Old Farmer’s Almanac, remember the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga, and visit our Appalachian neighbors in Pike County, Pennsylvania.

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- Wayne K.

Every year around Labor Day, that little yellow book with the hole punched in the corner shows up beside the drugstore register. Cough drops on one side. Reading glasses on the other. Winter weather predictions sitting there like they know something.

Forty years in newsrooms trained me to ask a simple question of anybody selling a prediction: Show me your work.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac won’t.

Its formula has been locked up since 1792, supposedly mixing solar science, ocean patterns and a long look at weather history. The publishers claim about 80 percent accuracy. They gave themselves an 86 for last winter.

Nobody grades his own homework and comes home bragging about a B.

So I read the Almanac the way I read a press release. Slowly, with one eyebrow raised and my wallet safely out of reach.

The 2027 forecast says most of the country gets off easy. Mild temperatures. Near-normal weather. Nothing likely to make the evening news unless the weatherman gets unusually excited.

The cold, however, is expected to settle over the eastern United States, which naturally includes us. The Appalachians are forecast to run colder than normal and snowier than normal. The Ohio Valley gets plenty of cold too, with the worst of it arriving in mid- and late January. Mid-January and mid-to-late February are the stretches most likely to make you regret having a long driveway.

The suspected troublemaker is El Niño, and apparently he is not coming north to exchange Christmas cards. Back in mid-August, NOAA put the odds of a very strong event above 90 percent. When El Niño gets worked up, it can shove the jet stream around and sometimes knock the polar vortex loose.

That is when Canada comes down the mountain, walks through the front door and starts fooling with the thermostat.

That part I believe. Not because the Almanac said it, but because the ocean people said it and showed their work.

The rest I keep at arm’s length.

A Wyoming meteorologist once told a reporter he had no idea what kind of voodoo magic the Almanac uses. That sounds about right. A seasonal forecast is a weather report wearing a necktie. It can tell you what the winter might look like from across the street. It cannot tell you what Tuesday morning plans to do to your back steps.

A typical Appalachian grandmother would have understood the business.

She read hornet nests. A nest high in a tree meant deep snow. She counted foggy mornings in August and claimed each one bought us a snow that winter. She cut open persimmon seeds and studied the shape inside. A spoon meant shoveling. A knife meant cutting wind. A fork meant an easy winter, though I never understood why winter would care which utensil we used.

She was wrong plenty. She was also right often enough that nobody in the family laughed until she left the room.

The Almanac is doing much the same thing with more arithmetic and better distribution. It is not quite science, but it is not complete foolishness either. It gives us something to argue about while waiting for weather nobody can control.

Cold January, it says. Snow in February.

Ask me again in January.

For now, the tomatoes are still coming in, and they have a much better record of telling me what season it is.

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 corn's rustling different this week.

Not the green rattle of July, when it still had some sass in it. This is a drier sound. Papery. Like the whole hillside is turning newspaper pages nobody's going to read twice.

That's September for you. Quiet about it, right up until it isn't.

Moon's just a sliver right now, coming off new on the 11th. By the tail end of this week she'll fatten up to a First Quarter half-moon, hanging in the evening sky like somebody left a porch light on and forgot to check it.

Look south after dark and you'll spot the real show anyway. Saturn's up there burning steady, no twinkle to it — planets don't blink the way stars do, they're too close and too proud for that. He's building toward his big night on October 4, when he swings closest to Earth all year and gets bright enough to embarrass every star around him. Right now he's just warming up. The rings are tilted better than they've been in years, so even a cheap telescope will show you something worth bragging about at the feed store.

Fall shows up official next Tuesday, the 22nd. This week's just the mountains clearing their throat.

Down on the ground, tobacco's coming out of the fields. Middle of September is when the old-timers say to cut it — not so early the leaf's still green as a frog, not so late a frost catches it hanging half-cured in the barn. Drive past any tin-roofed barn worth the name this week and you'll see the doors thrown open, the tiers loaded rafter to floor, and that green-going-brown smell drifting out that either means home to you or means absolutely nothing, depending on where you were raised.

Persimmons are setting on the trees too. Orange, dusty-looking, hard as a hickory nut. Don't let anybody talk you into biting one right now — that's a mistake a man makes exactly once in his life and never repeats. They won't be soft enough to split the seed and read the winter until after the first hard frost, and around here that's still the better part of a month off. The tree's not in a hurry. Neither should you be.

Goldenrod's lit up gold along every ditch bank in the county. Ironweed's standing purple right beside it. If your eyes are watering, you're blaming the wrong flower — goldenrod's pollen is too heavy to blow anywhere, it's the ragweed hiding behind it doing the damage while goldenrod takes the grief. Story of a lot of things in this world.

This Week In History

September 19, 1863. Chickamauga Creek, hard against the Georgia-Tennessee line, foothills of the same mountains that run clean up through here.

Two armies fought two days in those woods. When it ended, more than 34,000 men were dead, wounded, or missing — second only to Gettysburg for blood spilled in that whole war. The Union held Chattanooga going in. They didn't hold it coming out. Grant showed up not long after to clean up the mess.

Chickamauga's supposed to be a Cherokee word. Legend says it means river of death. Cherokee scholars themselves have long said it probably isn't even Cherokee at all — more likely Shawnee or Creek in origin, borrowed and worn smooth over time. Doesn't much matter which language got there first. By the time the killing stopped, the name fit either way.

163 years this Saturday. Long enough nobody living remembers it. Not long enough the ground's forgotten.

Old saying: onion skins thin and mild, easy winter for the child. Onion skins thick and tough, coming winter's rough as a cob.

Nobody's checked this year's onions but somebody's grandmother, and she isn't saying yet.

Season's turning. Mind the corn.

This week has been like a roller coaster. You know when some days are heartbreaking and others joyful.

That’s been this past week.

Heartbreak

One of my first cousins, Jody, passed away suddenly and completely unexpectedly. Heartbroken to say the least. Our childhoods go way back, when time was seemingly a lot slower.

Jody was a school teacher. She took her job seriously. Her passion was teaching and being a help to further every student she possibly could.

Her teaching passion showed when the students started making their way through the visiting line at the funeral visitation. Teachers, students, state and county school officials, all came to show their respect for this precious lady.

I have so many wonderful and precious memories of my cousin Jody.

Joyful

At our little country church this week, we welcomed “The Chuckwagon Gang.” They are celebrating their 90th year as a singing group, expanding across three generations.
And to say they could sing is an understatement. Their performance was top-notch

The original group in 1935 was D. P. “Dad”, Anna, Rose and Jim Carter.

Those two women and three men showed the most professionalism and also enjoyed the little country church. Shaye Smith, one of the lady singers, is the great-granddaughter of the original Carters who first formed “The Chuckwagon Gang.”

This song just simply reminds me of pain-free, sorrow-free place when we reach Heaven.

What A Day That Will Be

There is coming a day when no heartaches shall come 
No more clouds in the sky 
No more tears to dim the eye 
All is peace forever more 
On that happy golden shore 
What a day, glorious day that will be

What a day that will be when my Jesus I shall see 
When I look upon His face the one who saved mymey His grace 
When He takes me by the hand and leads me to the promised land 
What a day, glorious day that will be

There will be no sorrows there 
And no more burdens to bear 
No more sickness and, no more pain 
No more parting over there 
And forever I will be with the one who died for me 
What a day, glorious day that will be.

Bible Verse of the Week

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”
‭‭Revelation‬ ‭21‬:‭4‬ ‭KJV‬‬‭‭

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

Pike County sits up in the far northeast corner of Pennsylvania, wedged so tight against New York and New Jersey that it's the only county in the state that touches both. The Delaware River runs the whole eastern border. Cross it one way, you're in the Poconos. Cross it the other, you're in the Catskills. Pike County doesn't quite know which mountain range claims it, and honestly, neither do the mountains.

The Lenape lived here first, working the river and the ridges the way people do when the land's been feeding them a long time. That ended the way it usually did. The Walking Purchase of 1737 — a rigged deal dressed up as a legal transaction — swindled the Lenape out of more than half the county in one stroke. What followed was ugly on both sides, and Pike County has its own version of that violence in a local settler named Tom Quick, still argued over two hundred years later, still not somebody worth writing a hero's paragraph about.

The county itself got carved out of Wayne County in 1814 and named for General Zebulon Pike. Yes — that Pike. Same fellow the mountain out in Colorado is named for. He never set foot here, far as anybody can tell. County naming has never required much more than a general being famous at the right moment.

For a hundred years or so, Pike County ran on logging and tanning. Hemlock bark for the tanneries, timber floated down the Delaware to Trenton. Then coal got found upriver near Carbondale, and Pike County became a highway for it — first a canal, engineered with an aqueduct designed by John Roebling that's still standing today, the same man who'd go on to design the Brooklyn Bridge. Then railroads replaced the canal, the way railroads replaced everything.

One of those railroads gave the county its darkest afternoon. On July 15, 1864, a train hauling 833 Confederate prisoners of war toward a camp in Elmira, New York, collided head-on with a coal train a mile and a half outside Shohola. A drunk telegraph operator got the blame. Somewhere around sixty men died, prisoners and Union guards both, in a war that mostly happened somewhere else. The village of Shohola turned out that day and did what you do — pulled bodies from the wreckage, fed the survivors, buried the dead in a trench dug alongside the tracks. Nobody in Shohola had a side in that war by the time the wreck happened. They just had people who needed help.

By the early 1900s, Pike County had found its second act — tourism. Rich New Yorkers discovered the mountain air, the river, the quiet. Milford, the county seat, still has several hundred buildings from that era, enough of them lined up together that most of the town made the National Register of Historic Places. Later on, the Poconos as a whole picked up the "honeymoon capital" label, heart-shaped tubs and all, and Pike County rode that wave right along with everybody else. These days it's grown into something closer to a commuter county — close enough to New York City that people drive it — and between 1990 and 2000 it was the fastest-growing county in the whole state, up 65 percent in a decade. That's not the Appalachia most people picture. It's Appalachia all the same.

Milford's most famous house belonged to Gifford Pinchot, and it's a house that changed how this country thinks about its own trees. Pinchot's family built Grey Towers in 1886, a stone chateau up on the hill above town, at a time when the family fortune had come partly from clear-cutting Pennsylvania's forests down to stumps. His father, apparently carrying some regret about that, pushed young Gifford toward forestry instead of finance. Gifford took it further than anybody expected. He became the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service under Teddy Roosevelt, got fired by Taft in a fight over conservation policy, then went out and won the Pennsylvania governor's office twice. Grey Towers still stands, donated to the Forest Service by his son in 1963, and you can walk through it today — the house of a man who spent his life arguing that the woods belonged to everybody, not just whoever owned the deed.

A few miles up the river in Lackawaxen, Zane Grey built himself a writing life. He'd been a dentist in New York, pulling teeth by day, restless by night, and in 1905 he and his wife moved into a cottage at the meeting point of the Delaware and Lackawaxen rivers. From there he wrote the westerns that made him one of the best-selling authors in America — Riders of the Purple Sage among them — a man who'd never punched cattle a day in his life, dreaming up the whole mythology of the American West from a porch in northeastern Pennsylvania. He's buried there now, in the cemetery across the road from the house, and the house is a museum, and the joke practically writes itself: the man who invented the cowboy never left the Poconos long enough to become one.

And Milford gave the world Vanessa Carlton, born there in 1980 to a piano teacher and an airline pilot, raised on a house full of instruments before she was old enough to remember it any other way. She wrote "A Thousand Miles" — that piano riff you'd know inside two notes — and it turned into one of the defining pop songs of its decade. Small town, big piano hook. Pike County's still got a working export.

When you're passing through, stop at the Waterwheel Café in Milford. It's set up inside a nineteenth-century water-powered mill on the Sawkill Creek, running since 1989, the kind of place where the building itself has put in more decades than most of the staff. Get something baked. Sit by the water. Let the wheel do what it's always done.

Pike County spent two hundred years being a highway — for logs, for coal, for prisoners of war, for New Yorkers escaping New York. Somewhere in the passing-through, people kept deciding to stay. That's most of Appalachian history in one sentence, whether the county admits to being Appalachia or not.

Come see your neighbors.

The Wayne Train rolls out every Sunday morning.

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